Where do we meet God?

We can only meet God when we come to Him as who we are. That's the power of realising that we are 'sinners', or that we're lacking something substantial which we could never make up for on our own. When we realise this deep truth we are able to meet God for the first time and in doing this we also meet our own selves.

We must always resist the temptation to try and 'be holy' for God. He doesn't want us to strive to make ourselves holy people as in doing that we will simply seperate ourselves from Him. HE wants to make US holy. It's his job in us, not ours. It's not about attacking ourselves either. We need to see our faults and accept them so that He can come and change them.

We meet God at the place where all striving ceases and we can simply be ourselves. Nothing more and nothing less will do.

Making sense of Jesus

Jesus says in Matthew 13:14-17;

"In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.'

But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. For I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it."

Jesus' life and teaching was an assault on the senses. The senses needed to be assaulted before they could be healed and renewed. And this is just what Jesus came to do, to make new that which had become old and to uncover that which had been covered. Jesus came to give us new eyes and ears. Physical eyes, yes, but way more than just physical eyes. Jesus came that we might see the world in a completely different way. The physical healings always pointed to something greater, that the Kingdom of God had come near in Jesus. In other words, God's reality was 'here and now'.

He came carrying this message;

"'The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'" (Mark 4.18-19)

Jesus identifies the core of his life and work to be the bringing of freedom to people in captivity and the recovery of sight to those who are blind. But we're all blind until someone shows us how to see. The real meaning of the fall story in Genesis is that there is a blindness at the core of who we are as humans which has been there from the beginning (Dawkins take note -it's not a science textbook!). Something fundamental has gone wrong with humanity and it is this that Jesus comes to restore. He comes to mend this dislocation between us and God, by being both us and God.

When we enter into a relationship with him we find that our sight begins to come back to us. We should find that we have love and compassion for others, the like of which we could never have previously imagined. We should love nature and art more than ever too, as we find God in and through his creation. The idea is that we then are drawn into the kind of life that Jesus lived. We take on his mantle and spend ourselves in releasing the prisoners and bringing recovery of sight to the blind.

Now that's what I call good news!

The Cross

"The cross is a symbol reminding the world that God is at God’s strongest when God seems to be at God’s weakest."

Choan Seng Song - Taiwanese theologian

Bring on the reformation

"Christianity ... is always in need of re-simplifying, going back to its origins, ridding itself of the excessive superstructure it has acquired through history."

José Comblin, Catholic theologian in Brazil

Darwin - Friend or Foe?

Below is a link to an excellent blog written by Libby Purves on the Times website. The subject of this entry is a TV program hosted by Richard Dawkins on Darwin. She writes a very balanced critique of Dawkins habit of over-reaching from science into philosophy/theology, using Darwin as supposed evidence for the validity of atheism.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article4474112.ece

The True Self

"God is the only one we can surrender to without losing ourselves. It's a paradox. When Jesus says those who lose their life will find their life and those who let go of their life will discover their life, obviously he's talking about life in a different way than you and I experience it. We think life is the thing that we've got to protect. He's saying, No, the true self needs no protection: It just is."

Richard Rohr - from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

It's not what you know, but who you know

"And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God." (1 Corinthians 2. 1-5)

There are two types of wisdom which Paul compares and contrasts in his letter to the Corinthians. The first is 'wordly' and the second 'Godly'. Wordly wisdom is espoused in our centres of learning and throughout the media. It's the type of wisdom we most often glorify as it depends on the sophisicated telling of 'experts'. It makes us feel good when we hear and understand it because we are part of the select few who 'get it'. It builds our self-esteem and we can quickly become addicted to it. But this kind of wisdom, intellectual and rational, is not the best basis for faith. Despite what the intellectual movement of the enlightenment would have us believe, our heads are not the best place to begin when seeking to know God. We cannot function as isolated intellects.

Unfortunately, much of the theology ('words about God') we hear is only wordly wisdom dressed up in holy clothes. Godly wisdom begins and ends with the power of God, seen through God's action in human history. But the best theology is always an affair of the heart as much as it's an affair of the mind. Real faith is more about having an encounter than simply amassing greater head-knowledge. So how can we begin to meet the God who acts in human history again and again?

I would suggest the bible is a good place to start as it is the record we have made of God's story. How he made a beautiful creation then chose a nation. And how he then spent himself in reversing the tendency of his creation to harm itself, culminating in the cross. We find there that man chooses to destroy God's work of creation, then chooses to destroy the climax of his creation, His own Son Jesus.

Paul says in the above passage that he is only interested in looking to God's action in the story of Christ's death and resurrection. This story is the only proper basis for faith in God. Head knowledge is useful, but the rational will let us down when it comes to God. Someone will always have a better argument or more sophisticated philosophy. Head knowledge can't bear the wait of faith, whilst the cross can.

The key thing about encounter is that when we meet someone, we involve our whole selves, our minds and intellects as well as our emotions and our senses. So let us take Paul's advice and seek to know God with everything we have. It is this that Jesus is pointing at when he tells the teacher of the law that the greatest commandment is to 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' (Matt 22.37)

Peter and maturity

"I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, Follow me!" (John 21.18-19)

I think this text - which comes directly after Jesus' re-instatement of Peter - teaches us something about the journey to maturity for each one of us. As we grow older (and hopefully wiser) we make an increasing number of committments. We may choose a university, a job, a home, a spouse, to have a child or some other such life-changing decision. Such commitments bring us great life, but they also have a cost attached. Their cost is that we are not able to follow our own path so rigidly as we once were. We get swept up into the paths of others. In other words, we are brought into community as we commit.

This is life as God would have it and this is the type of life that Jesus is showing Peter he will lead from that point on. Martin Luther-King famously said that the one thing he would like to leave behind was 'a committed life' and I think this should be our aim too. But as Jesus shows us here, we don't need to worry about what we will commit too or where we should spend our energies. As we follow him He will direct our paths and lead us into the freedom that comes from mature commitment.