Love and Community

The goal of life is to have a real and authentic spiritual journey, to be transformed. In the New Testament the destination of this transformation is the person of Jesus.

Nakedness is the goal of the spiritual journey. What we see in the fall metaphor in Genesis is that our separation from God comes with a corresponding 'covering up'. This is regression. To progress towards God again we must be unclothed. We must remove all that has come in the way of our relationship with God, our pride and shame. God, for His part, promises to wear these clothes on our behalf, which is what happens on the cross. The God-Man, who we believe was perfectly united with God in all he did, wore the disgrace that we have become used to. He stepped into the breach in that event. He does that for each one of us again and again.

To experience this transfer we must join in with some form of community of like-minded people. This is otherwise known as a church. When we are loved in this context we come to understand what God's attitude towards us is and 'when we go to our brother and confess, we go to God' (Bonhoeffer - who else?). This has been my experience at a group I have belonged to for the last 9 months or so. We meet monthly and talk about who we are and what we're up to. We let each other in and in some small way we become naked with one another. That last sentence is in no way to be understood literally.

In doing this I have learned so much about God, my brothers and me. It has been a total privilege to have been trusted and divulged to and it has changed me in so many ways. It is for this reason that I highly recommend you do the same. Get together with some people you can be honest with and start doing just that, being honest before each other and God. It will change your life - I guarantee it.

Symptomatic vs. Systematic

To be a prophet is to look beyond the symptom and to see the failing of the system.

Some thoughts on power

I have noticed that we often ask God to fill us with his power when we pray but I have a growing suspicion that we might be asking for the wrong thing. I can't think of a single occasion where Jesus asked God to be filled with power, although I could be wrong. He certainly asked for courage to be obedient to his Father's will, but power? Maybe it is a semantic thing, but is this pursuit of power - even God's power - not open to abuse? The recent fall of those in charge of seemingly 'powerful' ministries would seem to suggest this is the case.

Perhaps we would be better to ask God to fil us with His powerlessness, as this is the form that his power so often takes. In Jesus' life we see that God chooses to reveal himself more often than not in powerlessness. If you don't agree take a look at the cross! Yes, there are great miracles and works of power but even they are often done in the secret place. Even the resurrection, the greatest single event of power in history, is done in secret and only after the humiliation of the cross.

When Jesus receives the Spirit of His Father during his baptism (Mark 1.9ff), he is sent into the desert place to work out what this event means. He is tempted by the devil (Matt 4) and in this temptation he is offered ultimate power over the world. Three times he chooses powerlessness over power. This surely is a foretaste of the ultimate choice of powerlessness which leads him to the cross three years later and is also the perfect contrast to Peter's threefold denial.

As a brief aside, I mentioned this to my dad who said that it was interesting that in the acts of the apostles the disciples never asked for power but instead for boldness. Why was this? Was it not that they already knew that they had received God's power so they didn't need more, just the boldness to lean back onto what they already had.

Finally, Paul surely sums it all up for us in 2 Corinthians 12.10;

"That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."

Or to put that last line another way, "when I am weak, then I AM is strong."

Idolatry

All sin is the sin of idolatry.

Idolatry is when we let the means become the end.

There is only one proper end in all the universe; God alone.

The reason we have messed this world up so badly is that we have exchanged God for something less than God. We have fallen in love with the process and let go of the destination. This is as evident within the church as it is without, perhaps even moreso. We love all our shows and grand events. We love sunday church and massive healing spectacles but we need to ask ourselves whether we love these more than we love God. How much of this is just entertainment with a spiritual twist?

We simply must stop taking ourselves and our actions so seriously, particularly our religious ones. Only God is to be taken seriously. Paradoxically, when we do this will we really have the great joy in us that Jesus promises.

Paul puts it like this...'they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.' (Rom 1.25)

Richard Rohr says that we end up loving the container (style) more than the contents (substance - God). He is right isn't he? We need to be so careful that what we think we are doing for God doesn't really become about fulfilling our needs.

The Third Way

"The church ... cannot be content to play the part of a nurse looking after the casualties of the system. It must play an active part both in challenging the present unjust structures and in pioneering alternatives."

Donald Dorr - Catholic missionary priest

Information = rubbish

Information cannot make us better people. This truth came as a disappointment to me when I realised it very recently, as I have spent the great majority of my life so far (25 years and counting) ammassing more and more information; some of it useful, most of it banal and redundant. I even went to a University to learn about God. As if I could learn much about God through a degree!

Most of us have idealised the faculties of knowing. It makes us feel good when we know something as it gives us an immediate ego reward. Those of us of western extraction have placed the rational on a pedestal. We want to know where someone went to school before we trust them in any major office.

The same is true in the church. The protestant tradition has taken this to the extreme with a huge emphasis on preaching. Now I think preaching is a very good thing, but true preaching is not the mere discussion or transmission of ideas and ideals. True preaching and true faith is a life lived towards God with all of our being.

The New Testament shows us both the limited importance and the limitation of head-knowing. Jesus works as if his actions are as important as his words. In fact, his verbal preaching was often simply an explanation of what he was doing. Paul puts it more directly;

"But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith." (Phil 3.7-9)

In comparison to 'knowing Christ Jesus' all things are to be considered rubbish. Whilst we should continue to seek to know about God it is far more important that we know God. This kind of faith requires all of our faculties to be presented to God as one.