SPCK
2006
AJM Jan 07
Aim
to describe what Christianity is all about, to commend it to those outside the
faith and explain it to those inside. It’s a postmodern apologetic,
essentially.
1.
Putting the world to rights
The postmodern, postChristian and increasingly
post-secular world cannot escape certain questions, strange signposts pointing
beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and out into the unknown. We
hear a voice, and lose it as a dream; but it echoes in our subconscious. It’s a
dream of justice. It’s not fair
echoes in the playground. Lawcourts get it wrong. Countries invade others.
Tsunamis. Decline in public morality. Gas chambers. Global evils of materialism
and fundamentalism. Family breakdown (cp Dr Johnson, who said the aim and goal
of all human endeavour was ‘to be happy at home’). The art of being gentle has
gone out of fashion, and everyone wants their ‘rights’. People ask, why is it
like this? Because we have a dream of a different world.
The reason for the dream is that this echo of a voice is
real; there is someone whispering to us, someone who talks about rescue.
Christians believe Jesus took the tears of the world and made them his own;
took the joy of the world and brought it to new birth. Often Christians have
got it wrong; but Tutu in S Africa didn’t; Wilberforce didn’t; Martin Luther
King didn’t.
2. The Hidden spring
Story of a dictator who
replaced unreliable spring sources of water with concrete and pipes. People
adapted, all went well, until one year water burst through the ground and
wrecked whole cities. It’s been like that with spirituality, the hidden spring
that bubbles up within human hearts and human societies. We have a W philosophy
which offers concrete roads and shopping malls and houses, church life
compartmentalised and seen as ‘an up-market version of daydreaming for those
who like that kind of thing’. Many people have done their best to tap into the
hidden springs, aware there is more available than the official churches have
let on. Others have been aware of an indefinable thirst. The official guardians
of the water system have been horrified to see the eruption of spirituality in
recent years. 9/11 shows what happens when you try to organize a world on the
assumption that spirituality is a private matter, and what really matters is
politics and economics. In many parts of the world the attempt to pave
everything with concrete hasn’t taken hold – Africa, Asia, S America. Religious
Experience Research Unit, www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/ahrerca.html
- running since 1969.
If there is a God who we can know in Jesus, this upsurge
of spirituality is what we would expect. So is the unguided experimentation;
people starved of water will drink anything, even polluted.
3.Made for each other
The whole area of human relationships forms another echo
of a voice. Desire for lifelong love marriage is undimmed. We want
relationships. One of the odd things in the W is the way we have remoulded and
shrunken them; we have lost our community, but don’t realise it. The echo is
the echo of relationship with God, which alone is permanent.
4. For the beauty of the earth
The world is full of beauty; but always incomplete.
It slips through our fingers; the music,
the mountain, the sunset – we cannot take them home, own them. They always seem
unfinished. The beauty of the natural world is the echo of a voice, a signpost pointing
beyond itself. Beauty is sometimes so powerful that it evokes our deepest
feelings of awe, wonder, gratitude, reverence. But it can’t be codified, or
even agreed about; and concepts of what is beautiful change. Plato said what we
see here is just a shadow of something in another world, a world of ultimate
reality; and yet that suggests this reality is gad, sick, which is not what
Christians believe. We believe the glory we see around us belongs to God the
creator; this world is the real one, waiting to be repaired. The masterpiece
already exists in the mind of the composer; one day we will be ready to perform
it.
Take away any of these things and human life is impoverished.
We are made for relationship with another Being who can only be known in a
spiritual way. What we mean by ‘know’ will be much more like knowing a person,
and less like knowing which is the right bus into town; a kind of knowing which
involves trust, trial and error, time. One food word for this deeper and richer
kind of knowing is love.
5. God
The Christian story claims to be the true story about God
and the world. The reflections so far appear to lead us towards the centre of a
maze; but leave us tantalizingly short of the goal. No path can lead the
unaided human mind from reflective atheism to Christian faith. Imagine looking
in the dark with candle or torch; but when the sun rises there is no need. Lots
of arguments about God are like someone waving a torch into the sky to see if
the sun is shining. He can’t be studied like maths.
Eccl 5.2, ‘God is in heaven, and you upon earth;
therefore let your words be few’. Heaven was conceived not as a place up there;
nor as a destination for the souls of the blessed - but as a space opposed to
our space; God’s space. We can imagine the relation between God’s space and our
space in 3 ways: co-terminous (ie pantheism); overlapping (Judaism/Christianity);
separate (ie deism or gnosticism). Christians believe the 2 spheres do overlap,
and that God makes his presence felt in the sphere of Earth. In the OT this
happened in the temple.
6. Israel
The story as Jews of Jesus’ day might have told it…
Babel; the covenant with Abraham; the leitmotif of going
away and coming home again, slavery and exodus, exile and restoration. 4 themes
give shape to the story: king, temple, Torah, new creation. New creation will
come about only through one final exile and restoration; restoration through a suffering
servant.
7. Jesus – the coming of God’s kingdom
Christianity is about something that happened. Not
about a new moral teaching (though we got some), or about Jesus offering a new
route to heaven after death (the right side of the LJ fresco), or about fresh
teaching on God (though we do learn lots). Christianity
is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfilment of his promises and
as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this – the finding,
the saving, the giving of new life – in Jesus. He has done it. with Jesus,
God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once for all. A great door has
swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It is the door to the
prison where we have been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to
experience God’s rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore
the new world to which we now have access. In particular, we are all invited –
summoned, actually – to discover, through following Jesus, that this new world
is indeed a place of justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty, and that
we are not only to enjoy it as such but to work at bringing it to birth on
earth as in heaven. In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that
has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along.
The two spheres now interlock in the person of Jesus
himself.
The reliability of the gospels. The kingdom message.
8. Jesus: rescue and renewal
His hearers will have recognised what he was saying, from
OT prophecies, in familiar riddle and parable form – but they couldn’t work out
exactly what he meant. They recognised him as Messiah; but no one thought the
Messiah would have to suffer or die. He arrived Jerusalem and directed his
attack not against the Romans but against the Temple. He intended to fight the
messianic battle by losing it; for the real enemy was not Rome but the powers
of evil with which Israel’s leaders had colluded.
Resurrection. ‘Nothing in Jewish literature or
imagination had prepared people for something like this’. They couldn’t have
made it up. Interestingly, none of the NT accounts talks about the resurrection
as proof of an afterlife; they all say instead that it means God’s kingdom has
indeed arrived. E Orthodox churches have always emphasized that when Jesus rose
again God’s whole creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of
new potential and possibility.
Those who followed Jesus had never imagined that a
Messiah would be divine. But the earliest Christians believed just that.
9. God’s breath of life
The early Christians spoke of new life, a fresh breeze, a
spring morning, the burning of winter rubbish; they picked up the image of a
bird brooding over the waters of chaos to bring order and life to birth. We
cannot separate the Holy Spirit and the task of the church. despite what you might think from some
excitement in the last generation about new spiritual experiences, God doesn’t
give people the Holy Spirit in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent
of a day at Disneyland… the point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow
Jesus to take into all the world the news that he is Lord, that he has won the
victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up and that we are
to help make it happen. Nor can the task of church be attempted without the
Spirit; it isn’t a matter of accepting what Jesus has done and getting on with
it; without God’s Spirit there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s
kingdom.
But often we’ve done just that. We need to rehabilitate
the word church by learning to rely again on the Holy Spirit, so that we can be
God’s people, part of God’s future arriving in the present – just as Jesus was.
The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the
present.
At the moment the world appears a place of suffering and
sorrow as well as of power and beauty. But God is reclaiming it. Our own self,
personality, body is being reclaimed; we are both part of the old creation and
part of the new creation and someone through whom it begins to happen.
Those who see God’s space and our space as separate tend
towards dualism, and value spectacular supernatural events such as healings
over quieter ones of service. These do happen; but the dualist framework
excludes the sense of God’s presence and power already existing in the natural
world.
10. Living by the Spirit
The Law is one of the places where heaven and earth meet;
and the Spirit enables us to keep it. This is one of the main points of
Pentecost.
Word. When you announce the good news that the risen
Jesus is Lord, that very word is the Word of God, a carrier or agent of God’s
Spirit, a means by which new life from God’s dimension comes to bring new
creation within ours.
God’s Spirit offers the answer to the 4 questions with
which we began.
· Creation
will be remade to become all that it strains and yearns to be; the greater
beauty for which the one we already know is a signpost will appear
· God
offers a fresh kind of relationship with himself, others, creation
· God
offers us a new spirituality, the gift of living in both dimensions of his
created order
· God
wants us to anticipate a world put to rights.
Christian spirituality combines awe with intimacy. And it
normally involves suffering.
11. Worship
When you begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural
reaction is to worship him. If not, you haven’t really understood who he is or
what he’s done. Revelation- John says a door opens in heaven. God’s sphere and
ours are not far apart; at certain places/moments they interlock, and the
boundary seems just a thin partition in which a door is opened, a curtain
pulled back, so that people in our dimension can see what’s going on in God’s
dimension. John sees the worship that is going on all the time in heaven.
Golden rules of spirituality:
Christian worship is the celebratory praise and adoration
of God the creator. Reading scripture in worship is the main way of celebrating
who God is and what he has done. Communion is taken in memory of Jesus – it
explains the meaning of his death. He died to rescue us; not give us new ideas.
12. Prayer
The LP is a way of saying to the Father, Jesus has caught
me in the net of his good news; I want to be part of this kingdom movement. For
a pantheist, prayer is just getting in touch with the deepest realities of the
world and of oneself. For the deist, it’s calling across the void to a distant
deity. For the Christian it’s about standing at the fault lines, being shaped
by Jesus who held heaven and earth together as he sweated in Gethsemane.
13. The book God breathed
The
history of Christianity is littered with ways of reading the Bible which have,
in effect, muzzled it. A computer will do a thousand things, and we just
use it for writing and email. So with the Bible; we use it just for the things
we already do.
OT and NT (‘testament’ means covenant; it is a central
Christian claim that the events concerning Jesus were the means of renewing the
covenant).
It’s inspired (not just inspiring, as the pantheist might
have it). Its inspiration is not just supernatural (as the dualist might have
it); it doesn’t bypass the minds of the writers. It’s one of the places where
heaven and earth overlap and interlock. Its writers were caught up in the
strange purposes of God; but remained themselves. It’s not just a work of
reference for making sure we are right about things. its there to equip us to
carry forward God’s purposes of new covenant and new creation.
14. The story and the task
Living within the authority of scripture doesn’t mean
keeping its rules, like the golf club. It means living in the world of the
story which it tells, under the authority of God and as part of his saving
plan. it’s not just a repository of true information, but part of the means by
which, in the power of the Spirit, the living God rescues his people and his
world, and takes the forwards on the journey towards his new creation, and
makes us agents of it.
Parables and metaphor.
15. Believing and belonging
The church is like a river and like a tree – a river of a
thousand historic tributaries, a tree made up of millions of contemporary
communities and individuals.
Becoming a Christian can be like waking to the alarm,
suddenly; or waking quietly, slowly.
The gospel is first and foremost news about something
that has happened. The best response is to believe it. by believing we mean
trusting.
The church is a community, existing for 3 main purposes:
to worship God, to work for his kingdom in the world, and to encourage one
another.
16. New creation, starting now
The point is not to go to heaven when you die. Christian
living means dying with Christ and rising again. The rules are not arbitrary
restraints, but signposts to a way of life in which heaven and earth overlap.
Working for justice. Building relationships of love. Discovering beauty as part
of a larger whole, seeing the world as a violin still waiting to be played.
Cp NT Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, SPCK 2000