Keith’s Blog

Rediscovering the Gospel (3) – the yeast of legalism

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

When I was young, I was always enthralled by Lewis Carroll’s wonderful imagination and the amazing twists and turns it allowed him to build into every page of his writing. Like the one he spoke of in his life as an Anglican clergyman, Carroll (his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was simply great with words.

So what is it that we mean when we use the word ‘Gospel’? And, much more importantly, what is it that God means?

Well, having explained why I believe we desperately need to revisit these questions, let me jump right in and state my conviction that the first and most important yeast we need to free ourselves from, to rediscover the joy of the Gospel, is that of legalism. It is not the only pollutant that has crept in but it may well be the major one.

When Paul tells those in the church at Ephesus, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast,” (Eph 2:8-9) could it be that he is saying something that all of us have heard but few of us have ever rightly understood? I think so. I think it is not only possible that what we mean by those words is no longer what Paul, and the Apostles and many of the inspired Christian writers throughout the centuries, meant. I think it is a reality. And we need to put that right.

In our culture, we have somehow allowed any number of variants to this text to float about unchallenged and become the version of the Gospel held and propagated through our churches. Here’s but a few of what’s on regular offer as an alternative to Ephesian 2:8-9:

“We are saved by grace alone through faith and by
.... attending the evening service.”
.... speaking in tongues.”
.... opposing abortion.”
.... by believing in a literal six day creation.”

And my personal favourite, to which we will return next time, “we are saved by grace alone through faith and by not being a Catholic.”

When Paul says to the early Christians in Rome, “we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law,” (Rom 3.28) what he is trying to communicate is something that I fear we have not only lost sight of in our preaching to others, he is saying something that we may well have lost experience of in our own spiritual journeys.

In the Gospel, people are made right with God, we are made right with God, apart from the observing of any laws, even our most precious, long-standing or historically significant ones. On the cross Jesus has born the full intensity of our rebellion and alienation and taken the consequences of it entirely upon himself. Having done that, and for reasons almost impossible to fathom, he now simply extends to us the offer of reconciliation – freely, without price, deserving or effort. All we have to do is acknowledge our need, turn to him in repentance and faith and receive from him his amazing gift of grace. In Christ, not only are we forgiven, we are reconciled. Moreover, it is by this same grace that we remain right with God, reconciled with God and intimate with God. As in justification, our sanctification is just as assuredly, apart from the observing of any laws. I maintain that it is in large part because we have forgotten this, it is because we have allowed our religious culture’s grasping bylaws to become part of the unwritten tenets of our faith that we have not only slipped into theological and missiological confusion, but have been robbed of the joy God so desires for us.

There can be no additions to the gospel of grace. Anything we try to add to it only subtracts from it, diminishes it. It needs no qualification, no protection. It is just perfect as it is. By grace, we are Sons and Daughters. By grace, we are those now embraced, forgiven, accepted as Children of the living God. By grace, God has chosen to reconcile us to himself. By grace, we are invited to walk with him once again and to have him walk with us. Surely this is good news indeed, and yet how many of us continue to live like those who need to justify our presence in God’s household, like those lucky to be there and needing to remember it, like those who have been given a second chance and better not screw it up this time, like those whose security is determined by how hard we work and how well we obey, like those who are hired servants, mere employees, barely tolerated house guests?

What causes us to live this way when we are offered such complete acceptance and invited to such intimacy in relationship with God and all of it free of charge? Above all the other issues we will discuss, surely it is the yeast of legalism – growing and distorting, stifling and corrupting, tainting and warping, robbing us, and those around us, of the pleasure and nourishment of unleavened joy.

Why do we let it in? Perhaps it is because the only world we know is the world we’ve seen and we’ve never seen grace before. Perhaps it is because we’ve never known what it is to be in a relationship where we are accepted without deserving, and thus, we are confused and uncertain as to what these things actually mean in practice. It is into just such a praxis vacuum that the yeast of legalism so easily creeps and so efficiently blooms. Since it doesn’t make sense that God would love us freely, we begin to act in such a way as to assure Him that he has made the right choice in forgiving us. Slowly, but surely, we then begin acting in particular ways to ensure that God continues to show us his favour – if we are truly messed up, even to begin to repay God for the kindness shown to us in Christ. Before we know it, we are wittingly or unwittingly earning our salvation. In fact, we are pretty sure we actually deserve it and the counter for the Pharisees has clicked on once more.

Perhaps it is just that we allow other people around us to use guilt and shame to squeeze us into the acceptance of legalism. Perhaps it is just our pride that wants to hide from our need of grace.

Whatever the cause, it is great to remember that others have been similarly confused and nonetheless rediscovered what the gospel was all about. Martin Luther himself knew what it was to wane under such a religion of law and then find afresh the gospel of grace. After his journey, he could joyfully write, “faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favour that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. “

May that same rediscovery be ours!

Rediscovering the Gospel (Part 2) – An Uncomfortable Truth?

During my student days, I had the privilege of spending almost a year in the wonderful but troubled island of Jamaica. It is a place of almost indescribable natural beauty in which both extremes of poverty and wealth coexist side by side. Jamaicans are great to hang out with so if you ever get the chance… Anyhow, three days per week, I would catch two buses from where I was living (serially, not in parallel) and head off to Webster Memorial Church in the downtown region of Kingston where I was placed as an assistant. Over the years, and recently again, I have reflected often on the words painted large on the outside wall of a school for the blind that I passed each day en route to the church: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
I very much liked the point they were making to those tempted to gaze at their school with pity or derision.

People often make the assumption that blindness occurs only in others. It is the reason for this rather unusual series of blog entries. I want to have this discussion on what the Gospel really is because my growing concern is that those of us in the church have lost our sight concerning it. I think we have allowed the Gospel to be changed and must recover it again if we are to prove faithful in the task God has given us. The Danish theologian and philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once noted that “in the matters of faith, every generation must begin again.” He is right, of course, but I think we need to pay particular attention to his words in these present moments of unprecedented spiritual turmoil and decline.

Why is it that the number of those involved in local churches in Ireland today is declining so quickly? For over a decade now, I have read article after article and book after book on this subject and there seems to be widespread agreement around a twofold answer to the question. More times than not, the demise of the Irish church is blamed on changes in the culture around it, and a failure to live out what is preached within it. Our primary missiological difficulty, we are told, is that those around us are caving in to the materialism, secularism and self-interest of modern Irish life whilst those in the church are themselves failing to live up to the message they believe in .

But what if both of the above answers are actually totally wrong?

Firstly, what if the problem with our churches is not ‘them’ at all, but lies solely with ‘us’? What if the changes going on in our culture are not the real reason for the steady decline our churches are experiencing? What if the problem actually lies in what has been going on in the church?

Secondly, what if what the painful slide into church decline evidenced all around is not primarily caused by our failure to practice what we preach but, rather, the opposite? What if, beneath the surface, the reality of our situation is that we are indeed practicing what we preach, we are faithfully embodying what we believe? What if people are leaving the church in droves, today, because the gospel now being proclaimed and incarnated there is nothing but a shadow of the ‘euangelion’ first proclaimed by the Apostles? Could the woeful dichotomy that exists between the ancient teaching of Jesus and the modern reality of our Churches reveal not just a shift from pre-modern to post-modern in our culture, not just a rot in our praxis, as we have always thought, but also, and much more seriously, a terrible rot in the theology that lies at the centre of our proclamation? Could it be that, at the end of several hundred years of assumed faithfulness in kerugma and confidently expressed certainty in orthodoxy, we actually find ourselves in the place of being blind guides in serious need of reformation in our own faith? Personally, I think it must.

Jesus says that “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:18) and His prognosis for the latter is somewhat worrying! If these words were true when he first spoke them, are they not just as true today? And could they not just as powerfully be confronting us as they once did the Pharisees? Could it be that it is us who are now the Pharisees, those who love the praise of men more than God, those who substituted relationship with God for knowledge about him, those who are passionate about the keeping of the laws but who fail woefully to offer and proclaim grace?

My answer to most of the above is, sadly, yes! Jesus clearly warned us to watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. It is my growing conviction that those in the reformed churches, and none more than me, have woefully failed to heed Him. If we would see Ireland respond once more to the gospel of Christ then we must first reclaim that gospel from the many influences that have diluted and altered it. We must preach the good news to ourselves as well as our communities.

So what do you think? In the entries that follow, I would love to invite you to interact with me as I try to explore what it will take for us to be free of this unwelcome yeast and its pollution once more.

Rediscovering the Joy of the Gospel (part1)

And now for something completely different…

Over the next number of weeks my hope is to begin a conversation with those of you kind enough to read my blog – a conversation about what it will take to help people in Ireland to rediscover the joy of the Gospel.

I have been a follower of Jesus for some twenty-six years and, for most of that period, I have been wrestling with what I can now articulate to have been a form of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This lasting ailment of mine, as our friends at Wikipedia put it, ‘is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling between what one holds to be true and what one knows to be true.’

My particular discomfort arose, and remains, because of two – for me undeniable -realities that have I seen played out since my very first encounter with the Gospel .

The first is that there is something simply incredible about this message Jesus has brought to our world. Ever since my first encounter with the good news of God’s Kingdom I have believed it to be the most powerful, wonderful and liberating news ever declared in human history. It simply captivates, invigorates and all sorts of other ‘..ates’ me! It has been a life-transforming joy for me to have discovered that the creator of this universe has revealed himself and has done so to invite us into new relationship with Him, with each other and with our world.

The second is that there is something simply wrong with our churches. There is something simply not right about the so-called ‘communities of faith’ in which this gloriously good news is being embodied. T.S. Mooney, my dear old friend and mentor in the faith, used to joke that whilst the early believers outlived, outlaughed and outloved all those around them, Christians today tend to be dull, daft and devout! I can remember myself laughing the first time I heard him say this and I’ve shared his humorous insight with many since. But as I have observed in my own ministry, as I have travelled to churches in all parts of our Island and as I listen as friends and colleagues describe the circumstances of their own church situations, I have come to the unwelcome conclusion that, in fact, our circumstances are far graver than even this.

When people in those early decades and centuries of the church were trying to find a way to summarise this new and rapidly spreading message that had come from a supposedly resurrected Rabi from Nazareth, the phrase that they came up with was ‘the Good News!’ When they tried to describe the sort of people that were arising from this growing religious movement, what they settled on were labels such as ‘followers of the way’ or ‘Christians.’ (There were some funnier ones too, such as ‘cannibals’ because people heard Christians were into eating flesh and drinking blood!)

But what do people in Ireland today say when they are trying to do the same thing? Over and over again, with young people and with adults, the summary I have heard people give to the message proclaimed by Jesus’ followers contains words/phrases such as ‘condemning’, ‘controlling’, ‘frightening’, ‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’. The descriptions they make of those within this Jesus movement include tags such as ‘self-righteous’, ‘judgemental’, ‘sectarian’, ‘bigoted’ and ‘hateful.’

When we watch what happened through the lives and communities of the very first followers of Jesus, we see that they not only were filled with joy but greatly impacted and radically changed the world around them. When we observe what is happening through our lives and church communities today, what we see are churches who have little joy and who are becoming increasingly irrelevant, unappealing and impotent (in a non-sexual way!)

How can this be? Well for many years now, I have simply assumed it is because those of us who have been recipients of the unchanging Gospel of Christ have woefully failed to live it out in any adequate way before those in our families and communities who are watching on. I have simply assumed it is because we have been teaching one thing in our words and then doing something completely other in our actions – a kind of ‘the mind is willing but the body is weak’ sort of thing.

Well, the reason I am hoping to begin the ‘conversation’ mentioned above is that this is no longer what I believe. I no longer think that our problem lies in our failure to live out the unchanging Gospel of Christ. I think our problem is that many of us in the Irish church no longer know what the unchanging Gospel of Christ actually is! I think we have changed it, and in changing it, we have lost the very thing that makes it the most wonderful and liberating news this world has ever known.

Over these next few weeks, I would like to try and spell out some of the reasons I think this devastating loss has occurred and invite you to discuss them with me. I do not have all the answers. I’m not sure that I even have many of them. I am simply hoping to start a conversation in which I, and maybe others, can explore again what this message of Jesus is all about. As I have been helped to do this myself, I have rediscovered a joy in the Gospel that I thought I had lost. I have found again a message that can truly change the world. My hope is that those who suffer a similar dissonance to me, will be helped do the same.

If you would like to correspond with me on any of what I will write, please just email me at kmccrory@maynoothcc.org and I will send you out the summary sheets of the discussions that follow.

The Objurgating of Labels!

It’s not very often that I get to cook for myself any more. Living with a wife and two children usually means that dinner menus are arrived at by that frustrating and objectionable process known as consensus. (Where’s Karl Barth and his view of democracy as ‘an wholly demonic system’ when you need him!?) For some reason I am the only person in my home who thinks that great tasting food, and food that absolutely burns your mouth off, are not mutually exclusive concepts!

Anyway, these days it is not often that I have the opportunity to eat any decently hot food at all so I suspect you can imagine my joyful anticipation when I was left by myself for a night recently and was able to cook whatever I wanted.

I also suspect that you can imagine my traumatic anguish when my long awaited hopes for a thoroughly hot curry were totally ruined by the presence of a supermarket Special Price label!

It was supposed to an ‘extra spicy’ Hot Thai red curry with three red chillies on the added warning notice. Food with a warning on it -it just doesn’t get much better than that for me! All I had to do was add chicken and water, put it in the oven and then feast on the delights of food that not only satisfies the appetite but which cleanses the pores.

But how much water was I supposed to add? What temperature was I supposed to set the oven at? How long was I supposed to cook it? Simple questions these that, in normal circumstances, are simple to answer. Just look at the back of the packet. It’s all there in black and white.. except when there’s a Special Price label stuck entirely over the top of it!

I tried everything. I held it up to the light to see if I could see through the label but the silver packaging blocked that idea. I tried to peel the offending paper off but it simply wouldn’t come off without destroying the instructions underneath. I needed to eat and get out to my meeting. So, I had to guess. I guessed the amount of water. I guessed the temperature and the time. And I guessed completely wrongly!!

What emerged from the oven 30 minutes later was a stodgy, burnt and thoroughly depressing chicken sludge a la yuk that even I couldn’t enjoy. What a waste of time and opportunity!

Don’t our labels always do that? Don’t they always leave us guessing at what’s really underneath? And don’t we almost always guess wrong? Frequently, in my encounters with people both inside and outside of the church, I’m left reminded that settling for such easy to apply labels on people, as well as food, so often robs us of the glorious opportunity life brings to genuinely engage, to genuinely understand, to genuinely enjoy.

Here’s to the objurgating of labels!

Easter is not about believing in God!

Without question, Easter is my favourite time of year. The blossoming of Spring; the lengthening of sunlight hours; the festive celebration of the resurrection; and especially the fact that, as yet, Hallmark and Cadbury’s have struggled to find any effective way to commercialise Good Friday as they have the events of Christmas – all contributes to my looking forward to, and my savouring of, this wonderful highlight of the Christian calendar.

This year as usual, all this talk about crucifixion and resurrection has initiated much discussion and debate in the media and in general conversation about the Easter events portrayed within the pages of the New Testament. Was this the greatest moment in human history or simply another tragic reminder of how the powerful can snuff out the light of any who dare oppose them? Was Jesus really who he claimed to be or was he just another in the long line of delusional messiahs who have blotted the landscape of our human history? Did Jesus actually rise from the dead bodily or was it simply some symbolic or spiritual occurrence to which the disciples bore witness? Can the bible’s version of the Easter events be trusted as eyewitness account or is it simply the fictional work of a later church?

These questions are, of course, very important ones and large amounts of energy, passion and resource are rightly expended in pursuing them. After all, Peter tells us in I Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” As followers of Jesus, we unquestionably do need to engage in this art of argumentation as polemics has been so nicely defined.

My only concern about all of this is that, if we allow ourselves to be drawn exclusively into these sorts of questions, we might well give the impression to others that the point of Easter, and the concern of Christians, is that people will come to believe in the bible and in the God it speaks about. And this is not the point at all!

I’m sure you’ve probably heard that old (and terribly non-pc) story about the agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac who sat up all night wondering if there was a dog! I guess it eventually dawned on him. (Sorry!) But whether there is dog, or even a God, is simply not the issue at stake in the Christmas and Easter stories. The startling, mind-blowing, life-changing point of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is not that we can now believe that God exists. (As James, the brother of Jesus points out in James 2:19, even the demons believe that!) The point of the Gospel is that we can now be in relationship with the God who exists!

Easter is not the proof that God is out there. It is the proof that God is right here, right here among us, right here before us, and right now desires us to know his presence in our daily lives! And there is nothing in the world (egg, rabbit or dog!) that even comes close to tasting as wonderful as that!