Maynooth Community Church

RTG 10: Creation and its Creator

2012-05-12T18:43:57Z

(FYI this entry is part of an going discussion entitled ‘Rediscovering the Gospel’ (RTG) so you might want to read some of the previous entries before starting here.)

For me, the masterpiece of Jesus’ message begins with the simple, yet utterly profound declaration that you and I are not alive today on this revolving planet by accident. We are here because this incredible creation in which we find ourselves has been carefully and deliberately willed into existence by an even more incredible Creator. As the very first verse in the Bible puts it, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) Plato and the Gnostics are wrong.

And not only is the world here because God wants it to be; you and I are as well! Genesis 1:26-27 tells us that having overseen the formation of the rest of our planet and its occupants, God then said: “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness… So God created human beings in his own image; male and female he created them.” There is so much for us to learn from these verses – and Jesus clearly affirmed their content in his own teaching (eg Matthew 19:4-6) – but, for now, it is sufficient for us to realise that the Gospel thus begins with God himself and the fact that we ‘are’ because we are, in fact, His.

Many of us are fascinated by the ‘how?’ of creation, and past and ongoing studies in such fields as geology, cosmology, palaeontology and genetics provide us with an abundance of awe inspiring learnings and insights. The manner in which our world appears to have been formed and how it has developed and evolved over the millennia is absolutely mind-blowing – and we still understand only a tiny little piece of the overall picture.

But beyond the ‘How?’ lies in each of our hearts the instinctive yearning to understand the ‘Why?’ and in the message of Jesus that second question is conclusively and majestically answered.

The joyous beginning of that answer is that you and I exist because there is a God out there who has created our world and who has created us; even more than this, we exist because this God made this incredible world just so that we could be made; we are not here by accident; we are not here by illusion; we are here because of Him.

The Gospel begins with the good news about Creation and its Creator.

RTG 9: The Gospel as it used to be

2012-05-12T18:39:31Z

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican is widely recognised as one of the great triumphs in human artistic endeavour. Painted from 1508 to 1512, Michelangelo’s striking portrayal of the creation, fall and destruction of humankind by the flood has evoked enormous praise for its interpretative and creative genius. As one commentator puts it, “rarely has anyone so beautifully depicted the human form. Never has the scope of the divine and human drama been so powerfully portrayed.”

How sad then, that Michelangelo masterpiece began to degrade almost immediately. No sooner had his scaffolding bridge, on which he had stood and lain to paint, been removed than the combination of smoke and grime, ever present in the chapel, began to attack the hue, lightness and colour of his work. Such was the damage inflicted by these unrecognised art terrorists that within a century of its completion, no-one even remembered what Michelangelo’s original frescoes had really looked like.

In subsequent centuries, well-intentioned restorers tried to deal with the problem by covering over the work with a type of varnish in a short-lived attempt to revitalize the original colours but that only served as an adhesive for yet more smoke and dirt. The painter Biagio Biagetti wrote in 1936, “We see the colours of the Sistine ceiling as if through smoked glass.”

However, In 1981, while cleaning other priceless frescoes within the chapel, Fabrizio Mancinelli, director of restoration work, performed a critical experiment on the smoked glass masterpiece. At the top of the scaffolding being used to clean the other frescoes, Mancinelli was able to reach Michelangelo’s lunette of Mathan and Eleazer, ancesters of Christ and using a special solution called AB-57 cleaned a minute portion of the famous painting.

The results were excellent and the decision was taken to clean the entire lunette – but only one square inch at a time! After all, this was the work of Michelangelo. Art experts from the Vatican and all around Italy were invited to view the results and, based on their conclusions, plans for the most ambitious restoration project in art history were set in place. They would restore the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!

A six-yard-wide bridge was built for the project and attached in the same holes used for Michelangelo’s bridge and the restoration advanced slowly and carefully, inch by precious inch. Various different approaches were needed throughout the process. For example, on portions were Michelangelo had painted on dry plaster, a different technique and solution was needed to those places where he’d painted on wet plaster.

The task was completed on December 31st 1989. It had taken twice as long to clean the ceiling as the artist had needed to paint the original. But the result was breathtaking. Beneath the centuries of smoke and grime, and beneath the flawed attempts to protect what was under the surface, lay vibrant detail and wonderful colour never before realised by students of the great master painter.

Michelangelo had been known as a master of form—his frescoes had been said to resemble sculpture rather than painting, but following the restoration work now completed, suddenly he was revealed as a master also of colour—with azure, malachite green, rose and lavender of such nuance that experts could only gaze in amazement.

Not surprisingly, there was quite a bit of controversy over the restoration. Many critics said no restoration was necessary. Some protested that the process had actually destroyed the work. But most agreed on two things: for the first time in nearly five hundred years, people were viewing this masterpiece the way it was originally intended; and secondly, before the restoration no-one could have imagined just how wonderful Michelangelo’s original creation had actually been.

Without wanting to be overly dramatic (I am a Presbyterian after all!!), it is my firm conviction that the reason we need to be working through and understanding the sort of issues we have been looking at in our little blog series thus far – such as legalism, individualism, Platonism etc – is that for most of us our view of the gospel has undergone a similar degrading to that of Michelangelo’s work on that chapel ceiling.

For hundreds of years now, perceived and unperceived theological and cultural terrorists have been at work in our midst undermining, discolouring and degrading the glorious wonder of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And such has been the enduring effectiveness of this attack that few of us in the church today even remember what the hue, light and colour of that original masterpiece actually was. If this is so for us then it is doubly so for those outside of the church. Despite what is taken for granted in so much of modern secular and sacred literature, the vast majority of church and non-church going men and women in our country have not actually cooled in devotion or rejected Christianity at all. They have simply never comprehended it and thus have never had the chance to decide what their response will be.

One of the things that excites me most about following Jesus, is that every time we peel off another layer of what his message has been coated in over the years, what we discover underneath is not a diminished nor reduced Gospel but rather the opposite. The more we understand the truth about what Jesus taught and accomplished, the more we see the wonder of his life, death, resurrection and ascension. The more we see that wonder, the more captivated and amazed we become. (It is for this reason that in the end, like the role of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, the seeming opposition to our faith from people like Darwin, Nietzsche, Bultmann, and Dawkins et al may well prove to have been gift as well as burden. But we’ll leave that for another day!)

So now that we've looked at some of the things that shouldn't be in the Gospel let's remind ourselves what should be.

Tach Demek- Our Favourite Town In Ethiopia

2011-11-10T12:37:09Z

For the last two Christmases, MCC has engaged in an utterly brilliant and subversive campaign called Advent Conspiracy. In the first year that we did it we raised over €5000 and so we were able to send $5000 to an organisation called Charity Water. We heard just this month that this money has been spent on a hand dug well for the 175 people who live in the small village of Tach Demek in Ethiopia.

This well doesn't just mean life- but it does mean that. Clean water saves the sick and the young and the old from the threat of diseases we can't even imagine. But it improves the quality of life immeasurably. Think of the joy of bathing as one such example- now possible in Tach Demek where once it was a distant dream. Since Christmas 2009 Charity Water have been working on getting local government on board, developing village water committees and finding the best contractors on the ground to do the work so that this well will have the best possible potential for being a sustainable change for the lives of the residents.

There are 81 million people in Ethiopia. 62% lack clean water. 88% lack basic sanitation. By saving ourselves from the slavery of consumerist Christmas we are also saving the lives of people God loves and treasures.

The location of our well is at 12.22697222, 36.95380556. You can see the location at Google Maps here or track it down amongst the many other excellent projects Charity Water are running that region on their website.

This Christmas we'll be running Advent Conspiracy again- who knows what the long term impact will be as we learn together that for followers of Jesus, presence means more than presents.

A Note On Eldership

2011-10-28T14:22:44Z

MCC are going to be electing new elders in November and many of us are prayerfully considering who we might be called to invite into this special role. Eldership is a serious business. One of the things I love about the Presbyterian Church is this structure of government. It is profoundly democratic. In fact, there is a direct correlation between the location of Presbyterian churches (France and USA as obvious examples) and the rise of the early republic states. It is no coincidence that the United Irishmen drew their vitality from local communities of Christians who for generations had been deliberating together as equals about direction and leadership.

I wanted to draw out one aspect of the eldership structure that is easily missed. Churches, like all human institutions, naturally tend towards solidifying into a power arrangement and hierarchy. Eldership doesn't magically save us from that- indeed there have been times in the past where the PCI really did lose its sense of what it was meant to be about.

Yet eldership has a unique strength. Power is never invested in an individual. All other ecclesial systems that I have encountered, from Roman Catholicism to independent baptists ultimately put power in a single person. Now I am not knocking those systems. They all have strengths we lack. But personally I have always been taken with the fact that our structure is set up so that only one man can ever be said to have authority over anyone in the Presbyterian tradition and that man is Jesus. We are never asked to submit to an elder as an individual. Eldership is always a community. The local "Kirk Session" (the body of elders) operate together as a team. We don't abide by their decisions as individuals but as a fellowship. The Presbyteries and the General Assembly of the church works in the same way- they are communities of communities, elders and ministers representing the 500+ churches that worship in our little stream of faith over the island.

So in Presbyterian churches, no individual has authority over another individual. The only person with authority is Jesus, and elders work in communion with each other to discern what that authority means for us in the here and now.

Learning To Pray From Catholics

2011-10-11T17:36:26Z

Two Saturdays ago, while most sane people were still in bed or at a push watching the rugby world cup, over a dozen MCC members showed up at the Post-Primary school to pray. Our guide on that morning was Rev. Tom Wilson, the minister of Kilmakee Presbyterian Church in Lisburn. He came to give us an introduction to the spirituality devised by St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits and the key leader in the Catholic Reformation of the 1500s.

It was a pretty awe-inspiring session for those of us who were there. In the first part of the morning Tom told us his own story and how he ended up being a Northern Irish Presbyterian Minister who found deep spiritual nourishment and guidance from the Jesuits. He also revealed how deeply Scriptural the approach devised by Loyola actually is.

In the second half of the morning he led us into the Examen, the nighttime prayer of Ignatius. He laid out a number of different ways this prayer of recollection could be approached. We all got to it. For many, this structured approach to daily prayer was deeply rewarding and deeply attractive. You might well hear much more about the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises in the coming months at MCC as we take up the Examen as a discipline.

If you missed the day and wanted to learn more about the Examen, there are two websites that I think are really helpful. The first is run by the Jesuits in Ireland and it is called Sacred Space. It is a daily reflection and prayer website that allows you to draw on the Ignatian spiritual disciplines, including study of Scripture, to connect with God.The second is a more general Ignatian resource called The Daily Examen. This is run by the Jesuits in America and it is full of great resources and videos to get you started.

On The Complex Job Of The Church

2011-09-21T10:10:02Z

NT Wright, speaking in this video on the task of apologetics in a college in Vancover, talks about the way people see that life is complex and beautiful and begging for some kind of spirituality but that the church is not a group of people they want to go on that journey with...

For many people, they know that life is multi-dimensional, in a variety of ways, but they don't associate that with the church or with orthodox Christianity. Shame on us! But that is the society we live in. So people, by and large, want to find something that they loosely call spirituality, whether or not they even associate that with God or a god. But they don't know how, and it goes wrong and it produces the Branch Davidians and it produces all sorts of other extraordinary things and we all know there is a mess down that road as well as an extraordinary golden hope down that road but we can't easily nail it down. And we in the church have often done our best, accidentally, to mess it up.

How good are MCC at being a group of people who welcome others into the story of God? Do we throw up obstacles for people that just get in the way? How does MCC become a group of people who are able to ask the very interesting questions of spirituality in such a way that it genuinely allows people to find this "golden source of hope"?

RTG 8: Rediscovering the World - the Yeast of Separatism

2011-09-07T15:33:53Z

“Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.” 2 Cor 6:17

I first encountered the ‘doctrine’ of separation, or non-fellowship as it is also known, during my early attempts to join a local church. Such was its hold in one I attended that the church leaders there not only refused to socialise with their non-Christian colleagues outside of work, they would also not even eat with them whilst in work. If they were having a sandwich in their office, for example, and an unbelieving colleague walked in, they would stop eating until either that person left again or they had found somewhere else to eat in private. Another encounter with it came some years later during an educational trip to the Holy Land with a group of reformed church leaders from various denominations. During our time there, I was more than a little surprised to discover that some of those present were not willing to share in communion with the rest of us because of their belief that they should keep themselves ‘separate’.

These are rather extreme examples, I grant you, but many churches have some version of this separation doctrine in place. Some have it very explicitly in their doctrinal statements. Some have it in what is communicated verbally in their teaching. Some have it very subtly in what is acknowledged as acceptable within their congregational life and culture. Wherever it emerges, its basic tenet is that ‘true’ believers should have nothing to do with those who are, and that which is, ‘of the world.’ The justification for this is taken from various biblical texts such as James 4:4 which says ‘don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God,’ Amos 3:3 which says ‘Can two walk together except they be in agreement?’ or Ephesians 5:11, which says, ‘Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness..’ At first sight, these verses may seem to support something like this idea but they only do so until we look at them in context and set them in their proper setting within the New Testament. When we do that, we discover that like many other erroneous teachings that creep into the church, the idea of separation as expressed above has the appearance of Christianity but is entirely at odds with its vital essence.

Fortunately, it is not a new problem and the Apostle Paul addresses it very adequately in I Corinthians chapter 5. When Paul first wrote to the church in Corinth (I and II Corinthians were not his only or his first letters to the church there) it is clear that this kind of ‘separation’ from the world is actually what the believers there thought Paul was calling them to. What they thought Paul had said was that they were to keep entirely away from all those in their community who were sexually immoral, or greedy and swindlers, or those who were idolaters. In other words, they were to do what the doctrine of separation calls us to. But then, in I Corinthians 5:9-12, Paul responds to their interpretation and makes it clear that they are entirely and absolutely mistaken! This is what Paul says:

9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with any who claim to be fellow believers but are sexually immoral or greedy, idolaters or slanderers, drunkards or swindlers. With such persons do not even eat. 12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?

Do you see the vital difference? The only sexually immoral people, the only greedy and swindling people, the only idolaters we are to separate from in our lives are Christian ones! It’s only with those inside the church that we are to judge or remove ourselves from! Those who are on the outside and who are immoral, or greedy and swindling, or idolaters, or whatever else they may be, with these people we are absolutely to associate! These are the people Jesus has died for! To withdraw from and seek to have nothing to do with them is to withdraw from and have nothing to do with the very mission God has called us to! How strange and sad it is that this passage in which Paul categorically says that Christians should not withdraw from the world should be used to advocate that very thing. And yet, that is what frequently happens. Imagine if Jesus had done this? Imagine if Jesus had refused to eat or socialise with sinners? Imagine if He had stayed well away from the sort of people whose lives were utterly out of step with God’s word? Imagine if He had never gone anywhere, nor done anything, that might have led to people thinking he was giving credence to the sinful behaviour of others? The Gospel records would have been entirely different and so would the Gospel itself.

In I Corinthians 5:11, and in the other passages quoted by those who hold this understanding, the separation we are called to from the world is one of heart and of holiness. It is never a blanket separation in terms of geography, involvement or friendship. Of course there are some contexts and some relationships in which it would be unwise for us to participate but this is a far cry from saying that we must entirely remove ourselves from the world. We are not to be of the world in which we live but we are very much to be in it! We are never to allow anything in the world to corrupt our primary love for God but we are absolutely to love and serve and do all we can to reach the people who are in the world. How can salt make any impact on meat without being in contact with it? How can light make any difference to darkness unless it shines where it is? Of course we must befriend those who are far from God. Of course we must join sports clubs and community groups and bring our influence there. Of course we must get involved in our society is every way we can so that as many as possible, in as many places as possible, can have the opportunity to know the love of God in Christ Jesus his Son! It may be a harder way to live out our faith, of course. It may be a riskier path than just staying safely and solely within the fellowship of God’s people. But this is our calling in Christ and we must not shirk from the privilege or responsibility of this calling to be God’s witnesses to the ends of the earth.

Separation is a doctrine of the Pharisees. It is they alone in the New Testament who advocated associating only with the righteous and having nothing to do with the world – and we are not to be like them. Our calling is to follow our master Jesus. Yes, to be utterly set apart for God but, also, to be very much the friends of sinners and to take the good news of God’s kingdom not only to the healthy but also to the sick wherever they may be found. Separationism has led a great many of us in the Christian church to settle for avoidance, if not self-righteous judgement, of those outside of our communities instead of doing all we can to love and reach them. It has led a great many of our churches to live isolated and bunkered existences and thus to never realise the missional potential God has placed within them. To rediscover the Gospel of Jesus we must remove this damaging yeast from our midst and we must recover our calling to be witnesses who do not withdraw from the world but who go into every last part of it in Jesus’ name.

Loving Your Enemies

2011-07-29T14:10:47Z

After the excellent Arts festival led by our teens yesterday, I thought it would be cool to share with you the testimony of Johnny Lee Clary, a Ku Klux Klan leader for many years and how "a little old black man defeated the whole Klan".

Loving The LORD Your God With All Your Mind

2011-07-22T12:21:41Z

Last Sunday we looked at the passage in Acts 17 where Paul addresses the Aeropagus, the council of philosophers, political theorists, dramatists and other gathered intellectuals of Athens. In the Q&A session that followed a lot of the conversation rotated around what it means to be able to reason about our faith and the command by Jesus to love the LORD your God with all your mind. Of course, Jesus' command is fourfold. He also says that we are to love God with our hearts, souls and strength as well as mind.

A fascinating aspect of that command is that Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, one of the most significant sections of the whole Old Testament for the identity of the Israelites. An even cursory examination of the verse reveals that Jesus remixes it. He adds the loving the LORD with your mind line.

The implications of this are immense. Reformed theology has always had a special emphasis on the sense in which our spirituality cannot be disconnected from our thought process. Jesus does not just reveal truth. He is Truth. Christian spirituality is centred around the fact that we can know things; the Unknown God has made Himself known.

We can't avoid reasoning. The question is are we reasoning well- are we exercising our brain so that we are fit to the task of reasoning about our life and making it coherent? John Henry Newman once wrote:

It is characteristic for our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself: we compare, contrast, abstract, generalise, connect, adjust, classify.

This process of shaping how we view the world is inevitable. Yet sometimes the call to reason that Gospel makes to us is heard as a call to yet another duty. Yet one more thing we have to do!

Yet in reality, this call that Jesus makes to us is one of liberation. I had coffee with a friend yesterday who spoke about how he was terrified when the New-Atheist movement began. He would see people reading Richard Dawkins' God Delusion on the bus and worry about what the book contained. He was genuinely intimidated by the possibility that the atheists had arguments that would force him to give up his faith.

In the midst of this fear and insecurity he stumbled across the huge amount of high quality apologetics that were freely available online. Premier Christian Radio have an excellent radio programme called "Unbelievable" with archives available. Perhaps one of the best resources is produced by the British wing of IFES and it is called Be Thinking. It organises talks and essays from beginner to expert dealing with pretty much every question you have been tempted to reason about. The Centre For Public Christianity in Sydney is led by the excellent Christian scholar John Dickson (who wrote the best recent book about evangelism) and has great material on hand. Individual Christian thinkers often have excellent websites that they themselves maintain. Alister McGrath is an obvious case in point. And the Sri Lankan theologian Vinoth Ramachandra will always make you think.

My friend started listening and reading and reasoning and he lost his fear. He regularly engages in apologetic conversations, especially with people who are heartily antagonistic towards Christianity. He marvels at how flimsy the arguments against God actually are and he has found great joy and some considerable spiritual growth in taking the task of loving the LORD with his own mind to heart.

A questioning mind is not something to be feared. It is essential for the health of MCC that we are a community of questioning minds. Loving God is always the path to freedom, with our hearts, with our souls, with our strength and with our minds.

The Legacy Of Eunuchs

2011-07-07T14:46:07Z

On Sunday last we looked at the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8. The Church Fathers tell us that the Ethiopian Finance Minister went home not simply rejoicing, as the text says, but evangelising. Around 180AD, Irenaeus of Lyon wrote in his classic Against Heresies says of the Ethiopian:

This man was also sent into the regions of Ethiopia, to preach what he had himself believed, that there was one God preached by the prophets, but that the Son of this [God] had already made [His] appearance in human nature (secundum hominem), and had been led as a sheep to the slaughter; and all the other statements which the prophets made regarding Him.

I love this aspect of the story. I wish we knew more about him and his subsequent life. Perhaps someday archeological finds will cast some more light on what happened. The great 20th Century poet TS Eliot speculated about the fate of the Magi after the wonderous things they saw in Bethlehem. Decades later, at the end of their lives, he has one reflect on it in his poem The Magi. In the final stanza he draws out how conflicting it would be to see the Kingdom of God dawn in Jesus and then return to a land where such hope had not yet reached.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

This is beautiful poetry. But there seems to be much more truth in Irenaeus' account, both historically and poetically. Those who "go on their way rejoicing" don't keep the news to themselves. They shout it out from the rooftops. Their infectious joy draws others to hear and before long we can imagine a church springing up in the land of the Magi, just as it did in the land of Ethiopia.

Today, that church is striving. On Sunday I tried to touch on the extent to which the great advances in global Christianity are happening in the southern hemisphere. I quoted from Lamin Sanneh's lovely little short book, Whose Religion Is Christianity? In case you missed it, it is good to read over. Sanneh is talking about how Africans began to adopt the Gospel at the very point that Westerners got out of the way. They made it their own and in so doing, they rediscovered what it means to be African. My point is that mission rejuvenates culture. Sincere and authentic worship of the living God has all kinds of spillover effects for a people in their music, architecture, literature, philosophy, language and every other field of life that can be turned towards worship (which is all of them!). This is what Sanneh says:

The old religions provided rules, rewarding good conduct and punishing wrong, but they had only a limited ethical range; the family, the clan, the village, the tribe. Small-scale societies insulated people from historical pressures and thus removed the need for adjustment in people’s world-view.

Christianity answered this historical challenge by a re-orientation of the worldview so that the old moral framework was reconfigured without being overthrown. It was not that old spells, turning benign from overuse, had dulled the appetite; but that under challenge, their spent potency sparked a clamor for a valiant God. People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred or their clamor for an invincible Savior, so they beat their sacred drums for Him until the stars skipped and danced in the sky. After that dance, the stars weren’t little any more. Christianity helped Africans become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.

One of the things that we as western Christians can look forward to in the coming generation is the rise of the global church. We will get to see the first flushes of maturity for this African, South American and south Asian church. In our lives the greatest theologians will not be Irish or German or American but Gambian and Brasillian and Chinese. Indeed, one of the most important theological voices in the world today is a Sri Lankan IFES worker called Vinoth Ramachandra. We will get to see the explosive growth of the church in these places bring about radical social change. But most of all we will get to relearn what it means to declare Jesus as LORD from the people least likely to be considered experts by the ways of the world.

There is something of the Spirit's ironic, irenic humour in that!

A Joke Of An Apology

2011-06-30T22:19:15Z

In the sermon on Sunday past, the first in our series on Acts called "Learning Evangelism From The Holy Spirit", I made a claim that when it comes to speaking theologically about Jesus with our friends who aren't Christians, irony is much more effective than dogma.

I was speaking from experience. I am the last person to malign serious engagement with theology. I am attracted to a life dedicated to understanding the intellectual influences of the 16th Century Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Molina. I have learned Greek to better appreciate what Paul is actually saying in Romans. But the reality is that for the large part, my peers simply don't share my enthusiasm for the 14 volume work that is Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.

Instead, they appreciate humour. And the claim that we make as the pinnacle of all theology is that the Cosmos is ruled by a crucified Rabbi is inherently ironic. Not in a mean sarcastic sense of a dumb Alanis sense but in the sense of the unexpected incongruity between the apparent meaning of things and the underlying nature of reality.

In Q&A people wanted me to unpack that and I tried to talk about how the whole of the world is a comedy, in a technical sense. It is a story with a happy ending. God's methods are always ironic and we can trust they will in the end undo the travesties of human cruelty, whether we refer to the killing fields of Cambodia or less seriously, the architecture of Northern Ireland!

So far so good, right? And interesting. Evangelism is a lot less daunting when we think about it as communicating that God's plan for the world as an ironic comedy. That's a seed that sits more comfortably in the soil of the office canteen or the pub than discussions of original sin from Augustine to Niebuhr!

After church, Claire and I were talking about this and as usual, her understanding had the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. She completed her operation and excavated the big problem in my argument without too much pain or gore.

The problem is that I said that we can think about God's salvation plan as a joke. I was wrong. That's going too far and becomes unhelpful. We can talk about the return of Jesus as a punchline, perhaps. We can certainly call it a comedy. We can definitely characterise it as ironic. But calling it a joke makes it sound flippant.

There is nothing more serious in the whole world after all.

So let me retract my words and say that the Gospel is humourous. Same effect, but much less space to get confused.

So having confessed my sin, let me unpack the theology/humour dimension of evangelism some more. Frederick Buechner put it best when he wrote:

Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvellous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church’s thing, the preacher’s thing, the lecturer’s thing. Heard as a joke – high and unbidden and ringing with laughter – it can only be God’s thing.

Karl Barth was perhaps the great comedian of theology and Jessica De Cou, a theology student in Chicago has written a wonderful essay on the role of laughter in Barth that I have read three times in the last six weeks. Barth said that when we talk about God we should be filled with joy, no laden down with "sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking." Such approaches are "intolerable in this science" of theology.

So too in mission!

Those who speak about God can persevere "in alacrity, hilarity, and spiritual joy, in the joyousness of the Holy Spirit" because Jesus is truly raised.

I said on Sunday that the churches least equipped for mission that I have visited are the churches with the most tangible sense of humourlessness. Barth echoes this point:

We need not be ashamed before the holiness of God if we can still laugh and must laugh again, but only if we allow laughter to wither away.

Fundamentally, Barth argues that laughter is the closest thing to grace.

There's a sentiment to consider!

RTG 7: Rediscovering the Kingdom - The yeast of Platonism

2011-06-10T19:29:21Z

The teaching of the Greek Philosopher Plato has been, and remains, the most dominant and influential philosophy in western history. Even though few of us spend much time pondering his work; even though many of us might struggle to know the difference between him and the former ninth planet in our universe(!); every one of us has been hugely influenced by this controversial figure who was born in Athens in 429BC. Like the unseen air we spend our lives breathing in and out, we are surrounded in modern day Ireland with the attitudes, viewpoints and approaches to life advocated by this ancient philosopher and, like the air, knowingly or unknowingly, we have all been breathing them in and out for our entire lives. Philosophical discussion may not be our thing; we may never once have read a philosophy book; but, nonetheless, whether we have ever known it or not, most of us have been shaped by Plato’s thought and are thoroughly Platonic in our thinking and approach to life.

Like individualism, of course, not all of Plato’s teaching creates a problem for those of us who would follow Jesus. Some of his insights about life, politics and being are more than worthy of our consideration. But when it comes to understanding the nature of this world and our own nature, Plato’s influence is one that we must be very careful about indeed if are ever to properly understand this good news that has been revealed by Jesus.

You see, for Plato (as indeed for Buddha in his teachings) this present world of space and time in which we live is a world merely of illusion. What we affectionately call our ‘material’ existence is in fact only the appearance of reality rather than actual reality itself. True reality is something than can only exist beyond what we see and hear and taste and feel. True reality, Platonism advocates, lies beyond and apart from our physical world. Thus, for Plato, and for many in our 21st century world, if we are to discover who we truly are and, from that, find the true meaning of our lives, we need to escape this illusionary, this physical world in which we find ourselves and learn how to enter fully into the real, the spiritual world that is beyond.

Plato’s famous way of illustrating his viewpoint is by thinking of the shadows in a cave.

Imagine you are sitting inside a large cave looking away from its entrance and towards its back wall. As light shines in through the entrance and as people and things move back and forth across it, movement and form will appear silhouetted on that back wall. As you look on you can see outlines and detail. You can have a pretty good guess at what is happening outside the cave but all of your understanding is based merely on the observation of those silhouettes. What you are seeing is not reality itself, but merely its shadow.

This is how Plato believed it is with all of us until we find what many of his modern followers call ‘enlightenment’. Until we grasp how to move beyond time and matter, he argues, until we escape our lives of silhouetted, monochrome illusion, we are wasting the time given us and missing the experience of vibrant, colourful reality that could be ours instead.

For Plato encountering this needed reality meant finding the true ‘Forms’ of our universe; For Buddha it meant entering into what he called the ‘eternal nothingness’. For many of the eastern mystic, platonic spiritual writers of our day, including for example, Eckhart Tolle , it is described as finding our true Being or Transcendence.

This platonic thinking managed to enter even Christian theology very early on, not least with the development of Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis – meaning knowledge) which first arose in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

Like Plato, the Gnostics believed that the material world in which we live is an inferior and dark place, evil in its very existence. However, within this dark world there are people who are meant for something much better. These children of light, as they are sometimes called, are like fallen stars, tiny centres of light darkened and hidden within the confines of a material body. Made for life and vitality, they are instead trapped and living only in shadow.

This is where people’s need for ‘special knowledge’ (Gnosis) comes in. If only we can learn the true realities of our world, the truth about who we are and how we should live, then we will be able to enter into a ‘spiritual’ or ‘enlightened’ existence in which the material world will no longer count. As we learn and apply this special knowledge, so the Gnostics proclaimed, through it we will be able to journey in wholeness and completion not only in life but in death, and after death, when we move fully into the infinite world, or Being, that resides beyond our time and space.

From this Platonic, or Gnostic position [it is also called dualism because of its contrast between the physical and the spiritual], creation is itself the fall that has happened in our universe; that we exist materially at all is the source of our malaise. And what is needed for us to find wholeness and healing in our lives is to escape these physical, mental and emotional realities that seek to bind us, these things that belong in the material world of illusion and decay, and to return ourselves to life lived in the spiritual realm.

It is thus easy to understand why these Gnostics had to create their own versions of Jesus’ story

If, as Plato and the Gnostics hold, our bodies, like our planet, are corrupt and evil, our very flesh is the evidence of our decay, then the idea that God himself would become a human, would actually take on flesh and blood for himself is utterly repugnant.

For them God is wholly Spirit. God is wholly good. The material world and our bodies are material and evil. Thus, there is no way that God would allow himself to be born as a human child in a stable or walk through adolescence or experience pain or allow himself to be tortured and die on a cross. It would be unthinkable. It would be a denial of everything they proclaimed. And that is why they could not accept the gospel accounts written by the first Apostles and those who travelled with them. Instead, they completely rewrote the story of Jesus to portray him in a way that supported their new (though not really new – just platonic) understanding of the world. It is not surprisingly, therefore, in these Gnostic Gospels that were penned in the second and third centuries – such a the gospel of Thomas, of Philip and of Judas – that Jesus’ story is retold and describes him as an ordinary spiritual teacher who got married, had kids, did not willingly die on a cross and most certainly did not rise from the dead! And it was largely on these and other books written on them such as the Holy Grail and Holy Blood that Dan Brown based his book, ‘The Divinci Code’, the Jesus Seminar folks based their presentations, and to which Channel Four seem determined to constantly focus our attention ad nauseam.

This underlying view of our world that comes from Platonism and Gnosticism remains firmly with us!

So let me set up the conversation by mentioning just three of the influences this prevalent philosophy brings that we need to overcome if we are to rightly understand the Gospel proclaimed in the pages of the New Testament:

1. The misunderstanding of Jesus’ Resurrection

When we in the Church today summarise our Christian hope by saying that the message of Jesus is that we will have life after death; that one day we will escape this dark & broken world and go instead to the perfection of heaven; when we orate and sing that we are just ‘passing through’ this world now in order to get to the better one then, that our universe is spiralling towards ultimate destruction and won’t it be great to leave it behind and go instead to glory, what we are in fact advocating is a soft version of what Plato and the Gnostics taught!

Such a summary misses so much of what the Gospel proclaims! It misses the promise of the New Testament that one day we will rise with new resurrection bodies that can be touched and felt and held. It misses our hope that not only we but this entire physical universe will be redeemed and restored by the salvation of our God. It misses the point that after death we go to heaven only as a first step in what God has planned for us as we await the creation and perfection of the new heaven and the new earth. It thus misses the fullness of what has been declared in the most important event in human history as God himself has become flesh, has died on our behalf, has been raised from death conquering it for us all.

2. The undermining of Jesus’ the Ascension

Since Platonism has led us to subconsciously believe that the purpose of Christianity is to prepare us for ‘that day then’ when we will all be gathered together ‘up in heaven,’ it has led many us to fail to understand what Jesus’ ascension means for us right now.

The strong assertion of the New Testament is that Jesus is not only raised, is not only alive, but is in fact now ascended and is reigning at the Father’s right hand as the Lord of All. Jesus will not only be Lord when God wraps up our universe on that final day, he is Lord already. He has all authority already. He sits upon the throne already! It was their crystal clear understanding of this that led so many of those in the early church to be martyred for their faith. Rome could not stand the presence of these dissenters who fearlessly proclaimed that Jesus was Lord, not Caesar. This was the threat of Christianity to all who saw themselves in power in the ancient world. It is the threat to those who see themselves likewise today.

Those who oppressed the poor, sought power through the suffering of others, pursued wealth and influence for their own individual benefit without reference to its impact on others all feared the message of the early Christians and for good reason! And yet today, aren’t Christians mocked for their timidity and weakness? Hasn’t our faith been caricatured as being kind to granny and the cat? Why is it that this life and world changing message has come to have so very little influence upon our society at large or even upon those within our churches? In part, it is because we have forgotten the significance of Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of his father in heaven. We have forgotten that God’s reign is already at hand in this present world, in our current and all so earthy present reality. We have forgotten that whatever our political, moral or culture position and persuasion, the claim of the gospel is already that our first submission, our primary obedience must be to our ascended, glorified and reigning Lord!

3.The masking of our calling to the Kingdom

Since Platonism has convinced us that the real goal of our lives is to escape this dark & evil world and go instead to be with God in heaven, we have thus been led to miss the gospel’s clear promise that one day God will actually come to live with us here on earth! More than that, it has blinded us to the truth that this kingdom that we yearn for and look forward to has already come among us and is already rising up all around us! Our calling as believers is not just to look forward to dwelling in God’s kingdom ‘then.’ It is to spend our lives advocating and building towards that Kingdom right now. Jesus first message and the primary focus of his entire ministry was that the Kingdom had come, the Kingdom is among us and the Kingdom was now moving towards completion. How often we miss this because of Plato’s philosophy. How often we pray ‘Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ and yet miss entirely the radical nature of our calling these words articulate as they call us right now to be agents not just for the church but first and foremost for the Kingdom.

Very few of us would regard ourselves as Philosophers. Thank goodness! Yet all around us are the proclamations of this philosophy of Plato and they would hide from us so much of what Jesus has declared to be true. If are ever to properly pray the Our Father, if we are ever to properly understand what the Resurrection, the Ascension, the gospel are all about, we will need to recognize this unwelcome guest in our thinking and do our very best to expunge its presence from our own minds and from our family of faith.

RTG 6: Rediscovering Community - The yeast of Individualism

2011-06-06T14:59:34Z

Unlike some of the other ‘isms’ we are discussing in this little series of blogs, ‘individualism’ is such an accepted and fully integrated element in our modern Irish culture that it is often difficult to even notice its presence any more never mind appreciate its influence.

The joy-robbing severity of legalism and jarring anger of sectarianism immediately stand out for most of us and thus are relatively easy to spot. In contrast, however, the impact of ‘individualism’ is much more subtle and much less easily discerned. Like old marks on our furniture or scratches on our car, we are so used to this modern philosophical companion that we simply and subconsciously filter it out of our field of perception. It continues to be right in front of us, of course, but we no longer see it.

A major reason for this evolving blindness is the fact that individualism’s contribution to our lives is so often one that is helpful, or at worst benign.

Originating with the Greeks and blossoming through the Reformation and Renaissance period, individualism has led to many of the social and political realities in our world for which we can be truly grateful – democracy and human rights, for example. Yet, like many fine things – think of sticky toffee pudding or a glass of vintage wine for merely a start – when the consumption of individualism is allowed to go on unrestricted and to excess, the results can be, and, I want to argue, have been extremely detrimental.

Of course, all of us are influenced by the presence of ‘behind the scenes’ philosophies. That’s just how life is. It is this way with me as much as with any other. For those of you from a Catholic background, for example, the discussion on transubstantiation in communion is case in point. It was Aristotle’s philosophical understanding that everything in our world has two elements – its accidents, which is what we perceive with our senses, and its substance, which is the hidden, essential reality of the thing. Dominant in the culture of the middle ages, this is where the idea of a transformation in the substance of the bread and wine used for the Eucharist came from. Its accidents remain as plain bread and wine. Its substance is transformed into the actual body and actual blood of Jesus. Thus transubstantiation. The primary reason I do not hold to this position in my own teaching is that I do not hold to Aristotle’s assertion that everything in our world has these two elements. Obviously, if bread and wine do not have a ‘substance’ then that ‘substance’ cannot be transformed during the liturgy of communion. And so on…

But it is not just Roman Catholic theology that has been influenced by outside philosophy. Individualism has just as surely, and on some occasions just as unhelpfully, skewed the theology of the ‘evangelical’ church. Take the reformed view of communion, for example. In I Corinthians 11:17-34 Paul provides us with arguably the primary text on the Lord’s Supper within the New Testament.

In the common interpretation applied to this passage, many of our bible teachers, shaped in their thinking by our current ‘ism,’ have looked at phrases such as “whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord” (v27) and “those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves” (v 29) and have concluded that what Paul is speaking of here are the dangers involved for those who would participate in communion without personal preparedness and personal worthiness before the Lord. It is the standard interpretation within the reformed church (and most catholic churches) and has given rise to a huge number of books and sermons on the subject. It has even given rise to one of evangelicalism’s special expressions, the ‘fence around the table’. Given the threat of judgement, even of death for those who eat and drink unworthily, bible teachers from John Calvin to this present day have taught that we need to carefully control access to the communion table. Thus there are discussions on how high or high low the fence needs to be. There are discussions on what proper examination and worthiness actual means. There is even the practice of issuing the blessed ‘communion tokens’ as a mechanism to regulate attendance. (You non-Presbyterians can just mutter to yourselves for a few moments!).

The only problem with all of this is that such an interpretation of I Corinthians 11 entirely fails to grasp the point that Paul is actually making here in this chapter.

What Paul is addressing in I Cor 11 has nothing to do with individuals’ proper approach to the Lord’s supper and worthy recognition of Jesus’ body on the cross while there per se. What Paul is addressing is the fact that rich people in the church at Corinth were utterly disrespecting the poorer members of their new Christian community when it came to the communion feast. Instead of waiting for them to arrive at the homes of the wealthier members before beginning the feast, the wealthier members were continuing to regard the poorer ones with less esteem and respect (just as those in society around would have done) and by doing so were in complete denial of what God had now done in their midst. As Paul says in Galatians 3:28 within the new family of the Christian church, all the alienation that is rife in the world around us has been overcome. Now slaves are brothers and sisters with those who are free, women are accepted on an equal basis alongside of men, gentiles are received just as much so as Jews and, we can add, the poor are just as much a valued part as the rich. We are “all one in Christ Jesus.”

But in Corinth the rich members were failing to honour this new reality and in doing so they were utterly failing to recognise the body of Christ, ie the church, to which they were now called in the bread and in the wine. Just read through the passage for yourselves, noting in particular v 22 and v 33 and you will see this immediately. Paul isn’t regulating who should and who should not attend the Lord’s supper, he is commanding the rich not to be stuffing their faces and drinking themselves under the table (if you’ll excuse my pun) so that when the poor arrive, there is nothing left for them to have!

How could so many have gotten this passage so wrong? The answer is individualism!

To pick another favourite verse, those of us in the reformed church often go to Ephesians 1:4 in our discussions about predestination and election. If I had a Euro for every time I have heard someone say something like ‘doesn’t Ephesians 1 tell us that God chose us before the foundation of the world?”, I could easily purchase a new hard-backed set of Calvin’s Institutes!

But what does the verse actually say? “For he chosen us in Him (ie in Christ) before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.” In other words, Paul is not really speaking in this verse about the election, conditional or unconditional, of individuals at all. He is saying that before the creation of our world, God chose a people, i.e. those who would be engrafted into the body of his Son, to be a community marked by holiness, who would be holy just as he is holy and who would be blameless in his sight.

Why is it that so many people get this verse wrong? Once again, because we come to the scriptures not with a community hermeneutic as we should but with an individualistic one as our ‘behind the scenes’ philosophy leads us to.

Space is gone but we could also examine how individualism has not only warped our view of the scriptures but has also warped our view of ourselves. Instead of those created in the image of God and who like him are created to enjoy relationship and community, individualism at its extreme turns us into nothing other than rugged singularities, islands, fortresses of utter independence. But that discussion will have to wait for another day…

I think that the ‘dark side’ of individualism lies primarily in this fact that it has led us to lose touch with the sense of community, this ‘community hermeneutic’ that we ought to have as we read through the scriptures and seek to apply them to our lives. If we are to recapture the wonder and glory of what God has actually done for us in Jesus, his Son, we must rediscover it. Indeed we must determinedly seek to wriggle free of every stricture that would bind or narrow our perspective of the Gospel. And for me, one of them, most certainly, is the philosophy of individualism.

RTG 5: Rediscovering Reconciliation: The yeast of Sectarianism

2011-06-06T14:46:04Z

Without question, there are many significant challenges involved in the planting of new churches. Yet, over these first years of MCC’s history, I have also discovered that engaging in mission in a completely new context, where nothing can be assumed and where people are rightly sceptical about many of your intentions, is also a place of incredible opportunity. Forced to look at myself, the tradition I am part of and the message I preach through the eyes of those who know little about us ‘Presbyterians,’ I have been permitted insight I doubt I’d have ever gained otherwise. As a result, ‘Why am I in ministry?’, ‘What does it mean to be a Presbyterian church?’ and ‘What is the gospel really about?’ are now questions I feel much more able to answer in a satisfactory, biblical and theologically coherent way. Church planting has its challenges but it has already left me a different (and hopefully, more reformed) follower of Jesus.

One of the most significant new convictions all this has led me to is that the issue of reconciliation is not just a part of what God is doing as he builds his kingdom in our world; it is the core of what he is doing. Reconciliation is not just a wonderful facet of the Gospel; it is the diamond itself!

As we read through the Genesis accounts it is clear that God’s purpose in creation was that we would know him and walk with him, and one another, in perfect harmony and fellowship. We were created for intimacy in relationship by the God who himself exists in intimacy of relationship. It is equally clear that our rebellion and disobedience marred the perfection of God’s creation, destroying the relationship that was intended and raising up in its place walls of hostility and distrust that divided us not only from God but from one another. Even our relationship with the physical world was gravely impacted. (See Ephesians 2.14, Colossians 1.21 and Romans 8.18-21)

If this is the source of what is wrong in our world, the bad news, then the good news is that through Jesus, ‘God was reconciling the world to himself.” (See 2 Cor 5:18-19) The word ‘reconcile’ comes from the Latin word conciliāre and means to bring together again, to overcome the hostility between, to unite that which is divided. Isn’t this what the Gospel proclaims? In Christ, God has broken down the walls of hostility between us, he has restored our relationship, he has brought us together again through the suffering and resurrection of his Son! The issue of reconciliation thus lies at the very heart of the gospel, and on this I am sure we would all agree.

Tragically, though, what I think we have forgotten is that acting for reconciliation is what lies at the very heart of our response to the gospel. In 2 Cor 5:19, Paul says, “And God has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” God’s Kingdom is now among us. God is building it all around us and it is a realm in which all hostility and division will cease, where the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the goat (See Isaiah 11:6). It is a place where people will live, and invite others to live, reconciled lives. This is what we pray for in our daily intercession when we say “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Our task, therefore, as those who been reconciled, is now to seek this reconciled life for others and, not only for others, but with others. Our task, as the children of God, is not only to see individuals come to faith in Christ, though it is surely that. It is also to work for the answer to our daily prayers, to see the values of the kingdom lived out in our nation as they are in heaven, to continue the work of peacemaking, of reconciliation that was the focus of Jesus’ life. This is what it means for us to be his disciples; this is what it means for us to take up our cross and follow him. (See Mark 8:34)

Yet, Christians in Ireland are known for the exact opposite of this. We are known for our division, our refusal to come together, our lack of unity. We are known, primarily, for our sectarianism.

Surely, any honest gaze at what Jesus’ life and death was all about, simply highlights and emphasises the utter incongruity of such a thing as this existing within any Christian community, in any location in the world – including the Presbyterian Church in Ireland? For those called to a ministry of peacemaking and reconciliation, arrogance or judgementalism, never mind prejudice or hatred towards any other grouping, faith or racial, is simply unthinkable. It is a complete denial of who we are in Christ. If we are to love our enemies, who is there that we are not called to love? If, on the cross, Jesus could pray for those who had betrayed, condemned, beaten and crucified him, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ who is there that we can refuse to pray that prayer for? And yet, what has been our reality? Is there not a widespread sickness in Irish spirituality that not only has, but continues to lead people to believe they can, indeed, claim to love God while being filled with anger and hostility towards those in the ‘other’ camp? Don’t we look with arrogance and judgement towards other denominational groupings? Don’t we have the reputation of being self-righteous and condemning towards those outside the church? When our spirituality is referenced around the globe, isn’t it often in connection to bigotry?

Over and over again we have all witnessed this sickness express itself around us. It has led communities of those called to be peacemakers to be known instead for their hostility. It has led those accepted and made right with God by his astonishing grace to be known for their refusal of acceptance, their lack of grace towards others. Ironically, it has even convinced many to embrace its corruption for the sake of so-called theological correctness, for the sake of defending the faith! How our real enemy must laugh at that! Most of us have even heard its expression through our own thoughts and words. And all this before a watching world to whom we claim to be bearing witness to the ‘truth’ of the Gospel in Jesus’ name! Little wonder our churches are in decline. Little wonder our witness has been so ineffective and our impact on society so slight!

Sectarianism is a toxic yeast, it is an infection that has not only robbed countless numbers of our churches of authentic community within and effective witness without, it has tragically robbed a great many in our churches of knowing the joy of the Gospel. We simply cannot, nor will ever, experience the joy of God’s mercy and forgiveness for us while we are denying these things to others. If we would know God’s grace we must embody it. If we would know reconciliation we must live it. If we would taste and feel God’s embrace, we must offer it freely to others. To think otherwise is foolishness!

Yet, surely there is still hope for us. The Gospel remains the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, even those of us who have been tainted by sectarianism. We can expel this intruder. We can remove this yeast. Already the vast majority of us are agreed that Christianity is not about people becoming Presbyterians, Baptists, or even Protestants. Already, we are agreed that we are not saved by grace through faith and by not being a catholic, a nationalist or anything else. Already we are agreed that there is only one JC to whom we must give our lives and it is not John Calvin! We need only to determine to live out this agreement and not be frightened into compromise any longer by those who do not yet comprehend the full import of God’s amazing good news.

Let’s not pretend, though. It will take great courage and determination for us to face this corruption down – both in ourselves and in our churches. To live in the way that brought reconciliation cost Jesus his reputation, his comfort, his very life. Breaking the world’s cycle of alienation and hostility meant, for him, the way of the cross. Breaking our nation’s cycle of alienation and hostility will mean the same way for us. Yet, what else can we do? What else can we do as those who have now been entrusted with this same ministry of reconciliation? What else can we do if we ever again want the good news of the Gospel to be widely comprehended in our land?

A Strange Religious Group

2011-05-30T11:37:10Z

Yesterday, John Mullaney preached at MCC on Psalm 96 and it was simply brilliant. As a guy who is employed to think carefully about mission, I can't describe how heartening it is to be part of a church where the understanding of God's mission through MCC is so gracious and expansive and Biblically informed. I encourage you to download the sermon if you missed it.

John argued that if you start thinking about missions you've already gone a step too far. Mission exists because worship doesn't. As a church, we are set on resisting the temptation to create programs for mission because if our hearts are not in the right place, they will just be extensive and exhausting camuoflage for our shallow life. He spoke about worship as the goal of mission and about how worship is the fuel of mission. He asked us if we were cats or dogs, theologically speaking. And he gave great practical examples of how all this works out, including the question asked of him in a pub in his hometown of Claremorris, "I hear you've joined a strange religious group".

Stick it on your mp3 player for the next time you're getting a train or burn it to a CD and listen to it in the car. Don't miss it!

But it got me thinking, as all great sermons should. There was a lot to take in and digst and mull over and think through so I wanted to think it through here. That way, you guys can help correct me if I go off course!

At one point in his latest book "The King's Cross", Tim Keller writes about the psalm John preached from:

Psalm 96:12-13 says, "All the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the LORD, for he comes to judge the earth." Isaiah 55:12 says, "The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, all the trees of the field will clap their hands."

If you put seeds into a pot of soil and then put it away in the dark, away from the sun, the seeds go into dormancy. They can't grow to their potential. But if you bring the pot with seeds into the presence of the sun, all that has been locked within them bursts forth. The Bible says that everything in this world - not just we human beings but even the plants, the trees, the rocks - is dormant. These things are just shadows of what they have been, would be, and will be in the presence of their Creator. When the Lamb of God presides over the final feast and the presence of God covers the earth again, the trees and the hills will clap and dance, so alive will they be. And if trees and hills will be able to clap and dance in the future kingdom, picture what you and I will be able to do.

So if John is right, and worship is both the goal and the fuel for mission, Keller may be spot-on with the conclusion that he draws:

The Lord's Supper gives us a small, but very real, foretaste of that future.

Mission begins at Eucharist, where we are nourished by the meal that consumes us in its consumption. And mission's goal is Eucharist- that those who do not know God would enjoy communion with Him. As John pointed out, the path of mission is a journey. Maybe if we put Mr. Mullaney together with Rev. Keller, we might begin to see mission as a pilgrimage to and from the Lord's Table, as a taste and a sign for the true feast that we were all made for.

It's unlikely that I will be given DJ duty at that feast, but if I would certainly request Sufjan Stevens' classic, "All the trees of the field will clap their hands":

RTG 4: Rediscovering Grace: The yeast of Legalism

2011-06-06T15:23:33Z

“Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against
the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”

Having explained why I believe we need to revisit what the Gospel is, let me jump right in and state that I think the first and most important yeast we need to free ourselves from is that of legalism. It is not the only pollutant that has robbed us of our joy 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 what he is saying here is something that all of us have heard but few of us have ever rightly understood? I think it could. I think it is not only possible that what we mean by those words is no longer what Paul and the Apostles meant. I think it is a reality. And we need to put that right.

We have somehow allowed any number of variants to this text to float about in our culture unchallenged and to 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

.... being a Calvinist.” .... 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!

RTG 3: Strangers in the House

2011-06-06T14:58:51Z

‘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 work as an Anglican clergyman, Carroll (his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was simply great with words. The quote above from Mr Dumpty is one of my favourites.

So what is it that I mean when I say we have lost sight of the Gospel? Clearly, there is much in our tradition to be entirely proud of. Clearly we have not lost any of the great fundamentals of our faith? Or have we?

Strangers in Our House.

The Good Shepherd starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, is a OSS/CIA based movie directed by Robert DeNiro that was first released in 2006. The film traces out the early, troubled years of the Central Intelligence Agency and walks us through the background, experiences and ultimate tragedy of the life of Edward Wilson, the long time iconic head of the service. One of the central motifs of the movie is infiltration and the continual quest to uncover and remove those within the US government who were actually acting for the enemy. Throughout it, these enemy presences are referred to as ‘Strangers in Our House.’

Another way of putting what I hope this conversation will be about over the next while is that there are strangers in our theological houses and we need to identify and get rid of them if we want our churches to be healthy again.

The church is still the church and we have not lost our way entirely. But we have been the victims of some powerful infiltrations to our thinking and practice and, if our houses are ever to be in order again, we must do something about that. In the pieces that follow I’d like to spell out five that seem to me to be the most serious.

Its Not The End Of The World As We Know It

2011-05-24T15:13:20Z

There is a good episode (relatively speaking for the later-era episodes of course) of the Simpsons (Season 16, episode 19 if you are interested) called Thank God It's Doomsday where Homer sees a movie in the cinema made by Christians who believe the end of the world is coming. The character in the movie who says dismissively, "Science has shown us that religion is just an old wives' tale" turns out to be one of the characters "left below" after the "Rapture". While being a brilliant parody of the way in which Christians can sometimes disregard the better reasons why people might not embrace the Christian faith, it is the beginning of a plotline where Homer becomes convinced the end of the world is nigh.

(The best Bible line in this episode has to be when Homer and Marge are about to get it on she says seductively to him, "I'll be Rachel to your Jacob", to which Homer responds worried, "Ok. But it will be hard for me not to think of their hardship" - if only GOD TV were as Biblically literate!)

Homer goes to the religious bookshop and buys all the books they have on the "Rapture", including a book called, "1989: The Year of Armageddon". He is convinced by a mathematical formula that he makes up that the end of the world is coming in a week. He takes to the streets calling on people to "raid your children's college funds and thaw that turkey now!" He ends up gathering a crowd around his vision (that came to him in a drunken haze or perhaps an ice-cream headache) but his prophecy turns out to be bogus. As "Nostra-dumbass", he becomes the laughing stock of the whole town.

His calculations are off but he corrects them. He ends up being the only person raptured. In the end, missing his family, Homer rebels in heaven and convinces God to defer the Rapture, although he does ignore God's hints that he should do something about his alcoholism.

Rewatching this episode is well timed considering that on Saturday we allegedly missed a close-call. A radio station owner passing himself off as a Bible teacher, called Harold Camping, has managed to get a huge publicity drive behind his bizarre claim that the end of the world would come at 6pm on that day. What kind of cruel God would end the world before X-Factor?!

There are four key things to consider as a result of this. Firstly, we have to recognise that we do live in an age when the ludicrous rules. A great American journalist, William Scheider once said that the "press just doesn't get religion". One would have to dig very deeply and search very keenly to recognise that only a handful of people believed that an imminent doomsday approached. Like the Koran burning pastor (whose church is half the size of MCC) or the Phelps Family (whose church is half the size of MCC), this Camping fellow has radio listeners all over but no actual following to speak of. He doesn't represent any church (since he declared membership of a church after 1988 to be a sin that would cause you to lose your salvation!) or group of people. The media will report the stories that generate the most attention. Faithful worship and acts of service are unlikely to get much attention since they aren't interesting- even if we are succesful as Christians, big deal - isn't that what we're meant to be doing? Controversy reigns and we need to expect that.

The second thing to recognise is that the theology of Rapture is not taught in the Bible. It is a brand new innovation, speaking against the history of the church. Sadly, Ireland is the source of this misleading set of ideas. A Church of Ireland minister called JN Darby fell off his horse and banged his head in 1827 and a few years later revealed that he had discovered the true way of reading the Bible, which was based around "Dispensations". There were, he claimed, seven dispensations or ages in history and in each age God acted differently to humanity. We were in the dispensation of grace but soon the dispensations would come to a close in a "tribulation". Darby attracted no following in Ireland or the UK but gathered a movement around him in America and from his teaching we have "Dispensationalism" from which the idea of Rapture has grown.

In this short article, Tom Wright lays out the Biblical problems with rapture theologies. His book "Surprised By Hope" remains the best account of what Christians believe about the afterlife, the end of the world and all those questions around which craziness can sometimes abound. The Bible does say that Jesus will return but that is not something to be dreaded- it will be good news! As to when that will happen, "no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father".

The third thing to consider is the way in which our tradition makes it hard for us to get lost the way this Camping fellow has sadly been confused. At MCC we are very aware that we stand in the Reformed tradition as a Presbyterian church. This is not something to be proud of in the sense of it being better than other ways but we should be proud of it in the way we can be proud of our families. That my dad is a total legend doesn't mean he has to be "better" than your dad but it does mean that I, as his son, have certain sensitivies about how to do things that I wouldn't have otherwise. In some senses I inherit the ways he has lived his life. So it is with the Presbyterian Church and while we are not shy of pointing out deficiencies in our tradition and places where we must seek reform, it is also true that there are strengths. The Presbyterian focus on basing everything on Scripture bears tremendous fruit when you compare it to other ways of being Christian where other sources of authority are consulted. We are protected from charismatic teachers or from the spirit of the age by the fact that ultimately, our arguments have to be grounded in the narrative of the Bible.

Finally, Camping reminds us that what we say we believe really does matter- it shapes and informs the decisions we make about our lives. A man tried to kill himself in New York on Saturday morning to avoid the coming apocolypse. Too many people to even consider are now without any assets, job or income following their decision to spread the rapturous word. Extensive studies have been done on those left behind when these "left behind" prophecies fail. (Such prophecies are not in any way unique to Christianity by the way.) Very often they spiritualise their belief (this seems to be Camping's angle so far) and continue trusting in their dogmas. Spiritualising beliefs (separating the world into a dualism of spirit which is separate from body) is one of the great symptoms that warns us that our theology might be sick. The Bible holds body and spirit firmly together, while maintainging they are distinct. The subsequent cognitive dissonance flowing from spiritualisation distorts the lives of those who persist in their apocolyptic beliefs. Christians need to be wary of this- when we say we believe things that are not real, we do damage to ourselves and perhaps lead others to harm.

So what can MCC learn from this Camping catastrophe? These are four things to get going with although I do think one of the few benefits of this shambles of a situation is that it allows us to sharpen what we actually believe as followers of Jesus:

We have to do a good job of actually explaining to our friends that the media depiction of religion doesn't necessarily map on to our practicing Christianity in any way.
We have to read our Bible with care and interpret it in line with the church down through the ages, not just our own personal ideas.
We can be grateful for some of the strengths of our tradition that saves us from excess in all sorts of areas.
We must always be able to give a reason for the hope that we have and that means being our own fiercest critics; if we commit to things that are not real, we are not following God.

RTG 2: Why is the Christian Church in Ireland in decline?

2011-05-23T21:21:53Z

During my student days, I had the great privilege of spending almost a year in the wonderful but troubled island of Jamaica. It is a place of almost indescribable natural beauty yet one where the extremes of poverty and wealth coexist side by side. Whilst there, three days per week, I would catch two buses from where I was living and head off to Webster Memorial Church in Kingston where I was placed as an assistant. Painted large on the outside wall of a school for the blind that I passed en route to the church were the words: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” I grew to very much like the point they were making to those tempted to gaze at their school with either pity or derision. It’s a point we need to consider ourselves.

Christians often make the assumption that blindness only occurs in others. Yet Jesus’ wry comment on specks and planks warns us well of our own vulnerabilities. What if we have lost our sight concerning what the Gospel is really about? Could this happen? I think it can. I think we have not only lost our sight of the Gospel, I think we have allowed the Gospel to be changed and we must ‘un-change’ it again if we are ever to discover the wonder of what God has done for us. The Danish theologian and philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once noted that “in the matters of faith, every generation must begin again.” Seldom have these words been more appropriate for those of us in the Emerald Isle.

Why we are Declining

Why is it that the number of those involved in local churches in Ireland today is reducing so quickly? For over a decade now, I have read articles and books 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 these answers are actually wrong?

Firstly, what if the problem with our churches is not ‘them’ at all, but lies primarily with ‘us’? What if the changes going on in our wider secular communities 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 our own spiritual communities?

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 the message what we believe?

Could it be that people are leaving the church in droves, today, because of what the church has become and 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? At the end of several hundred years of assumed faithfulness in kerugma and confidently expressed certainty in orthodoxy, is it possible that we could actually find ourselves in the situation where the gospel we have been and are proclaiming is not the gospel as Jesus taught it at all? 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?

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 of us in the reformed churches have woefully failed to heed Him. If we would see Ireland transformed once more by the gospel of Christ then we must first reclaim that gospel from the many influences that have diluted and altered it. We must first preach the good news again to ourselves.

Rediscovering the Gospel (RTG 1)

2011-05-22T21:19:00Z

Introduction: Please note that this is blog series I began on our old website that was sadly hacked and destroyed. (I hope it wasn't because of my blog!) Now that our new site is up and running I thought I revisit what I'd already done and then complete the series as previously planned. So here goes..

I have been a follower of Jesus for some twenty-seven years. For most of that period I have been wrestling with what I now know to have been a form of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This is the psychological description for the uncomfortable feeling that arises when what one holds to be true and what one knows to be true are not the same. My particular condition arose, and remains, because of two undeniable realities that have played out in front of me since my coming to faith.

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 clearly wrong with our churches. T.S. Mooney, my dear old friend and mentor in the faith, used to joke that whilst the early believers outlived, out-laughed and out-loved 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 observe what happened in the first communities of those who followed Jesus, we see that they were filled with joy, grew in number and greatly impacted the world around them. When we observe what is happening through Christian communities today, what we often see are churches in decline, who have little joy, and who are becoming increasingly irrelevant in their local contexts.

How can this be if the gospel is truly a message from God?

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 assumed it is because we have been teaching one thing in our words and then doing something other in our actions – a kind of ‘the mind is willing but the body is weak’ sort of thing.

The reason I am hoping to begin a new conversation on ‘rediscovering the Gospel’ 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.

In what follows, I would like to try and spell out some of the reasons I think this devastating loss has occurred and invite you to reflect on this for yourself. I do not have all the answers. I’m not sure that I even have many of them. My hope is simply 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 for ever. I have found again a message from God that can truly change the world. I have uncovered a way to live that can only be described as ‘good news.’ My hope is that through this discussion, those who suffer a similar dissonance to me will be helped do the same.