Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
Every society has its purity laws. Germany has hundreds of years of purity laws in relation to the production and promotion of beers. The “Reinheitsgebot” law was introduced in Bavaria in the 16th century BCE to restrict the ingredients to water, barley and hops, thus preventing brewers from using the wheat and rye needed for production of bread. With Pasteur’s research into bacteria in the 19th century it was realised that yeast was also an ingredient. The “Reinheitsgebot” law was enforced throughout Germany with unification laws in 1871, leading to the disappearance of local brewing traditions using spices, cherries and other distinctive flavours.
Most purity laws are not written down like the Reinheitsgebot. I think about the purity laws that come into play when I do the laundry each week. I keep the colours and whites in different loads. Underwear and socks, for some reason, don’t get put next to the tea towels and handkerchiefs on the clothes line! There’s nothing written down anywhere that I’ve seen and the fact that I’ve noticed this is probably due to my time on Maori marae where these kinds of customs are spoken about openly with reference to the tapu (holy or sacred) nature of the head.
Peter had no shortage of written laws to tell him what was pure and what wasn’t. Leviticus is stacked with instructions on ways of avoiding mixing and matching. And he knew that Gentiles who broke those laws did not go together with Jews who kept the laws. And yet here’s an experience that challenges Peter’s assumptions about who’s in and who’s out. He had a blind spot. He needed a visual metaphor to help him prepare for the inevitable experience of meeting people who didn’t fit his neat diagrams of in and out, clean and impure.
Peter Reports to the Church in Jerusalem
(1) The apostles and the followers in Judea heard that Gentiles had accepted God’s message. (2) So when Peter came to Jerusalem, some of the Jewish followers started arguing with him. They wanted Gentile followers to be circumcised, and (3) they said, “You stayed in the homes of Gentiles, and you even ate with them!”
(4) Then Peter told them exactly what had happened:
(5) I was in the town of Joppa and was praying when I fell sound asleep and had a vision. I saw heaven open, and something like a huge sheet held by its four corners came down to me. (6) When I looked in it, I saw animals, wild beasts, snakes, and birds. (7) I heard a voice saying to me, “Peter, get up! Kill these and eat them.”
(8) But I said, “Lord, I can’t do that! I’ve never taken a bite of anything that is unclean and not fit to eat.” (9) The voice from heaven spoke to me again, “When God says that something can be used for food, don’t say it isn’t fit to eat.” (10) This happened three times before it was all taken back into heaven.
(11) Suddenly three men from Caesarea stood in front of the house where I was staying. (12) The Holy Spirit told me to go with them and not to worry. Then six of the Lord’s followers went with me to the home of a man (13) who told us that an angel had appeared to him. The angel had ordered him to send to Joppa for someone named Simon Peter. (14) Then Peter would tell him how he and everyone in his house could be saved.
(15) After I started speaking, the Holy Spirit was given to them, just as the Spirit had been given to us at the beginning. (16) I remembered that the Lord had said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (17) God gave those Gentiles the same gift that he gave us when we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So how could I have gone against God?
(18) When they heard Peter say this, they stopped arguing and started praising God. They said, “God has now let Gentiles turn to him, and he has given life to them!”
Acts 11: 1-18 (Contemporary English Version)
Like Peter, I’m a recovering purist. I’ve certainly had a few blind spots over time. I remember talking with a fellow student at school about how you’d know if a girl was a Christian or not. He suggested that if she smoked cigarettes that would reduce the odds. I was inclined to agree with him. A Christian teacher overheard the conversation and challenged our blind spot. It took a long time for me to work through that. I was helped to deal with that by a Dutch ministry colleague who pointed out that the Christian taboo against smoking was culturally conditioned. In the Netherlands, he explained, this would be a nonsense. Likewise the taboos against drinking beer wine and spirits.
The house church I’m connected to is starting a series tonight on ‘Generous Orthodoxy’, the book written by Brian McLaren. Brian challenges the polarization found in the church in which people find it hard to recognize God’s work in those with differing practices and beliefs. Maybe we’ll be confronted with a few visions like that experienced by Peter, challenging us to connect with people we’ve thought to be off-limits.
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Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
Part II in a series on the Lord’s Prayer
In the inspiring movie Molokai about the true story of Father Damian, a missionary priest to a Leper Colony of Hawaii, there is a powerful scene (actually there are heaps - this is just one of them), where Father Damian goes into a liquor house to bring back a young girl who has been helping him. As Father Damian berates the crowd for turning to despair and alcohol the crowd jeers and brings forth one of the most horribly disfigured lepers (the actor in this scene is a real leper who lives in the modern leper colony at Molokai) hoping that Father Damian will be repulsed. Instead Father Damian lets the leper kiss him and then cradles him in his arms while speaking words of love, an act which brings an awed silence to the room. This scene (in fact the whole movie) to me is a lived out example of the words
Your Kingdom come
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
For in the story of Molokai we have the story of a man, Father Damian, who has found life through the gift of Jesus. In response, Father Damian seeks to live out the truth of his new life - that he belongs to heaven not earth. So where ever he goes, he tries to live, struggle and pray in a way which seeks to bring the reality of heaven to the earth which he walks. So in this scene, we have Father Damian confronted by a hideously disfigured leper, and Father Damian responds not in the way of the world with horror and pity, but as a citizen of heaven. He does not see a leper but a child of God who has been alienated and isolated from love and compassion, and in heaven, there is no place for alienation - only love. So Father Damian lives out the Kingdom of his God and reaches out to hug and to love - to cross over the bridge of alienation to make real the love of God to one of God’s children.
Your Kingdom come
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
We pray these lines every week, but do we know what we are committing ourselves to? Do we recognise the foolishness of what we pray? To pray these lines is to say
“I am committing my life to a struggle with this world and its powers where I refuse to accept the world as it is now. I will not rest until this world and my life is in obedience to God’s will”
This of course will never happen in our life, or indeed in any time until God renews the whole of creation through the coming again of Jesus. So why bother? Why would we commit ourselves to something that we know cannot happen? Why not compromise?
Compromise. This is in fact what Western Christianity has done. We have said that we have no faith in what Jesus taught us to pray, so we settle for being comfortable with the world (what can we do anyway?) and put our attention into adding a few people here and there to our local churches.
And why would we do it when we know that we won’t fix the world? Why? Because of love. Because in Jesus God first loved us. Because to love Jesus is to necessarily love our neighbour. We don’t do this because it may or may not work in our lifetime. We don’t do it because it is or isn’t practical. We do it because God loves us, and through his love in our lives how can we not love those around us, those who share this world with us?
Your Kingdom come
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Your Kingdom come. There have been times in my life when I have caught a glimpse, tasted - just for a moment- that Kingdom that Jesus spoke of. It has been in those times when my eyes have been opened, my heart stretched when I have seen or experienced some amazing act of God’s kindness and grace to me or someone else. Those times when I have read the words of Jesus and known in my heart that HE is my home, my beginning and my end, when the words that I read become more than words but a living picture of reality - not the reality I know - but the TRUE reality - that is of heaven - of God’s Kingdom, here but masked and hidden, breaking out in patches of mystery in my world. It is this Kingdom that has come and claimed my life in Jesus. For he is the reality of God’s Kingdom. Jesus is the one who has lived out those words. In Jesus God’s will was done on earth as in heaven for the first (and only) time in history. When we see Jesus, we see God’s Kingdom in action.
Your Kingdom come
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
So to pray these words is to pray for that reality that Jesus proclaimed to be reality now - the reality where there is Good News for the poor, release for captives, sight for blind, freedom for the oppressed, healing for the sick, forgiveness of sins, salvation for the lost, healing for the hurt and sick. It is to pray for that place that we know as heaven, to become reality now. No more pain or sorrow.
For this indeed is God’s will.
And it is God’s will for earth as well as heaven.
This is the Good News that Jesus proclaimed. God does not just care about our soul - but our bodies and lives as well. God wants to redeem ALL of us, ALL of this world. This means that ALL violence, poverty, abuse, environmental degradation, injustice, lies, deception, greed, SIN is against God’s will. This means that God will call to account ALL Governments, corporations, institutions, churches as well as individual people on whether they acted in accordance or opposition to God’s will. There is no out clause. No place where Governments, institutions, corporations, churches are exempted from this because ‘it is not practical’.
It is not practical. How many times has this been used to nullify the will of God?
Honesty? Not practical in politics.
Care of the poor? Not practical for economics.
Justice? Not practical for corporations.
Caring for the environment? Not practical for our country.
Living out God’s will? Not practical for our churches.
Well, whether we like it or not, whether it is supposedly ‘practical’ or not, Jesus has taught us this prayer, and to pray it, is to be called to live it.
So to pray it is a call to Live, Struggle, Pray.
LIVE
First and foremost we are to live according to the truth of who we really are. That is that it is no longer us that live, but Christ that lives in us. We are to live not as citizens of this world, but as citizens of heaven, who through our very lives show what God’s will is.
But this is not primarily a call about being individuals - it is a call for us to live as community - as church in a way that witnesses to God’s Kingdom. To be a people who when we meet forgive sins, tell the truth, look after the sick, care for the poor, break down racial barriers, love each other and BE through the Spirit what God has called us to be.
STRUGGLE
And as God’s people we are called to struggle with this world we live in, with its ‘powers and authorities’ (Governments, corporations, religious institutions etc…). We are called to struggle with them, to remind them who is their God whether they acknowledge it or not, and to call them to be not what is ‘practical’ according to this world, but to be what God wills them to be for the sake of God’s world. We are called to enter into a holy struggle of love for this world and all its people, for God loved this world that he gave his only son Jesus that the world might know him and believe in him and find life.
PRAY
Lastly we are called to enter into prayer for this world. To pray the Lord’s Prayer as our life and our words. To lift up our world and our lives to the One to whom we belong, knowing that this is God’s Kingdom, God’s will, and that this is ultimately God’s work, we are just God’s children who want to please our Father by being a part of what he is already doing through his Spirit.
Amen.
Q’s for reflection
1. When have been times that you have glimpsed the Kingdom of God?
2. Why do Christians so often let Governments, corporations etc.. of being obedient to Jesus’ teachings by saying ‘It is not practical’?
3. What is a situation in your own life where you could live out God’s will and so demonstrate God’s love to others?
4. What is an issue in this world that you can remind the relevant Governments, corporations etc.. of who is their God and how they should act?
5. What can you start praying for regularly?
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