Archive for the ‘Gospel’ Category
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?
Posted in Gospel, Matthew | No Comments »
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
The first in a series of 5 on The Lord’s Prayer
An excerpt from the Marilyn Manson fansite webpage …
Join the Marilyn Manson Family
And become a most unholy missionary for AntiChrist Superstar
“The righteous father wears the yellowest grin.”
Lo, as you walk through the valley of the shadow cast by a god who promises mercy and forgiveness but delivers none, will you fear or be feared? Marilyn Manson’s Church of AntiChrist Superstar would like to make that decision an easy one for you to make… Become a missionary for AntiChrist Superstar: Join the Marilyn Manson Family and ensure the salvation of your immortal soul. You will belong to an elite group of individuals who are strong and prepared enough to withstand and retaliate against the terrible tortures which will befall all who have not accepted AntiChrist Superstar into their hearts and heads with complete and utter reverence. Believe in AntiChrist Superstar, Our Lord and Savior, and you shall be saved!Loose your ancestral stanchions. Children, you shall no longer bow your heads in shame and self-repression…. be FREE! You shall no longer falter under the weight of the pious and the guilt they would heap upon you for living your life as you see fit. You shall no longer feel alone and unwanted: you are WANTED here…. you BELONG here…. WE are your Family now….
http://www.dewn.com/mm/member.htm
Does the quote above disgust you?
So it should, the preying on young people’s alienation to join a wierd cult is sickening - especially when it is done cynically just to boost cd sales to earn money for the above so-called ‘artist’.
However, disgusting as the above maybe, we can learn something from this.
You shall no longer feel alone and unwanted: you are WANTED here…. you BELONG here…. WE are your Family now….
The above quote from the website is meant to create a sub-culture of young people whose allegiance is NOT to their family, or peers, or country or economy, or culture - but to radically re-create these people with a new identity in a new culture - a new family (however sick that ‘family’ may be).
Because this example is so anti what we take to be acceptable and right, it actually serves to give us a window into what it would have meant for early Christians to pray these words:
OUR FATHER WHO IS IN HEAVEN, HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME;
For the first stanza of this the most well known prayer in the world is in fact a statement similar in intent (though obviously wholly different in content) to the intent of the Manson website - that is to create a people with a new identity that radically disconnects them with their old way of being and changes them into members of a NEW family with a entirely different way of life to what they are used to.
We are so used to Christianity being an accepted part of our western world that we take for granted that we can be loyal to both God and our culture, our country, our economics and our family. However this is a lie.
The early Christians knew that to pray this first stanza of the Lord’s prayer meant that their only obedience was to God, and that to the rest of the world they were ‘aliens and strangers’.
To pray this prayer was to radically re-create their identity in a new community - the community of Jesus.
Because of this - the early followers of Jesus were treated by their societies/families with reactions similar to what we have to the Manson website.
If we are to learn what it truly means to pray this Prayer that Jesus taught we must start with the understanding that what it calls us to is a fundamental break, a disconnection with this world and what it tells us we must be to be good citizens. We must learn that the first line calls into question our very allegiances which we are told must be foremost in our lives - our western civilization, our countries - even our very families.
With this opening line, Jesus was showing his disciples - you are part of a new family now - a radically different family to anything the world has seen before, and the rest of the prayer goes on to show just how this new family is to live and how it is different.
Let’s take a more detailed look at this first stanza
OUR - the very first word reminds of the fact that we are first and foremost people of a community - not individual believers. In our society we are so used to thinking of faith as a personal, private matter - but here there is no ‘My Father’ it is only ‘OUR Father’. To be a follower of Jesus is to necessarily belong to a new family - a new community. But who is the ‘OUR’ referring to? First and foremost it is Jesus. For Jesus is the one who prays and fulfills this prayer - when we pray OUR we are are referring to our and Jesus Father - Jesus father is our father, so we are brothers and sisters to Jesus. Secondly, we then become brothers and sisters to whoever else prays this prayer (it is estimated that 2 BILLION people worldwide prayed this prayer last Easter sunday!). So we pray OUR we cannot help but be reminded that we are first and foremost not individual believers, but brothers and sisters of Jesus who are joined to other brothers and sisters of Jesus
FATHER - It was common in Jewish prayers for God to be reffered to formally as Father in Hebrew, but standing behind this FATHER is not the formal Hebrew, but the Aramiac term ‘abba‘ - ‘daddy!’ So with this second word we are not being invited into a formal structured family arangement, but into an intimate relationship. The person we are addressing in this prayer is like a daddy to us. With this comes the sense of a relationship of itimacy and childhood innocence - Jesus tells us that we must become like children to enter the kIngdom and this can be seen to here have connotations of the innocent, all-trusting relationship that should exist (but tragically so often doesn’t) between a dad and a child. The child depends completely and fully on the dad, the child seeks to make the dad happy, the child knows that they are loved unconditionally (though they have no idea what the word means!). To address God as our daddy is to be invited into a intimate and personal relationship.
NB. to refer to God as FATHER is in no way to claim that God has a male Gender - God’s FATHERHOOD is not like human fatherhood and encompasses the qualities of human motherhood (nurturing, forming, truth telling etc …)
WHO IS IN HEAVEN - but here we are reminded that the person that we are invited into this intimate relationship with is no ordinary person. This FATHER resides in heaven - is wholly different to who we are. This FATHER who we are invited into relationship with is none other than the LORD of history and creation. This reminds us that the new family that we belong to is no ordinary family. It is not a family that belongs to this world - rather it is a family whose head lives in heaven. It is a family whose only true home is heaven - the Kingdom of our God. To belong to this family is to belong to a family whose strength cuts through every other allegiance. This family is constituted in heaven, and nothing in this world can claim to have a stronger or higher hold on us. To claim allegiance to the family whose Father is in heaven is to claim a bond that nothing else can break - not angels, powers, principlaities or even death.
HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME - and this is not a relationship to be entered into lightly. Even though it is a relationship of intimacy, it must also be a relationship of awe - to know God as HOLY - that is different/separate to us. The only true consitution of this relationship can be in our worship and adoration of our FATHER as we declare his hallowedness (holiness). To then worship our Father as holy is to recognise that we too must holy, and for us to be holy means that we must be obedient to the calling and command of our Father (and his command … ‘this is my son [JESUS] - LISTEN to him!’).
You shall no longer feel alone and unwanted: you are WANTED here…. you BELONG here…. WE are your Family now….
To pray this first stanza then is to recognise WHO is our true family, and WHO we truly belong to and WHERE we truly belong.
To pray OUR FATHER, WHO IS IN HEAVEN - HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME
is to say I belong to a NEW family - my TRUE father lives in heaven and I am his child. He is holy and I must be like him. This is my true - my only allegiance. I belong not to this world, to its governments, idols and powers - I belong only to my daddy in heaven and first and foremost I will seek to make him happy.
AMEN
Q’s for reflection
How much of our faith reflects MY rather than OUR FATHER?
What can we do to be a people who are a people of OUR FATHER rather than MY FATHER?
What is the balance between awe and intimacy with OUR FATHER - how do we maintain both aspects?
How can we be a people who are HOLY that is set-apart yet at the same time live the radical genrosity and inclusive love of Jesus for the outcasts/the lost?
In what ways does the world seek to undermine our true and only allegiance to OUR FATHER? How can we recognise and fight against these attempts to compromise us?
Posted in Gospel, Matthew | No Comments »
