RUNNING WITH THE BULLS

I've always wanted to do the Pamplona Bull Run, and in an idle moments YouTube-ing came across this somewhat off-putting clip...

BOOK REVIEW: TRAVELING LIGHT

Traveling Light, by Eugene Peterson

Grace and I have been free-basing on The West Wing the past month. Having got hold of the box set of the complete series a few months back we had been steadily working our way through episodes, and then by the time we got to the last couple of seasons lost all self-control. This means I have been doing rather less reading than I should have been, but one book I have managed to get through is Traveling Light – Eugene Peterson’s meditations on the book of Galatians.

I like the way Peterson writes. I have previously reviewed Eat This Book in which Peterson tells the story of how his Message paraphrase of the Bible was born. The Message started from a desire to preach Galatians in a way that would make Peterson’s congregation sit up and take notice. He wanted them to understand how the gospel leads us into radical freedom, and not just let the words roll over them as spiritual platitudes. Peterson’s first attempts at rendering Galatians in contemporary idiom run through Traveling Light, and it is fascinating to see how he then unpacks Paul’s message.

The basic framework of the book is that we humans want freedom, and seek it in all kinds of places, but the only sure place to find it is in Christ. Perversely, Christians, who should be the freest of all people, too often fail to live in their freedom. He wants us to grasp Paul’s fury at the Galatians ransoming their freedom, and to open our eyes to the danger we are in of doing the same. This quote pretty much sums it up:

We might fairly suppose that a congregation of Christians, well stocked with freedom stories – stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Samson, Deborah, Daniel – would not for a moment countenance any teaching that would suppress freedom. We might reasonably expect that a group of people who from infancy have been told stories of Jesus setting people free and who keep this Jesus at the center of their attention in weekly worship, would be sensitive to any encroachment of their freedom. We might think that a people that has at the very heart of its common experience release from sin’s guilt into the Spirit’s freedom, a people who no longer lives under the tyranny of emotions or public opinion or bad memories, but freely in hope and in faith and in love – that these people would be critically alert to anyone or anything that would suppress their newly acquired spontaneity.

But in fact the community of faith, the very place where we are most likely to experience the free life, is also the very place where we are in most danger of losing it.

Peterson explores these dangers and how we can avoid them, and does a good job of it. He puts his finger on the problem nicely – that the freedom we are offered in Christ is so radical, so liberating, that it is seen as dangerous. Like prisoners released from a long jail term we fear recidivism and so clamp down on freedom – a rule here, a condition there – and soon religion creates another prison for us. We forget that the reason we obey God is not in order to gain his favour but because we have experienced his favour already. We start to look for security with,

little borrowings from the past, inconspicuous compromises with the environment: an Egyptian calf-god, a Judaistic circumcision, sentimentalized prayers, stereotyped emotions, formula explanations.

Paul’s answer to this is shocking: “Go castrate yourself!” We need to let this shock us out of comfortable religion and into a dangerous, but wonderfully free, faith in Jesus Christ.

A good book. I recommend it.

WEDNESDAY MORNING PEP-UP

DON'T BE A TWIT

I have been enjoying getting into Twitter but regular health warnings regarding its use are worth noting. The Cisco employee who got fired for unguarded comments has become the stuff of Twitter legend, and yesterday Lance Armstrong went one better by inadvertently tweeting his email address to all 700,000 of his followers - now that makes for a full inbox! You can see a video response to his gaff here.

TOUGH IN DORSET

This shouldn't be funny, but is - the perils of Poole Harbour.

POST-BUDGET THOUGHTS

In preparing to preach this Sunday I looked up Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" speech, given during the Great Depression. FDR's analysis of the failings of the 1930's financial system sounds just as apropos in our own cash strapped times:

Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence....The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

I like that last sentence. "Noble social values" - now there's a flag I can rally to.

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

A few months back I posted a review of The Shack in which one of my main concerns was the lack of thought Christians seem to show about visual representations of God:

I think we struggle to grasp the importance of this as we live in a visual culture in which we assume that everything can and should be represented visually. But God the Father cannot be represented visually! At the end of the book, in a section titled, “the Missy project,” there is a stated aim to produce a film of the book. When this happens (as it undoubtedly will) we will have a false representation of God on our screens – false because God will be an Oprah Winfrey type figure, and blasphemous because it will be a graven image.

I took a bit of flack for this, but I am not the only one to think it.

My friend Phil posted me a link to the Reformation 21 blog which reveals similar concerns:

I always thought it was the Bible that was meant to interrogate the culture; but the order seems to be being somewhat reversed in recent times. For example, a few years ago, Mel Gibson's film, The Passion was all the rage in evangelical circles. One day, I was sitting in my office and a student called by to let me know he was taking the youth group at his church to see it and to ask if I had already done so. I said I had not, and we then entered a discussion about whether it was right to depict Christ visually on the big screen. At the end of the discussion, he said that he felt sorry for me because my qualms about the visual depiction of Christ were making me irrelevant to ministry in the modern church. Now I may well be irrelevant, although I think that time has proved Gibson's Passion to be pretty irrelevant as well. What shocked me in this encounter, however, was not that we had different views on the matter, but that the student could not even see that there was any question to be asked. For him, the question of the meaning, relevance, and application of the second commandment was not even a question. He just thought it was obvious that anything which generated interest in Jesus was a good thing; thus, my concerns about the visual depiction of Christ revealed me as an irrelevant old hack, a superannuated puritan who simply didn't get it. To me, this was a most dramatic symbol of how culture had come to set the theological agenda even within a conservative, confessional, reformed tradition, and to define the plausibility structures not simply of the answers but even of the questions. My question arose out of my concern to see what the Bible said to our cultural situation, and that refracted through centuries of discussion of this point; but this student did not even have the categories to see that there was any question to be asked.

The odd thing is, Phil sent this to me in January, but it only arrived in my email last week. This just confirms my theory that email has an evil will of its own at times.

Anyway, the whole piece is worth reading, and you can find it here.

STORIES OF THE AFTERLIFE

An Easter poll by Theos yields some interesting results about spiritual beliefs in the UK:

The poll of over 2,000 people, conducted by ComRes on behalf of Theos, shows that 70% of people believe in the human soul, 55% believe in heaven and 53% believe in life after death.

Almost four in 10 (39%) of people believe in ghosts, 22% believe in astrology or horoscopes, 27% believe in reincarnation and 15% believe in fortune telling or Tarot, the research reveals.

The comparison with the 1950s is especially striking. In 1950, only 10% of the public told Gallup that they believed in ghosts, and just 2% thought they had seen one. In 1951, only 7% of the public said they believed in predicting the future by cards and 6% by stars.

What kind of story does this tell? A decline in attendance at conventional places of worship, and of recognition of any church as authoritative, but a growing openness to the 'spiritual'. It probably also helps explain why Richard Dawkins and Co. are feeling so frustrated!

The challenge for followers of Jesus is how do we draw this acceptance of the spiritual away from the harmful and the weird towards a healthy and life giving knowledge of Christ? If 70 percent of people believe in the soul, how can we minister more effectively to their souls? Why are we not connecting better?

TELLING TALES, 3

As well as telling our own stories we need to learn to listen to one another, and to the stories of the people around us.

Everyone has a story, and that story can always be connected in some way to God’s story. I got talking recently with a young woman in a coffee shop who told me something of the story of her life – how she had been let down by her parents, how her children had been placed in the custody of her previous partner, how her life was boring and empty. She was a classic case of someone who needed to be connected to the story of God – to a story of love and a story of rescue.

Jesus often listened to peoples stories, and then responded to their issues with a story of his own. Think about the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)…

A lawyer came to test Jesus, and asked him, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

What is the story here? What can we guess about this man? We are not told much about him, but from his occupation and his question we can discern something about his story. As he was a lawyer we can guess he was used to being right – at least in his own eyes – and that he had a well developed sense of his own self-sufficiency. From his question we can guess that he had a certain sense of superiority – he was here to test the orthodoxy and logic of this upstart builder from Nazareth.

We can guess that this man was low on love.

Jesus doesn’t respond to this man with arguments of fact or logic. Instead he tells a story – a story that will force the lawyer to a logical conclusion, even though it is not the conclusion he wants to reach, and that will expose his need to step into the story of God’s love and rescue.

“Which of these three – the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan – was a neighbour to the wounded man?”

“The one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus said, “You go, and do likewise.”

The woman I talked to in the coffee shop didn’t suddenly fall on her knees in repentance and gratitude to Jesus. There is no record that the lawyer was converted by Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan. But it is by listening to other peoples stories that we can begin to tell stories of our own about the goodness and greatness of God, and by these stories draw others closer to God.

There is a real skill in story telling, and a real skill in listening. I am often not very good at either. Often I think, “This is how I should have told the story” the day after I have been listening to someone! But as a community of God’s people we can together learn to listen and to tell. The evidence of our lives will tell its own story, even if at times our ears and our mouths fail us.

We need to make space for people to tell their stories, and to disciple one another by connecting the story of the gospel to our own experiences. For every story we have to tell there is a gospel application: You’ve had a tough week; you’re struggling with an addiction; you’ve suffered abuse; you feel let down – how does a story of love connect with this? How does a story of rescue offer you a way through?

And as we listen to the stories told in our town we will begin to work out how we can apply the gospel to our neighbours. As we listen we will ask questions: What is that people are talking about? What concerns do they have? What are their hopes and ambitions? Where do they get their sense of identity? And we will find that the gospel offers the best answers to all these questions.

Listen!

TELLING TALES, 2

The Rescue story: Boy meets girl. Fall in love. Girl captured by evil monster. Boy kills monster, gets girl. Live happily ever after.
Many of our most popular movies and TV shows are rescue stories: Die Hard, 24, The Matrix. A hero does something impossible and saves the day. Often the story ends with him getting the girl, but it might be something more than that, like Oscar Schindler rescuing hundreds of Jews from the gas chamber.

This story connects with us so powerfully because many of us (especially men) indulge a fantasy to do something heroic, and because in some way all of us need rescuing (from addictions, disappointment, mundane jobs, debt, etc.)

This is also a Bible story because Jesus is our great hero who rescues us from our most deadly enemy – Sin and death. Jesus does the impossible in going to the cross, but, just as the closing credits are about to roll, he bursts back into life unconquered and undimmed. The last enemy to be destroyed, as 1 Corinthians says, is death. This is the big one. In films, the last enemy to be destroyed is always the head villain (it wouldn’t be quite the same if Alan Rickman died half way through Die Hard, or if Jack Bauer killed the chief terrorist by 11am). The last enemy is always the most dangerous villain of all, and the reason why the other villains are there. It’s the same in Scripture. Death is the biggest of the enemies and the explanation for the others. If there was no death, there wouldn’t be any war or injustice or fear or sickness. So if you can abolish death, you can totally strip all the other enemies of their power.

And that’s the Gospel of Jesus and resurrection. On Easter Sunday, the biggest of all the villains was totally and completely undone. The tomb was empty, and it still is. And that means that at least one person has conquered the grave, smashed the last enemy, and overturned the curse of death that has afflicted every human since time began. A champion only has to be killed once. Death had a pretty strong track record, until it faced Jesus, to whom it had no answer whatsoever. His resurrection life was simply too powerful. So, as Paul taunted: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O grave, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).

[Thanks to Andrew Wilson for the those last two paragraphs]

Telling our stories
Every other type of story there is (tragedy, comedy, parable, myth, legend, biography, fairytale, fable, mystery, whodunit, epic, etc.) will contain at some point these two greater stories of love and rescue.

The way that we get to know people is by listening to their stories. We need to listen to one another’s tales of love and rescue. We need to share together the stories of what God has done for us, and we need to help others see how God’s great story connects to their personal story. We need to help people see that they can actually become part of the story of God – that he is the one who loves them, and can rescue them.

This is the Easter Story.

What a story!

GOING DIGITAL

Daughter No. 3 won a camera at the Gateway holiday kids club today.

It is a 35mm film type camera, not a digital one. She was completely baffled by it. Grace and I really struggled to explain it to her - not just the mechanics, but the very concept of a camera you have to put film into. What is film? Where do you see what you're taking a picture of? How do you get the film out? Where do the pictures come from? Do you throw the camera away afterwards?

Bizarre, that something so familiar should be so alien to a 7 year old.

Exciting news in our local paper: Poole Park is going to be the first public park in the UK to go digital. In a few weeks free wi-fi is going to be installed so that you can sit in the sun, feed the ducks, and surf. I remember when I was 7 and there was talk that one day most homes might have computers in them.

Man I feel old...

TELLING TALES

My blogging mojo seems to have deserted me the past couple of weeks...

Anyway, I've been working hard on lots of other stuff, and figure that good material is worth using more than once. So I thought I'd post some things that I've been working on for the relaunch of Small Groups at Gateway in the autumn. First up is some thoughts on story. I've been thinking about this after picking some stuff up on my trip to Seattle, and from sitting with Andrew Wilson at the Newfrontiers Theology Forum talking about how the gospel is the answer to everyone's story.

Here goes...

Everyone loves a good story, and Small Groups should be a place where we can tell our stories, as part of the bigger story of what God has called us in to.

A love of stories is not something we have to learn – it is just hardwired into human nature. My children have loved stories from as soon as they were able to communicate in any meaningful way. At first the stories children love are very simple – ‘duck goes for a swim’ – but quickly the stories get longer and more complicated. Small children (very irritatingly!) love to hear the same story over and over again. As we get older we like to hear the same story strung out over a long time, as in a two hour movie or a novel, or even over a lifetime, as with Coronation Street! Some of the best moments in my family are when someone says, “Remember when…” Stories are important to us.

The big story
There are many types of story, and they can take many different forms, but they can all be pretty much boiled down to just two broad categories: The Love Story, and the Rescue Story. Everyone’s personal story will contain elements of these types of story, and everyone’s personal story can at some point be connected with the story of God:

The Love story: Boy meets girl. Fall in love. Live happily ever after.
This is probably the most common story of all, and is told and retold in countless forms from ‘high culture’ (Romeo & Juliet) to ‘folk culture’ (Snow White) to ‘pop culture’ (Sleepless in Seattle).

Most people’s stories will contain a lot of this story, because it is the story of relationships. Everyone has a story to tell of love fulfilled, broken or unrequited. This is the story that fills acres of newspaper print and celebrity magazines. It is the story other people tell us whenever we sit down together and say, “Tell me about yourself…”

The love story is also the story of the Bible because God’s story is about him winning for himself a bride, the love of his life, who he will lavish his love on forever. From Genesis to Revelation the story is all about a God of love and the consequences of that love. Out of the overflow of his love God created the universe and people to fill it. Out of love God pursues relationship with these people, even when they sin and mess everything up. Out of love God chooses a people for himself – Israel. Out of love God remains faithful to Israel, even when she divorces him. Out of love God comes to the earth in Jesus Christ to win his bride back for himself. The climax of the whole story is a wedding feast when Jesus and his Bride are at last brought together in the made new heavens and earth.

Of all the types of story there are, this is really the one big story, because every other story is really in some way about our search for love.

BOOK REVIEW: ROME & JERUSALEM

Rome & Jerusalem by Martin Goodman

Encouraged by pastor-missiologists such as Tim Keller there is a renewed emphasis today in reaching cities with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christianity has always been a religion of the city. It was birthed in the cities of the Roman empire and the most significant shapers of Christian thought and practice today come from the cities. Two cities stand pre-eminent in ancient history, the development of the Western world, and the story of Christianity: Rome and Jerusalem.

I wouldn’t claim this is particularly light reading. It is written in a fairly engaging style, and is not overly technical, but at 600 pages long and with a lot of detail it takes some determination to get through. Such determination will be repaid though by a sweeping and penetrating analysis of the circumstances that led to the destruction of the Temple in 70AD and the events that flowed out of that.

Reading this as a Christian in the West is to feel oneself as the inheritor of the two very different worldviews of Rome and Jerusalem. Roman attitudes to religion, sex and entertainment draw many parallels with our own culture. (And for an economic parallel try substituting ‘Brown’ for ‘Catiline’ in this quote: “Cicero accused the debt-ridden aristocrat Catiline of seeking support … from among those who had wasted their ancestral fortunes on sex, gluttony and gambling.”) At the same time, the Jewish understanding of being a unique people, called and set apart for God, is familiar ground for the follower of Jesus.

Goodman traces the development of Christianity as a faith that saw itself as totally distinct from Judaism. While the roots of the faith were in Jerusalem, culturally Christianity rapidly became Roman, even long before Constantine adopted it as the official faith of empire. One of the things that is fascinating about this is the contrast with so much contemporary evangelicalism (to use the term loosely) that is ‘pro-Israel’. From the earliest centuries of Christianity the destruction of the Temple and the refusal on the part of the authorities to allow its reconstruction was a clear sign of the claims of Jesus as Messiah. For our forefathers in the faith, Reconstructionism would have been something to wail over, not aspire to. How different from those today who would want to see the Temple re-established as a prelude to the return of Christ. This should be a warning to us that our biblical interpretation is always coloured by our place in history.

The fact that the Temple was never rebuilt is a greater anomaly than I had previously understood. Typically, if Rome destroyed a temple it was quickly re-established. The Roman strategy was to co-opt the gods of the nations they conquered, not banish them. The main theme through this book is to unpick why Roman hostility towards Jerusalem was so disproportionate. Political factors were involved – Vespasian’s need to big up a military victory as he sought supreme power for himself, and the need for his successors to create a legend out of this that validated their own claims to power. But the ongoing hostility towards Jews in the empire does not submit itself to mere logical examination. Some might claim that this was the result of a heavenly dynamic at work, which ensured both the preservation of the Jews as a people, and their exclusion from wider society. Of course, it was a misinterpretation of just such a hermeneutic that led to the tragedy of antisemitism in so much of the Church over the centuries; a theme Goodman turns to in the closing chapter of the book.

Fascinating reading then, and very helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of the social, political and religious background to the birth of Christianity, and the development of Western civilisation. Goodman clearly writes as a secular historian, so people of faith may be irritated by some of his slants on things; but my one main criticism is a fairly insignificant one – the ridiculous vogue for substituting BCE for BC and CE for AD when recording dates. My pencil was kept busy scribbling over this nonsense…

15 YEARS OF GRACE

I particularly like this time of year. I like it once the clocks have gone forward and the evenings are suddenly long again. I like the way we often get good weather at the end of March/beginning of April. (It is a Hosier cliché, passed through the generations, that, “You can have a heat wave in March”.) I like the sense of spring getting under full steam and summer not being far away.

And it is funny how the overall patterns of the years get mirrored in smaller repeating patterns. On the last Monday of March 2008 we were out walking on the Dorset coast path and I got my first touch of sunburn of the year. We also got talking to some people who are on the coast path every day looking for dolphins (which they hadn’t seen for a couple of years) and showing people adders (which we saw in abundance). On this Monday just gone Grace & I were again on the coast path, and I again got my first touch of sunburn, but this time we didn’t see adders – we saw dolphins. A pod of six, which swam along parallel to the cliff as we walked. It was quite special.

This time of year is also special for me because it is my wedding anniversary – tomorrow will mark 15 years since Grace & I got married. God has blessed me with an incredible woman, who has been a wonderful wife and exceptional mother. She works hard, in the home and serving in the church. She displays a constancy of faith and good humor. She copes with my foibles without complaint. And she bakes the best bread known to man.

The grace of God has been rich to me in Grace. Another year together, another reason to be thankful, another milestone to celebrate.

Thank you Jesus for your gift of Grace!