Saturday’s Age had a brilliant article by Simon Moyle defending the non-violence of the Christian message, following the disturbing (to say the least!) revelations of Bible verses appearing on weapons that the US military has been using in Iraq and Afghanistan. I feel quite proud of Simon as he was a young lad when I ran a boys club that he was in back in the 80s. Great work Simon. Judging from most of the comments to this article, it has generated a lot of healthy debate.
Category: Jesus (Page 11 of 12)
A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to share on Advent at my place of work. As I studied the passage where Elizabeth greets Mary, I was reminded that the story of the birth of God is not a nice story. We have sanitised it beyond belief – literally. We sing carols like Away in a Manger with lines like ‘no crying he makes’. Really? He’s a baby for goodness’ sake. Babies cry. Don’t get me wrong; Away in a Manger is a beautiful carol but some of it betrays the smelly, shocking, subversive story of the birth of the Saviour.
A colleague of mine has recently spoken about Mary becoming pregnant and the dread she must have been feeling, thinking ‘how do I tell Joseph about this?!’
She probably ran off to her cousin Elizabeth with mixed feelings. She would have had the typical joy of being an expectant mother, but probably more so the dread of how she would explain this to everyone.
I reckon the scene in the picture opposite wouldn’t have been when they first saw each other. If this was a photo, it would have been taken well after Elizabeth had comforted Mary with her sense of joy at the whole occasion. Mary wouldn’t have been smiling much when she first turned up to see Elizabeth.
When we look in a bit more depth at passages like this, we soon see that the whole Christmas story speaks of scandal. As I mentioned, this is not a nice story. The images we have of the nativity are of gentle baby Jesus in the manger with fluffy farm animals gathered around. But consider the story. An unmarried young woman, a virgin, gets pregnant. And then we have the story of her cousin, an older woman, known as being childless. The Jewish culture of the time regarded being childless as a misfortune; it showed that you were cut off from God, and it was therefore grounds for divorce.
Despite all this, we have the joyful outburst from Elizabeth, followed by the even more amazing cry from Mary, known as the Magnificat. Their response was quite different from that of their menfolk. Joseph must have been thinking, ‘what do I do with Mary, now that she’s pregnant?’, and Zachariah was quite literally struck dumb at the news of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Us blokes tend to be more skeptical than our women and we can learn alot from them.
So, it is into this setting of scandal, disbelief and unspeakable joy, that we have the birth of God. Born in a horse’s trough because there was no room at the inn – rejected from the day he was born. Some years ago, Joan Osbourne asked the haunting question, ‘What if God was one of us?’. She was dead right in her lyrics – ‘just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home…nobody calling on the phone’. The God who is rejected and crucified by a brutal Roman regime is the God who is resurrected and defeats the powers of evil to establish his kingdom – creation reborn. This is what we celebrate at Christmas.
Last Sunday I preached on the outrageous request of James and John in Mark 10:35-45. This is a passage that has enormous relevance for our society today as we are constantly told to strive to be number one. But does Jesus condemn this?
Every man’s question is “am I good enough?”, “am I a man?”. During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and’60s in the US, some of the banners that people would carry during their marches proclaimed ‘I am a man!’ Why? What does publicly affirming your manliness have to do with civil rights? Well, quite a lot really. For years black men in the US had been called ‘boy’, which for them was yet another degrading term which depicted them as inferior to the white man.
Recently I received some news which was particularly unpleasant. My emotional response over the next week ranged from defensiveness, to acceptance, to seeing my part, to mild depression, not in that particular order.
One of the lessons in life I have learned over the last few years (I’m now 40. You would think I wouldn’t have taken this long!) is that of not running from pain when life doesn’t treat me as I want it to. We live in an analgesic society. We have pills for almost everything and, as Stephen Ilardi says in his new book The Depression Cure, the rate of anti-depressant medication in America (translate that to most other western societies) has skyrocketed but the rate of depression has not reduced. It has in fact increased tenfold since the Second World War.
The culture we live in is a feel-good culture where pain is to be eliminated at all costs. As a result, our pain threshold lessens and we become less resilient people. The offset of this is that we become less able to sit with others in their pain. Rob Bell makes the profound point that your ability to sit and listen to someone else’s pain is directly proportional to how well you have dealt with your own pain.
The results of our addiction to pleasure and to pain minimisation is that our society ultimately fragments. We become more distant from each other and more unable to empathise with other in our times of sorrow. In my culture in Australia, many people still live by the adage that “she’ll be right mate” and “just have another beer”. And it’s generally us men who display this very unmanly attitude. Contrast that to the attitude and response of Jesus at the death of his good friend Lazarus. In our sporting culture, when a team comes frmo behind to win, we sometimes say it was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. But we have no idea who Lazarus was and what the circumstances behind his amazing comeback were. The shortest verse in the Bible, which comes from this story, is also perhaps the most human and at the same time the most divine – “Jesus wept”.
Jesus demonstrated gutsy, manly care for his mate Lazarus when he found out that he had died. He was unafraid to show his emotions and to sit with his pain. He didn’t run from it, he didn’t try to medicate it. He sat with it and expressed it, and did so for all to see. The responses he got were mixed, but the people’s response when he did something about the situation was nothing short of amazement.
I well recall some years ago when I was going through a very acute personal trauma that, one afternoon, it just felt like I had this huge hole in my chest. I called a friend and shared my feelings with him. I have never forgotten his simple response – “you’ve just got to sit with the pain”. I did and, after some time it lessened and I became a little more resilient.
When we don’t run from pain as from a burning building, our character grows. We become a little more able to deal with life on life’s terms. And we become a little more able to help someone else when they go through their pain. And in the process the kingdom of God is demonstrated yet again.
Imagine if you could take yourself back 2,000 years and immerse yourself in the world of 1st Century Palestine, in a little Jewish backwater where you were hearing reports of a man who was healing people and making the most extraordinary claims about himself. Imagine if you could follow him on the way for a bit and listen to some of what he was saying, and see some of these things he was doing, these things that had people talking and spreading all sorts of rumours about him. But imagine your disappointment if you had no idea of the meaning of what he was saying; if you were just thrown back in time to try to understand the scandal that this man was creating everywhere he went.
Back in 2007 I wrote an article on the decay of western culture, in which I mentioned the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index. This is an index that addresses the relative success or failure of countries in supporting a good life for their citizens, while respecting the environmental resource limits upon which all our lives depend. Australia was ranked 139th out of 178, which suggested that Jesus was right when he said that life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.
Well, the NEF has published its latest version of the Index, and it is indeed quite prophetic in its call for a new way of living in a world in which the earth’s resources are being depleted at a simply alarming rate. The report begins by stating that,
“In an age of uncertainty, society globally needs a new compass to set it on a path of real progress. The Happy Planet Index (HPI) provides that compass by measuring what truly matters to us – our well-being in terms of long, happy and meaningful lives – and what matters to the planet – our rate of resource consumption.”
It goes on to say that “we are still far from achieving sustainable well-being, and puts forward a vision of what we need to do to get there.”
Some of the interesting results to come out of the study we as follows:
- The highest HPI score is that of Costa Rica (76.1 out of 100). As well as reporting the highest life satisfaction in the world, Costa Ricans also have the second-highest average life expectancy of the New World (second only to Canada). All this with a footprint of 2.3 global hectares. Whilst this success is indeed impressive, Costa Rica narrowly fails to achieve the goal of ‘one-planet living’: consuming its fair share of natural resources (indicated by a footprint of 2.1 global hectares or less).
- Of the following ten countries, all but one is in Latin America.
- The bottom ten HPI scores were all suffered by sub-Saharan African countries, with Zimbabwe bottom of the table with an HPI score of 16.6 out of 100.
- Rich developed nations fall somewhere in the middle. The highest-placed Western nation is the Netherlands – 43rd out of 143. The USA comes a long way back in 114th place. Australia comes 102nd, a slight improvement on its 139th in the original study.
- Many of the countries that do well are composed of small islands (including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and the Philippines).
- No country successfully achieves the three goals of high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and one-planet living.
- It is possible to live long, happy lives witha much smaller ecological footprint than found in the highest-consuming nations. For example, people in the Netherlands live on average over a year longer than people in the USA, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – and yet their per capitaecological footprint is less than half the size (4.4 global hectares compared with 9.4 global hectares). This means that the Netherlands is over twice as ecologically efficient at achieving good lives.
- More dramatic is the difference between Costa Rica and the USA. Costa Ricans also live slightly longer than Americans, and report much higher levels of life satisfaction, and yet have a footprint which is less than a quarter the size.
What this study clearly shows is that our way of living in the (still) affluent west is unsustainable, as if we needed reminding. Brian McLaren calls our way of living the ‘suicide machine’, because it is a way of living that is literally killing us and the rest of the planet. His brilliant book, Everything Must Change, explains this in more detail.
The study also highlights what many people have been saying for a long time now. Consider this quote from Thomas Friedman, a long-time advocate of growth and globalisation:
“Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more'”
Jesus was indeed right when he warned of greed which is idolatry. Our whole way of living is based on greed and it is not just a doom-and-gloom killjoy remark to say that it is killing us. It is an undeniable fact. T. Jackson, in a NEF publication called ‘Chasing Progress’ has said that “every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” The Happy Planet report has an excellent section on this myth in which it discusses the history of the philosophy behind economic growth and how it came to prominence.
Many respected social thinkers have long put forward the argument that a religious outlook on life is beneficial to a peaceful and harmonious society. A society that places ethical values and a positive outlook for the future, often based on a religious faith, is a society that is based on a solid foundation. The Happy Planet report echoes this by saying that even a magazine such as The Economist says that
“attempting to explain why well-being does not keep rising in line with consumption, [The Economist] suggests that ‘there are factors associated with modernisation that, in part, offset its positive impact.’ Specifically, it argues that alongside consumption growth, [a] concomitant breakdown of traditional institutions is manifested in the decline of religiosity and of trade unions; a marked rise in various social pathologies (crime, and drug and alcohol addiction); a decline in political participation and of trust in public authority; and the erosion of the institutions of family and marriage.”
An article in The Age a few years ago showed that, if all people in the world lived like Australians, we would need 4 planets to maintain our lifestyle. And of all the states in Australia, my home state of Victoria was the worst of the lot. That is mainly due to our reliance on brown coal to create electricity. We have a lot to change, but happily, there are signs that change is happening. The Happy Planet report tells of incidences such as a community in Scotland sharing ownership of a new windfarm with developers, a ‘Big Lunch’ being arranged on streets across Britain to bring neighbours together, a community in a council estate in Luton partnering up with tea-growers in Southern India to ensure trade that is even fairer than fair trade. Things are happening. As Gandhi famously said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.
Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you. Through Jesus, the kingdom is invading history, and the good news is that all are invited to be a part of it. Heaven on earth will only happen when the resurrected Jesus returns to put the world to rights. But in the meantime, we have the absolute privilege of laying the building blocks. That is why everything we do matters. Every act of kindness, every act of justice. It all matters because when we do it in the name of Jesus, it has cosmic and eternal implications. As Ross Langmead sings,
“the kingdom is coming, a kingdom of peace. Beat swords into ploughs for fighting will cease. Justice will prosper, love will be king. Peacemakers will be able to sing that this is God’s earth and it has been worth all the pain.”
The Happy Planet report is a huge step in showing us how our current way of living is not of the kingdom, but it also shows some of the things we can do to help fulfil Jesus’ wish that the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
I’m reading a very interesting book at the moment called Sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus. It takes a look at the Jewishness of Jesus and how it can profoundly affect our faith today. Stay tuned for a review of this book as soon as I finish it. In the meantime, I thought this quote from one of the authors, on talking about discipleship, was quite brilliant and challenging:
“None of us is so mature that we cannot be influenced. The question is: who or what do we want to shape our lives? Even the culture around us will try to ‘disciple’ us if we have not placed ourselves under the transforming influence of Jesus Christ.”
A few months ago I went to a UNOH seminar and, as part of the worship before the seminar, we sang the old song Lord of the Dance. I was pleasantly surprised to hear the catchy tune again and thought this song, with its earthy lyrics, was very relevant to both the work of UNOH and the seminar we were about to be a part of. I couldn’t help but be transported back to the 70s though, to the first time I heard this song. I used to see it on one of those ads that the Christian Television Association used to do. The cringe factor was off the scale for most of those ads, but for some reason the tune of this song has always stayed with me.
Lord of the Dance (not to be confused with the theatre production by Michael Flatley) was written by Sydney Carter in 1963. Here’s what he wrote about the song:
“I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance [my edits – a bit new agey for me. Not really sure how Carter saw Jesus, but keep reading]. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.
Whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee to the rhythm of a pipe or drum I do not know. We are told that David danced (and as an act of worship too), so it is not impossible. The fact that many Christians have regarded dancing as a bit ungodly (in a church, at any rate) does not mean that Jesus did.
The Shakers didn’t. This sect flourished in the United States in the nineteenth century, but the first Shakers came from Manchester in England, where they were sometimes called the “Shaking Quakers”. They hived off to America in 1774, under the leadership of Mother Anne. They established celibate communities – men at one end, women at the other; though they met for work and worship. Dancing, for them, was a spiritual activity. They also made furniture of a functional, lyrical simplicity. Even the cloaks and bonnets that the women wore were distinctly stylish, in a sober and forbidding way.
Their hymns were odd, but sometimes of great beauty: from one of these (Simple Gifts) I adapted this melody. I could have written another for the words of ‘Lord of the Dance’ (some people have), but this was so appropriate that it seemed a waste of time to do so. Also, I wanted to salute the Shakers.
If you know the tune, let the words sink in as you read or maybe sing it to yourself as you remember the Lord of the Dance who came to bring life for all:
I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem I had my birth.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
I danced for the scribe and the pharisee,
But they would not dance and they wouldn’t follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John –
They came with me and the Dance went on.
Chorus
I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame;
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high,
And they left me there on a Cross to die.
Chorus
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black –
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance, and I still go on.
Chorus
They cut me down and I leapt up high;
I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me –
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
Chorus
Over the next 4 weeks at St Martin’s Community Church in Collingwood, John Smith will be presenting a series on each of the 4 Gospels. While time restricts even John from going through the Gospels from start to finish, his presentation will look at some of the following issues:
- Why do we have the current 4 Gospels?
- What about all the other ‘Gospels’?
- What about the apparent contradictions between the Gospels that we have?
- The context in which the 4 Gospels were written
- The intended audience of the Gospels
John is one of Australia’s foremost preachers, and some years ago completed his doctoral dissertation on church revitalisation movements at Asbury in the United States. Over the last 40 years, John has been known for his gift of making the Gospel come alive and reveal its relevance for living today. John was the first preacher I ever heard who preached the Gospel in a way that made sense for how I should live, not just for giving me assurance that I was going to heaven.
During his studies, John had the privilege of being taught by Ben Witherington III, a noted New Testament scholar, and author of the widely acclaimed ‘The Gospel Code’. For those not in Melbourne, I would recommend this book for an excellent analysis of the questions above. It was originally written as a response to the claims of Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.
For those of you in Melbourne though, come along over the next 4 Sundays to hear John talk about the Gospels. The service starts at around 10am.
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