Faith and relevance in the 21st century

Category: Kingdom of God (Page 3 of 4)

Mental health and consumer culture

The latest New Internationalist focuses on mental illness and has a great article on what is called the collective insanity of consumer culture. It is certainly no exaggeration that our obsession with stuff is an addiction. The fact that, as Brene Brown says, we are the most obese, addicted, medicated society in history, coupled with the widely acknowledged fact that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, shows that we are in a seriously dangerous place in our mentally ill culture. Here are some quotes from the article, along with comments from me in blue:

  • A century on from Oscar Wilde’s immortal poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, death comes gift-wrapped and perfumed, in beguiling guilt-free varieties, delivered with a toothy smile and prophecy of material salvation. Betrayal gets absolved as the consumer age supplants conscience with craving, and duty with self-devotion. Even with our beloved Earth and the future of humankind balanced on a knife’s edge, our killing feels strangely like a bargain.
  • In Escape from Evil, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker describes consumer culture as a second-rate religion that has programed a society of ‘cheerful robots’ to martyr all to “a grotesque spectacle of unrestrained material production, perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history.”
  • If consumer culture were a separate individual and assessed psychiatrically, its diagnosis would be criminal psychosis of the most fiendish variety.
  • Once sold on ourselves, we can be wooed by the most impoverished of ambitions, from ‘having it all,’ and ‘living the dream,’ right on down to ‘making it to the top.’
  • Hyper-competitive individualism is a lonely straightjacket that fuels frustration, alienation, and rage. Freedom has cheapened into a demeaning free-for-all in a prison of petty wants. As a springboard to happiness, emotional health, and social well-being, ‘the good life’ is an exhausting flop. As evidenced by Martin Seligman’s research which shows that consumer culture now has ten times the rate of depression we had at the end of the Second World War.
  • The term ‘cultural insanity’ refers to normative templates that have become so counter-productive and self-defeating, or so misaligned to our basic human needs, that they stand to undo society or its life supports. In fact, normality can be the deadliest of foes.
  • Never before has a society indebted itself so heavily to unreality.
  • For the first time, Utopia is a matter of life or death. Getting it half right or even mostly right is not enough.
  • For cultural psychologist Erich Fromm, the only defense against our all-consuming social insanity was ‘a radical change of the human heart.’ Perhaps the most important change that needs to happen, because all the other changes will not last unless the human heart is connected with a Source outside of itself.
  • We recognize in films like The Matrix and The Truman Show our phantasmagoric world of factory-farmed experience that keeps us blankly nippled to fantasy, and numbed to life beyond our brainwashing.
  • God, increasingly hell-bent on wanting us to be rich, is resisting the green makeover that some prayed could spare Creation. Unfortunately, as with many article of this type, written by those with a socialist leaning, the God they critique is the God of fundamentalism, who is a kill-joy and only cares about punishing homosexuals and people who have had abortions. Millions of Christians don’t believe in this God either.
  • The highest act of love in a criminally insane society is disobedience. Normality can no longer be trusted. Unconditional obedience is an unaffordable luxury. To be “well-adjusted” is to be part of the problem. Brilliant; a great definition of love in this context.
  • Economics, once the boring background affair it should be, is now the cornerstone for cultural consciousness. What will it profit someone if they gain the whole world but lose their very self?
  • For the same price as the insanity-saving ‘credit crunch’ bailout, we could be well on our way to a society of minimalists, naturalists, humanitarians, and debt-dodging vegetarians. Compassion and childlessness could be chic, and conservationists sexy. Throw in half a year’s military budget and peace could be hip, education could enlighten, and eloquent simplicity could be all the rage. A society where childlessness is encouraged is a society on its way to extinction. What else could it be? And as far as education goes, as I read once, because of human nature, education doesn’t achieve the desired outcome. If you educate a devil, you don’t get an angel, you just get a clever devil.
  • There is nothing that we cannot be or believe. We are as perfectible as we are corruptible. Thousands of years of human history has shown us by now that this is simply not true. This type of thinking is really the same addictive thinking that says that despite the mountain of evidence, we can still be perfect one day. It is not for nothing that Jesus said that without Him we can do nothing. It is only when we find ourselves in our ultimate Connection that we will eventually be made perfect, and that will not be this side od death.
  • The biggest problem is that, by design, we are cultural creatures, fated to be normal except for rare individuals with enough courage and conviction to liberate themselves partially from culture’s powerful gravitational pull. Even well meaning individuals who profess concern about the unfolding apocalypse usually plod on like zombies in allegiance to their cultural norms.
  • Culture is the last great frontier. While it would be a spectacular leap of maturity on our parts, the deliberate and preemptive management of collective consciousness guided by a responsibility-based culture is the next and most important step in our evolution.

This magnificent article needs to be shared far and wide, despite its naivety and seeming ignorance of the deception of the human heart. It comes closer to a vision of the kingdom of God than much of what we hear in our churches. I am reminded of a couple of brilliant books that should also be must-reads for people of faith. They are Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change, and Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.

It is true that what we need is a change in the human heart, but what this article proposes is a kingdom without a king. As Johnny Cash sang in the song The Wanderer, ‘they say they want the kingdom but they don’t want God in it.’

Perhaps the most important omission from the article is the house on rock that Jesus spoke of, that of hope; not just hope that we will one day get to our utopia, but a hope based on a fact of history, that because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, there will indeed come a day when utopia will be a reality, and we can indeed build for it now. But it will not be one that is finally completed by defective humanity, but one that is completed and consummated by God himself. It will be the wonderful new creation that the Scriptures point to and whose consummation is gloriously described in Revelation 21. May that day come quickly because God knows we need it.

God’s Gift to a Broken World

We live in a world of immense suffering, and whether we call ourselves Christian or not, we are often faced with the universal question of why such suffering occurs in a world which was made by a good and loving God.

At Easter we remember that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he also asked why, and said “into your hands I place my spirit.” It was an act of trust that God is good despite what we see around us.

In our society we are bombarded with the message every day of our lives that life is found in having more. Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ mantra from the heady days of the late 1980s is the philosophy we are encouraged to live by today. Yet study after study shows that ‘money can’t buy me love’, as The Beatles sang fifty years ago. The American psychologist Martin Seligman has conducted research showing that the rate of depression in Western nations has increased tenfold since the Second World War ie. we now have ten times the amount of people who are depressed than we had seventy years ago. On top of that, Brene Brown points out that we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated people in history. All this is during a period in which we have never been wealthier. Something is not adding up; it looks suspiciously like we have been sold a lemon.

And if that is not enough, our affluent way of life is leading to a greater gap between rich and poor, as well as to the dreaded spectre of a changing climate. Jayakumar Christian, National Director of World Vision India, says that while everybody talks about the booming Indian middle-class, with economic growth rates of 7-8%, no one talks about the growing gap between rich and poor in that vast land, and the fact that there are 836 million poor people in India. And you just need to talk to just about every climate scientist as well as every aid and development worker in places like Africa to learn about the effects that climate change is already having on their farming practises. No wonder the author and pastor Brian McLaren calls our way of life the ‘suicide machine.’

It’s all depressingly bleak, and enough to drive you to despair. But despite all this, we don’t have to be stuck in that mindset. The comfort we can find at Easter is that Jesus identifies with our pain and with our questions. But it’s more than that. If that is all he did, we wouldn’t have any hope. Thankfully we are told that in Jesus, God came to earth not only to die for our wrongs, but to reconcile all things to himself. But again, if that is all there is, there still wouldn’t be any hope. The New Testament is open about this. The apostle Paul says that if Christ was not raised from death we are to be pitied more than anyone. Christian faith lives or dies on the physical resurrection of Jesus as a historical event. If Jesus was not raised, then Christian faith is pointless, as death would not have been defeated and life is meaningless. But our joy and hope come from faith in Jesus, that as well as dying on Good Friday, he was raised on Sunday. As Nick Cave sings, death is not the end. And, as only he can, American preacher Tony Campolo adds, “it’s Friday but Sunday’s a-comin!”

Hope is alive. There is no line on the horizon; heaven and earth are slowly overlapping. There is no reason to despair and there is nothing to fear. The Christian message says that it is because of the resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter morning that we have hope that death will not triumph in the end. Life, justice, peace, hope and love will triumph. Nothing is surer. And it is all because God came and dwelt among us and defeated the scourge of death.

Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we are shown how to live, we are offered forgiveness for our many wrongs, and all things are reconciled to God. All things. Our hearts, so we can be at peace with God; our society, so we can live at peace with each other; and the rest of the whole created order, so we can live at peace with it. To the question of why God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about the suffering and pain in the world, we can assuredly say that God already has. Through the life of one man, we see a glimpse of the wonderful kingdom come; through the death of that one man on a dark Friday afternoon, we are offered forgiveness for our wrongs; and through the resurrection of that one unique man on the most wonderful Sunday morning in history, all things are made new.

What we remember at Easter is what drives us; it is what drives our continual struggle for a better world, for peace on earth, for shalom. One day there will be no more tears; one day there will be no more pain, no more ‘stupid poverty’ as Bono calls it, no more war and no more injustice. One day everything will fit; it will all make sense. And it will all be because of Jesus. And we get to live this resurrection life here and now, working with God to renew the world, living out the compassion of Jesus, and standing in the tradition of the prophets to work for a world in which one day everything will be made complete. That is the hope of Easter. May you have a blessed one.

Playing for Change – Stand by Me

Fuzz Kitto preached at church this morning and played this magnificent clip of people playing John Lennon’s classic Stand by Me as part of the ‘Playing for Change’ initiative. I think some of the lyrics were changed to highlight the importance of standing by each other. As Roger Ridley in this moving performance says, no matter our situation in life, we need somebody to stand by us. We are made for relationship, and without healthy relationship in our lives, we are less human than we could be. We are created for God and for each other. Check out this inspirational clip:

Biblical politics

Sojourners today has a great article from Jim Wallis on biblical politics. The comment that stood out to me was,

“If you work with and for the poor, you inevitably run into injustice. In other words, poverty isn’t caused by accident. There are unjust systems and structures that create and perpetuate poverty and human suffering. And service alone is never enough; working to change both the attitudes and institutional arrangements that cause poverty is required.”

I remember a story a former colleague told once about when his small group watched the movie Bruce Almighty in which the main character gets to play God for a day. The small group discussed what they would do if they had the opportunity to be God for a day, and the main response was that they would redistribute all the wealth in the world so that everyone had the same. But then came the comment that the next day things would be unequal again because of systems that are in place that perpetuate inequality. Thus the need for justice and changing structures, and not just for ‘giving’.

The area which Jim Wallis’ article doesn’t touch on though is that even changing structures does not go far enough, because structures that are run by unredeemed people will corrupt again sooner or later. The sins of the past will be passed on to the current generation and beyond unless a radical change of heart occurs. When someone affirmed a pastor of mine once by saying they would vote for him to be Prime Minister, he replied that the job is too small. Politics cannot bring in the kingdom of God. Only the Holy Spirit working through the faithful people of God can do that.

That is not to say of course that politics is useless. Far from it. Christians have a responsibility to be politically engaged in the way that Jim Wallis describes in the article. The world needs people who stand in the prophetic tradition of the Amos’s, Isaiahs and Jeremiahs. But it also needs those same people to be filled with the Holy Spirit to proclaim the kingdom come, that there is a God of love and justice who is changing things, who is spreading rumours of hope (as those same prophets did proclaim). As C.S. Lewis puts it in the Narnia stories, Aslan is on the move. The yeast is working through the dough; the Spirit is moving in ways mysterious and some not so mysterious. Thank God for his grace that we are being changed and have been invited to be a part of it.

What if there were no consequences?

If there were no consequences whatsoever for any destructive behaviour you engaged in, would you want to engage in it? Someone asked me that question once, and its profundity has caused me to think long and hard. If there were no consequences for cheating on my wife, for stealing what wasn’t mine, for taking credit when I didn’t deserve it, would I do it?

The issue here is, where is my heart at? How captive am I to that which enslaves me? Many years ago Gil Cann said in a sermon that when we think of our inner life, the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart. At the end of the day, what we all need is a heart transformation. As U2 sang even more years ago, “a new heart is what I need. Oh God, make it bleed!”

Where is my heart at? Do I want what is right simply because it is right? With God’s help, yes I do. But as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, there is a line that divides the good and evil in every human heart. In our heart of hearts there is a desire to do good which sits alongside a desire to get whatever we can for ourselves. A heart that is being redeemed by grace is one which wants to become more like Christ, that just wants to do the right thing. It is a heart that is sick of its own selfishness and deception, a heart that confesses it is in need of grace, a heart that cries out for renewal.

The human heart needs transformation, and it can only be done by the Holy Spirit. Social justice can’t do it, simply reading the Bible can’t do it, and listening to your favourite preacher or reading your favourite Christian books won’t do it. Only a heart open to the conviction of the Holy Spirit of God is one that will change.

Part of the way the world is set up is that there are consequences for our actions. There are good consequences or there are destructive consequences. We reap what we sow. It cannot be any other way. There are some things we just need to accept in life, and this is one of them.

But not only is this the way life works, it is the wonderful truth of the Christian message. There are consequences that go beyond what we experience in this life, but at the same time those consequences are utterly dependent on our actions in this life. The kingdom of God has broken into history and will one day be fully consummated. Things will one day be finally put to rights. There will be a day when the first will be last and the last will be first, when those who constantly suffer now because of injustice will at last get to see justice, when those who are downtrodden will be downtrodden no more. All the suffering that goes on in the world today is not meaningless; it is in fact redemptive. It will be used for good and it drives us toward hope, the sure hope that one day everything will be put to rights and suffering will be no more.

So, in one sense, the question of whether or not my behaviour would change if there were no consequences is a moot one. The fact is there are consequences and we can’t do anything to avoid the fact. It is a bit like asking what life would be like if there were no gravity on the earth. Our existence just isn’t like that.

Yet on the other hand the question is highly relevant, because it is a question that quite literally speaks to our ultimate motivations for doing the things we do in life. It is a question that asks where our hearts are at. Are we altruistic because it makes us look good and holy in front of our Christian brothers and sisters? Or are we altruistic because we really want to glorify God and see his kingdom of love and transformation come on earth as it is in heaven? Truth be told, we spend most of our lives hovering between both. I know I do. As I continue on this journey of life though, I am also more convinced that living a life daily surrendered to the God of Jesus Christ is the only way to find the sense of home that our restless hearts yearn for.

When we think of the secret thoughts that we have, or even the secret actions that we might engage in, what do we think of the consequences? What do you do with those secret thoughts you have that you are too ashamed to admit? For us men it is said that all of us are faced with the temptation at some point in our lives to run away from everything. Women may have similar dark thoughts. The problem is not so much that we have them, but how we deal with them. This is where it is crucial to have a person or people in our lives with whom we can share our darkest thoughts without shame, with the knowledge that we will still be accepted for who we are, and to know that such thoughts and desires can be redeemed.

My heart needs redeeming every day. It needs desperately to be brought in line with the heart of God. I am sometimes tempted to live like there are no consequences to my actions. But when I am deceived by such thoughts, it is then that I need to be reminded of the transforming love of God in Jesus to change me from the inside out, to create in me a clean heart and renew within me a right spirit. God help me to live such a surrendered life.

Jesus, communion and the future

N.T. Wright says that at communion we must remember it as not just the extension of God’s past (or Jesus’ past) into our present, but also as the arrival of God’s future into the present, for this is what Jesus’ resurrection did. In him the kingdom of God broke into history. After all, Jesus did say that this was the body and blood of the new covenant. Something to think about when we take communion this weekend.

Rahab the woman made in the image of God

As part of an ongoing celebration of the 100th International Women’s Day, I have been asked by some colleagues to say a few words about a significant woman of history. Here is an extended version of what I plan to say.

As a male, I am aware of the responsibility I have to my colleagues to present a woman of history in a way that does justice to their real struggle. And so, of the women that were on our list to choose from, I chose Rahab, a woman we know about through the book of Joshua in the Old Testament.

To give some background, Joshua had been Moses’ right-hand man. So when Moses died, Joshua took over as leader of the Israelites. As they were about to go into the land that God had set aside for them, Joshua sent two spies to Jericho to check it out before the rest of them went in there. That night the spies were taken in by Rahab. She had heard about Israel’s God and was afraid of the mighty deeds of this God and so wanted to do something to help.

When soldiers of the city guard came to look for the spies, Rahab hid them on the roof of her house. After escaping, the spies promised to spare Rahab and her family after taking the city, even if there should be a massacre, if she would mark her house by hanging a red cord out the window. What is interesting in all of this is that Rahab was a prostitute, and some have claimed that the symbol of the red cord is the origin of the “red light district”.

As we think of the type of woman Rahab was, I am reminded that Jesus was known as a person who ate and drank with prostitutes. In Jesus’ day, who you ate with mattered. It spoke highly of who you considered was important. Status and honour was everything. But Jesus didn’t care about that. He was known as one who cared for those that nobody else cared about. And aren’t prostitutes still seen like that in today’s society? But not in God’s society. Contrary to the way we would think of a prostitute, Rahab is included in the genealogy in Matthew’s gospel as an ancestor of Jesus, she is mentioned as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews, and she is given a special mention in the letter of James as an example of faith resulting in action. People like Rahab matter to God.

I believe that men in general need to apologise to women in general for the treatment many of us have inflicted on them, in all sorts of ways. And so, as a male I want to offer my own apology for that. I apologise for the times in my life when I have thought of and treated women as less than men.

If you consider someone like Rahab today, the great injustice about women in the oldest profession is that they are the ones who have the stigma attached to them, but the truth is that prostitution is a profession driven by men. And as far as using prostitutes goes, thousands of men visit prostitutes every week in my city. And I heard a statistic some years ago that said that 25% of prostitutes try to kill themselves. Prostitution is considered by many to be simply trading in commodities, to use a financial term. There is no relationship, no care, and no love. These women, like Rahab, are someone’s daughter, someone’s partner, and someone’s mother – human beings made in the image of God.

Women have suffered terribly at the hands of men. And while I can sympathise all we want at the mistreatment of women, I can never put myself in the position of a woman simply because I am not one. The nearest I ever came to relating to the experience of women in this regard was about 15 years ago when I was doing some volunteer work in a mainly gay environment. I remember being looked up and down by some of these men, and my immediate thought was “back off!” It made me realise the sense of violation that women must feel every time a bloke ogles them and sees them as an object.

The woman who hid the spies in Jericho is not known to Jesus as Rahab the prostitute. She is known to him as Rahab the incredible woman made in the image of God. Her profession does not define her. This woman, considered a slut in her society as she would be in ours, is a heroine in the eyes of God. Jesus warned the religious leaders that the prostitutes were going into the kingdom of God ahead of them because they believed the message about Jesus when the religious leaders – the church of that time – didn’t. I pray that I will not be like the religious leaders and that, as a man, I will treat women as Jesus does – with dignity and full equality – as people made in the image of God.

Empty cross, empty grave, full throne

I’ve pretty much decided that the next book I need to read is Scot McKnight’s One.Life – Jesus Calls, We Follow. It says everything the church needs to hear today about what Steve Chalke calls the lost message of Jesus. I’ve been thinking more lately about how much the Christian church is off the mark with much of its teaching. Some of it doesn’t affect us a great deal, but other wrong teachings affect the very core of what it means to be Christian. A pastor of mine said once that an error might not seem that much initially, but eventually it can destroy. If you think of it like taking a trip to the moon, you might be only a kilometre off course at the start, but once you’re supposed to have arrived, you will be hundreds of thousands of kilometres off course.

The following quote from One.Life gives a hint of what our future with God will really be, and it is contrary to much evangelical teaching:

“The Lamb of God is also the Lion of Judah … [and] he triumphed (see Revelation 5:5). How did he triumph? He has been raised from the dead, he has conquered death, and now the Lamb-Who-Is-Lion is on the throne of God. The cross is not the final word; the final word is Life, the God.Life that raised Jesus from the dead to sit on the throne as the Lion. Amazingly, that Lion’s job, this grand finale of books in the Bible tells us, is to install Jesus’ followers as a “kingdom and priests” and our task is to “reign on the earth” in God’s kingdom.

Do you hear the roar? The Lamb-Who-Is-Lion roars from the distant horizon. The Lion has been inside the grave and down into the depths of death, but God raised him from the dead and is now roaring. He came back to life and he ascended into the throne room of God, where he reigns. From that distant horizon, the Raised One now roars. He roars to let us know he is Lord. He roars to let us know that Caesar is not Lord, he is. He roars to let us know he’s sent the Spirit to make us one and to empower us to live as God’s beloved community. He roars to let us know we are gifted to serve in that community. He roars to let us know God loves us. He roars to let us know that justice, love, wisdom, and peace matter to him. He roars to inform us that he’s watching. He roars to let us know that he’s coming again. He roars to let us know that Death is not the final word.

The last word is the roar of the Lamb-Who-Is-Lion-Who-Is-Life. That Lion’s roar doesn’t frighten us. No, that roar gives us confidence to press on with the Cross.Life. That roar empowers us to pick up the cross daily and follow the Lamb-Who-Is-Lion. That roar enables us to fight through our doubts and to struggle through defeats. That roar wakes us up and gets us going and keeps us going straight along the cross path. That roar points the way toward the Kingdom.Life and urges us to give up our One.Life to him. The Cross.Life, the roar tells us time and time again, is about a cross that is empty and about a grave that is empty and about a throne that is full.”

This shows what it will really be like, and it’s wonderful news. It reminds me of a description of Aslan, the great Lion in the Narnia series. When one of the children, upon first being told about Aslan, asks if he is safe, the firm reply comes, “Of course he ain’t safe. But he’s good!”. Says it all.

What did Jesus really mean when he said you must be born again?

I reluctantly call myself a born-again Christian. I say ‘reluctantly’ because of the huge cultural baggage such a label brings, not to mention the likelihood of being written off by all and sundry outside the church as soon as you give yourself such a label. But I still have to say that I am a born-again Christian because to deny it would be denying something very deep about who I am. I know what it is to be reborn of the Holy Spirit, I surrender my life to God each day to do with as He wills, and I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He died for my sins and that he was physically resurrected. But if someone asked me how I would describe myself in terms of my Christian faith, I would definitely not refer to myself as a born-again Christian. I would much prefer to say that I am a follower of Jesus.

It’s interesting that evangelicals like me get so hung up on being born again. Why is that so? Jesus mentions the new birth twice in the Gospels, and that is in the same conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. But Jesus says “follow me” 87 times in the Gospels, and the kingdom of God is mentioned 110 times. Why don’t we get as hung up on the importance of following Jesus or about finding out what the kingdom of God is about? I suspect it is because we have a wrong interpretation of what Jesus’ whole message was.

Before we explore this further though, a little clarification is required. We need to clarify what describes someone who says they are a born-again Christian. To most people outside of Christian circles, a ‘born-again Christian’ is someone who is probably into converting people, who doesn’t smoke, drink or have sex before marriage, and who is known as being judgmental. And while that label is unfortunately all that a lot of us Christians are known for, being born again is of course much more than that.

In evangelical circles, talk about being born again has to do primarily with individual salvation. It is about a personal relationship with Jesus that assures you of salvation, which more than anything else means going to heaven when you die. The date and time you are born again refers to the time this personal relationship with Jesus starts. It is when you make a commitment to Him and give your heart to Him. On the whole, it means you have accepted that God loves you, that you are a hell-deserving sinner in need of salvation, that Jesus died for your sins, and that you have repented and accepted Him as your personal Saviour and Lord. These steps are otherwise known as the ‘four spiritual laws.’

It is worth saying too that, in much of the United States, saying you are born again guarantees you a majority of the Christian vote, so it is a very politically astute thing to do. But that of course presupposes a certain cynicism on the part of this author. The fact is that most U.S. Presidents who have claimed to be born again have in fact had a genuine faith in Christ, despite what many of their policies have been. Jimmy Carter was the first in the 1970s, soon after Chuck Colson’s book Born Again was released. Since then, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush have expressed their personal faith, as has Barack Obama. In the latter case though, there is less talk about his being born again than about him simply having a genuine faith in Christ (Sadly there is also a significant proportion of the US population that are convinced that Obama is a Muslim – something to do with the fact that he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia – the largest Muslim nation on the planet – and his middle name is Hussein, something Christian fundamentalists are quick to point out). So, whatever you think of their politics, US Presidents from both sides have expressed a genuine faith in Christ.

But it doesn’t just go back to the US. John Wesley preached a sermon on the new birth in the 18th century, and a Menno Simons spoke about it in the 16th century. It seems that the new birth has been an issue that Christians have talked about for many centuries. And why not? After all, Jesus did talk about it. Even though it was by no means his most important topic, the fact is he did say it, and therefore we have an obligation to take it seriously.

So having said that, let me add that I believe in the new birth. Because Jesus said it, I take it seriously. I believe in being born again. The problem I have though is that what Jesus said has been so misinterpreted over the years that it has caused much confusion and tension both within and outside of Christendom.

So what was it that Jesus was talking about that night in his conversation with Nicodemus that is recorded in John 3? To answer this question honestly, it is absolutely imperative that we remember that we are reading about an event that happened 2,000 years ago in a completely different culture to our own between people with completely different worldviews to our own. I cannot stress enough that when we come to the Bible, we simply must take what we read in context. That is why a simple reading of this passage on its own and without taking into account the context of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, is fraught with danger. It is not too extreme a statement to say that taking verses out of context like this is how heresies start. As has been said many times, a text taken out of context is a pretext. Or, as someone else has said, a text taken out of context is a sure sign you’re being conned!

In our Western culture, we look at life through the lens of individualism, and so, as mentioned above, we see the message of Jesus as being primarily about a personal relationship with God. But this is not how people in 1st century Palestine viewed life. In fact their worldview was pretty much the total opposite of ours today. For them life was all about living in community. Hospitality was a huge part of life. Identity meant who you were in relation to the group you belonged to and had nothing at all to do with ‘finding yourself’ or any of the nonsense that we hear today in many churches about improving your self-esteem. What this means for understanding the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus about being born again therefore has enormous implications for how we understand the Gospel, because it is on this little verse in John 3:3 that much of our understanding of the Gospel is based.

Merrill Kitchen, former Principal of the Churches of Christ Theological College in Melbourne, and someone who has led many tours to Israel and the Palestinian Territories for many years, reminds us that, contrary to our general understanding, Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, “you must be born again”, were actually directed to Nicodemus’ whole community. The literal translation is “All of you must be born from above”. The main point of their conversation was not so much about the new birth, but about who was now included in God’s kingdom. Kitchen goes on to say that the strong ethic behind the command to ‘be born again’ or ‘born from above’ is about redefining who ‘the chosen people’ are. No longer is being a child of God a matter of national identity. Remember that Paul says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Remember too that Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a respected Jew, so hearing Jesus say that God’s chosen ones also now include anyone who wants to be included would have been shocking news for him. It was a radical change to everything he would have grown up with and had ingrained into him.

Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus also needs to be read in conjunction with the rest of the gospels so we can see their overall message. And the overall message is clearly that, with the coming of Jesus, everything has changed. Here was someone who ate and drank with despised tax collectors and ‘sinners’ in a society in which who you ate with mattered enormously. Here was someone who hung out with the poor and outcast in a society in which to be poor was a clear sign of your sinfulness. And here was someone who touched and healed lepers in a society in which such people were unclean and to touch them made you unclean as well. Everything was turned upside down with the coming of Jesus. Those who were last would now be first, and those who were first would now be last. This is the main point of the coming of Jesus, not whether or not you remember praying the ‘sinners prayer’ and that being the day you were assured of a ticket to a place in the sky when you die.

In Jesus the kingdom of God has broken into history. It is a kingdom of love, justice, peace and mercy – all characteristics of the very God of Jesus himself. As Scot McKnight says in his recent book One.Life, while the church talks about accepting Christ, Jesus talks about following him, and while the church aims at getting people to heaven when they die, Jesus aims at getting heaven actively involved in history now. We have seriously misread much of the message of Jesus, and this includes his message about what it means to be born again.

A useful illustration of this misinterpretation is told by Steve Chalke in his book The Lost Message of Jesus. Chalke relays a story in which a small group had gathered one evening to talk about how they became Christians. As they shared their stories, a common theme began to emerge. Each of them could recall a specific day in their lives when they had prayed a prayer and ‘given their heart to Jesus’. That was the day they claimed they had been born again. Then one lady in the group dropped a bombshell by saying she had always been a Christian. This caused quite some scepticism in the group. How could she have always been a Christian? There must have been a point at which she ‘crossed the line’. But she said no, she had grown up in a Christian household and had always had a love for Jesus. As she continued to share, her love for the Lord was obvious to the others. Their worldview had been shattered.

Now what this story is not saying is that there is no need for people to be born again. And this story is also not saying that this woman was not born again. It was clear that she had a passion for Jesus and had indeed been born from above. It was clear that the Holy Spirit was in her heart. The fact that her experience did not conform to that of the others in the group did not negate it one bit.

The experience of this lady could be related by many thousands of genuine followers of Jesus. I can somewhat relate to it as well. I too made a ‘decision for Christ’ when I was about 15. At the time I had a Sunday School teacher who was a used car dealer, and he would turn up at the church every week with a different car. As I was his only student most of the time, he and I would sit in his car and he would teach me about Jesus. One day, after what must have been a year or two of meeting like this, he asked me if I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour. Having grown up in the church I just said “yeah”, as if it was not such a big question. But as soon as I said this, his eyes widened, a huge smile broke out across his face and he shook my hand profusely, saying how wonderful it was that I had just accepted Christ. Of course I had no idea what all the fuss was about. In my mind I had just affirmed something that I had always thought was true of me. Things fell into place a bit more for me a couple of weeks later when someone else at the church said to me that they had heard I had ‘made a commitment’ recently. Realising that he must have been referring to the strange moment in the car with my Sunday School teacher, again I just said “yeah” (being a pretty shy teenager my vocabulary wasn’t the greatest!).

It was only after these events that I went home and thought that now that I had done this thing I suppose I had better start reading the Bible. And so began a love affair with God that has waxed and waned over the years and has become deeper than ever over the last 5 years or so.

My story would be similar to many others, perhaps to yours. And while I would say that I was definitely born again around that time, I’m not sure that it was that day in the car with my Sunday School teacher. Maybe it was, because something definitely changed in me from soon after that. Up until then I hadn’t taken seriously the claims of Jesus. But after that, and when I started reading the Bible, my whole worldview began to change and I wasn’t the same person.

Whether I became born again that day in the car or whether it was some other time, the fact is that as I began to surrender my life to God each day, something shifted deep within me. For me it was a process. You see, I think we need to be born again every day. It is not just a once-off event. Being born again is about conversion, conversion to the way of Jesus. It is becoming more Christlike as we submit our lives to Him. Jim Wallis of Sojourners, in his book The Call to Conversion, says that conversion is a daily process of being moulded into the image of Jesus. For me, it is only as I surrender my life to God each day and ask God’s will and not mine be done for that day, that I live the life that I am meant to live, the life that I am convinced that God wants me to live. And it is a life lived in relationship with others. It is not a life lived in isolation, as if it was just me and God. Following Jesus is only done in community with others who are also on the journey, the journey from self to God. It is the type of life that wants to include and not exclude, that wants to love and not just be loved. And it is a life of humility that, as Ross Langmead says, realises that what we know is just a glimpse of what there is to know.

Being born again involves a daily dying to self, taking up our cross and following Jesus on the costly, sacrificial way to life. It is a journey of constant searching, of constant discovery, and it is a journey that never ends. In Jesus the kingdom has come. Through the life, death and resurrection of this man, everything has changed. Salvation is not just for a chosen few anymore; it is open to everyone. All are welcome at the banquet table. It was this that was the point of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. Yes Nicodemus had to be born again, but that was a peripheral issue. What Jesus was saying to the learned Pharisee was that it was not just Israel that was looked upon favourably by God anymore. It had nothing to do with who you were and how ‘holy’ you were. Anyone and everyone could now come in and feast at God’s table. How often we become like the Pharisees, thinking that we are ‘in’ and those who haven’t made a definite commitment and can recall the day and time it happened are ‘out’.

If Jesus had wanted us to be so focused on whether or not people are born again according to our faulty definition of it, I think he would have mentioned it more than twice. But his clear emphasis was the kingdom of God. When Jesus came into contact with people and they were healed, their healing was not just physical; it was social and personal as well. In Jesus the kingdom of God was among them. We do need to be born again, but that means nothing if we are not following in the footsteps of the Son of God, loving the loveless, walking with the poor, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, and reaching out to all with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus.

Am I a born again Christian? You bet I am, but only in the sense that Jesus meant it, not as most evangelicals define it. The fact that I don’t pinpoint it to a single day and time doesn’t mean anything. What matters is that I am inclusive as Jesus is, that I surrender my whole life to Jesus every day and seek to follow Him, to go where He sends me, and to walk where He walks, with the poor, with the outcast, with the ones that nobody else wants to know. In the words of the old song, I want Jesus to walk with me. I need Jesus to walk with me. I want this world to be a better place and I want to work with God to make it so, to help bring the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus’ message to Nicodemus about being born again was a radical message of inclusiveness. It doesn’t matter what type of life you may have lived in the past. It doesn’t matter whether you are a top-of-the-town millionaire or a cleaner at the local school. Those status symbols don’t matter in God’s kingdom. There is no difference between the person who has used and abused people their whole life and the one who has grown up in a Christian home and never smoked a cigarette. In God’s kingdom there are no favourites. This is what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus and it is the life that He calls us to as well. God help me to live such a life.

Blessed are the cheese makers? Misquoting the Beatitudes

The Beatitudes, those sayings of Jesus that make up part of his Sermon on the Mount, are the heart of his teaching on the kingdom of God. But I would guess that whether you are a believer or not, you would probably have rarely, if indeed ever, have heard a sermon on these most famous of Jesus’ sayings.

Throughout the 2,000 years of Christian history, there have been few people who have really taken the Beatitudes seriously as ethical guidelines. Dave Andrews offers a reason for this. He says that the Beatitudes are rarely taught in churches. And when they have been taught, more than likely people will hear that they are not to be taken literally because they are too unrealistic and can never work in the ‘real world’. This is such a common response amongst preachers that one of the most famous movie lines of all time takes it off. Check out this clip:

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

However when you look at the people over the years who have taken the Beatitudes literally, people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, these are the people who have made a real difference in the world and lived the Beatitudes out in their own lives. Other people who have lived them out in different ways have been Nelson Mandela, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Oscar Romero.

However it is not just the Beatitudes that have been misquoted and misinterpreted. The whole Sermon on the Mount has been taken this way, to the extent that it is pretty much ignored by many Christians. There is a scene in the movie Gandhi which expresses this in a way that brings shame on the Christian church. When Gandhi meets clergyman Charlie Andrews, he asks Andrews to walk with him, and pretty soon they are both faced with a real life situation in which the reality of the Sermon on the Mount is put to the test. As they are about to walk down a laneway (remembering that this is in 1890s South Africa, when apartheid is in full swing), they are both confronted by three white young men who pour scorn on the fact that a white man is walking with a coloured man such as Gandhi. Andrews quickly suggests they perhaps go a different way, but Gandhi reminds him that the New Testament says that if someone strikes you on the right cheek, to offer him the left as well. The Christian clergyman then displays the attitude that we have seen too often in the Western church: he stutteringly tries to explain that Jesus didn’t really mean these things literally; they are more to be taken metaphorically. Gandhi though, says he is not so sure, explaining that what Jesus meant was that we must display courage, and in doing that, we will earn the respect of the oppressor but also not be pushed aside. So, as they approach the young men, the larger one tells Gandhi in no uncertain terms to get out of the neighbourhood. As he does so, he is pulled up by his mother who asks from the floor above their house what he is up to. As his mother tells the young man to get on to work, Gandhi looks him intently in the eyes and calmly exclaims, “you will find there is room for us all.”

What this exchange shows is that the Beatitudes are not some fluffy teachings of Jesus that are fine in an ideal world but can never be applied in real life. To the contrary, when lived out in the here and now, they change the world. The Beatitudes take enormous courage to put into practise. They are not to be taken metaphorically at all. Nor are they, as those on the more liberal side sometimes say, to be taken as statements by which we attain a salvation by works. Neither position takes Jesus seriously enough. And I reckon that’s why everyone knows how many commandments there are but most Christians wouldn’t know how many Beatitudes there are (there are 8).

In this scene from Gandhi, the Indian leader – the non-Christian – lives out what Jesus said. The problem for Gandhi though was that he so respected Jesus that, as John Dear points out, he could never understand why Christians didn’t obey their Master. For over fifty years, Gandhi asked Christian friends. “Why do Christians go about saying ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do the will of Jesus? Why don’t they obey the Sermon on the Mount, reject war, practice nonviolence and love their enemies?”

Gandhi once said that the Sermon on the Mount was the greatest teaching that has ever been given, but he decided not to become a Christian mainly because of Christians. Something else he said, which is just a great an indictment on us in the church, was that everyone knows what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount except Christians. I would qualify that last statement and say ‘Western Christians’. Because for the first 300 years of the Christian church, the Sermon on the Mount was its guiding ethical framework. And look at the impact the church had in those days. It was only when Constantine became Emperor and Christianity became the official State religion of the Roman Empire and aligned itself with the powers, that it suddenly became impractical to oppose the State when it came to such teachings as ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, ‘love your enemy’ and ‘do good to those who persecute you.’ We have so lost sight of the message of the Sermon on the Mount that we now see bumper stickers like the one below reminding us of the obvious:

While there has been a shift in the church over the last 20 years or so (and the above bumper sticker was actually from a church in the US) sadly not a lot has changed since the time of Constantine. The church today generally lives by a different set of ‘Beatitudes’, as brilliantly expressed by Joe Abbey-Colborne:

Blessed are the well off and those

…with ready answers for every spiritual question;

…they have it all.

Blessed are the comfortable;

…they shall avoid grief.

Blessed are the self-sufficient;

…they wait for nothing, they have everything they want,

…and they have it now.

Blessed are those who are not troubled by

…the injustice experienced by others;

…they are content with realistic expectations.

Blessed are the ones who gain the upper hand;

…they take full advantage of their advantages.

Blessed are those with a solid public image

…and a well hidden agenda;

…they are never exposed and see people

…in a way that suits their purposes.

Blessed are those who can bully others into agreement;

…they shall be called empire builders.

Blessed are those who can point to someone else

…who is a worse person than they are,

…they will always look good by comparison.

Blessed are you when people praise you, give you preferential treatment, and flatter you because they think you’re so great. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, because it doesn’t get any better than this.

This is the way our church has always made celebrities of the best and brightest.

As with anything like this, I need to ensure first and foremost that I am not falling into the trap of living such a smug life. The fact is that I still tend to spiritualise the Beatitudes, living as if they are good aspirations which could not work in real life. But Jesus lived them out. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, it says that the crowds were impressed with his teaching because he taught as one who had authority. That means they saw that he lived out what he taught.

So let’s have a look at these troubling sayings of Jesus:

Blessed are the poor in spirit – This one has had a few different interpretations over the years. It is one of the main ones we have tended to ‘spiritualise’ because Matthew’s version adds ‘in spirit’ whereas Luke’s version just says ‘Blessed are the poor’ (Luke 6:20). This beatitude has generally been seen to be referring to those who see themselves as inadequate, whose only hope is in God. And the fact is that these ones are actually the outcast. Listen to what Athol Gill says about this:

“For Jesus…the kingdom of God belongs especially to the poor, the powerless, the outcasts, and the dispossessed – all those who have no standing within the community. Those who count for nothing in the eyes of their fellows are the very ones to whom the kingdom of God is promised. They come empty-handed, with no power or position of their own. Their only hope is in God, and that hope will not go unrewarded.”

So it happens that the poor in spirit are also the outcast and marginalised, those with no power or privilege. And these are always the materially poor. But notice that Jesus is not saying they are blessed because they are poor. This is not about having a poverty mentality. There is no glory in wanting to be poor, UNLESS God has specifically called you to a life of poverty. They are blessed because even though they are poor, in the kingdom of God they are loved.

Blessed are those who mourn – Dave Andrews points out that God does not bless those who are happy with the present state of affairs. He blesses those who mourn. Ridley College lecturer Dave Fuller talked once about having a holy dissatisfaction with life. You don’t have to look very hard at the world to see that things are not good. Deep down we all have a sense that something is wrong with everything.

Blessed are the meek – The main thing we need to keep in mind here is that meek does not mean weak. Being meek in Jesus’ day actually referred to the taming of a wild stallion, meaning those who have powerful emotions but who have them under control. This can mean channeling your energy in surrender to God and God’s will, not being out of control and running your life how you think it should be run.

Blessed are those who seek righteousness – This should really be translated those who seek justice, as that is what the original Greek translates to, but I think both fit, because righteousness can be seen in an individual sense which is like being pure in heart, but justice is seen more in terms of social justice. Jesus sought out justice for those who were being oppressed by the Romans and the religious leaders. He said they were of the same status as everyone else. And those who seek justice in the same way as Jesus did are blessed.

Blessed are the merciful – Jesus says blessed are those who seek justice (previous beatitude) but many who are into social justice are merciless. There is a constant anger about them. I’ve seen them at peace marches. There is not a lot of gentleness shown by these people at these marches. More problematically though, I see it in myself. I very quickly become resentful at politicians who go against what I think is right. But Jesus says ‘blessed are the merciful.’ Justice and mercy are often linked throughout the Bible. An example is another classic passage from the Old Testament, Micah 6:8 – do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.

Blessed are the pure in heart – This beatitude refers to those who work for what is right but don’t bring attention to themselves. I saw a coffee mug once that had written on it, ‘integrity is doing what is right when nobody is watching.’

The pure in heart are those who want to be pure, not just in their actions, but in their thoughts as well. That’s why Jesus told the disciples and the crowds to not just not kill people, but that anyone who hates has done the same thing as kill their enemy. Jesus actually intensified the norms of the culture to their true meaning. It is about integrity. That’s why he also said that when you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and when you pray, go into your room and lock the door, because God sees what you’re doing. It’s not about showing everyone how righteous you are.

It needs to be pointed out here too that the Beatitudes are very confronting statements. To say in this case that purity is what’s on the inside was a profoundly politically subversive statement to make by Jesus. For to say that purity is a matter of the heart was to deny that it is a matter of observing the purity system that the religious leaders obeyed in those days. The purity system was a strict code designed to exclude ‘outsiders’. It was all about how good you looked. But Jesus turned that right around and said that it is actually about what you’re like on the inside. And the Pharisees didn’t like that one bit because they knew that he was saying to them that they were rotten on the inside. I need to constantly be aware of this to ensure that I am not being a ‘Pharisee’ myself in my own life by doing apparently godly things which actually exclude others.

Blessed are the peacemakers – This is another beatitude that Dave Andrews has some good points to make on. He explains that Jesus says that only committed peacemakers have a legitimate claim to be called children of God. And notice too that it is not saying ‘blessed are the peace keepers’; it is blessed are the peace makers; those who actively and intentionally work for peace between people. Teachings like this highlight loudly and clearly that, even under the ‘just war’ principles put forward by Ambrose and Augustine when Christianity became the State religion, our current wars simply do not fit that criteria (are you beginning to see how the Beatitudes are relevant to the real 21st century world?).

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake – It is very important to note that this beatitude does not say ‘blessed are the persecuted’. There is no merit in suffering for suffering’s sake. It is about suffering for doing what is right, as Peter says in his letters later on in the New Testament. Just as I mentioned before that it is not about having a poverty mentality, it is also not about having suffering mentality or a martyr complex.

If we are to take the Beatitudes seriously, these sayings of Jesus call us to change ourselves. Dave Andrews says that ‘to quote the Beatitudes is religious, but to act on them is revolutionary’. Before calling on others to change, we have to change, ourselves. As we live them out, we change. The Beatitudes are about conversion – conversion to the way of Jesus. This is why the earliest Christians were called followers of the Way, because they lived out the way of Jesus, and literally thousands joined their ranks because they saw that these people were different. They cared when others didn’t. They were prepared to suffer for what was right, and they took outrageous risks of love when others didn’t.

The Beatitudes are the framework of the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on the Mount is the framework of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God. Remember that Jesus talks about the kingdom of God 110 times in the gospels, and he talks about being born again twice. Just something to remember for those of us who go on and on about the need to be born again while not stressing the real message of Jesus (and here I must stress that I am NOT denigrating being born again. I believe in the new birth. It is essential for a relationship with Jesus. And while Jesus mentioned it only twice, the fact is he did mention it and therefore it is to be taken very seriously. I am just saying that if we are to truly follow Jesus, we need to stress the kingdom of God much more than being born again, just as Jesus did).

In Jesus the kingdom of God has come into history. The Beatitudes are Jesus’ announcement of this coming kingdom, a time when those who mourn will be comforted, when those who hunger and thirst for justice will finally have found what they are looking for, to quote the U2 song, and when the merciful will receive mercy.

This is the upside down kingdom, when the first will be last and the last will be first (Luke 13:30), a kingdom which will finally be consummated, as we have described in that wonderful passage in Revelation, when the final coming together of heaven and earth happens and there will be no more tears or pain or death (Revelation 21:1-5). That is when all things will be made new. But here in Matthew’s gospel, with the coming of Jesus, the kingdom of God has broken into history and that is what Jesus is announcing in the Beatitudes. In him, in his life through his works of compassion, his healing, his including of those who have always been excluded, the kingdom has come. It has broken into history through this man.

So the Beatitudes are not about us. They are not just a set of values. They are about Jesus and who he is and what he is doing. This is the good news, that you who are broken, you who are last now, you will be first. It is the great reversal, and it has begun to happen in Jesus. It is the beginning of heaven coming to earth, which we see finally completed in Revelation 21 when heaven and earth come together fully and completely, never to be separate again, to make God’s consummated kingdom, where the characteristics of this kingdom reflect the character of the king – just, loving, peace, reconciling and restoring. These are all what God is like, and so it will be what life in the kingdom is like when it will finally be completed at the end of all things.

In Jesus the future has arrived; it is here. Remember that Jesus says ‘blessed ARE the poor in spirit’, not ‘blessed will be’; ‘blessed ARE you who mourn’, not ‘blessed will be’. You are blessed now, but it is not the type of blessing we often refer to in our churches. It is the blessing of the kingdom of God, of following Jesus and being drawn closer to Him. The kingdom has come, and we are called to live by its values, reflecting the king, being merciful, doing justice, loving our enemies, and living with integrity – being pure in heart, not just in outward appearance. We live like this in anticipation of the day when all things will be made new, when our hope will be made complete, when justice reigns, when peace reigns, and when love reigns, in our hearts, in our thoughts, and in the world. Amen.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Soul Thoughts

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑