Soul Thoughts

Faith and relevance in the 21st century

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Love and need

October 11, 2010 / / 0 Comments

“I love you ‘cos I need to, not because I need you. I love you ‘cos I understand that God has given me your hand” – U2, Luminous Times

I was walking through the café at work the other day and heard this song playing over the airwaves. The next line of the song says “hold on to love”. Love is the only force that triumphs over anything. It often comes across as weakness but it succeeds where others perpetually fail.

Much of what we call love though is really an emotional neediness which comes across as being nice, but is actually designed to protect us from rejection. I know this because I do it all the time. As I realise this more I realise how committed I am to not experiencing the pain of someone not loving me in return. My good deeds are often cloaked in the convincing veneer of niceness. And I am further blinded to this when people feed back to me about how nice I have been to them.

True love comes out of a deep conviction that love does indeed transform an enemy into a friend, as Abraham Lincoln said so long ago. It comes out of a deep conviction that love is the most powerful force in the universe. That’s why the words of this song are so powerful.

The paradox of true love though is that there is a genuine neediness about it. True love loves because of a human need to live this way; it is the way we are wired. At the same time, true love does not need the other in a negative self-protective way to boost its own ego or identity. It is free of all that; it is free to truly love the other no matter the response. If the response is hatred, true love continues to love; if the response is indifference or apathy, true love continues to love; and if the response is love reciprocated, true love still continues to love.

As I write I am reminded of two famous people who both talked and walked this attitude in their lives. I speak of course of Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. Dr King talked often of the power of redemptive, suffering love, and Mother Teresa has the following words attributed to her, which were apparently written on the wall of her home for children in Kolkata, India. Even if they were not written by her, they fully encapsulate the life she lived:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centred. Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

Hold on to love. Cultivate it, learn it, and most of all, ask God for it, because we simply don’t have in us the capacity to live a life of love without the Spirit of Jesus living in us and guiding us. He will redeem the ugliness of our self-protective neediness into a love that only the Divine can empower us with.

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The ANZ and cluster bombs

October 4, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I just read an article stating that the ANZ admits it is ‘indirectly’ financing the making of cluster bombs. It is in the latest edition of Online Opinion. I find it astonishing that this is not front page news. The ANZ is one of the big banks in Australia and it is literally getting away with murder.

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The article includes the clip above (it’s a UK clip highlighting other banks such as Barclays and HSBC, the latter being a sponsor of Hawthorn Football Club) and a link to a report by the NGO, IKV Pax Christi. The report shows a number of other banks that fund cluster bomb manufacturers in one way or another. Banks have not had a good rap for many years, and that reputation is further justified by this damning report. Knowing that one of our own banks in Australia is a prime culprit just brings it closer to home. Spread this story far and wide.

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Big Googler is doing the thinking for you

September 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I found this article on the John Mark Ministries website today. It’s taken from The Age. I so relate to it. I find myself doing what this article says, in terms of scouring over articles for bits of information. I think one of the reasons we are like this is that, for all the internet’s wonderful benefits, it gives us too many choices. We suffer from choice anxiety.

I think the cure for this is to trust that we will be more at peace when we take in and absorb what a good book can offer. The anxiety that we experience when we fall into what this article refers to is not worth any extra knowledge we might gain. Further to this last point, I would argue that any extra knowledge is not real knowledge anyway; at best it is surface knowledge. The more we submit ourselves to this way of thinking, the more we are dumbing ourselves down.

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Reflection, information, obsession, and Jesus

September 26, 2010 / / 0 Comments

“All the books you never read, just started; all the meals you rushed, never tasted” – U2, Falling at Your Feet

I lament our loss of reflection in this information age. We are the most informed generation in history but we are losing the art of reflection. We are constantly wired, and I don’t mean just connected to an iPod or iPhone but emotionally wired. When we are constantly consuming information we are no longer being still and thinking about the deeper issues of life. Everything is rushed. We are overwhelmed with choice and we no longer feel at peace with ourselves. We have everything at our fingertips but don’t know anymore how to be. We think we have to always be doing something; we feel guilty when we aren’t being ‘productive’; and we wonder if we’re being lazy when we’re lying around on a Sunday afternoon.

Linked to this loss of reflection is our culture’s obsession with experience. We have a terrifying fear of missing out. We are the addict who thinks we cannot do without more and better. We talk about things being boring or cool. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in leading a boring life. The life of following Jesus is anything but boring; it is counter-cultural and filled with opportunities. But what this means is that we live a life that is other-centred and not based on how we feel at a certain time. A life of other-centredness is one that doesn’t have to look for the next fix, because it is inherently satisfying. It is borne out of a deep knowing that we are loved by God and therefore don’t need to spend our days and years trying to prove ourselves to others. We are free to love and serve our fellow human beings. This is what it is to be a follower of Jesus. This is life, and deep down we know it is the right way to live.

The way of Jesus gives the most satisfaction, the most depth and the greatest enjoyment of life. This is anything but boring, but it is not a life that seeks to avoid boredom as an end in itself. It is a life that has a higher end; a life that has found something better. For if we do not find what we are really looking for we will inevitably go back to the life we lived before, and, such being human nature, we will pick up where we left off and it will be worse than before. Jesus spoke of this when he told about the house from which a demon has departed but then has other demons more evil than the first one come back and make the house worse than before (Matthew 12:43-45).

Life in the information age promises so much but delivers so little. We are still dependent beings. The fact of human nature is that we simply cannot live without outside help. We are created with a God-shaped hole and as St Augustine and others down through the ages have said, we are forever restless until we find our hope in Christ. No wonder Edward Mote could write the words of that famous hymn back in the 1830s, “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand”.

We are indeed in trouble when our information age gives us so much to take in but leaves us with so little time to reflect on it. The Christian message is one which offers a way out of our malaise; a way out of the self-centred slavery to which we are addicted. The way to life is to fall at the feet of the One who is Life itself; Jesus, who says to our tired and information-burdened age, “Come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). It is when we reflect on this that we come back to reality and find the life that is truly life, where we share with those people down through the centuries who have had their lives unburdened and their hopes transformed.

Some more words from Falling at Your Feet sum it up eloquently:

all the information
all the radio waves
electronic seas
how to navigate
how to simply be
to know when to wait
this plain simplicity
in whom shall I trust
how might I be still
teach me to surrender
not my will, Thy will

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Putting ‘Charlie’ in perspective

September 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

In this day when elite sportspeople get themselves in all sorts of trouble, it’s refreshing to hear words like those spoken by Chris Judd in his Brownlow Medal speech on Monday night.

Judd spoke of the fact that football is just a game in the end, and that the real heroes are people like Jim Stynes in his public show of courage in his fight against cancer. Judd also referred to the ordinary strugglers who have to get by in the real world, living lives vastly different to that which he is able to live. It was a mature speech by a deserving winner and a true role model. It’s not often that this Hawthorn supporter can find anything good to say about Carlton, but credit where credit is due!

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Responses to Terry Jones

September 15, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Amidst the outcry over the initial decision then reversal by Pastor Terry Jones to burn the Koran, come some mature and gracious responses by Christian leaders who have actually taken the time to talk to him. The first response is by Geoff Tunnicliffe, CEO and secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance, and the second comes from activist Shane Claiborne. I’m not sure I agree with Claiborne that Jones called off the burning out of repentance but the fact is that he called it off and that is of course a good thing (and as one commenter to Claiborne’s piece pointed out, his article is more about us than Jones).

The subsequent burning of Bibles by some Muslim groups in response to Jones’ threat is only to be expected when someone says they are going to perform such a provocative act as Jones did, especially knowing the tension that already exists between Christians and Muslims in some parts of the world. Martin Luther King rightly said that hate begets hate and violence begets violence. The gracious response of Tunnicliffe and Claiborne, and the subsequent grace of some Muslims in response, needs to be highlighted. Sadly though, such grace is not newsworthy, and so most of the world will only ever see the hatred that is fanned by such irresponsible acts as that initially proposed by Terry Jones.

Outbursts of grace such as that shown by Tunnicliffe and Claiborne need to be reported far and wide. In all of this sorry saga, we would all do well to remember what Bono used to say sometimes during U2 concerts, “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed; it’s true – all sons of Abraham”.

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Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

September 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

For a long time now I have been thinking of the tension in living Christianly between right belief and right action. I have been writing notes for an article over the last few years called ‘Christ or Creeds’. In the church I grew up in there was a heavy focus on believing the right things – as long as you believed that Jesus was God and that God raised him from the dead, you were a Christian. After all, that’s what it says in Romans 10:9.

As has been aid before though, we cannot ‘cherry-pick’ verses and passages and form them into doctrine on their own. The Bible needs to be read in terms of its meta-narrative, not in terms of systematic theology ie. taking themes from different passages throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Rowland Croucher makes the point that, of all the Christian creeds we have, none of them talk about love. None. They all talk about what we believe, but apparently we don’t believe in love and living that out. John Smith also pointed out many years ago that the Gospels state once that we need to be born again, but those same Gospels have Jesus saying no less than 87 times, “follow me”. Ours is an activist Gospel.

Now please don’t get me wrong. I believe in belief. I think it is highly important that we believe correctly about who Jesus is, for this informs our actions. But the evangelical church has placed too much emphasis on creeds and right belief instead of right action. And too often we have created a dualism – separating belief from action. Jesus would never have countenanced such a thing. For him there was no dualism. Relationship with God was living it out. After all, that’s what James says – faith without action is dead (James 2:26).

The Christian church (and that includes me) has for too long focused on being right rather than being loving. As I have done a bit lately, I’ll leave the last word to Richard Rohr:

Where has this obsession with believing correct dogmas and doctrines gotten us? Presently, the Roman church, and fundamentalists of all stripes, are right back into it. It creates great dramas on both sides. Maybe that is why God is humbling us at this time.  The obsession with being right and having the whole truth has not served the Gospel well at all, nor has it kept us humble and honest. 

If you go to the four Gospels and read what Jesus actually taught, you will see that He talks much more about the “How” (practices which we ourselves must do) rather than the “What” (which just allow us to argue and try to be verbally right).

From Emerging Christianity: the conference recordings

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Here for a purpose

August 31, 2010 / / 0 Comments

What a wonderful planet we inhabit. My wife and I spent a few days down at Ocean Grove recently. It was a time to just get away and reflect and recuperate after some stressful months. On one of the days we went for a drive and stopped at nearby Bluff Lookout and gazed over the vastness of the ocean. As I looked out over towards the horizon, I was struck by the beauty of the world. What a wonderful planet, I thought, as I watched the waves crashing against rugged rocks.

Another thought also struck me as I saw a plane flying over head and as I noticed the dome of the earth reaching down to the horizon on the deep blue yonder. I was struck with the thought again that as I look at the world I cannot help but be moved to sense that we are here for a purpose. The very fact that this world is teeming with life, the fact that we have clean air to breathe and that we have minds that can work out how to build machines that can fly through that air, makes me realise that all that we see around us could not possibly have arisen by chance. Because that’s what the alternative is if there is no God. Even Richard Dawkins, that staunchest of atheists, when once asked if this is all there is, remarked emphatically, “what more could you want?! This is beautiful!”

Dawkins is right. We do indeed live in a beautiful world. Sometimes it takes a moment of reflection like I was able to have on that cliff face to realise that, and wonder at the magnitude of life, the vastness of creation, and the beauty of all that we see around us. This is no accident. We are here for a purpose. Thank You Lord for reminding me of that again through the wonders of what You have made.

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Surrender and paradox

August 27, 2010 / / 0 Comments

white flagRecently I’ve been thinking about how attractive the idea of surrender is to me. I wrote in a previous post how I seem to spend most of our lives clinging on to control when the fact is that I cannot do life on my own. Surrender is the way to freedom. The way to life is in giving up – giving up control and the idea that I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul, to quote William E. Henley.

I have no power to live life the way I want to live it, and so I submit to Christ in full surrender. But the more I realise that this is the way to life, the more I find myself resisting. For me, it is a matter of trust; trust that God really is good and that the life God wants for me is not too good to be true. Just like Peter who, when Jesus had just demonstrated the outrageous grace of God, could only say “go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8), I don’t believe I deserve the grace that God gives. And truth be told I don’t deserve it. No one does. But give it he does, and when I accept it, I enter into that life that is truly life, where I am free from having to perform, free from having to strive, where I am free.

Paul said “when I am weak then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). True Christianity never aligns itself with power. It always aligns itself with weakness, with failure, and with powerlessness. Richard Rohr, as usual, sums it up brilliantly:

When Christianity aligns itself with power (and the mindset of power) there’s simply very little room for the darkness of faith; that spacious place where God is actually able to form us.

So when we speak of paradox, I’m trying to open up that space where you can “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), because YOU are not in control. That is always the space of powerlessness, vulnerability, and letting go. Faith happens in that wonderful place, and hardly ever when we have all the power and can hold no paradoxes. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position.

Surrender, faith, and paradox. The combination that gives the life that transforms our hearts, and then transforms the world.

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Some thoughts on the election

August 22, 2010 / / 0 Comments

After one of the most bizarre weekends in Australian political history, here are some thoughts:

  • Whatever one may think of Maxine McKew’s comments being sour grapes and said in the bitterness of the moment, they were profoundly accurate. Labor has shot itself in the foot. To have the most popular Prime Minister in the country’s history to possibly losing Government within 4 months is unheard of.
  • This election is uncannily similar to the 1999 Victorian state election in which 3 independents eventually decided the fate of the state and changed the Government. This time we also have 3 independents who will most likely determine what direction the country heads in over the next 3 years.
  • Having said the above, whoever is in Government for the next 3 years, some things will not change, namely the response to climate change. The response of both the major parties to this issue has been nothing short of lamentable. This is one of the reasons forr the huge swing to the Greens right across the country.
  • The Green vote highlights how much we need a change of voting system for the House of Representatives. As some Greens were saying last night, if we had proportional representation, the Greens would now have 17 Lower House seats. Instead they have 1, having polled more than 11% of the vote across the country.
  • The Greens need to be very careful about which major party they support if indeed they find themselves in that position. If the Coalition ends up winning more seats than Labor and the Coalition needs the support of the Greens to form a Government, then the Greens may feel morally bound to support the Coalition, as they would have secured the highest number of seats. However, by doing that, they may be seen to have sold out for the chance at power. We all know what happened to the Australian Democrats when that happened. The Liberal Democrats in the UK have also been accused of the same. On the other hand, if the Greens support Labor in such a situation, they may be accused of not supporting the will of the people who would have given the Coalition more seats.
  • One of the 3 independents mentioned above, Rob Oakeshott, made an important point tonight on the 7.30 Report when he said that decisions over who should govern should be made in the interests of the nation, not in the interests of the party. Tony Abbott can hardly claim that because the Coalition won more primary votes than Labor, the people wanted them more. Julia Gillard has equally climaed that the two-party-preferred vote shows that more people put Labor ahead of the Coalition. Such arguing will get us nowhere and is not in the best interests of the country. Australia has been known for having stable Government and that has to be one of the priorities in deciding who will govern us.

Anyway, they’re my thoughts for the moment. I’d be interested to hear what others think. We have a long week or two ahead of us.

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