church/kingdom and church/mission

i was asked to answer some questions in a methodist fresh expressions research forum. specifically on the role of church/mission and church/kingdom as concepts within methodist fresh expressions. i thought i would repeat my answer here:

hmm… i’m not sure if i’m qualified to speak on methodist fresh expressions as i’m not a methodist myself coming from the reformed tradition. however, i have read wesley’s sermons and believe you might find wisdom in wesley’s seventh sermon entitled ‘the way to the kingdom’. it makes it clear that wesley saw two legs to the kingdom of God, the first being holiness/obedience and the second being happiness/peace in the heart. the way, wesley believed or even insisted, must be repentance and belief in the gospel – indeed he wrote, ‘He [God] would set up his kingdom among men, and reign in the hearts of His people’ and also ‘Wheresoever, therefore, the gospel of Christ is preached, this His “kingdom is nigh at hand”.’ – if this then doesn’t identify church and kingdom in the thought of the wesley brothers then i am not sure what will.

i believe one of the dangers of the fresh expressions movement, and perhaps a way not left open by wesley, is to make a false and potentially devestating separation between the church and the kingdom. it seems to me that fresh expressions rides on a wave that sees evangelicals (with a passion for evangelism proclamation of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus) and liberals (who embraced Adolf von Harnack’s emphasis upon the social message of the gospel) united in mission. equally those who might like to disrupt this holy harmony might use a radical, and unwarranted, separation between church and the kingdom as a lever to force apart evangelicals and liberals who are discovering common ground.

so to mission and the church, we agree that it is God’s mission, which the church is invited to participate in. this is in keeping with the methodist doctrine of prevenient grace but the goal is that God would reign (establish his kingdom) in the hearts of his people, the consequences of which are social holiness. without either of these, repentance or social holiness, the gospel of Jesus proclaimed by Wesley would be incomplete. i think, therefore, the church is both an agent of and result of mission in its most complete sense. the question ‘does “church do” mission or “mission do” church?’ then is answered,’yes, both, and’. but the challenge then is what shape our church should take if its task is to “make disciples” and disciples are to be both church and do mission. both of which are corporate and individual endeavours as the holy community the trinity reveals.

i suspect that we may have failed in our mandate to make disciples because we saw mission as something done by a select group within the church rather than the aim of the entire church. surely discipleship is best expressed not by cerebral creeds and formulas but by active engagement in theological mission. rather than thinking we must do mission to get people through the doors then we must do discipleship, surely we would do better to see mission as something we are calling people to whilst being engaged in ourselves? i am convinced that this is the meaning of the Christian life to meet with God and one another as we respond to God’s call to join His mission in the world.

The Foolishness of the Cross

It’s April fools day and I thought I’d speak to you this morning about foolishness. We’ve all played the fool from time to time haven’t we? Playing practical jokes on our friends, misleading them, or surprising them in humorous ways. Well, I certainly have.

But there is a stupider side to foolishness isn’t there? An embarrassing side, which I’m sure we have all had our fair share of.

I can remember waiting in the cold for several hours for a young lady I’d agreed to meet unfortunately she’d left before me and wasn’t coming but instead of waiting half an hour and going my own way I waited four hours before finally catching the train home. In hindsight, I guess that was a pretty foolish thing to do. 

But, I know I’m not the only one to act in a foolish way, in Hans Christen Anderson’s fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes: A great emperor is fooled into wearing nothing as he is told that only “the worthy and intelligent” are able to see the fine robes he is wearing. Being too embarrassed to admit that he cannot see the clothes himself the emperor parades through the streets until a young boy whispers ‘the emperor’s got no clothes on’.

I’m sure you’ve heard that famous story or perhaps you can think of an equivalent story.

In the Bible foolishness is treated in a number of ways: In the Old Testament the fool is a person who denies the existence of God or who acts without moral restraint. Fools are described as being ignorant of the truth, deceitful liars, slanderers, and lazy. In the New Testament fools are those who fail to heed the warnings, they ignore Jesus words. Hence, the story of the wise and the foolish builders; the foolish builder is compared to the person who ignores Jesus’ teaching.

However, in our verses today Paul writes about the foolishness of preaching the cross and picks out three groups (the Jews, the Greeks, and the Christian community) he argues that the weakness of God is stronger than the strength of great people and that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of great people.

1.      Paul argues that the cross is nothing but weakness to the Jews, for they demanded signs but they saw the messiah hung upon a cross. Our first reading this morning told of Jesus triumphant procession into Jerusalem; expectations must have been high the Jews must have felt that Jesus had come to overthrow their Gentile rulers but their expectations were dashed upon the rocks of reality.

It is interesting to note all the excitement surrounding Jeffrey Archer’s The Gospel According to Judas. In this story, Judas is portrayed as being a faithful follower of Jesus. Speculating about Judas’ motives for betraying Jesus it suggests that Judas is acting upon Jesus command. However, the orthodox interpretation raises a more interesting possibility. Judas betrayed Jesus not simply for thirty pieces of silver but to engineer a showdown between Jesus and the civil authorities.

In Jesus day, people were awaiting the coming of a king who would overthrow the Roman Empire and Judas Iscariot was no different. In fact, Judas was probably a zealot, committed to overthrowing the Roman Empire. Judas’ surname Iscariot may be a form ‘Sicarii’ meaning ‘dagger-man’. However, when Judas realised that his plan had failed and Jesus had been nailed to the cross he was overcome with remorse and the gospels tell us that Judas took his own life.

But, “what does all this stuff about Judas have to do with the weakness of the cross?” you may be asking. Well, if the Jews and Judas expected Jesus to triumph over the Roman Empire the cross must have seemed like an abomination!

Today, there are those for whom the way of cross and self-sacrifice seems awful. For example, there are conservative bible-believing Christians who have been utterly behind the war in Iraq. I suspect that some of these Christians much like the Jews of Jesus’ day would feel more comfortable with a conquering hero than the crucified Lord. And although they would hardly admit it the suffering of the cross is a rebuke to their imperialistic Christianity.

Likewise, there are those who consider Christianity to be a religion of weakness and who reject the gospel on the grounds that Christ’s patience, unconditional love, free grace, and humility are weaknesses in a world that praises the ambitious, socially successful, powerful and admired icons of pop culture.

In all of this, with Paul, I affirm, “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength”.

So we know why the cross was a stumbling block to the Jews, but what about the Greeks? Why does Paul suggest that suggest that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks?

2.      It is easy to see that faced with the philosophy of Socrates and Plato; the teaching of illiterate fishermen must have seemed little more than foolishness. Indeed Aristotle, whose statue stands today in the great City of Thessalonica, was the tutor of Alexander the Great. Compared with him, the wisdom of an itinerant teacher from Israel, a vassal state within the Roman Empire, must have seemed ridiculous.

But there is a further problem, whilst Jesus held little esteem when compared to the Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophecies and scriptures held even less interest for the Greeks. In fact, the entire Jewish faith with its forms of reasoning, ideas, symbols, and witticisms was like a foreign language to the Greeks. Hence, when Paul is speaking in Athens people dismiss him as preaching foreign gods.

It should come as no surprise that it is possible to draw a comparison between the situation that has arisen today and the context the apostle was writing into. We like the Greeks have our contemporary philosophers; people like Richard Dawkins, who chant the mantra “faith is the absence of reason”.  And despite our best efforts to argue: 

a.       with the explorer William Adams that “faith is the continuation of reason”

b.      or with the theologian St Augustine that “faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe” All our attempts fall on deaf ears because to Richard Dawkins these ideas are completely alien to his pattern of thinking.

And so like Paul we also end up affirming that, “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom”.

3.      Finally, we come to the message of the apostle to the Christian community in Corinth.

“Brothers and Sisters think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many of you were influential; not many of you were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

In this Paul is reminding us that the God who has chosen to display His infinite wisdom in the form of foolishness and weakness has chosen us and called us in our foolishness and weakness to shame the wise and the strong. Pastor John Piper puts it like this: “the infinitely wise way of salvation in the death of Christ is rooted in an infinitely wise way of choosing sinners before the cross, and an infinitely wise way of calling sinners after the cross.” And why has God done it in this way? So, that “the one who boasts may boast only in the Lord”. In other words, everything that is involved in our salvation: the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ; our calling, response, and sanctification has been brought about so that we might not boast in ourselves but praise our Father in Heaven!

Well, I began this morning by talking about the emperors new clothes and the reception he was given as he was paraded through the streets, today we celebrate another emperor who was paraded through the streets, beaten, abused, taunted, tortured, murdered and the challenge is do you see the wisdom of the cross?

my sermon for Palm Sunday – some changes have been made- this is the more radical version)

Amazing Grace – a must see!

I encourage everyone to make sure they attend Amazing Grace it is a fantastic film. It portrays the relationships between William Wilberforce, John Newton (author of the hymn Amazing Grace), and William Pitt (the Prime Minister). It shows the extraordinary pressure Wilberforce felt when deciding between entering the ministry and serving Christ through politics.  

Pitt felt that the Wilberforce’s evangelical faith would damage his political prospects, but it was Newton who convinced Wilberforce that he must serve God in politics (making William Wilberforce a man to be reckoned with). Wilberforce was not a political pragmatist, blowing with the winds of expediency, but a man of great faith and principle, driven by God to bring about the abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom.

I was taken by one fantastic quote by John Newton (played by Albert Finney):

‘I know two great things:

one that I am a great sinner

and two that Christ is a great Saviour’

And that is wisdom indeed!

Character, Communion and the Identity of Christ

Original Sin

Many people misunderstand the concept of Original Sin they often think of it in terms of visiting the sins of the parents on their children. It is amounted to us being born into a situation of sinfulness where it is almost assumed that we will fall from grace. Sometimes, Original Sin is thought of as sinful actions that God holds against us even before we are born. The court room analogy for our sinfulness plays into the idea that Original Sin is about God holding us to account the first human rebellion.

However, to consider Original Sin in either of these ways is to misunderstand that sin is not primarily about our context or past actions, it is about fundamentally about our characters. We are originally sinful not because we are born into a fallen world or because we have inherited the blame for Adam and Eve’s taste for fruit. We are sinful from conception because we are born with fallen characters or to put it another way we are originally sinful because our characters are not God’s character.

The story of the Garden of Eden, taken either metaphorically or literally, reveals that sin is about the people we are rather than actions we commit. We were and are naturally sinful because we considered the idea that God might not know what is best for us, or put another way that God may be keeping a blessing from us (Genesis 3:5). It was not the action of eating the fruit that somehow made us sinful but the fact that we were led astray so easily.

Justification and the Community of Redemption

If we say that Original Sin primarily concerns our individual characters then how do we understand justification and the significance of the community of redemption? I believe justification makes it possible for all people to be reconciled with one another and with God in the covenant community- the church.

In this context, the Eucharist is a celebration of our unity with one another (koinonia) through Jesus the Messiah. It is a celebration of our reconciliation to one another in the mystical body of Christ and the communion we share with one another through justification. When we come to the table whilst still bearing a grudge against a brother or sister, we devalue the meaning of the Eucharist. In a similar way when our actions cannot be reconciled to the rule of Christ in our lives, we devalue the meaning of the Eucharist.

The practice of excommunication (or the ban) is designed to protect the integrity of the Eucharist. Excommunication is a way for the church to say to an offender ‘you’re actions have put you outside the communion, here is how you can be reconciled.’ If there is no salvation outside the church, then excommunication is not a condemning act but an invitation to repent and rejoin the fellowship.

Our communion matters because it is within our common life that characters our characters are formed and conformed to the likeness of Christ. As Abbot Christopher Jamison writes in Finding Sanctuary, ‘Obedience, silence, and humility are qualities we experience through persevering in community life; that is what a community is for: to foster the experience of these qualities through its very structures.’ Jamison observes that for Benedict, ‘once you are outside community, then these qualities are in danger of evaporating’.

Jesus, the Nazarene, the Jew, the Servant Saviour

In today’s pick and mix society people are often afraid of community, likewise they are afraid of identifying. I’m sure you have heard people contrast ‘spirituality’ with ‘organised religion’, or say things like ‘I am spiritual but not religious’. I want to suggest that the opposite is true everyone is religious but not everyone is spiritual!

People are religious in that everyone is worshipping something fame, money, or sex- no matter what it is everyone has an idol. Perhaps the god upon which the human heart is most commonly set is the self. You may have heard it said ‘He was a self-made man’ or even the old joke ‘I used to be an atheist until I realised I was god.’ You see everyone orders their life around something but that thing is very rarely spiritual at least not in the biblical sense.

In the Bible, being born of the spirit is used to refer to someone whose life is rooted in the Spirit of God. This is a world away from the self-centred devotion of much contemporary spirituality in which the interior world is enthroned as a god. Christian spirituality has to do with the Spirit who leads us into Truth (John 16:13).

During the approach to Christmas, we often exchange cards and sometimes we receive or perhaps we will send a card which says ‘Merry Xmas’. I wonder whether we are sometimes guilty of being people of the X rather than the Christ. I mean sometimes we can be vague about the identity of Christ because recognition of identity makes demands of who we are.

I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood in solidarity with the Jewish people as they resisted Nazi persecution. It was his insight that the identity of Jesus as a Jew meant that the church could not remain in communion with its Lord whilst being in sympathy with the Nazi oppression of the Jewish people.

It is not simply Jesus’ race, creed, or colour which is pertinent to the way we live our lives. It is our identification of the way of Jesus, the messiah, which is most significant. The Christian spiritual life is not pick and mix spirituality or spirituality of the X it is embodied spirituality. It is embodied in Jesus, the Nazarene, the Jew, the Servant Saviour!