Ahh my much maligned blog. There will now be a flurry of posts, just to catch some ideas and sermons as much as anything else...
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I have stood in the crowd at the Bataclan
theatre on more than one occasion. I love the
bustle of 11e bounded by the Places des
Vosges and the the Bastille and Pere
Lechaise cemetery at the other. Paris was
the backdrop to 2 important years of my life -
years of faith, friendships, music, culture and
where my vocation was tested. My heart
breaks, all of our hearts break, recalling the
unspeakable tragedy on those streets in the
last 24 hours. They are attacks on music
lovers and gig goers like me; culture vultures
like me; tourists like me; ordinary people of every walk and way of life like me, like you.
And in so many ways there are no words.
And yet into unspeakable tragedy words do
eventually come - boiling to the surface of
our lives, spat in rage and frustration. But this
reaction in the face of grief and injustice is
more than a toddler griping that they didn't
get their own way. This is a railing from our
very core - that signs and symbols of our
enduring values and the supposed
certainties of life - political freedom, justice, tolerance - have been challenged, levelled,
and lives obliterated.
The Temple - the sign of the presence of God
in the Israelite community where heaven and
earth united - was originally built by King
Solomon to house the Ark of the Covenant
and it was supposed to, like God, endure
forever. Yet it was destroyed by King
Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BCE.
This enduring symbol was rebuilt during the
reign of King Darius by Nehemiah in
516BCE. This 2nd Temple was added to by
Herod the Great but the building was
decimated in the years after Jesus after a 4
year Jewish revolt against the Romans.
Levelling the Temple, decimated the
Israelites’ identity and values, their sure faith
and hope in the presence and power of the
God who had called them to be His people,
lay in piles of crushed rubble. Jesus talking
of the levelling of the Temple will have sent
his hearers sense of national identity, underlying values and faith in God crashing
to the ground.
In Hebrews it says: ‘... And let us consider
how to provoke one another to love and good
deeds...’ This is a passage brimming with a
confidence mentioned in vs 19 - confidence
that consciences are cleansed, confident of
the forgiveness of God and wanting to
encourage one another therefore to love and
good works. Confidence is frankness,
outspoken speech, openness to public
scrutiny, courage, boldness, fearlessness,
and joy. It is a characteristic of free citizens
who may hold their heads up without shame
or fear, looking others directly in the eye. In
Roman society, slaves did not exercise such
boldness; it belonged to the free members of
the household.
Did you watch this series of The Apprentice?
It’s been a big earner for the BBC. I wonder
what do we love about this show - is it Is it
the wonderful opportunity that is on offer?
Could it be the Lord Sugar put-downs? The
mind-bending tasks perhaps? How about the
boardroom battles ending in the pointy finger
and those immortal words “you’re fired.” No,
what we like is listening to the absolute ego
driven, self-aggrandising statement these
people come up with. “I am the Swiss army
knife of business skills” or I’m the Godfather
of the business and I’m going to make Lord
Sugar an offer he cannot refuse” oh dear. Oh
and please remember these ‘business
people’ made £1.87 in profit in the first show.
Business people? Nah!
The ego is an amazing thing; it tricks us into
believing so much about ourselves to the
point where we only hear our own voice.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews
reminds us we need confidence not based
on who we are or our perceived abilities but
whose we are, namely God’s.
As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his
disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what
large stones and what large buildings!’ Then
Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great
buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’ We all
do love the bigger, the better, the faster, the
bolder. We are all attracted to splendour,
grandeur and the external look. That which is
true for films - the bigger the budget the
better - can be true of our churches in terms
of Sunday attendance, the number of home
groups and so on. What large stones, yes,
but what’s the story behind them?
I watched 'Imagine', the arts programme
recently, on which there was a retrospective
of the artist Anthony Gormley. It was intensely moving. Raised a Roman Catholic
but now staunchly atheistic, Gormley’s work,
so often based around the human form. It
became clear over the documentary, that
whether creating ‘little Gorms’ our of Indian
clay six inches high, or the Angel of the North
with a wing span of a jumbo - Gormley was
interested in exploring not our outer form as
people - but what goes on inside of us when
we close our eyes. His works ask us not to
look at them - as spellbinding and
untraditionally beautiful as many of them are,
but to look into ourselves - to our inner,
eternal world of drives and motives. Jesus is
not focussed external values of numbers or
size, or even the endurance of a culture and
it’s systems, but eternal values of faithfulness
and trust.
What is Jesus asking of us? In these days of
violence, when our confidence, culture and
values are all violently challenged and in
Paris have come crashing down, it would be
all to easy to answer it with more violence.
Instead perhaps, we should answer it with
love. Not just love for the victims who died in Paris or continue to die in Syria or the
Lebanon; but more challengingly with love
even for our enemies, for those who
perpetrated the atrocities.
That does not mean that we must ‘grin and
bear it’; no, love requires that we must
sometimes do hard things to reject sin and
evil. But our love must strive to heal
differences, to address the pain of historical
events that continues to divide us. And, we
must learn to live side by side in love, despite
our fears, accepting each other as we are.
We must do this, not because we are forced
to do so by our rulers, rather because we
believe God loves us: from a heart that freely
and willingly chooses to love, to accept, to
nurture and to care, knowing that others may
not be able to respond in a like fashion.
As Dag Hammerskjöld, the United Nations
Secretary General, who died in an
unexplained plane crash in Zambia in 1961,
wrote, ‘It is only when I can give without
expecting a response that the other can
receive and be grateful’. Our love must be open to all, given without the price ticket of
reciprocal love. And that means that we
leave ourselves open to the possibility, even
the probability or the certainty, of pain and
loss. If that seems a price too great to pay, we must remember that it was exactly that price which was paid by Jesus to redeem us from our sins.
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