the epicentre of church

Fried & Hansson make the point that the epicentre of your business is what really matters, To locate the epicentre, they suggest you ask the question, "If I took this away would what I'm selling still exist?"


So: church. What is the epicentre? What can you can take away and it's still church? What can you not take away because it ceases to be church?

at the well: salvation-history being fulfilled

This previous post mentions aspects of the salvation-historical themes present in Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well. Especially striking is the repeated disclosure that, in Jesus, salvation history finds its fulfilment (see vv.21-23 in particular).


Preparing to preach on vv.27-42, it struck me that the harvest note that Jesus sounds is entirely suited to the fulfilment motif that has been present throughout this incident.

what 'glorifying God' looks like

Here's what Jesus says:

I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.

(John 17:4)

(cf. worship in Spirit and truth)

tom wright: easter sermon

If you remember little else about this morning, you will probably remember it as the day you got up at half past three in the morning to go to church. I hope you remember a lot more than that, but that’s a good start: because the whole point of Easter, and of baptism and confirmation, is that it’s all about getting up ridiculously early, being splashed with water to wake you up, and perhaps, in old-fashioned houses at least, lighting a fire somewhere so that the house can warm up for everyone else. Then, when all that’s done, you can think about some breakfast. Well, that’s what we’re about this morning – the water, the fire, and the breakfast: and all because Easter is about waking up ridiculously early while everybody else is asleep. That’s why, at the first Easter, everyone was shocked and startled – the women perplexed and terrified, the men disbelieving and amazed. This was all wrong. Things shouldn’t happen like this. The world was surprised and unready. It was still asleep. And it still is.

You see, the popular perception of Easter lets us down in a big way. I don’t just mean the chocolate eggs and fluffy chicks and rabbits. In a sense, they are all just good fun. Nobody in their right mind would mistake them for the real thing. No: the danger lies deeper. Many people in our culture, including many Christians, think of Easter basically as a happy ending after the horror and shame of Good Friday: ‘Oh, that’s all right, he came back to life, well, sort of, and so he’s in heaven now so that’s all OK, isn’t it?’ And the answer to that should be, ‘No, that’s not OK; that’s not what Easter is about at all.’ The whole point of Easter is that God is going to sort out the whole world, put the whole thing to rights once and for all – this world, not just somewhere called ‘heaven’ – and the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of that great work. It is the launching, good and proper, of this thing we call the kingdom of God. 

What’s that got to do with getting up two hours before sunrise, and with the water, the fire and the breakfast? Well, pretty much everything. You see, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it’s still night-time. Nothing new has really happened. The world would much prefer to believe that Christianity is simply another ‘religion’, offering another strange spiritual option, with a few odd miracles to back up its claims, but that really nothing’s changed. Corruption and death still rule the world, and Easter simply whispers that there’s a way of escape if we want it. No! Believe it or disbelieve it (though you, here, had better believe it!), the point of Easter is that when Jesus came out of the tomb he was alive again in a bodily life which was the start of the new physical world which God is going to make. And that means that God’s time has jumped forwards, so that what we thought would happen at the very end – God putting everything to rights at last – has leapt forwards into the present, into the middle of our time, our history. When the early Christians told the story of Jesus’ resurrection, that’s what they were saying: God’s new world has begun, and you are invited to be part of that new world – part of the world which lives on God’s time, and lives in God’s new way.

And it’s all because of Jesus, and his dying and rising again. God’s new time is the time when new life happens, but new life can only happen when death has been overcome. God’s new world is the world where sins are forgiven, but forgiveness can only happen when sins have been dealt with. God’s new life is the genuinely human life, the life that fully reflects who God actually is, but we can only even dream of that holiness if something happens to us and in us so that we ourselves make the transition from the way of death – which is what seems, to us, the ‘ordinary’ way of living – to the way of life. And the way we are brought into that new time, that new world, and that new life, is through being plunged into the death and resurrection of Jesus so that his death becomes ours, and his resurrection becomes ours.

Jesus himself showed how we are to do this. When we are baptized, we are drowned in his death and come out the other side into his new life, his new world, his new time. This is the meaning of the water of baptism.

But to be complete, we creatures of earth need not only the water but also the fire. When people come to confirmation they not only ‘confirm’ the promises made at their baptism – promises about dying with Jesus and rising again with him – but also pray for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the living fire of God’s own presence and power, and that fire comes to live inside us – us together, and us individually – so that we can live the new life, be part of the new world, and in particular live on God’s time, which is always ahead of the sleepy time of the rest of the world. When you pray for the Holy Spirit, and when together as a church we pray for the Spirit to come upon us – and today in particular upon you – God answers that prayer in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes it’s quite dramatic, and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s slow and quiet, and you will only gradually realise that things are different. You are to take responsibility for thinking it through and working out what God is now calling you do be and to do, what his new life will look like in and through you. As the Americans say, ‘You do the math’: figure out what are the ways in which he is calling you to wake up and live on a different time to the rest of the world, and in particular the ways in which he is lighting a fire inside you not simply to warm you up but so that, through you, he can warm up the rest of the world.

Because that’s the point of all this. Confirmation isn’t simply about God’s gift of himself, his own Spirit, to live within you. Confirmation is about God’s gift of himself through you to the rest of the world – more particularly, to the bits of the world where he has called you and put you. You are God’s Easter-presents to your family, to your school, your place of work, to our country and our world. The early Christians used to dress people up in white clothes after baptism, to symbolize the new life they had now entered. Perhaps we should dress you up as large chocolate eggs, to make the point that God is giving you to the world all around as a delightful and delicious Easter-present. I know people don’t usually think of Christians that way, but perhaps it’s time they did. After all, in many towns and cities and villages it’s mostly Christians who are volunteering to help in the hospice, or visiting in the prisons, or doing meals on wheels, or whatever. Yes, several people do these things who are not Christians, but again and again you’ll find they are. It’s Christians, mostly, who are campaigning on behalf of asylum seekers, who are working as Town Pastors in the confused night-time world of our city streets. Christians should be at the forefront of the world’s celebrations and its tragedies: rejoice, said Paul, with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. You are the salt of the earth, said Jesus; you are the light of the world. You are the fire that God is lighting in our cold, dark, nighttime world, the fire that says it’s morning-time and the place needs warming up. Christians are people who have been washed in the water and filled with the fire, abandoning the old life and bringing the new one to birth in a surprised and unready world.

And the water-and-fire people are then the breakfast-people. You can’t sustain the new life by yourself. You can’t live in God’s new world, on God’s new time, without constant help. And the help we need is Jesus himself – his death to go on dealing with our sins and failings, his new life to go on becoming ours, for us and through us. As we come to his feast, the bread and the wine become heavy with fresh meaning, Passover-meaning, Jesus-meaning, meaning for us and for the world through us. This, too, is shocking and puzzling to many people. How on earth can this simple, symbolic meal carry all that power?

The short answer is: because Jesus said it would when he told us to do it. The deeper reasons are all there to be explored in due course. But today, as we come to the first Eucharist of this Easter, you come with special joy, because you are today’s water-and-fire people, and, as we share in this breakfast with you, you remind us that all of us who belong to Jesus are water-and-fire people, all of us Easter-presents to and for God’s whole world. Thank you for standing up and being counted today. Thank God for all that he’s doing in your lives and through you for the rest of us. No doubt there will be times when you, like the rest of us and like those first disciples, will be perplexed and amazed, perhaps even disbelieving and terrified. But Jesus Christ is risen again! He is on the loose, on the move, at work in his world and in our midst, and you today are the living witnesses to the power of his death and resurrection and Spirit. Remember the water; pray for the fire; come to the breakfast, and be ready then to go out live as God’s Easter presents to his surprised and unready world.

the horses

I realise this could become a repetitive strain on this blog but, reading through Ted Hughes' first published work, The Hawk in the Rain, I'm being reminded of some great work, first sampled during 'A' level english classes. This one is just terrific.


The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird-
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey –ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
                                 There, still they stood,
But now steaming, and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays –

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

friday night spotify: ultravox - the collection

Some bands were always better in single doses and, for me, Ultravox were always in that category. But when you stack the singles up alongside each other, they make for a great album. So here's The Collection - enjoy.

work & worry

It’s not the work which kills people, it’s the worry. It’s not the revolution that destroys machinery it’s the friction.

Henry Ward Beecher

(HT: Leo Babauta)

breaking the law

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

(Mark 2:23-28)

What's going on here? Jesus' disciples upset some Pharisees by picking heads of grain on the Sabbath. So this is a sabbath-controversy, right? Yes - and no. Look how Jesus handles it: he refers to an incident from the OT where David and his companions ate some bread that wasn't theirs. What was the problem with that? Was it on a sabbath? No. The problem is that the bread was reserved for the priests.

Jesus answers a sabbath controversy by using an argument that effectively relativises the whole law.

And in doing so, he elevates the importance of a genuine concern for people's needs - seen in David and his men having their hunger met and seen in the feeding of his disciples. The law was never meant to be upheld in such a way as to deny or exacerbate human need: the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. As Paul would say in Galatians 5:23, "the law is not against such things!"

If that is true of the law, how much more so with our church traditions! The key questions to ask ourselves ought to centre upon whether those traditions, rules or whatever, contribute to the alleviating of need, to the expressing of genuine love and care, to the liberating into service of God's people, or do they not.

Because love is the fulfilment of the law, the great end to which it pointed and, finally, expressed and met in the Son of Man, the Messiah.

ted hughes: the hawk in the rain

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

what worship 'in Spirit and truth' looks like

The Father is seeking worshippers who will worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23). What would it look like for a fully-faithful response to that call?

Maybe being able to say "My food is to do the will of (God)" and to be busy in harvest labour (John 4:34ff).

workaholics

I loved these quotes...

Workaholics miss the point...They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgements. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisons when tired.

Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up.

(from Fried & Hansson)

the great albums (v) - wha'ppen

The Beat were in many ways embedded within the Ska revival of Two-Tone Records but were always a little bit different, with maybe a slightly harder edge to them.

Wha'ppen was their second album, released in 1981. It lacked some of the energy of their first offering, I Just Can't Stop It, but it was a far more solid affair, with their politics more centre-stage (which makes it a great album to post on the day a general election is called).

The album on spotify kicks off with a track that wasn't on the album (Too Nice To Talk To). It was probably their strongest ever single (how I wish I could find the 12" version of it!) but never really belonged on this album.

In terms of the album's themes, they're maybe best expressed on the song Cheated - an almost prophetic portrayal of Thatcherite Britain, years ahead of its time. If the album was looking to portray the darkness descending, they would surely want to say that the gloom had yet to reach its deepest.

It isn't just politics, it's relationships and their rocky ground (no wonder the album fuses so many musical styles). It could easily have been an incoherent mess and, whilst not every track works, they largely succeed.

It's one of the great by-passed albums of all time.

gospel coalition: book reviews & previews

This is a great new resource from The Gospel Coalition folks - a section of their site that handles book reviews and book previews (sample chapters of certain books).

Well worth adding to your RSS feed.

why knowing what you believe (foundationally) is important

Well, it's important for all sorts of reasons, of course, not least of which is the simple matter of truth. But in terms of inter-personal & organisational dynamics, Fried & Hansson put their finger on it:

When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.

(Fried & Hansson, Rework, p.44)

sinclair ferguson: praying for our dispositions

it's so important for us to pray that our dispositions, as well as our minds, will be sanctified. Otherwise the disposition in which we teach the scriptures can actually have the function of distorting the very scriptures that we teach.

from The Pastor & His Heart

apps that make iPad desirable

I've already mentioned the free ESV app but of course there's so much more to come in terms of Bible software (think Laridian, Olive Tree and Logos).

But here, for me, is a huge draw to the iPad: the Evernote app. Fabulous. Almost peerless.

And if the iBooks experience is one you hanker for, then this announcement of material from Zondervan will only deepen the desire.

C'mon, keep this ball rolling you guys!

a bible for your iPad

You know you want one.

Now you'll want one even more.

Free ESV Bible app for iPad.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

ono: nobody sees me like you do

I wanna quit moving
I wanna quit running
I wanna relax and be tender
I wanna see us, together again,
rocking away in our walnut chairs

(from the album Season Of Glass, 1981)

a book of the conference - for free

Talks from a recent Desiring God conference are now available as a pdf, free to download.

Looks like it's chock-full of good stuff.

Go here.

well said, john ortberg

Reflecting on the search process for a church leader, John Ortberg writes:

But I do have a conviction that when it comes to getting leadership right, 98 percent of the ballgame is relationship. I believe where there is a relationship of joy and commitment and mutual submission and trust and authentic love—then the division of labor issues can flow freely and effectively. But where the relationship is broken, all the org charts in the world can't save it.

Well said, says I.