religious archeology

Religious archeology? What’s that, a cross between Tony Robinson enthusiastically digging up a dusty pew and Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou earnestly making stuff up [surely, digging stuff up? Ed.] to get on TV?

Neither actually. I came across this fascinating concept whilst meeting with the chaplaincy team at our local specialist cancer hospital. They were talking about how many people, when facing death or its possibility, often turn back to their concepts of God and religion they had when they were previously ‘spiritually active’. Or just went to church. As often people he would talk to were older people, who went to Sunday School etc… and then grew up and grew out of church, in order to understand the God they understand you need to go back to the 1950′s or thereabouts. Once you understand how God was understood back then, you can begin to find a way to relate to these new seekers. 

Religious archeology, then. Digging down through the decades to discover what paradigms and concepts and understandings of God to start with. You can’t take 21st century concepts of God and expect them to slot comfortably over these dusted-off concepts.

The chaplain added a note of caution though. Because he said that these people, who are ill now, are the last generation of people who had a pretty much guaranteed Christian foundation, even it was the basics of Sunday School. In 10 or 20 years those people who are facing imminent death, and therefore begin to search for meaning and becoming open to the possibilities of God, will have nothing to dig for. There will be no paradigm for God, no matter how 1950′s. Just a murky muddy quagmire of pop theology, folk religion and wishful thinking – if even that – which will serve to provide little in the way of comfort, let alone a bridge back to the God they never believed in.

Of course, it can be true that having no paradigm for God can be more helpful than having a bad one. But without one at all we are limiting the chances people will be open to searching for God at all. And this gives me hope and it gives me encouragement for some of the tasks that I perform that can seem to tedious, pointless, and theologically dubious. For some, what we call ‘occasional offices’ – baptisms, weddings and funerals (or hatches, matches and dispatches) – are central to their ministry. I try to see it like that, but more often than not the time taken to perform a service in which no-one else believes in God can seem a little… hypocritical. And time-consuming.

But instead of seeing it like that, on my good days I see it like giving the religious archeologists of the future something to dig for. If I can give these people, usually now with little or no church background, a snippet of a positive memory of the church, a small but significant encounter with the church – which for them equates with an encounter with God – in which the church say yes and you’re welcome, the church says Jesus loves you and the church says come, then it’s no longer a waste of time.

Like planting a seed-bomb on a wasteland, you don’t know if it will grow, but the hope is always there. 

Always. 

baggage

There’s lots of half-truths and myths and wishful thinking that we bandy around at church. We’re all as guilty as each other, which is kind of comforting to know. Unless you believe you have the whole and complete and unblemished truth of course, in which case it might be disconcerting.

One of the half-truths came to mind when I was doing my regular Saturday parkrun. I saw this sign. It spoke volumes. 

non-secure baggage here

When we come to Jesus we can give him our baggage and he can redeem it. All that stuff that has us back and holds us down. Guilt, bad habits, too much cheese. Cumbered with a load of care? Come to Jesus. His yoke is easy and his burden is light.

Half-truth. Theologically it works. Practically, it’s a work in progress. The trouble is when we give Jesus our baggage usually we are giving it via the church, which is when the “non-secure” part of the photo springs to mind.

This isn’t to say we don’t give it at all in case it goes wrong. At the parkrun we leave our baggage together in one place because there safety in a shared risk, and when someone is likely to be keeping an eye on it. Though of course we don’t leave our valuables in view, and if you’re like me you keep anything really valuable strapped to your arm (there’s another illustration there about leadership and vulnerability…).

So yes, we do place our burdens on Jesus, we allow him to nail it to the cross and deal with it… but we also live in the knowledge that it’s a work in progress, that when we do this we take risks, risks involve trust and though God won’t us down it might sometimes feel like it. And people probably will.

So, baggage. Non-secure, left at your own risk.  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the half-truth.

to the unknown god

I wonder when you last prayed? Was it this morning, that the alarm clock wouldn’t go off, or when you realised you hadn’t done the right homework and would be in even more trouble? Was it a few days ago when you nearly got hit by a car crossing the road in the split-second of blind panic you shoot a prayer like an arrow ‘just in case’ there’s a power up there listening. I take a lot of funerals as part of my job, and most of the people in those families are not church-goers or religious but they believe in God when someone dies. They pray then. 

A couple of weeks ago the Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba had a heart attack on the pitch, and the response from his team mates and thousands of supporters was what…? To simply wish him well. To write a card? To send him good vibes? To read his star sign to see if it mentions recovering from a heart attack? To tell his family all the bad things religion has done? Or… was it to pray? 

His whole team came out in t-shirts saying ‘pray for Muamba’. Which is fantastic and demonstrates that the doo doo hits the fan we know – we know! – there is something out there, someone out there, someone who might just be able to help. It’s an instinct we have, it’s a connection we have with out creator that even if we have forgotten about, our souls haven’t. 

So when we pray, who do we pray to? A nameless face, a ball of gas, a statue, an idea? Maybe we are praying to a mystery, maybe we are praying to whoever you want God to be? 

I think not. 

I believe that I know who the God is that we pray to. I believe that God isn’t nameless and faceless, that God doesn’t hide away behind the clouds. That God in’t just for certain people at a certain time. And that God isn’t reserved for those who ‘feel’ the spiritual or like to have a fuzzy feeling and say [Darth Vader voice] *The force is strong with you..*.

And I believe God is here.  

My faith is rooted in actual historical events. I believe that the God we pray to in emergencies is revealed to us through Jesus, who is present here by his Holy Spirit. I believe that the man Jesus was actually God, that he actually gave us a face and a name. I believe that God so loved the world – that is, you and me and this earth – that he came to earth as one of us to show us, to be present with us. I believe that he so wants to be in relationship with us that instead of staying far way and hoping one day we’ll discover him for ourselves he came looking for us. 

You see, there is this dividing wall between us and God, it’s what prevents us from being in a relationship with him. God is a God of love and goodness and compassion and every time we don’t live like that, like he does, and all the time we don’t recognise him as God, it’s like a new brick in the wall. Jesus came to break down that dividing wall between us and God. And not just to break it down, but at the same time to transform us so that we might be able to approach God and be in relationship with him. 

Because all that bad stuff we do when we don’t live lives of love and goodness and worship sticks to us like charcoal, makes us dirty. And God is clean, like Morgan Freeman in a white suit in Bruce Almighty. So he makes us clean. When we trust in him, when we follow him, Jesus makes us clean. When he embraces us. We don’t have to be clean before God will embrace us. That is so important. Morgan Freeman’s suit takes on our dirt. We don’t have to be good, fine, sorted, religious to be embraced by God. In fact, it’s because I’m not good, sorted and religious I know I need Jesus. 

That is what happened that first Easter. Jesus took all the bad stuff – we call it sin – on himself, so that we might be holy and be in relationship with God. Paid the price to free the slave. That’s me. You.

This is the God I believe in. A God who came to be with us, who searched us out; a God who answers prayer, who isn’t a nameless and faceless force; a God who is Jesus, who came to break down the wall that divides us and God so that we might live as we were meant to live, in relationship with God who made us and loves us. A God who is personal. A God who shows us love. Love that is real and true and deep, not a love that goes up and down on a tide of emotion like a teenage crush or tugs at the heart strings like the backstories on X Factor. Love, unconditional and unfailing love. 

That is the God I believe in. This is the God to whom we pray. He’s called Jesus, and he is here right now by his Holy Spirit. Do you want to know him? 

why i still believe we can change the world

I was talking to someone yesterday about changing the world. Changing the world is something that  I believe we are called to do; or at least, it is a consequence of doing what we are called to do. Which is to follow Jesus.

When we follow Jesus, the world changes. Not all at once. Because the world isn’t a big mass of ‘all at once’, but is made of up people in families and communities. So, as we change, so our world changes. Like a virus, but a good one.

Is it still called a virus if it’s good? 

The conversation began about being angry. My friend was angry about the situations adults can create for kids. Grrrr. It is enough to make you angry. But what do you do with that anger? Suppress it, ignore it, release it on the running track? Or do you allow your anger to show you your passion; and do you turn your passion into action.

If homelessness makes you angry, you’ve found you passion for the poor. If the treatment of people with mental health problem makes you angry, you’ve found your passion for the marginalised. If football makes you angry you need to get out more.

And so on. 

But what’s the point? I can’t change the world. I am just me. Better to live my life, to be calm, to keep quiet. And if necessary, channel the anger into my running. Or my music. Or whatever. 

But who does that benefit? Just me. Not the world. In this conversation I realised that I still believe we can change the world. Which is not a doe-eyed optimism that if we all stand in front of Bambi we’ll save her. But that being the change we want to see in the world (Ghandi said that, I wish it was Jesus) is a theological imperative. That means we absolutely have to. Because if God cares for me and wants to turn my life around then he cares for everyone. We are not meant to be saved and gather dust like an old piece of furniture. 

If we follow Jesus and allow the Holy Spirit to grow fruit in us then we cannot be blind to the world around us. We cannot give more than God has already given. We cannot sit on our laurels (what are they?) and complain it’s too big a problem. 

And I don’t believe this is a specialist branch of the Jesus movement called ‘activist Christianity’ which can be opted out of, any more than repentance or grace or being slightly fed up with Church can be opted out of. 

So I do believe that we can change the world. Not on our own. The ‘we’ very much begins with God, revealed in Jesus and present by the Spirit. Present in us, whom he called his body. Of course it is a stupid idea and of course I don’t REALLY believe that me, I, Kevin Lewis, can change the world. On my own. But together we can. One starfish at a time.

Do I always feel it? No. Do I always want to be a part of it? No. Is it frustrating? Yes. Do I see changes? Yes.

Sometimes.

Mostly importantly, is it true? Yes.  

… [ waiting ] …

I wonder what your symbol of waiting is. The bus stop, train station, school gate; red brake lights, red traffic lights; the egg timer on the computer, the slow-boiling kettle, the long-winded preacher…

We spend a lot of our time … waiting.

I struggle to enjoy waiting. Some might take the opportunity whilst stuck in a traffic jam to pray or worship or something equally holy. I just get cross and put the Foo Fighters on.

Advent is about waiting.  Advent isn’t just ‘that bit before Christmas’, like the check-in desk is to a holiday. And advent isn’t Christmas itself, whatever the shops would have us believe.

Advent is when we remember that the people of Israel waited for their expected Messiah for a very very very long time. And we remember that we are waiting for that Messiah to return again and finally and once and for all sort everything out. So advent is definitely not just the bit before Christmas.

There’s a lot of biblical precedent for waiting. Noah waited. Abraham waited. Moses waited, Joseph waited, Ruth and Naomi waited. David waited, the prophets waited. All these different people pleaded and begged and bribed God to do things at their speed, rather than his, and all failed. Because God will not be rushed.

As we wait for Jesus to come again, I wondered which biblical characters we might find ourselves behaving like.

The story of the golden calf tells us a lot about waiting. Moses had gone up the mountain and had been gone ages. Aaron and the people got fed up with waiting. Things were better in Egypt, at least there we could do things to make the gods work for us – rituals and sacrifices and we could touch and see the Egyptian gods because they were made of real stuff. So instead of waiting for God, they made their own out of gold.

A lot of people have got fed up with waiting for God and decided to make their own. Or to go back to their old ways. Or make church like the golden calf – familiar things, familiar rituals, that feel like they are achieving something. But God will not be bribed with ritual.

Maybe we find ourselves waiting like the zealots or Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Two very different groups that both wanted to make the Messiah come quicker because he would overthrow the Romans. So they busied themselves with forcing God to act quicker – the zealots with violence and the Pharisees with holiness.

It can be very tempting to try and rush God. How many times have you heard people say that once everyone in the world has heard the gospel Jesus will come; or if we all say the right prayer;  or return the Jews to Israel; or believe the same things about Jesus or moral and ethical issues… then Jesus will be forced to return because we’ll have done our side of the bargain. I’ve done a, so will you do b. Bargaining with God. We always try it, but he doesn’t do it.

The prophets had a lot to say about waiting. They were constantly addressing a people who were waiting. And their message I think is the same as the message to us as we wait.

Wait patiently. And while you wait, be faithful. And by faithful I mean worship God even when he doesn’t work at your speed; submit to God even when he doesn’t do what you want when you want; and serve God even when it feels like a waste of time. 

There is hope.

Jesus will come again. That is our hope. We will meet him and welcome him here to earth where he will renew all things. In the meantime we live lives in which we do not get distracted into making our own gods or bribing or bargaining with God but in which we wait expectantly, live hopefully, and serve faithfully.   It won’t make him come any quicker, but the waiting will be much better, and allowing God to break into our lives like he did at Christmas is the best type of waiting there is.

harmless halloween

Halloween is harmless. We all know that. What harm can dressing up as witches and ghouls and zombies do to anyone? So let’s stop being grouchy Christians and let them get on with it. Let’s allow our halls to be hired for Halloween parties. Let’s light up the pumpkins. Let’s slap on the face-paint and join in.

That would be the easy call anyway. And the one most people make.

Part of me wants to believe that. Part of me knows that there’s a whole load of fun to have. I’ve just read the 4th Harry Potter. I love Shawn of the Dead. 

But I can’t let it rest like that. I don’t have a well-developed theology of demons and spirits and the rest of the dark-side. But I know it is there. I have prayed in people’s houses for evil spirits to leave. I have prayed for spiritual oppression to leave an area and felt it go. And I do, after all, follow Jesus who broke the power of sin and death defeated the Great Deceiver and so I have to believe there are dark forces. Not like the Frank Perretti books of old first taught me. But it is real.

And so to glorify the dark side cannot be right. Even for comedy value. It’s not about being kill-joys. It‘s about knowing the hold darkness has on people, knowing that Jesus can and does and is breaking that hold, and not wanting to undermine that or mock it. I know so many people who live in my area go to spiritualist churches. I want to be a part of breaking this hold. And not to be seen to be condoning it. This is not to be taken lightly.

Jesus is not harmless. Jesus takes us to dangerous and uncomfortable and difficult places, and he loves us and carries us through. So Halloween cannot be harmless. Focusing on the darkness cannot be harmless.

No matter how much we want it to be.

george’s [one holy catholic] marvellous medicine

I am an accidental Anglican, by virture of a beautiful lady I fancied who I followed to church back in the 90′s. I’ve now been married to the beautiful lady for 10 years and an undercover Baptist (erm, Anglican) vicar for 6. I don’t mean I’m married twice. I’m the vicar.

Accidentally and reluctantly, I was drawn into the strange concoction of personalities and traditions that is the Anglican church. A bit like George’s Marvellous medicine, it often feels like someone was having a laugh when they decided to put us all together. Po-faced cassock-wearing catholics / cords-and-shirt-wearing evangelicals * [* delete as applicable], too-trendy-jean-and-hoody wearing young upstarts and a whole load of [insert adjective] people across the board.

See what I have just done. Succumbed to the basic human desire to categorise according to prejudice. You are like me, you are not. You are different, so I will stereotype and ridicule, thereby reinforcing my own belief in my innate superiority.

I have just been to a licensing of a vicar in the neighbouring parish, and there could not be a more different church experience. From our low-church mostly evangelical working-class urban thing, to a cathedral-like exposure to choirs and cassocks and incense and posh people in suits and hats and a word called ‘Mass’ and someone called the Mother of God. This can bring out the worst in me. I look around and see so much that seems wrong. 

God seems to be worshiped from such a distance, people seem to need to wear fancy haberdashery and look all solemn to approach their Saviour who bled and died and rose through shit and death so we didn’t need to do just that; where the church seems to say ‘over there, look, God!’ rather than ‘in here? God? amazing!’ Where the incarnation seems to be restricted to the sacrament, like God is bound into some contractual agreement not to cause too many problems by running around like a naughty schoolboy, but only to appear when the priest is there to maintain order…

There I go again. Sometimes prejudice just flops out. The way to challenge prejudice? People. Simple, really.

Image from ASBO Jesus

The way we structure our relationship with God is so precious to us. So it can dominate our thinking. But I meet people from the breadth of church traditions and, mysteriously (and occasionally disappointingly), find them to be genuine. Genuine followers of Jesus. In a very different way, and often in a way I do not understand. And some ways I cannot agree with. And me also for them. I know what I look like. Disrespectful of tradition, casual with the Eucharist,  slouchy with the liturgy and lazy with the proper order of the church. Offensive, even.

But I follow Jesus. And people who fundamentally disagree with me can see that. Mostly.

One of the beauties of the Anglican Church is that we rub up against each others differences all the time. In charitable moments, this feels like a beauty and a gift. In less charitable moments it is frustrating and annoying, because so often we go for the lowest common denominator, bore ourselves to death and it makes me want to leave.

Image from ASBO Jesus

But we follow a subversive rabbi who included in his inner circle Matthew the collaborator and Simon the insurgent and used a Pharisee to build the church so I feel it must be right to try and find our common ground and purpose and try and see each other as people and not representatives of ‘tradition’ or any other kind of label. So I promise to keep trying. Maybe you will too.

That being said, please don’t put me in a cassock, sit me in a straight-line and make me enunciate every word to old hymns like I’m teaching a toddler to lip-read.

jelly

I am not a ‘cat person’. By that I don’t mean that some mistake me for being half-man and half-cat, though Lion-O from the Thundercats was one of my childhood heroes. But having had Smokey the Cat for about a year, I am beginning to see that if cats don’t actually rule the world, they are certainly in charge of the home. At least in their own heads.

Smokey the Cat teaches me many lessons. Some which involve a certain feline dexterity that I have no intention of learning. That is what the shower is for. But more usefully, we turn to jelly. Jelly is that stuff that chunks of cat food are coated in, that Smokey is far more interested in eating than the actual food. If desperate, if she hasn’t caught enough moths and flies to complement her jelly diet, she will deem it necessary to eat the actual tuna, duck, salmon or whatever else the chunks claims to have once been waved at on their way from sheep brain to sachet.

how very dare you

The jelly is obviously the best. But you can’t survive on just jelly. It’s one of those lessons we teach children. You can’t just eat the nice bits and leave the peas. Cats are harder to teach. If Smokey the Cat teaches me any lessons about following Jesus, she reminds me that we all like to pick and choose the parts of our faith we like, the chunks of the Bible we like, the churches we like,  and ignore the rest. I like the part of our faith that bangs on and on about grace and hope and transformation and heaven coming to earth and all that exciting and dynamic stuff; I am less inclined to feast on passages that talk more about judgements and laws and things all a little more Pharisaical. But those things are there. I prefer to preach about Jesus than Samson. But Samson is there. 

We all have our jelly. The things we lap up. But a mature faith is able to take the whole plate, and somehow hold it together; or, to hold parts of it, at least recognising there are other parts but that I cannot hold them. I can see where high-church Anglo-Catholics are coming from, I can see where low-church free-church evangelicals are coming from; I can see the grace, I can see the judgement, I can see the social action, I can see the personal commitment to faith that is needed. I can see the importance of string-free relationships in the community, and the importance of evangelism and challenging people to faith.

I can see that actually the world is more nuanced than polarised opposites, however easy it might be to assume otherwise.

moth balled

It’s the same in politics. We have our mantras, our favourite narratives, our ideologies, but if we take only the good bits from our politics and leave aside the flipsides we are kidding ourselves. 

I wish everyone’s jelly was the same as mine. My jelly is to preach hope, to lead towards Jesus, and to hope for the best that God will understand if I have got it wrong.  The rest of the food is there, and I promise I will get to it.

Unless I find a moth to eat instead.

 

torchwood, but I wouldn’t

Wish for immortality, that is. Something that unknowingly, and without understanding it, so much of our society longs for. Easy immortality though, to be fair. We wish to be immortal at the best and most able part of our lives. Not to be immortal and be… old. Or… ill. After all, where would L’Oreal be if we didn’t age. 

*Caution – Torchwood plot spoilers!* 

I am a big Torchwood fan. The new series needs to do a lot to satisfy die-hard fans of a quirky Cardiff-based and very British low-budget sci-fi drama, and as the story goes so far, this is good. The basic premise:

Nobody can die. Death is not an option. 

Even those who should be dead are not. Something is keeping people alive despite accidents and illness; even severed limbs still contain life. The planet faces overpopulation within 4 months. Hospitals are full of people who are alive, but in terrible pain. Triage is reversed, there is no ‘golden hour’ for A&E patients during which their lives can be saved. They will not die anyway. Minor injuries are treated first to get them out of the hospital, whilst seriously injured wait.  Just… wait.

The miracle day becomes a terrible day.

jack in a (wooden) box?

With this simple but dramatic change, the tables are turned on attitudes to death. From fearing death, from death being the enemy and to be avoided at all costs, suddenly death is the old friend people desperately want. Our craving for constant youth and for constant life seems ridiculous. In an instant an entire culture in the West designed around real-life death-avoidance finds the ground it stands on disappears.

We who follow Jesus are not afraid of death. We welcome it, in fact. In theory. When we read the book of Revelation, for example, we can see that death is not to be feared; the early church certainly wouldn’t have seen it that way. But it doesn’t swing so far that way that we end up craving death, like so many seem to – the sort of ‘passport to leave this earth and get to heaven’ mis-reading of Scripture. Jesus came to bring life and life in all its fulness – in this life and the one beyond.

gwen will it all end?

So we do not fear death, though we may fear its consequences for those we leave behind.  We welcome death, in it’s right time and place, because we know life is not designed to be immortal. The weariness and loneliness of Dr Who and Captain Jack are windows into the world of those who do not die. Even Jesus died.

Our story is of a life that dies but that does not stay dead. Our story is of resurrection that conquers death and all fear of death. Our Miracle Day is not the day people stopped dying, but the day one man died and was raised to life. Our story is not immortal life but eternal life, that begins here and now whilst we are mortal.

In Torchwood through one life all crave death; in Jesus, through one death we all gain life.
Watch the Torchwood: Miracle Day trailer here…

certified

I remember my first car chase. I say car chase. I was on my bicycle, and slapped a car for stopping on the yellow-box junction outside Oval tube. He reversed out of the queue and chased me down a side-street where I lost him.

I remember the first time I was punched. It was days after the car chase, in almost the same place. I had slapped the white van for pulling out on me when I was cycling home from work; the white van man chased me, and I didn’t lose him. He overtook me, waited for me, and punched me.

After this I took the bus to work.

I assume both those driver had driving licenses. Their driving licenses didn‘t mean they were driving well. The fact that I have my cycling proficiency certificate from 1987 didn’t mean I was cycling well either.

The proof of ability to drive is in the driving, not the certificate. The proof of ability to cycle is in the cycling, not the certificate.

I have another certificate. My birth certificate proves that a birth took place.  But it doesn’t prove that I am still alive. What proves I am alive? Me.

Hello.

Jesus talks about us being born again, or born from above. It’s like being born the first time, except that the first gulp of life-source we take is not air, but the Spirit. In the Greek, the word is pnuema, as in pneumatic tyre. Filled with pneuma.

Often when this happens we get a certificate. We remember this day. Like our first birth, we rightly celebrate it, but unless we keep on breathing the Spirit our baptism certificate, like our birth certificate, is meaningless. Interesting history, but it doesn’t prove life. And this applies whether you are baptised as a baby or a believing adult. Because neither prove on-going life. Anyone can get wet.

We may go faithfully to church every week; we may just come for a baptism. But the challenge is the same for all of us. Are we living as new creations? Are we living as those who have been born from the spirit, breathing in him as our source of life, reconciled to God and changed from the inside out?

That is proof of life.  Certified.