Dear Sir,

Have people gone mad?

Some are using their democratic voice to wonder aloud how the 'fanatical' opinions and 'hate' of Destiny Church marchers can be suppressed, by law if necessary, so as to stop them 'interfering' with politics.

The voicing of these thoughts is very, very scary. Not least because the perception they encourage of the marchers is as patently absurd as Jews being styled rodents, but even more because they violate with equal brazenness the ethos of our collective security and democratic society: open debate.

Widespread respect for accurate language, and the internalization of democratic ideals are the guarantors of our democratic process. The repeated violation of both by commentators leaves us on the precipice of a very big fall. Let us hope we do not take the plunge, lest we must repeat the vow: ‘never again’.

Aaron Stewart
Oriental Bay

Douglas Wilson's The Evils of Pietism has something to say to the concerns of both parties in the conversation below about worship.

I recommend it.

A conversation

pelican says:
was looking at your blog last night. what do you mean by the 'full bodiedness' of worship God requires, and what does it have to do with incense?

Azza says:
morning. which post are you talking about? I can't remember that...

pelican says:
you'd gone to a high anglican church - it was an old one

pelican says:
i was thinking tho that these rituals of 'worship' are meaningless anyway if you're heart isn't right. And if God's Word isn't being taught properly

Azza says:
ah I've found it. ummm

pelican says:
oh sorry, yes, good morning! If God's word isn't being taught properly (as is the case in many high anglican churches here) then how can your heart be right and how then can you truly worship..ie your life as an act of worship like Paul talks about in Rom 12

Azza says:
hmmmm. i would say that if the people are being exhorted to faithfulness then there's a good chance that their lives will follow

pelican says:
yeah i agree, but the 'if' is important I think. just from my experience most of these rituals are exactly that because there is no exhortation to faithfulness. sometimes they are even lucky to get a bible reading.

Azza says:
what I meant by 'full-bodied-ness' was that worship and teaching doesn't just concern the intellect. The whole person should be instructed and taught what it means to follow God. Therefore, it is not a bad thing to have 'instructive' signs and symbols that the person does with their body.

Azza says:
A ritual whose meaning is not met in and by the lives of those who do it is empty and hypocritical, yes. And doesn't please God - especially when the people think that God is pleased by the ritual itself, regardless of what else happens in their lives. But that criticism applies to all sorts of christians, us as well

Azza says:
incidentally, sometimes us Reformed Christians fall into the trap (I think) or treating the preaching as a ritual that, if done 'right', will please God. Some have a tendency to think that way about the entire worship service. So, we have a big emphasis on what is allowed and what isn't.

Azza says:
But it's really the lives of the people that God cares about, and the way that these are bought and presented to Him in worship, and there refined by the mutual fellowship/exhortation etc.

pelican says:
yes i agree with that too...but then you should also ask how these signs and symbols 'instruct'. But yes it does apply to us too, and anything we do can be a ritual then if it stands in place of how we should be living. Yeah I don't like the title 'worship' service, if our whole lives are meant to be worshipful.

Azza says:
Yes. What I like about having my body do things in worship (like the sign of the cross, like genuflecting, like standing in respect) is that when I leave the service, I am very reminded that it is all of my body and life that I have just comitted to serving God with - not just my head. Somehow, I find it much more powerful than merely sitting still and hearing something.

Azza says:
And that, I think, is why God gave so many 'bodily' ways of doing worship in scripture - ceratinly in the old covenant, with the very visual and sensory temple, tabenacle, clothing and sacrifice, but also under the new, with baptism and especially Lord's Supper as the chief action of fellowship and worship.

Azza says:
Unformatunately, though, we've turned Lord's Supper into quite a bare and barren ritual (in the bad sense), not at all like the meal it was instituted as. So even in that, we have lost the full-bodied sense of worship that (in fact) we should be very familiar with.

pelican says:
mmmmm interesting. i find it seriously distracting when these things happen because i don't need to do them outside church to remind me, so why do them now? it can make religion rather mystical-ish, and not always that understandable to non christians.

Azza says:
ha :)

Azza says:
I think our services are rather 'mystical' in their own way - all the significance is held in our heads, as we come to the right 'understanding' of things. To me, this is very disconnected from the concrete world of things and matter and experience, where I actually *do* things.

pelican says:
mmmm. i really have to go to uni, i'm going to be late. but we should finish this at another time. the OT worship is interesting, will have to think about it. yeah that's true about disconnection...but i think ultimately we have to think about what we're doing and its relation to others as well. i think also we need to think about what we actually 'do' in the concrete world, and how this relates to what we 'do' in church services. anyway i better go... talk later love ya xxx

I am enormously challenged by Wendell Berry's article on Christianity and the survival of Creation.

I hope that its approach will shape the Christianity that I and my people practice. I encourage you to read it too.

Working worship

"In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world -- and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor -- modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion." (emphasis mine)

- Wendell Berry, Christianity and the survival of Creation

Dualism at the core

"I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, and so on. This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best-known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important, and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning.

The crucial test is probably Genesis 2:7, whichgives the process by which Adam was created: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." My mind, like most people's, has been deeply influenced by dualism, and I can see how dualistic minds deal with this verse. They conclude that the formula for man-making is man = body + soul. But that conclusion cannot be derived, except by vio-lence, from Genesis 2:7, which is not dualistic. The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the formula there is soul = dust + breath. According to this verse, God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope. He formed man of dust; then, by breathing His breath into it, He made the dust live. The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. "Soul" here refers to the whole creature. Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery.

We can see how easy it is to fall into the dualism of body and soul when talking about the inescapable worldly dualities of good and evil or time and eternity. And we can see how easy it is, when Jesus asks, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?", to assume that he is con-demning the world and appreciating the disembodied soul. But if we give to "soul" here the sense that it has in Genesis 2:7, we see that he is doing no such thing. He is warning that in pursuit of so-called material pos-sessions, we can lose our understanding of ourselves as "living souls"-- that is, as creatures of God, members of the holy community of Creation. We can lose the possibility of the atonement of that membership. For we are free, if we choose, to make a duality of our one living soul by disowning the breath of God that is our fundamental bond with one another and with other creatures."

- Wendell Berry, Christianity and the survival of Creation

The love of God

"We will discover that God found the world, as He made it, to be good, that He made it for His pleasure, and that He continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us. People who quote John 3:16 as an easy formula for getting to Heaven neglect to see the great difficulty implied in the state-ment that the advent of Christ was made possible by God's love for the world-not God's love for Heaven or for the world as it might be but for the world as it was and is. Belief in Christ is thus dependent on prior belief in the inherent goodness-the lovability-of the world."

- Wendell Berry, Christianity and the survival of Creation

CHQ in the news

"...in Romans 3.21–31, by anyone’s showing a vital and central passage, Paul makes what most commentators in the reformation tradition regard as a strange shift in verse 29, when he asks ‘Or is God the God of the Jews only?’ (Notice how the NIV, for instance, omits the word ‘Or’.) If he had been talking all along simply about individual sinners being put right with God, we should indeed regard this as a sudden intrusion of ethnic questions. But he hasn’t. As chapter 4 will reveal, when we allow it to play its full role, he has been talking about God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham, and about God’s creation of a single family from both halves of sinful humanity. God’s declaring that sinners are now in a right relation to himself and God’s declaring that believing Jews and believing Gentiles belong in the same family are inextricably bound up with one another."

"The same point emerges in Galatians 2.11–21. Here, beyond cavil I think, the point of vindication is not ‘how someone becomes a Christian’ but the question of table-fellowship: with whom may I, indeed must I, share table-fellowship? Peter’s action in separating himself from Christian Gentiles was not implying that they needed to perform moral good works; it was implying that they needed to become physically Jewish. Paul’s argument against him was not to do with the mechanism of how people come from being sinful idolaters to forgiven members of Christ’s people, but with the equality within the people of God of all who believe the gospel, Jew and Gentile alike. That controversy, indeed, dominates the entire letter in a way that, alas, I think Martin Luther never saw (though specialists may correct me)."

"this new perspective reading of Paul enables us to understand, crucially for some current debates in my church at least, why Paul is very tolerant of differences on some points (particularly food, drink and holy days) and completely intolerant on others (particularly sexual ethics). The boundary lines he insists on blurring (in, for instance, Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8) are precisely those between different ethnic communities, particularly Jew and Gentile. The boundary lines he draws the more firmly are those between the holy lifestyle required of those who have died and been raised with the Messiah and the unholy lifestyle of those who behave as if they had not, but were still living ‘in the flesh’. This, too, is urgent today."

"I am fascinated by the way in which some of those most conscious of their reformation heritage shy away from Paul’s clear statements about future judgment according to works. It is not often enough remarked upon, for instance, that in the Thessalonian letters, and in Philippians, he looks ahead to the coming day of judgment and sees God’s favourable verdict not on the basis of the merits and death of Christ, not because like Lord Hailsham he simply casts himself on the mercy of the judge, but on the basis of his apostolic work. ‘What is our hope and joy and crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus Christ at his royal appearing? Is it not you? For you are our glory and our joy.’ (1 Thess. 3.19f.; cp. Phil. 2.16f.) " ... "But he is still clear that the things he does in the present, by moral and physical effort, will count to his credit on the last day, precisely because they are the effective signs that the Spirit of the living Christ has been at work in him. We are embarrassed about saying this kind of thing; Paul clearly is not. What on earth can have happened to a sola scriptura theology that it should find itself forced to screen out such emphatic, indeed celebratory, statements?"

"...here is the first statement about justification in Romans, and lo and behold it affirms justification according to works! The doers of the law, he says, will be justified (2.13). Shock, horror; Paul cannot (so many have thought) have really meant it. So the passage has been treated as a hypothetical position which Paul then undermines by showing that nobody can actually achieve it; or, by Sanders for instance, as a piece of unassimilated Jewish preaching which Paul allows to stand even though it conflicts with other things he says. But all such theories are undermined by exegesis itself, not least by observing the many small but significant threads that stitch Romans 2 into the fabric of the letter as a whole. Paul means what he says. Granted, he redefines what ‘doing the law’ really means; he does this in chapter 8, and again in chapter 10, with a codicil in chapter 13. But he makes the point most compactly in Philippians 1.6: he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation."

Crescendos of the soul

You built the windows high.
And said it would last forever.
You stare all night at the empty sky.

To keep his thoughts together.
To see the angel once again.

She came to him back when
His life was full of promise.
And he swore that he had all he needed then.
Swore it would last forever.

To see the angel once again.
To see the angel once again.

He wouldn’t let her go.
He thought it would last forever.
She said that his love was a dead man’s love
Draining the life from another.

To see the angel once again.
To see the angel once again.
To see the angel once again.

And if you’re gonna live your life like that
It’s gonna let you down.
If you’re gonna live your life like that
It’s gonna let you down.

If you’re gonna live your life like that
It’s gonna let you down.
If you’re gonna live your life like that
It’s gonna let you down.

You won’t see the angel again.

See the angel once again.

- Unbelievable Truth, Angel

In praise of peaceful mothering

I have to say that I am full of admiration for David and Angela's situation.

Ange wanted a home birth, surrounded by the familiar and the comforting. If you know her, I will let her tell you about the labour and birth. When she told me, it was very obvious that her choice had been the right one. She is pefectly relaxed, Lucy is very contented, and David is now home for 2 weeks with mother and daughter. It seems a great blessing to have brought Lucy into the world in such a happy, welcoming way.

I don't really have the words to express how I feel (which is why I've delayed writing this), but if anybody - including my wife - should ask me for thoughts regarding pregnancy and birth, I will have no hesitation in saying, "go talk to Angela".

When Paul comes to town

"...when Paul comes into a town and declares that Jesus is Lord, no doubt explaining who Jesus was, the fact and significance of his death and resurrection, and so on, then the Spirit is at work, mysteriously, in the hearts and minds of the listeners, so that, when some of them believe in Jesus, Paul knows that this is not because of his eloquence or clever argument but because the announcement of Jesus as Lord functions as (in later technical language) the means of grace, the vehicle of the Spirit. And, since the gospel is the heraldic proclamation of Jesus as Lord, it is not first and foremost a suggestion that one might like to enjoy a new religious experience. Nor is it even the take-it-or-leave-it offer of a way to salvation. It is a royal summons to submission, to obedience, to allegiance; and the form that this submission and obedient allegiance takes is of course faith. That is what Paul means by ‘the obedience of faith’."

Civilisation as a power and principality

"The simple posing of these questions makes one thing clear: maintaining a civilization is far easier than pursuing our truest ends. Any civilization tends as a matter of course to turn its members toward an elemental dependency of body and soul on the grand, overarching political and economic system it has developed to sustain and organize human life. This dependency is crucially and fundamentally religious: an offering of the self to that which it believes will deliver what it needs. Civilization, rather than being a means to an end, becomes an end in its own right, and so a god. A false god. And in the name of this cult(ure), we end up justifying massive moral, political, and intellectual compromise for the sake of the lower-order pursuits—pleasure, painlessness, power, tranquility, identity, or simply survival—that “civilization” affords."

http://www.newpantagruel.com/issues/1.3/realism_against_reality.php

Don't do the dishes

There's no point.

http://www.newpantagruel.com/issues/1.3/realism_against_reality.php (via matt)

"My proposal is this. When Paul refers to ‘the gospel’, he is not referring to a system of salvation, though of course the gospel implies and contains this, nor even to the good news that there now is a way of salvation open to all, but rather to the proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord. ‘The gospel’ is not ‘you can be saved, and here’s how’; the gospel, for Paul, is ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.

This announcement draws together two things, in derivation and confrontation. First, Paul is clearly echoing the language of Isaiah: the message announced by the herald in Isaiah 40 and 52 has at last arrived. Saying ‘Jesus is Messiah and Lord’ is thus a way of saying, among other things, ‘Israel’s history has come to its climax’; or ‘Isaiah’s prophecy has come true at last’. This is powerfully reinforced by Paul’s insistence, exactly as in Isaiah, that this heraldic message reveals God’s righteousness, that is, God’s covenant faithfulness, about which more anon. Second, since the word ‘gospel’ was in public use to designate the message that Caesar was the Lord of the whole world, Paul’s message could not escape being confrontative: Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, and at his name, not that of the Emperor, every knee shall bow. This aspect lies at the heart of what I have called ‘the fresh perspective on Paul’, the discovery of a subversive political dimension not as an add-on to Paul’s theology but as part of the inner meaning of ‘gospel’, ‘righteousness’, and so on."

"...what I find frustrating is the refusal of the traditionalists to ... recognise that some of us at least are brothers in Christ who have come to the positions we hold not because of some liberal, modernist or relativist agenda but as a result of prayerful and humble study of the text which is and remains our sole authority."

"For me, the question has always been ‘But does this make sense of the text?’, not ‘But will this fit into some abstract scheme somewhere?’"

"When I began research on Paul, thirty years ago this autumn, my aim was to understand Paul in general and Romans in particular better than I had done before, as part of my heartfelt and lifelong commitment to scripture, and to the sola scriptura principle, believing that the better the church understands and lives by scripture the better its worship, preaching and common life will be. I was conscious of thereby standing methodologically in the tradition of the reformers, for whom exegesis was the lifeblood of the church, and who believed that scripture should stand over against all human traditions. I have not changed this aim and this method, nor do I intend to. Indeed, the present controversy, from my own point of view, often appears to me in terms of a battle for the Reformers’ aims and methods – going back to scripture over against all human tradition – against some of their theological positions (and, equally, those of their opponents, since I believe that often both sides were operating with mistaken understandings of Paul). I believe that Luther, Calvin, and many of the others would tell us to read scripture afresh, with all the tools available to us – which is after all what they did – and to treat their own doctrinal conclusions as important but not as important as scripture itself."

Shine on you crazy diamond

Sometimes it's a real mission to see difficulties and challenges as fun or desirable things. Who would be mad enough to start a company?

You have to do everything. I mean, everything. Not just the things you're qualified to do. Not just the things you enjoy doing. Not just the things for which someone else takes a larger responsibility as your leader or boss. Not just the things you know how to do. Not just the things you know need doing. No, everything. The things you know, and the things you don't.

And along the way, you have to be ready with that nice shiny 'elavator pitch' that explains, in 20 seconds (the time in an elevator with a trapped CEO), why he or she should buy what you do.

O, and confidence. Remember confidence.

Woooo-hooooo!

Many congratulations to David and Angela on the birth of baby Lucy mid-evening yesterday!

Ok, so congratulate me. I have a list of things I want to blog about but I have a more urgent list of things that I need to do for work, so I am resisting the urge to blog.

mystery, o mystery enigmatic

why is it that a coffee and a conversation can completely alter the disposition of mind & body?

why is it that someone can hop on a bus, and without saying a word, rock my world?

sing it: I'm a believer

A short treatise on absolutes and postmodernity

The post below has got me thinking. There are two basic options for understanding what someone might mean when they argue against absolute truth.

Someone may be denying an independent reality 'out there'. They would see our environment as somehow constructed in the interaction between subject (the perciever) and object (the percieved). This is the sort of radical relativism that people like Chuck Colson get upset about. It's the 'make your own truth' sort of stuff. Reality is what I make it.

Ontheotherhand. It is perfectly possible to affirm an independent reality 'out there', beyond the subject, and yet deny that any description of it is absolute, as I have done below. This is a way of acknowledging subjectivity.

This subjectivity concerns embeddedness. Every perciever has a vantage-point; there is no such thing as a 'view from nowhere'. Nobody is neutral. And the tools of perception (such as senses and language) are not universally identical. No view can be identically generated for all people, of all times, in all places.

That last statement sums up the crux of the issue, I think. For, the tools of perception and meaning are constructed from the interaction of human action with God's creation. Out of such interaction comes all the varied and wonderful means we have to speak to one another: cultural forms, language, symbols, imagery, clothing, address, ritual. This is the same material from which the bible is constructed.

The shaping of such tools has limits. There are some things that the creation can't be made to do or to mean, because it has a God-imposed constitution - as I have written about previously. For instance, sharing our bodies sexually cannot be made a casual affirmation of friendship. The creation under God's rule rebels against such uses, and rebukes us in the judgment of pain, broken relationships, cursed offspring, and disease. The lesson that God's meaning will win was the one that Adam and Eve learnt when they pitted themeselves and the serpent against God in the Garden, over the issue of a certain fruit.

But insofar as our shaping of creation - our working with it - is in harmony with God's intentions, we can create a truly staggering array of beautiful, trustworthy meaning-bearers. And in each of the various times and places in which humans are, such arrays become unique and differentiated.

This richness is the origin of the tremendous variety of cultural forms and features that we find throughout the world. At the tower of Babel God fast-tracked this process of differentiation, but that's beside the point: it would have happened anyway. And hence, as different communities develop, we find the need to translate meaning.

Now, one of the things that Chuck Colson gets wrong in his book on worldviews is precisely this: he doesn't engage intelligently with what it might mean to dismiss absolutes. Reacting uncritically, as if no such dismissal can be a good one, he uses the language of absolutes against 'relativism' to discuss the distinctives of a Christian worldview.

The problem with this is the cultural embeddedness of his readers. Postmodernism, rejecting the philosophy of modernism, has for various reasons (not all of them good) rejected the idea that anyone can speak absolute truth. It has, in the last 50 or so years, taught people to speak a a different kind of language. Colson's language is now therefore alien to our society. I find this approach less than ideal from a Christian educator.

Recall the apostle Paul, speaking on Mars Hill in Athens, using the language and poetry of the Gentile greeks to tell them about the gospel? The gospel does not require a particular type of language in which to take shape. We must therefore speak the language of our hearers if we are to be effective in our communication. We must be all things to all men.

Colson's approach is disappointing because postmodernity does offer genuine pearls. It is a valuable correction to the idolatrous knowlege of modernity, to which Christians have been as susceptible as anyone. And yet he not only leaves his readers without any critical understanding of their own cultural tradition, but affirms this ignorance as effective Christian witness.

His approach is doubly disappointing because what he wants to affirm as orthodox is easily available to the biblically grounded Christian, speaking the language of postmodernity with discernment. Christian users of 'absolute' langauge want to affirm that there is a reality 'out there', that it cannot be manipulated by man's desires; that it is in fact God's reality. Yet I can say all that, and still maintain the sense of relativism that I outlined earlier. Framing the discussion in terms of God's creation and God's rule allows me to speak faithfully about the state in which we find ourselves, while affirming the riches of fully embedded, viewpoint-differentiated perception and meaning.

In short, while denying absolutes, I can still say, with the biblical writers, that "It is a trustworthy saying that...". All I must ensure is that I am selecting linguistic tools that have meaning for my hearers.

musings

Since YHWH chose, out of all the things on earth, to manifest Himself as fire and cloud (to Israel), do we say that fire and cloud are absolutely true? It sounds wierd, doesn't it?

In the same way, perhaps, we should keep our distance from the absoluteness of any words used to describe God. Devices such as words, fire and cloud can point away from themselves and tell us something about YHWH, but it is He that is absolutely true, not them. They are trustworthy insofar as they communicate something about God.

So, all such devices are analogies, a grasping at something beyond themselves, an attempt to arrange recognised meanings in a way that speaks, at that moment of hearing, about their object. Such things are tools.

Hmmm. As humans, we are appointed by YHWH to speak of Him; we are His images. And therefore we are the closest thing to absolute truth that it's possible to get. Quite challenging, that. And who is the foremost human, the one who faithfully, trustworthily, communicated the fullness of God to Israel? Jesus Christ.

What dignity humanity bears, when it lives in faith!

I am reminded strongly of Psalm 8. And I suspect that assigning an absolute to anything other than God is both dehumanising and idolatrous: it sets up another image of God in our place.

The wind blows his tears back like the earpieces of a pair of spectacles. The bridge has begun to shine. He turns and sees that the sun has risen and is making a path to him over the water.

He is held, though he does not hold. He is caught up again in the old pattern of entrances: of minds into minds, of minds into place, places into minds. The pattern limits and complicates him, singling him out in his own flesh. Out of the multitude of possible lives that have surrounded and beckoned to him like a crowd around a star, he returns now to himself, a mere meteorite, scorched, small, and fallen. He has met again his one life and death, and he takes them back. It is as though, leaving, he has met himself already returning, pushing in front of him a barn seventy-five feet by forty, and a hundred acres of land, six generations of his own history, partly failed, and a few dead and living whose love has claimed him forever. He will be partial, and he will die; he will live out the truth of that. Though he does not hold, he is held. He is grieving, and he is full of joy. What is that Egypt but his Promised Land?

- Wendell Berry, Remembering, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988, pp.58-57

Out the Window

Wellington can be so...beautiful. Today the streets are dry, and the day is misty and still. There's low cloud hanging around the tops of the hills like wraiths, and it feels like we're in a mountain village or - at the least - some place wrapped in the sense of home, of here and now, from which the outside world is faded away. It might be out there somewhere, I guess, but today the boundaries are drawn in cosily.

Marshal your evidence

I give you a shnippet of NT Wright's thoughts on The Passion. It is worth saying that all the particular criticisms he gives are new to me, and strike me as both reasonable and informed. I find myself liking the movie slightly less than I did (though I still intend seeing it again in the late afternoon of next Good Friday).

Ups to Garth George: the responsibilities of the child (via Dan)

The hardship of faith

Part of the difficulty, it seems to me, in experiencing the despondency of faith is that the circumstances of trial are never quite what I expect. They always put me in a place that I had not already explored with my imagination and populated with my fantasies of 'standing strong'. They put me, in other words, in a place uttery foriegn, utterly different to the one I had steeled myself to face.

Indeed, it seems to me that it is precisely when we steel ourselves for a fight, and find it where we expect, that we are at our worst. So, for instance, it is part of Reformed lore to stand when all others abandon the truth in various degrees of apostacy. It is lore that has become romance to us; the romance that causes a perverse delight to be taken in being the one who stands to fight. And fight we do.

But you see, it is not in the places prepared afore, by our romantic imaginations, that we find reliance on God. In such places we more often find our own strategies, our own strengths, our own tactics and responses. And thus we find the very opposite of humility, but a kind of steely determination that, after all, I will hold.

So I suspect that God rarely puts us in situations demanding a choreographed response. At least, not when He means us to grow. The situations that match our romantic fantasies are probably those where God is tempting us to show our true colours; they are those of judgment.

This, I think, is the hurt and pain of faith. God casts us for a time in a place unknown, in an alien landscape, unprepared and not in the least bit romantic. And there, ironically, we are tempted to say God has abandoned me, because we cannot find any of our usual strengths or markers. And yet it seems to me that such a place is exactly where we must call out to God, to find Him again, to seek Him in humilty, fear, and dependence. It is here in which all of us is stripped away.

And yet what a hideous and horrible place it is. Exposed and alone, it feels achingly close to that place where it becomes obvious that we should abandon God, and do what seems right to us. For of what benefit has God been, after all? Where has my faith got me? Here? Then what is it worth?

Yet here in the wilderness, in the place I cannot navigate and do not recognise, is - if it may be found - the gentle, refinining, stunningly compassionate grace of God.

O God, make Thyself known.

My stomach twists

Messers Wilson and Jones write that homosexuality is God's curse on a culture led astray by the church. I am tempted to dismiss the analysis; but parts ring true. Other parts I am already deeply committed to. Not beyond changing my mind, but enough so that when I think of the parts I hesistate over, my guts end up in a knot.

They conclude, for instance, that -

"True repentance in the Church, not trust in civil coercion, will either restore that order or establish a different order. So we openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm as God's means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for wicked fathering within the Church."

This may be a fine recommendation, but the Lord have mercy! If boys like me grow up in today's society with homosexual marriage normalised, and homsexual values, tastes, fashions, and abilities celebrated, then many more will be trapped, as I would have been. We will become structurally bisexual - in every way saying, "it doesn't matter who you play with". Shall we openly accept homosexual marriage, then?

Arrrrrggggggh!!!!!!!!

But God knows this, of course. He knows. What does this mean, though? It cannot be - it must not be - that we look at the homosexuality of people in such a society and say there go the cursed, the damned of God. Or is it? Is this God's will? I cannot accept that. Or should I? So how do we deal with the trapped, the hurting, in practice? I suppose that is what I want to ask Mr. Wilson, with heat - how do we deal with the product of God's curse??

Perhaps it is God at whom I am angry. But Wilson will do for a target, right now.

Rage. Inchoate.

Tears. The mockers arise and say, "where is your God?"

O Lord, glorify your Name; heal your people.

Worthy to partake

There is a most fascinating series of comments after this post of John Barach's, reflecting on the issue of visitors turning up to a Lord's Supper celebration, and when invited, saying "no thanks, I had it last week".

I especially and warmly commend comment #7 to your attention.

Psalm 118

Here's my attempted reconstruction of the voices in Psalm 118. There seem to be 4:

1. the voice of the choirmaster, framing the song
2. the voice of the priesthood or religious leaders, instructing and blessing Israel
3. the voice of Israel, narrating her history and thanks,
4. the voice of the assembly, confessing faith

It's a great Psalm. It has the form of a choreographed liturgy, seemingly oriented around (and culminating in) the sacrifice at a great gathering (perhaps at a feast-day). Bounded by the all-encompassing instruction to give thanks for the Lord's love, it has a narration of Israel's history in the first person. The response of the gathered assembly, as the heirs and posessors of that history, is to affirm the Lord's work and to seek further blessing. The priests, speaking from the Temple, give it, thus sealing YHWH's name to Israel (read the dialogue; it's fascinating - Israel coming in the name of the Lord sets up all the resonances of that in Christ's ministry). The assembly and priests then interact around the sacrificial event, togther portraying it as the Lord's light shining within Israel, whose response of ritual confession reminds me somewhat of an inverted Shema.

Also very stimulating is Jesus' rather loaded appropriation of this Psalm to position himself as, simultaneously, the true Israel named of YHWH, and in some sense the glory of the Temple - YHWH Himself! (See Matt 23-24, and esp. 23:29-24:3). But that's another story...

CHOIRMASTER:
Give thanks to the LORD , for he is good; his love endures forever.

PRIESTHOOD:
Let Israel say: "His love endures forever."
Let the house of Aaron say: "His love endures forever."
Let those who fear the LORD say: "His love endures forever."

ISRAEL:
In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free.

The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?
The LORD is with me; he is my helper. I will look in triumph on my enemies.

It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes.

All the nations surrounded me, but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.
They surrounded me on every side, but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.
They swarmed around me like bees, but they died out as quickly as burning thorns; in the name of the LORD I cut them off.

I was pushed back and about to fall, but the LORD helped me. The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation. Shouts of joy and victory resound in the tents of the righteous: "The LORD's right hand has done mighty things! The LORD's right hand is lifted high; the LORD's right hand has done mighty things!" I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the LORD has done.

The LORD has chastened me severely, but he has not given me over to death. Open for me the gates of righteousness; I will enter and give thanks to the LORD . This is the gate of the LORD through which the righteous may enter. I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation.

ASSEMBLY:
The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

O LORD, save us; O LORD , grant us success. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD .

PRIESTHOOD:
From the house of the LORD we bless you. [the Hebrew for 'you' is plural]

ASSEMBLY:
The LORD is God, and he has made his light shine upon us.

PRIESTHOOD:
Bind the festal sacrifice with ropes and take it up to the horns of the altar. [marginal reading of this verse]

ISRAEL:
You are my God, and I will give you thanks; you are my God, and I will exalt you.

CHOIRMASTER:
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.