Bournagain

It seems that Eve did not fully understand the reasons why the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not to be eaten (we see later that it was in fact Adam that was held accountable for his wife’s actions), but this lack of understanding did not mitigate in any way the requirement that she obey.  I don’t suppose Abel understood exactly why God approved the offering of an animal but didn’t approve an offering of vegetables (Genesis 4:2-5), any more than we do today, but nevertheless God’s reaction to his offering shows that Abel had obeyed, but Cain hadn’t.

Noah is an excellent example of what obedience looks like.  We can barely imagine life inside the ark those 40 long days and nights, shut up in that huge windowless box, buffeted in all directions by the waves.  But forty days is only just over a month.  What we don’t always notice is that once the rain had stopped, Noah waited over 7 months before leaving the ark. After the ark stopped moving, 7 more months living on stale food with all the smell and mess of those animals, presumably in the dark, breathing old air.  Why did he do that?

Why did God require that of Noah and his family?  We can only guess – he had his own reasons.  But we see by Noah’s obedience that he had unshakeable faith in the fact that God knew best, that he loved him, and had his best interests at heart.  This is what gave Noah the confidence to obey, even in such difficult circumstances.

“Faith” has become a very esoteric word, meaning something like a vague positive feeling that everything is going to work out ok.  At least that’s how the term is often used in popular music and Disney movies.  This is not at all the same kind of thing as the faith that we find in the Scriptures, which is a very concrete, day by day discipline of believing God: believing that God is who He says he is, that His vision of my identity is the correct one, and that He really does have my best interests at heart.  On this basis, trusting and obeying him is the most intelligent response I can make.  This is not a once-and-for all decision, but a choice that has to be made several times each day, when we are faced with situations that on the surface would seem to call God’s love into question.

How did Noah’s family feel about being cooped up in the ark for so many months following the end of the rains?  We don’t know, but I imagine that Noah’s decision not to leave the ark until God explicitly told them to possibly didn’t go down very well.  There were a hundred and one reasons why it would have seemed a good idea to get out of that place.  ”Did God really say that we had to wait….?” – echoes of Eve about eating the fruit.  ”Did God really say…?” is the question at the root of all doubt concerning the integrity and goodness of God.

But not only did Noah stand firm, but what was his first act in the new world?  No sooner had his feet touched terra firma than he was looking for materials to construct an altar:

Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.  The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in is heart:”Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.  And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.  As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. Genesis 8:20-22

Much more could be said about the significance of altars and sacrifices, but for now let’s just notice that Noah shows by his obedience that he is acting consistently with the line of Abel, and his obedience is what saved humanity, and continues to be a protection for us right up to our day, regardless of the evil inclinations of human hearts.

That’s because God doesn’t forgive because of man.  God forgives because of God.  Obeying Him because it’s in our best interests is as good a motivation as any when we start on our journey, but we are on a path heading for a deeper understanding of obedience, and a higher motivation, which is that we obey him for no other reason that He is who He is.

I’m sitting here in my shed, which has recently had an extensive facelift to transform it into an office.  Part of the process has required sorting through piles of old papers – the accumulation of several years of odd documents that I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw out.  Surrounded by piles of paper, let me take a break and share with you an old treasure I must have clipped from somewhere.  I mean really old – this one dates back to A.D.150 – well, the text, if not the document itself.  Apparently it was a report received by one Diognetes from some outpost of the Roman Empire.  This man had evidently been marked by his dealings with a peculiar group of people that seemed to be spreading throughout the empire…

The Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country nor language nor the customs which they observe.  For they neither inhabit cities of their own nor employ a peculiar form of speech nor lead a life which is marked out by a singularity…

They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.  As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners.

Every foreign land is to them as their native country and the land of their birth as a land of strangers…

They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.  They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.  They obey the prescribed laws of the land and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.

They love all men and are persecuted by all…They are poor yet make many rich…To sum up in a word: What the soul is in the body, that is a Christian in the world.

Were Diognetes alive today, I wonder if he would be able to recognise a Christian.

I have got so much out of reading other people’s blogs over the years (see my list of bloggy heroes in the sidebar), but my own has suffered from a bout of indentity crisis to the point where it went into hibernation.

It was partly due to the challenge of living as a person of faith in a culture where everybody assumes that faith is to be completely restricted to the private sphere of life. This creates somewhat of a dilemma if your life’s goal is to follow Jesus who said not to hide your light under a bowl, but to put it on a stand so everyone in the house can see it – how can you reconcile keeping faith private with letting the world know what makes you tick?

For my work I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it has become increasingly obvious to me that the only way to completely protect your privacy on the Internet is not to use it at all. Anything you put up there is available for the whole world to see. This was brought home to me when I was kicked out of a local community centre where I was running an activity. The director had been alerted to the fact that a dangerous cult leader had infiltrated their centre and was trying to brainwash their members. Some well-intentioned officer of the French religious police (the anti-sect brigade) had followed a rabbit trail from a press article about me, to my blog (via Google), to the mission organisation I am part of, and discovered that I was a threat to the well-being of all the patrons of the community centre. The humour of the fact that it was the yoga instructor that showed me the door was definitely not lost on me. Yoga, sophrology, tarot reading, doing spooky things with magnets were all kosher, but faith in Jesus of Nazareth was definitely not – not that I had even mentioned anything about my faith by that point.

This experience was partly what lead to my bloggy identity crisis – I wasn’t sure how much I should be putting out there for general consumption, and it was easier just to give up writing altogether. The kind of behaviour I witnessed at this community centre might seem extreme – and I hasten to add that many of my non-believing friends also found it very peculiar. However, it is a completely logical application of the assumption that faith should be private – which incidentally was never the intention of the separation of church and state. La laïcité – that untranslatable concept which is a foundational value of the French Republic – should be about protecting French citizens who adhere to a minority faith from being disadvantaged, protecting us from having religious beliefs imposed upon us, and allowing free exchange and debate on the subject of religion. Instead it has become an innoculation against any faith other than the majority faith of the culture, which is difficult to name, but can be expressed in a series of -isms (individualism, materialism, existentialism, evolutionism, republicanism à la française, laïcisme etc.)

But why should that stop me from blogging about things that are important to me? If somebody reads something on my blog that s/he finds offensive, the little red circle (for Mac users) or the little red ‘x’ (for the unconverted) is only one click away. I now see blogging as one way of being a whole person – not talking psycho-babble here – I mean that there is a huge temptation to modify your words and actions to suit the circles you are moving in. I have a tendency to be much more open about my experiences in God with those who share the same faith as me, than with those who don’t. This is normal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its good. I use religious jargon when speaking with other Christians, which I would not use when talking with work colleagues, for example. This is part of “hiding my light under a bowl” because the language we use can exclude people. Being whole is about being the same person whoever you are with, which is why blogging is such a good discipline, because it makes you think about how you communicate. Everything I put up here I have to be willing for people from all the different spheres of my life to read (well, theoretically at least – the odds of people finding my blog amongst the 36 squillion blogs out there are almost as great as the odds that the universe evolved from nothing).

All that to say to anyone who stumbles onto my blog that I’m back (Hi Mum), with a spruced-up blog theme, and occasional postings where I will think out loud about living in France, faith, family and mission, not necessarily in that order, with lots of unfinished thoughts, digressions, and useful links to people I admire.

You’d think that after 9 years of working in the domain, I would have a better grasp on the question “what is mission”? But if the Christian life is about transformation and pilgrimage, it stands to reason that lifelong learning is part of the deal, so I suppose it’s no surprise that our views change as our understanding grows. I have been increasingly uneasy with a vision that places the simple “conversion of souls” at the centre of the enterprise. Before the stones start flying let me say that I’m not suggesting that this is unimportant, but rather that it is not the centre. This is where I have found Newbigin’s writings so very helpful:

It is impossible to stress too strongly that the beginning of mission is not an action of ours, but the presence of a new reality, the presence of the Spirit of God in power [...] The great missionary proclamations in Acts are not given on the unilateral initiative of the apostles but in response to questions asked by others, questions prompted by the presence of something which calls for explanation [...] Where the Church is faithful to its Lord, there the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the question to which the gospel is the answer. And that, I suppose, is why the letters of St. Paul contain so many exhortations to faithfulness but no exhortations to be active in mission. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

This is from a man who spent most of his career as a missionary in India. It almost sounds heretical. He also makes the point that the end of the enterprise is not the successful conclusion of our projects, but the coming of Christ to reign. Jesus’ statement, “Where I am, there shall my servant be” is central here. Where is Jesus? At the frontier of light and darkness, where the acted out good news of the kingdom is pushing back the powers of evil, whatever form they may take. If we want to be with Jesus, that’s where we need to be.

All around me I see projects. When our projects succeed, we feel good. When they fail, we sink into existential crisis. Our whole reason for being seems to be predicated on our projects. This is because we see the Church as the source and agent of God’s coming kingdom, which is not so very far from the imperialism of medieval Christendom. The Church is not the source, but the sign and witness. It is here that the reality of the kingdom begins to break through in a visible way.

Mission is an acted out doxology. That is its deepest secret. Its purpose is that God may be glorified.

So why aren’t more people in our culture looking a the Church and asking questions?

Okay, so I know I’ve been silent for months. This blog has been suffering from a terrible lack of attention. But I just had to share this with you, from one of my favourite authors at the moment.

Faith enables us to be at the same time realistic and hopeful. We can be realistic, knowing that no human project can eliminate the powers of darkness as they operate in human life. This realism delivers us from the utopian fanaticisms which have condemned millions of people to misery and death in the cause of an imagined future. But at the same time we can be hopeful, acting hopefully in apparently hopeless situations, not dreaming of an absolute perfection on this side of death, but doing resolutely that relative good which is possible now, doing it as an offering to the Lord who is able to take it and keep it for the perfect kingdom which is promised. In this sense [...] our actions in the public life of the world are acted prayers for the kingdom. They do not themselves lead directly to the kingdom. They are acted prayers for its coming and as such they act as signs of its reality and so enable others to act in hope.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

It’s such a shame this guy isn’t better known. What I love here is the refusal to escape into a pessimism which sees the world “going to hell in a handcart”, which leads some to retreat into a kind of “lifeboat” Christianity which refuses to engage with the world other than trying to pull a few drowning people into the boat. But at the same time there is no room for living in denial, as if heaven was already here. Yes the world is profoundly sick, and yes at this point in time we can’t actually bring ultimate positive change through our actions. But, we can rest assured that our actions are not wasted. Change is coming! It is not our actions that will bring it about, but our acts do have an important prophetic role in pointing people toward the glorious reality that is coming. I also really like the idea of viewing our actions as a form of prayer. No room for passivity here.

How refreshing to find this interview with Bishop N.T Wright in Time Magazine.

The question of heaven is a good example of how we fail to understand the clear and obvious teaching of Scripture because of the blinkers imposed by our “Christian” culture. Men have been burnt at the stake for less than Wright’s assertions about what happens after death. This is a crucial question which cannot help but influence the way we live. The “it’ll all pan out in the end” approach to eschatology and the question of what happens when you die has left many of us ineffective and unproductive in our faith. I think there’s a real need for us to get our theology sorted on this issue.

I had one of the more surreal experiences of my life this week. We had set up an English conversation & coffee event at a local community centre. Our first meeting was a great success, and we were just planning the next event when I was called in to meet with the director of the centre.

It transpired that an overly zealous member of what is sometimes affectionately referred to as the “anti-cult cult” had contacted the centre to warn them about me. I was informed that the community centre was awaiting a file of incriminating details confirming that I had infiltrated the community centre in order to brainwash the other members and drag them into my “cult”. This file duly arrived, and I went to a meeting to hear the verdict.

Yes, it was as they feared: I am a dangerous and deceitful man, and I was to be struck off the membership of the community centre without further ado.
“We are a non-confessional organisation sir”, I was reminded by the Catholic director and her yoga-instructor assistant, who rather put her foot in it when she said that as a coordinator of an activity it was impossible not to let one’s beliefs show through, and this would be in violation of the secular principles of the community centre… Whoops. So, in other words, it’s okay for Hinduism to “show through”, but not Christianity ??

I was fascinated to know what juicy bits of information there might be in my file, but they made the rather surprising decision to ferret the file out of my sight the moment I asked for it. So, no specific accusation was made, no serious investigation into whether or not any complaints had been made, just an arbitrary “on your bike”, for no apparent reason other than that I am perceived to be an e***gelical Christian (there’s that terrible “E”-word again!)

You think this is a joke, right?

It really happened.

One of the most striking things about our return to France is what a different place we are in compared to August 2004 when we last came back from New Zealand. Last time we landed in the middle of a visit from the ship Doulos to Saint Nazaire (near Nantes), new interns joining us in our project to assist a church in the north of Nantes, various projects with Christian youth, and a whole bunch of meetings and conferences in the diary. We hit the ground running and didn’t stop to draw breath for several months.

This time we have arrived in a more typical French August: eerily quiet. If you didn’t know that everyone has head for the beach or the mountains, you would wonder whether you’d stumbled onto the set of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

But even so, many of the people we have most wanted to catch up with have been around, and the most meaningful things that have happened since our return 2 weeks ago has been renewing contact with friends. We’ve had a more or less constant stream of visitors, which has been both surprising and encouraging, and has really helped in dealing with the odd coup de blues* over leaving New Zealand.

We have not come back with a stack of new projects to launch into, but already we see the few ideas we have beginning to take shape. Some of them are not quite cooked enough to talk about them here, but we are really enjoying having the space to step off the ministry “roundabout”, and actually ask the question, “Lord, what do you have for us to do?”, and sensing the freedom to wait for him to answer before forging ahead.

Not sure that we’ve ever been in this place before.

*coup de blues – you can probably guess: a time of feeling down.

Had a great weekend in Lower Hutt, and some interesting discussions including a chat on the subject of tolerance with a friend of a friend. We got there by a fairly circuitous route, touching on the war on terror, world peace and the role of religion in armed conflicts. But what got us onto tolerance was those statues of Buddha that were vandalised by the Taleban in Afghanistan. Intolerance was seen as the vice behind this act, and present in all the major world religions. “If the religions would just teach tolerance, the world would be a better place” was the basic idea.

This got me thinking. Sooner or later something or someone will step onto the world scene to fill the present vacuum of leadership. The chaos we see today (the war on terror, Iran, AIDS, Israel/Palestine, global warming etc.) will continue to escalate until some agency, be it a man, a consortium, or even a government, arrives on the scene proposing some concrete solutions. It is only a matter of time before these situations become so desperate that the world will be willing to accept peace at almost any price, and it is in precisely this context that this agency (let’s call it a “Man of Peace”) will come with a clear and seemingly effective strategy to unite national and international powers to to resolve once and for all the problems that plague the world.

But these solutions will come with a price tag, and it is here that the current love affair that we have with this notion of tolerance will come to a brutal end. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever noticed that there are occasions in the Bible where people act in a certain way and God commends it, and yet the same act at a different time by different people is an act of sinful disobedience? A good example can be found in comparing the census of Israel that Moses undertook in Numbers 26 with the census of David in II Samuel 24. When Moses finished the census in obedience to God’s command, God gave to the nation an inheritance of land which he has never revoked. In this way he blessed Moses’ obedience.

Several generations later we see King David undertaking exactly the same project which God had blessed in Moses’ day when he sent his commanders throughout the land to count the fighting men of Israel and Judah. The text does not elaborate on David’s motives for doing this, but we see Joab, his trusted advisor, warning him not to do it. David stubbornly continues with his project, and finishes with a stricken conscience, repenting before God for this foolish sin which resulted in a severe outpouring of God’s judgement in the land.

Is God capricious? Does he have double standards? Does he have favourites? Read the rest of this entry »