The latest in our James series...

Amanda has taken the last couple of weeks and they work together well. The first focuses on our response to trial, the second on the different ways we can take action and from what place we do that.

In reflection, here's a poem written by Koreana.

Soak in and observe,

Notice, 

Be mindful.

What are you seeing?

What is it evoking in you?

What parts is it touching?

Where is it running deep?

Where is it taking you?

Where are you in this moment?

This moment you are witnessing.

This moment you can participate in.

This moment to be present in.

To live in.

To see a new.

To respond to.

To enter into. 

To Soak in and be soaked.

Saturated in His love for us,

Washing over ones soul

Over and Over again.

Enjoy!

Ben Wilson: Swearing in Church

I have a friend who swears the way most people would use a comma. When she's around me and suddenly becomes aware of her swearing she feels the need to apologize. Knowing I'm a Christian she believes it offends me. I actually don't notice her swearing. Nor do I care. It's kinda cute really.

Which begs the question, why do we as a church (especially) generally believe certain words to be bad?
“But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” - Colossians 3:8 (NIV)

I think it's important we differentiate using a swear word from 'swearing'. There isn't much innately wrong with a swear word. The heart of swearing, the reason it's offensive is because it's been allied to wrath, impatience, frustration and insult. Swear words have become affiliated with these because of how they've been used down the ages. Using one of these words doesn't have to be inherently offensive, but the way you use it might.

If people started saying 'fluffy bunnies' in angry response, maybe it too could become a swear word. If used consistently and adopted by wider culture, perhaps the world at large would know the phrase 'fluffy bunnies' to be offensive.

I should hope nobody thinks I'm implying the liberal use of swearing is a good idea. There are better words to use and it's not particularly articulate. I use to swear at everything. Just for gigs and shiggles. I was pretty good at it too, but I gave up a few years ago - much to the lament of my friends. I found myself an angry person doing it and it wasn't worth the detriment of my character. Which is a shame 'cause swearing can make things funnier. Maybe it's the novelty, or maybe it's how the words sound. Regardless there are more skilful ways to induce comedy.

I've come to learn though that a swear word can be just like any other. A word isn't bad in itself because a 'u', k', 'c' and 'f' are arranged in certain order - rather from the malice they've been abused with, the malice we've connected it to.

I'm not against swear words, what I am against is the legalism that taboos them in absolute. It strikes me as absent from the redemption and freedom that Christ offers to our lives.

So the next time someone drops one from the pulpit, whether it's tacky or warranted, pointless or meaningful - look past the word and rather at the heart of what they're saying.

Suffering, trials and joy. What the...

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

I’m going to have a good hard look here at this particular line in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, three verses that have brought believers a lot of comfort and assurance of God’s love, but have also brought a heck of a lot of debate and controversy. Because of possible significant repercussions for other theology to be built from, this verse should be treated with care and understood in light of what Paul is saying throughout the letter’s argument to avoid nauseating and never ending conversations about predestination and making God sound like a bit of an idiot.

At the centre of all of Paul’s thought is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is mentioned 35 times throughout and is undoubtedly the focus of much of Paul’s attention to God’s working in the world. This is particularly important for interpreting the text in hand with 21 of those appearances in chapter 8 alone. So it would probably be sensible to read this passage with this focus in mind as we try to get into Paul’s head on this one!

It is said that a prominent preacher during the first World War was said to have claimed that Romans 8:28 was “the hardest verse in the Bible to believe.” Paul seems confident that  despite evidence that might suggest otherwise, God is in the midst of the world working for its good. But obviously this raises very difficult questions about the nature of God’s work within the world and the issue of ultimate responsibility of suffering.

It would be a mistake to interpret this in two (perhaps understandable) ways that lead to further problems. The first is to read that Paul is saying ‘It will all come right in the end’ in some sort of universal optimism, and that Paul is simply encouraging people to wait until everything is good at some future moment. The second would be to read that Paul is suggesting that all things, although often negative, are working to achieve a positive goal in a cosmic “the end justifies the means” scenario. But this is not a case of the universe working together for ultimate good in some utilitarian sense, like God is manipulating cosmic events to teach us a lesson or something. We have big problems then when we look at actual (not just theoretical) suffering, events like divorce, death, abuse, genocide and rejection. If we want to argue that God is somehow behind all that then we’ve got a bit of a task on our hands!

In context of the chapter so far with a strong emphasis on God in control of working within creation to bring about His redemptive purposes, and acknowledging very real present sufferings, I would probably suggest that the most coherent way of understanding Paul’s argument would be to read this as “God is working in all things, including seriously crap situations, to bring about good for those who love Him.”

It is to say that God is involved within situations working for good, rather than just using an optimistic and very general bumper-sticker phrase to encourage positivity. Present sufferings are very real for Paul and so he is being very careful to focus on God’s goodness. He continues to do this in the following verses, but as we will see, this ‘goodness’ is really talking about God conforming believers into the image of His Son, not a general remark about having good fortune. Working for good is to made more like Jesus – the trials and sufferings are still just as crappy, but God wastes none of it!

After this, Paul embarks on a description of what God has done for the believer in Christ, reminding us that we lack nothing, we have every spiritual blessing now. Pretty amazing stuff.

I would also suggest that Romans 8:28-30 also helps us to reframe our ideas around suffering. Paul makes it clear in all his letters that real suffering is inevitable, but goes on to explain that although suffering is a very real and serious reality, it is not a hopeless reality. In fact it would seem that it is central to imaging God and being ‘conformed to the image of His Son.’ It is in connection with an acknowledgement of suffering that Paul writes these verses and there it is within suffering that the Holy Spirit is working within these things “for the good of those who love Him.”

Totsengard says it this way: “That is the journey on which the sovereign God is taking us, a cruciform journey for Christ’s sake and in Christ’s image, where the itinerary is by no means only on the heights, but rather in the everyday depths near which we always find ourselves.”

God doesn’t leave us. God turns the crud into gold. We’re made more like Jesus in our sufferings when we allow the Spirit to guide us through it.

Mean.

If anyone wants the full essay hit me up. Here's Sunday's talk on this in engaging with James 1:

Francis Spufford on the mystery of experiencing God

“I’m going to have to generalise freely now from my own experience, because I’m dealing strictly with internal events, and I don’t have direct access to anyone else’s interior. I haven’t been anyone else; only myself. But I’d guess that for most of us who do end up believing, the moment when we asked and nothing happened changes in retrospect. It becomes, afterwards, part of the history of how help did after all arrive, though not in the way we expected it to. We look back on it and we find it altered. Its significance is different now. Literally its significance: its sign-age, the way that it points. 

It isn’t the story that has been rewritten, with a piece of imaginary cause and effect projected back into it from some happier future point, with unreliable memory erasing the disappointments of the past by inserting a phantom helper’s phantom action. That’s not the feeling. It remains perfectly clear that at the moment of asking nothing happened, nothing altered in the world, nothing started up. But we begin to recognise that the moment signifies anyway, because it was then, when we asked and because we asked, that we started, falteringly, tentatively, to be able to notice something was already happening…

…Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can ‘beyond or ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are included in the sum of what is so? I don’t know. I’ve only got metaphors to work with, and this is where metaphor, which compares one existing thing to another thing, is being asked to reach beyond its competence. Beyond, again: but I’m not talking about movement through or out of any of the shapes of existing things. I’m talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which now feels as if, in this direction that can’t be stated, it is no thickness at all…

…I feel what I feel when there’s someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world that glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of…

…On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent’s safe hold is nothing compared to this. I’m being carried on the universe’s shoulder. But on another level, it’s terrifying. Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed. And while it may be safe, it is not kind in one of the primary ways in which human beings set about being kind to each other…

…I have been shown the authentic bad news about myself, in a perspective which is so different from the tight focus of my desperation that it is good news in itself; I have been shown that though I may see myself in grim optics of sorrow and self-dislike, I am being seen all the while, if I can bring myself to believe it, with a generosity wider than oceans. I’ve been gently and implacably reminded of how little I know a whole truth about myself. I have been made unfamiliar to myself, and therefore hopeful; I’ve had the grip of desperation loosened…

…These are explanations of how my feelings might have arisen, physically, but they don’t explain my feelings away. They don’t prove that my feelings were not really my feelings. They certainly don’t prove that there was nobody there for me to be feeling them about. If God does exist, then from my point of view it’s hard to see how a physical creature like myself could ever register His presence except through some series or other of physically-determined bodily states.”

-  

 Francis Spufford – Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, p62 - 67 - well worth reading!