Tag Archives: faith

Lectionary Psalms

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Easter 3 – Psalm 4

I can remember a Churchwarden moaning about her troubled church, although the phrase is much more widely applicable, by saying ‘We don’t lament here, we just grizzle!’ She was absolutely right about the difference between the two. Lament form is a particular genre in the Psalms, and I’m sure we will get to one before long, which, like any good liturgy, takes people on a journey, in this case from bringing to God their troubles, and their feelings about them, but ending in a place of confidence and hope. Without that journey, and in particular its ending, it is just grizzling. Psalm 4 is officially an individual lament, but the confidence is so strongly present that it almost overshadows the rehearsal of the problems, which in any case are not specified, leading different scholars to speculate wildly on who ‘me’ (v.1) is, and what was up with him. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that this is a prayer for rain, which seems wild beyond any evidence! But without that kind of information, it isn’t easy to exegete the Psalm.

Slightly more possible, though, is the suggestion that this is the prayer of someone who has been falsely accused, and then acquitted, but that there are still people hanging onto his guilt, no doubt saying things like ‘Well, there’s no smoke without fire …’ If that is the case, it might help explain why this is set for Easter. So the Psalm begins with a prayer for God’s v indication, and a rebuke on those still harbouring false impressions about him. The reference to ‘false gods’ in v.2 can better be translated ‘lies’, which would fit with this explanation of the psalmist’s situation. V.3 explains that if God has declared him innocent, there is no place for their belief in his guilt. The accusers are told either to ‘meditate on the goodness of God’ or, more likely, to think about their attitudes and search their hearts in the light of God’s forgiveness of their victim. This should lead them to sacrifices of repentance.

Then the psalmist’s appeal seems to shift from his opponents to his God, and, as is common in lament psalms, he expresses his pain at the treatment he is receiving from others. The word ‘many’ might refer to the recognition that his situation is not an isolated one, and that others, like him, are being hurt by the accusations of cruel people.

The situation resolves into hope, though, when the author prays, and hopes, for the kind of rejoicing which people know when there has been a successful harvest, which is seen as a sign of God’s blessing. This is more likely than to see this as a prayer for rain, although as I write that prayer is being abundantly answered in Sheffield! Finally the psalmist proves his confidence and trust in God by failing to let his troubles keep him tossing and turning at night, a lovely verse which explains this Psalm’s use in the office of Night Prayer or Compline.

This Psalm might, therefore, be seen as applicable to all those of us who, like our Lord, have been falsely accused, and who suffer from the cruel words, and even actions of those who continue to believe that we were in the wrong. In this resurrection season we might be reminded that although Jesus, executed as a criminal, was dramatically vindicated by God, who raised him to new life and reversed the effects of those who hated him, there are still those (in fact the vast majority) who still curse him, accuse him or even just ignore him. I’m not sure what more you can do to prove someone’s innocence than reversing their death penalty (and after it has already been carried out!) but the Bible’s answer is that those who pierced him will one day understand and mourn over what they have done (Rev 1:7) I find that this Psalm spurs me on again to pray for our careless world, and for those I know who continue to regard Jesus as of no account.

Lectionary Psalms

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Mothering Sunday – Psalm 127

Now that we’re all woke up it has become almost a cliché to say that Mothers’ Day can be a very difficult day for many people, so while some of us are busy celebrating mums who love us, of course others will be missing those who have died, or grieving for difficult or even estranged relationships, or desperately wishing that they could become mums themselves. Today really is a minefield, and our thoughts and prayers need to be sensitive to whose who have different things to say to God. I have chosen from the options Psalm 127, another of the Psalms of Ascent which we have looked at previously, perhaps used during a pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple for a major festival. Psalm 127 is also a Wisdom Psalm, containing teaching on how to live well. Whilst it seemingly has two unconnected parts, v.1-2 about the need for reliance on God if we are to be successful and v.3-5 about the blessings of children, there may be an interesting precedent for linking these two themes. We have a song from the Sumerian empire, the oldest known human civilisation which dates back to around 5500BC in southern Iraq. This is a song of praise to the goddess Nisaba who was believed to be the deity without whom no house, palace or city can successfully be built, but who also built families through her gift of children. It may be that this song was known and used later for the worship of Yahweh. It is unlikely either that the ‘house’ is the Temple, or that the author was Solomon, easy though it may be to make those connections. Interestingly Deuteronomy 25:9, among other places in the OT, refers to ‘building up’ the family line through bearing children.

So actually this is not a Psalm in praise of mothers or motherhood, but rather of the God who grants children and builds up the community through them. In biblical thought children, and sons in particular, were the first line of defence of the family when times became hard, particularly for widows with no husbands to provide for them. The picture of your kids as arrows in your quiver speaks of this idea of children as weapons of survival. And of course sons born early in your life will be reaching their prime just as you are getting a bit past yours! This idea is perhaps echoed in the NT’s instructions to children to care for their parents, an apposite comment in a time when we have the ability to pay for others to care for our elderly.

What else can we learn about God from this text? Our dependence on him, of course. It is customary in Church to begin business meetings with a prayer that God will guide us, and the more seriously we take that prayer, according to this text, the more likely we are to be successful in our enterprises. It can be so easy simply to pray the prayer and then get on with our own agendas. After many years of chairing PCC meetings I think I would say that the times when we have most clearly known God’s very specific guidance have been the times when we have been most desperate. God loves it when we simply have nowhere else to turn but to him: that’s why he allows us to get there from time to time. But perhaps it can also give some help to those who are parents about how we treat our kids. I realised pretty early on as a parent that the most important part of my role was always to treat my kids as God would treat them, so that I would reveal through earthly parenting what divine parenting was like, and how my imperfect fatherhood was completed and perfected in the fatherhood of God. That meant, of course, that I had to know how God would treat them in any given situation, which meant that my own discipleship became a vital task if my parenting was to be the best it could. We rarely think of parenting as a theological task, but it really is, and it’s one which doesn’t end when our kids leave home.

Therefore I’m reassured by the first part of the Psalm. Unless God is involved in my parenting, unless he builds me up so that I can build up others, it’s all in vain. Like all parents I felt, and continue to feel, daunted by the task, so it’s great to know that behind all my hard work, joy and tears is the wisdom of a loving Father who, if I let him, will work together with me to build a strong family. You’ll have to ask Steve, Paul and Vicki how well God, their mum and I have done between us!

Reflections on Discipleship – Teach your Children

My job at the moment is developing discipleship in one Anglican diocese, so as you can imagine I do quite a bit of thinking about what discipleship is, what it means, and what it looks like. Here are some random thoughts, gleaned from my reflection on the Bible and current thinking …

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.          (Deut 6)

 We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done. 5 He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, 6 so that the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. 7 Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.                                                                                               (Ps 78)

It was my privilege recently to attend a conference following up the Anecdote to Evidence report. It was a great day, but there was one moment of deep shock and sadness for me. The one major headline of the whole day was that as a church if we don’t begin to take seriously the desperate need to engage with younger generations, we simply have no future. But one speaker asked the question ‘How have we got to this stage?’ Why are parents not passing on Christian commitment to their children?

He spoke of some research in which parents were given a list of ‘values’ – nice, positive qualities such as kindness, respect, honesty, diligence, law-abidingness (if that’s a real word), and also religious faith. The parents were asked to list the top five of these qualities which they would like to see imbued in their children as they grew up. The results were shocking:

  •  Of those who called themselves ‘Anglicans’ only 11% had ‘faith’ in their top five
  • Of those who were ‘active Anglicans’ (attending church regularly) only 28% did, and
  • Of ‘Committed Anglicans’ only 36% did.

Anglicans don’t seem to care whether or not their children grow up with faith! This news cut me to the core. As I pondered it, I reflected that the figures spoke of even committed Christians who regarded their faith as an optional extra, a leisure activity, or a lifestyle choice which, in our tolerant age, they would not be so presumptuous as to try to force on anyone else, even their own kids.

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I am aware that there are many many parents in the churches of our land who know the grief of seeing their children grow up to abandon the religion in which they have been faithfully brought up, and choose lifestyles which they would not want for them. I am sometimes made to feel guilty because all three of my grown-up children are as passionate about God as they ever were, and all seeking to serve him in different ways as their top priority. I also know that for many parents of lost children the reaction is shoulder-shrugging resignation, because the alternative is far too uncomfortable to contemplate.

But if I could address new parents of those contemplating parenthood, I would point them to the passages above and tell them that their single highest calling in life is to make sure that their children have vibrant faith, and that God’s way of achieving this is through parents, and not through Church or Sunday School. If you feel inadequate to this task , welcome to the club. You need to attend seriously to your own discipleship, because you won’t create in your kids what isn’t in you.

And if I could address parents with kids no longer living for God, I would call them to deep, grief-stricken and anguished prayer and intercession, rather than merely believing that ‘everyone does it nowadays’. I know this is uncomfortable: I’ve got myself into deep trouble more than once for saying this, but unless we start taking our children’s faith seriously, there quite simply is no future.

What is Church meant to be for?

I have a friend who is training for ordained ministry in the C of E, and quite frankly he’s struggling a bit with it all. The problem, he told me, is that while everyone thinks they know what church is all about, there has never actually been any discussion about it, and certainly, therefore, no agreed consensus. So much of their learning isn’t really aimed anywhere, or certainly anywhere which he would recognise as being useful. There tends to be a kind of lowest common denominator pretence that we all understand it really.

This problem, I realised, is a microcosm of the church at large. Not many of us, I would dare to suggest, have ever had much discussion about what it is we think we’re doing by belonging to this venerable organisation. Yet we all get on with it week by week, and most of us, if we have ever thought about it, will be working on our own personal agendas.

I have some thoughts about church myself at the moment. I find myself in the position of being a vicar without a church, having been bullied out of my last job and finding it difficult to find a new one. I tell you this so that you will understand that I might just be a bit jaded at this stage of my life. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it if I’m honest.

So I want to take a few weeks of my blog to explore this question. I’ll begin with a few historical reflections, based on changing fashions during my lifetime, but I want to go on and ask some deeper questions about the way we do church, and get a few rants of my own off my chest.

 

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I’m going to end this series with a model of church which I believe is a useful and biblical one, but it’s probably right to begin with the Bible too. Why did Jesus set up a church? Quite simply, I would argue, because he wanted the stuff which he had been doing carried on, by more people in more places. When St Paul called the church ‘the body of Christ’ he was literally right: the things which Jesus had been doing with his body were the same things he intended his followers to keep doing. As the famous prayer of Teresa of Avila says:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out with Christ’s compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

Now that right there would be an interesting thing for a church to do: look at what Jesus actually did do while he was physically on earth, and compare it to the things which occupy your church’s life. Now of course time does move on, and we can’t recapture all the simplicity of organising twelve blokes and plop it down into a world-wide organisation. But surely we ought to be able to recapture something of Christ’s priorities. That is going to be my starting point, but for now let’s take a trip back 60 years while I invite you to consider some of the models of church which I have experienced.

Next week: Church as fortress.

 

Why doesn’t God do something?

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Perhaps the most frequent question about suffering is the one I haven’t addressed yet in this #godingrimtimes blog. It’s fascinating to know what I think is the origin of evil and suffering, and yes, perhaps it does make sense that suffering is only a problem for orthodox Christians. But when life kicks me in the teeth actually none of that matters too much. The agonised question which springs to my lips is far more urgent and poignant: why doesn’t God do something? Who cares about the origins of suffering when the pain of it is gnawing at me: I just want to know why on earth God allows it to go on. That’s the real question, perhaps the only one at all worth asking. Why doesn’t God do something?

I want to suggest first of all that far from being inactive and unconcerned God is most deeply and passionately hurting with those who hurt. I can remember being impacted many years ago by a picture which Graham Kendrick described of seeing the face of Jesus, and focussing in until he could see that Jesus’ eyeballs were in fact spinning worlds, which were being washed by his tears as he wept for the world he created, sustains and loves. His heart breaks for his suffering children: the gospels are full of that. The Greek word which we rather lamely call ‘compassion’ actually describes real gut-wrenching agony. But of course that only makes us want to ask the question again; then why doesn’t he just make it go away? Why doesn’t he do something?

I want to say three things towards in answer to this: No. 1: God has done something. Rather than leaving us to get on with it, like some great but uninvolved architect of the universe, he stepped into our world in Jesus, and went around among the sick and suffering curing pain and alleviating hurt. That of itself doesn’t do that much to help me now, but it does give the lie to accusations that God simply doesn’t care about our fate.

Secondly, God is doing something. I wouldn’t want to say that only Christians do positive things in our world, but the fact is that the Christian church down the centuries has been responsible for the betterment of life and the alleviation of suffering worldwide. Health care, education, care for animals, horticulture, abolition of slavery – too many projects to mention have been and continue to be inspired by the involvement of Christianity’s founder in his world. Countless of his servants have gone to extreme lengths, even to their death, in the attempt to help the world’s lost and suffering people. Remove the Christian faith and its effects from our world, and we would live in a radically different and worse place.

But thirdly, God will do something. The promise of Christianity is that the sufferings of this present age are worth nothing to be compared to the glory which awaits Jesus’ followers. For now we live in a world where appallingly bad things happen to us, and if that were the end of the story it would be tragic indeed. But one day we’ll wake up as if from a bad dream into a reality where all our agonised questioning will seem irrelevant.

Why does God allow suffering? Presumably because he thinks it’s good for us. Why doesn’t he stop it? No idea, but that’s how it is, so we’d better get used to it. But we simply can’t say he does nothing about it. It’s what he’s all about.

 

Coming next week – a new series: What is church for?

Hanging on to God in Grim Times

And now for something completely different. Let’s leave liturgy aside until next week, and consider instead the subject of hanging on to God in grim times (#godingrimtimes). At the moment my life is in a bit of a mess, if I’m honest. I’ll spare you the details, but the past few months have seen me bullied out of a parish to the point where I could go on no longer, then being diagnose with cancer, and a lot of other stuff you don’t need to know about. So what is a Christian to do? I’ve written a book on the subject, which is due out next year, but I thought it might be helpful to share a few insights as to how I have managed still to believe in and love God when just about everything in my life has crumbled. I know there are a lot of hurting people out there, but it does seem to me to make it harder when you’re supposed to follow a God who can work miracles, who loves you and is supposed to be for you. All I can offer are a few hints as to what is getting me through the night.

I’m very aware, of course, that all this could come over unbearably twee and nice. I have no idea, dear reader, what you are going through at the moment, and I’m sure it could be even worse than my situation. I have been through the stage of finding all the pat Christian answers unconvincing, but somehow I have come back to the point of hanging on to God. So let me tell you some of the stuff which has helped me, and maybe you can come back to me and tell me if it has helped you or not.

The first thing to say, and you won’t like this any more than I do, is that real though it is your pain is relative. A few years ago a friend and I wrote a Grove Book called ‘Hanging on to God’. We were a pair of charismatic Christians who were going through hard times, and we wrote up a series of dialogues we had had trying to make some sense of it all. At the time I was reflecting on a period of joblessness, almost homelessness, and what seemed like utter rejection and abandonment by God. My friend had just lost his wife in the most cruel way to MS. I acknowledge in the book that I felt unworthy even to be bound within the same covers as him: what was my temporary unemployment compared to the tragic death of your wife? Yet the fact is that suffering is unique and personal, and doesn’t hurt any the less because someone else’s suffering is worse or different. But what I have found is that it can be a good discipline to find things, even from the depths, for which to thank God.

Tomorrow I will be journeying back to the church of which I was vicar in the 90s to the funeral of my successor, who dropped dead of a heart attack. I may have been diagnosed with cancer (everyone’s worst nightmare), but at least I’m getting over it. John’s life ended just like that, in a moment. I may face homelessness, but millions around the world live their entire lives like that, including many in my own country. On one level that doesn’t help me, but it is useful exercise to look for items for praise. It keeps the cynicism wolf from the door.

More tips next week!