"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." Genesis 2v25 KJV
There are various statistics about the number of searches on the internet that relate to sex and pornography, certainly a large amount of spam relates to it. Go into any newsagent and you will see that sex sells. Sexual temptation can destroy marriages and relationships and we live in an age where it is not uncommon for 12 and 13 year old's to be experimenting with sex. In such a world it is easy for the church to be different, but how should we respond?
First question. Why is sex and pornography such a strong driver?
C S Lewis argues that the devil cannot create anything, so instead he takes what God has created and misuses it and abuses it and turns the good into something bad. We were created to have intimacy with God and intimacy with one another. We were created to walk with God and walk with each other, to share our lives and to share ourselves.
God created woman because man needed company.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." NIV
The problem is that there are so many people who feel so alone, and therefore vulnerable to the false intimacies that the devil offers. We live in a world of full of lonely people, a world full of Eleanor Rigsbys. It is not necessarily that people do not have friends, but that friendships do not go deep. We live in a world where we teach people the biology of sex, but not the importance of real relationships. Indeed it is difficult to teach relationships, we tend to learn by having them. However if you are born to parents who do not relate to each other it puts you at a disadvantage.
We need intimacy, and even in our damaged world, I believe that God is the answer and the healer. I do not believe that we are fully human unless we truly connect with each other. Sin therefore makes us less human. God however can and does restore the broken image.
We were created for intimacy, we were created to connect, and with God's help we can in a real way as God intended.
Tuesday 27 March 2007
Saturday 10 March 2007
Happiness - The greatest gift that I possess?
There is the Ken Dodd song that has the words, "Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess I thank the Lord that I possess more than my fair share of happiness."
We live in a world that still more than anything else wants to be happy, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This involves living in peace with other people, by which we mean the absence of open conflict.
I sometimes feels I live in a culture that is not pursuing life, but living death. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World has a dystopian vision of a world living on Soma, a drug which keeps everyone happy - but by doing so removes meaning from the world. Probably most of the population of Britain would be happy with that idea. We seek happiness in pleasure, in material possessions, in the sexual possession of people, and in being comfortable. We live in a feel good world, and we want to feel good.
When we enter the church we do not leave this baggage at the door, because we do not even think of it as baggage. Indeed, it is very hard to identify baggage that has been with us for so long that we see it as us. Therefore when we come to church we want a church that will make us happy, that will make us feel good, that will keep us from pain, and that will make us comfortable.
We argue that God will help us to be happy far better than the devil's ways, but we do not question whether indeed we are pursuing the right goals, and how "Don't worry be happy!" really fits with, "If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow me." Matt 16v24. Now of course it is easy to pick out one verse and take it too far, but there are other verses and there is the life of those followers of Jesus who are recorded in the Bible. One of the most comprehensive summaries being Hebrews 11v32-39. Just a short extract says, "36Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37They were stoned[f]; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword." v36-37a.
Really being a Christian what more could you want? What is even better the passage states, " 39These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised." Great, really great. So you get sawed in two, you get killed, and you still do not get what you were promised.
Reminds me of the old quip attributed to St Teresa of Avalla when having a bad day, "God, if this is how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so many enemies." Not really a case of keep taking the happy pills.
Following Jesus is not easy, and does not automatically lead to increased happiness. Moses suffered alienation from his own people and from the Egyptians, and the years spent tending sheep cannot have been easy. Joseph had done his time in Jail. David seems to have never really enjoyed what really matters, when you take a step back he had a heart after God, but he was perhaps a pretty dysfunctional creative genius. Jesus was rejected and crucified, Paul had a very difficult time, and probably ten out of the remaining Eleven Disciples were martyred.
If life is just about material happiness then Christians are losers. Paul comments, 1 Cor 15:19 "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."
We believe, whether we like it or not, in something that is bigger than life itself. We cannot escape the fact that either we have a hope of heaven, or our sufferings are in vain.
How we believe affects how we behave, indeed conversely sometimes how we behave tells more about what we believe than what we say we believe. We need to regain a sense of eternity, we need to regain a sense that we have a God who is bigger than life itself. That the concerns of this current age, or not ultimately our concerns, we were created for more and we have been redeemed for more.
Church buildings used to awe people with a sense of something bigger than themselves, today tiny in comparison with the shopping centres that instead block out the light in our City Centres we have lost sight of the fact that there is something bigger than all this. The answer to the plight of the church is not that God can make you happy, but that there is not just something bigger than happiness but someone.
Happiness is not and cannot be pursued as an end in itself, happiness for happiness sake makes us emotionally paralysed, happiness is a by-product not an end-product. Paul talks about joy, he talks about contentment, intermingled with suffering. Jesus is focussed on love, He promises peace and joy, but also a cross.
Ultimately we were created for something bigger, for something more. In a world that is addicted to happiness, it is easy for us as Christians to sing from the world's hymn sheet and say Jesus can make you happy. Except sometimes following Jesus can be very hard, and it forces us to put aside the things that in worldy terms we think make us happy. The Church therefore must point the world, like the Spire on a traditional church, heavenwards. To a world that is addicted to the moment, to the here and now, we present eternity. The Kingdom of Heaven is near, that it can and does break through into our reality.
We live in a world that still more than anything else wants to be happy, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This involves living in peace with other people, by which we mean the absence of open conflict.
I sometimes feels I live in a culture that is not pursuing life, but living death. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World has a dystopian vision of a world living on Soma, a drug which keeps everyone happy - but by doing so removes meaning from the world. Probably most of the population of Britain would be happy with that idea. We seek happiness in pleasure, in material possessions, in the sexual possession of people, and in being comfortable. We live in a feel good world, and we want to feel good.
When we enter the church we do not leave this baggage at the door, because we do not even think of it as baggage. Indeed, it is very hard to identify baggage that has been with us for so long that we see it as us. Therefore when we come to church we want a church that will make us happy, that will make us feel good, that will keep us from pain, and that will make us comfortable.
We argue that God will help us to be happy far better than the devil's ways, but we do not question whether indeed we are pursuing the right goals, and how "Don't worry be happy!" really fits with, "If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow me." Matt 16v24. Now of course it is easy to pick out one verse and take it too far, but there are other verses and there is the life of those followers of Jesus who are recorded in the Bible. One of the most comprehensive summaries being Hebrews 11v32-39. Just a short extract says, "36Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37They were stoned[f]; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword." v36-37a.
Really being a Christian what more could you want? What is even better the passage states, " 39These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised." Great, really great. So you get sawed in two, you get killed, and you still do not get what you were promised.
Reminds me of the old quip attributed to St Teresa of Avalla when having a bad day, "God, if this is how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so many enemies." Not really a case of keep taking the happy pills.
Following Jesus is not easy, and does not automatically lead to increased happiness. Moses suffered alienation from his own people and from the Egyptians, and the years spent tending sheep cannot have been easy. Joseph had done his time in Jail. David seems to have never really enjoyed what really matters, when you take a step back he had a heart after God, but he was perhaps a pretty dysfunctional creative genius. Jesus was rejected and crucified, Paul had a very difficult time, and probably ten out of the remaining Eleven Disciples were martyred.
If life is just about material happiness then Christians are losers. Paul comments, 1 Cor 15:19 "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."
We believe, whether we like it or not, in something that is bigger than life itself. We cannot escape the fact that either we have a hope of heaven, or our sufferings are in vain.
How we believe affects how we behave, indeed conversely sometimes how we behave tells more about what we believe than what we say we believe. We need to regain a sense of eternity, we need to regain a sense that we have a God who is bigger than life itself. That the concerns of this current age, or not ultimately our concerns, we were created for more and we have been redeemed for more.
Church buildings used to awe people with a sense of something bigger than themselves, today tiny in comparison with the shopping centres that instead block out the light in our City Centres we have lost sight of the fact that there is something bigger than all this. The answer to the plight of the church is not that God can make you happy, but that there is not just something bigger than happiness but someone.
Happiness is not and cannot be pursued as an end in itself, happiness for happiness sake makes us emotionally paralysed, happiness is a by-product not an end-product. Paul talks about joy, he talks about contentment, intermingled with suffering. Jesus is focussed on love, He promises peace and joy, but also a cross.
Ultimately we were created for something bigger, for something more. In a world that is addicted to happiness, it is easy for us as Christians to sing from the world's hymn sheet and say Jesus can make you happy. Except sometimes following Jesus can be very hard, and it forces us to put aside the things that in worldy terms we think make us happy. The Church therefore must point the world, like the Spire on a traditional church, heavenwards. To a world that is addicted to the moment, to the here and now, we present eternity. The Kingdom of Heaven is near, that it can and does break through into our reality.
Thursday 1 March 2007
Creating a habitat for humanity
Alain de Botton in his series The Perfect Home gives the example of Marie Antoinette who built for herself an idealised rural village - a false pastiche. She wanted to escape Versailles and the artificiality of court life and reconnect. The problem was it was nothing like a real peasant village. We may say what is wrong with living in a world of delusions?
The need, as demonstrated by the French Revolution, is to be able to connect with the world, deal with the issues and resolve the problems. Nietzsche made the point that often such coping mechanisms create a worse mess than the problem that they are trying to resolve.
So what has this got to do with the church?
The point that he makes is that the modern British house shows nothing about who we are and where we live, it represents an escape into a rural idyll that never existed. It is a form of delusion and it is created by our unease, our alienation from the modern world.
It is a sign of our insecurity with our actuality, our lack of connection - and it creates bad housing. What is interesting is the programme starts off to say how housing affects the soul, but talks more about how the soul affects what we build and where we live.
I was listening to a recording of Jeff Lucas today speaking about Joseph in Egypt and saying that we cannot keep God as a Deity who lives in the church car park. We need to escape the separation of the spiritual and the none-spiritual.
God is interested in where we live. He created a wonderful world, and I wonder if he puzzles sometimes at why we then choose to live in such small boxes surrounded by small gardens - that reflect little of the creators creativity.
Housing can be seen as unspiritual, we are just passing through, where we live now has no lasting significance. We can get excited about the poor and their need for good housing, but we seem to have lost our heart to dream of a better world. One that is better not just in terms of justice and equality, but one which has better houses, great art, wonderful books and terrific music.
We are not just called to reflect God love as if it can be distilled as pure love like some clear liquid with all the colour removed. We are called to reflect the creativity of a creative God. When we think of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when we think about Redemption we need to see that not purely in terms of the soul - but in terms of the whole of our being. Heaven will not be a pale distillation of what is good, but a fulfilment of what earth was created to be. Heaven will not be less, but more.
As Christians we need to think about whatever we do be great at it. Whatever our job and our role is be great, but we need to go beyond the roles that society defines for us. We are now the out breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we need to get involved in transforming the world.
We tend to shy away from the idea that the environment affects the person wanting people to take responsibility for their own lives - which of course is important and can be the beginning of finding liberation. However, we need to look at transforming the environment. Christians in all societies need to be fundamentally involved in making the world a better place, and sometimes we can help people more by working in business at creating jobs than we can by doing worthy things to reduce poverty. We can sometimes do more to help people by improving their environment, then by just looking at their problems. We need to do this in a partnership approach where everyone can participate rather than having a holy us approach.
It is easy to say that God could have created a black and white world with few pleasures instead he created an earthly paradise (which we then set out to spoil) - but I'm not sure if that is true. I'm not sure that God could have created a boring world - it would just be so much out of character.
There are limited resources and the plight of the poor must always be in our hearts, but it needs to be not either justice or beauty - but both.
The call of the church is not just to be just, but to make the world a more beautiful place for people to live in.
The need, as demonstrated by the French Revolution, is to be able to connect with the world, deal with the issues and resolve the problems. Nietzsche made the point that often such coping mechanisms create a worse mess than the problem that they are trying to resolve.
So what has this got to do with the church?
The point that he makes is that the modern British house shows nothing about who we are and where we live, it represents an escape into a rural idyll that never existed. It is a form of delusion and it is created by our unease, our alienation from the modern world.
It is a sign of our insecurity with our actuality, our lack of connection - and it creates bad housing. What is interesting is the programme starts off to say how housing affects the soul, but talks more about how the soul affects what we build and where we live.
I was listening to a recording of Jeff Lucas today speaking about Joseph in Egypt and saying that we cannot keep God as a Deity who lives in the church car park. We need to escape the separation of the spiritual and the none-spiritual.
God is interested in where we live. He created a wonderful world, and I wonder if he puzzles sometimes at why we then choose to live in such small boxes surrounded by small gardens - that reflect little of the creators creativity.
Housing can be seen as unspiritual, we are just passing through, where we live now has no lasting significance. We can get excited about the poor and their need for good housing, but we seem to have lost our heart to dream of a better world. One that is better not just in terms of justice and equality, but one which has better houses, great art, wonderful books and terrific music.
We are not just called to reflect God love as if it can be distilled as pure love like some clear liquid with all the colour removed. We are called to reflect the creativity of a creative God. When we think of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when we think about Redemption we need to see that not purely in terms of the soul - but in terms of the whole of our being. Heaven will not be a pale distillation of what is good, but a fulfilment of what earth was created to be. Heaven will not be less, but more.
As Christians we need to think about whatever we do be great at it. Whatever our job and our role is be great, but we need to go beyond the roles that society defines for us. We are now the out breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we need to get involved in transforming the world.
We tend to shy away from the idea that the environment affects the person wanting people to take responsibility for their own lives - which of course is important and can be the beginning of finding liberation. However, we need to look at transforming the environment. Christians in all societies need to be fundamentally involved in making the world a better place, and sometimes we can help people more by working in business at creating jobs than we can by doing worthy things to reduce poverty. We can sometimes do more to help people by improving their environment, then by just looking at their problems. We need to do this in a partnership approach where everyone can participate rather than having a holy us approach.
It is easy to say that God could have created a black and white world with few pleasures instead he created an earthly paradise (which we then set out to spoil) - but I'm not sure if that is true. I'm not sure that God could have created a boring world - it would just be so much out of character.
There are limited resources and the plight of the poor must always be in our hearts, but it needs to be not either justice or beauty - but both.
The call of the church is not just to be just, but to make the world a more beautiful place for people to live in.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)