Why believe?

Life as a Christian can get interesting and challenging. Paul describes his troubles in 2 Corinthians Ch11. "24Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. 27I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked."

A tough time, but when we pan out to see the context, the real problem he was noting was not all of these difficulties, but he was having problems with "super-apostles". There were real issues in the church in New Testament times, and it is that rather than the lashes and the beatings that Paul is complaining about in this passage.

The Christian race can be a tough race, but the hits that really hurt are the ones that come from those who are supposed to be on the same side.

It is easy to stop there, and not to go on any further, but that is only the introduction to what I want to say, because despite all that Paul says both about the "super-apostles" and the rest of it. Paul is not proposing giving in.

He writes in 2 Cor 12 about the great things that go on, but then continues in verse 7.

7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The reason that I am still in the church and trying to follow the Kingdom is not because it always feels good, it is not because I believe intellectually that it is the truth (though I do), it is not because I feel moved (though sometimes I do).

The reason which keeps on bringing me back is Jesus asking Peter will you too leave, and Peter saying, "Where can we go from you, you have the words of eternal life?"

But God does not abandon us either. I think my journey in the church has long been a difficult one, I have had times of amazing fellowship and friendship within the church, but I have also on more than one occasion had trouble. In fact I am beginning to wonder and worry that part of my calling is to cause trouble. Some people get missions to far flung places, or to serve in certain people groups, my calling is, as one person put it, to be a large piece of grit, the irritation that causes a pearl. At least I hope that is what they meant.

The reason though why I continue is that God is with me, and God is changing me. Now I would like to be able to say evermore from glory to glory. But I don't think that would be entirely true. I am more and more conscious of my lack of glory and my deep need for Him. For His light to shine in my darkness, to His truth to show me the way forwards, in a world of moral confusion.

I have been born again, and God is at work in my life. I would love to say that the Old has gone and the new has come, and some days it feels like that, but often if I am honest the old can be familiar. We can be too comfortable where we are, when Jesus calls us to follow Him.

I'm uncomfortable with the talk of leaving our comfort zone, because I fear that it is so badly abused as a phrase. We can seek to become some sort of spiritual Arnold Schwarzenegger. As if by our strength and spirituality we can conquer the world, "make me day." However we cannot make our days, we need God to make our days.

However, there is a sense in the Pilgrim's Progress sense that we do need to leave our comfort zone. We need to leave the safety of the City of Destruction, like Moses we need to respond to the call we hear from God, and be sent to difficult places. It was not because Moses was able, the man who had thought that he could do it all, finally realised that He could not. There is a sense of journey, a sense of being changed.

There needs to be a journey into reality. One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we tend to see ourselves as people who are sorted out. We have the answer, the answers, unlike those people in the world who walk in darkness. Of course Jesus is the light, but the truth is we all need Jesus, both inside of the Church as well as outside. On a philosophical level the church is the body of Christ, and therefore Jesus is there very present. However, sometimes when we have another falling out, because we cannot accept someone else's way of doing things, it does not feel like Christ is there in the centre of us.

However, there is a deeper truth. Christ is there, in the mess, the question is not so much whether or not Christ is present, He is always present everywhere and in every situation. However, sometimes in the church it is the beaten bruised and crucified Christ that we see. Hurting with those who are not only hurting but being hurt.

The mystery of the incarnation is that God is with us, not just in the dark places, but perhaps particularly in the dark places. The light that shone at Calvary, the light that lights every man, is the same Christ.

There is a universalism about Christianity in that Jesus is the God of everyone in every situation, however there still is that call, the call that Jesus made, to follow me. The Jesus of the cross, is too often the Jesus of the church.

It is not that He is not present, He is always and ever present, it is that He chooses, as He chose at Calvary, not the route of power and conquest, but the still small voice of love. The refusal to overwhelm, to conquer, to deafen, to shout, but instead in weakness, in powerlessness to present His broken body as the salvation of the world, and particularly of His people. The broken body of Christ, in which He is ever present.

I'm convinced if Jesus came today He would not have His own chat show, indeed He would avoid the press, but he would be someone who we hear rumours of and would want to meet. In the time of Jesus people would hear stories of an amazing preacher who changed lives, and people would think who could this be. They would hear rumours.

Obviously we are many miles in place and many years in time from the historical Jesus who came to this earth in a particular place at a particular time. However, there is a similarity that we hear rumours of something, stories that we struggle to believe, but somehow ring a chord, hear an echo. There is someone who has walked this earth, who healed rather than hurt. Who called people to live the most amazing lives of love. Who changed the world, and still changes the world.

And it is like a rumour, it is a story which we struggle to understand. However, I do believe that the same Jesus who met with those who sought Him out, meets with people today, but like the people who went to find Him in first century Palestine, He may not be the one that we expect. In a world that worships power, wealth and comfort, a poor powerless itinerant is not who we expect to be the Saviour of the World. For He must have looked like such a nobody, Isaiah comments prophetically long before He came.

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

I think one of our problems that we want to remove the mystery and see God face to face. Yet the burning bushes do not litter every highway, indeed Moses was probably around 80 before He saw one, and the people of Israel had been crying in Egypt since before He was born.

Therefore I think there is a danger, and I need to be careful with my words here, and I mean no one any offence, but phrases such as intimacy with God, can I think give, if we are not careful, the wrong impression. Yes, God created us to walk in the garden with Him, yes one day we shall see Him face to face. Yet, here, in this fallen world we see through a glass darkly. In this fallen world there is disfigurement and dysfunctionality. Therefore, and it may be very much our fault, we do not see God clearly. We look for a City with firm foundations, and we long for it, because He has set eternity in the hearts of men, and yet we struggle in a fallen world, spiritually partially sighted.

The divine mystery is that Jesus came and Jesus died for us, but perhaps that is indeed the point, that He had to come and He had to die, because otherwise we would never see Him. He has sent His Spirit, who reveals Jesus too us, but all too often we do not spend the time and therefore we do not see.

For some people this would be woolly doubt, but for me this is real faith, for it is the only faith that I feel I can really have. The only way that I can square my experience of what I live, with what I read and see and try to understand.

That does not mean God is far away. I see His smile in a child's face, I see His joy in the leaves blowing in the wind, I hear His whisper in nature and in my relationship with others. God is here, this is hallowed ground, every bit of it, for He made it. It is the glimpses through the trees that we see.

If I could answer the question of why that is, then so much of philosophy and theology would be answered, but I do not know. Yet somehow I still hear the call, and still seek to follow, in weakness, hopefully in humility and also in love. And sometimes I feel I lose sight of Him in the trees, but still somehow, I do not understand it I still when I turn again to Him find Him, or perhaps it is that He finds me.

Be a friend

The story of the Good Samaritan seems particularly vivid at the moment. Jesus gets questioned by a religious guy, what the man must do to get eternal life?

Jesus throws the question back, what do you think?

That whole response is worthy of a whole series of sermons, how much hot air do Christians create in understanding the culture of the unchurched, I have a really radical solution. Perhaps rather than creating courses on it, we ought to ask them what they think.... Now that is perhaps rather simplistic, the real point is how do we get to that stage where we can get rid of the baggage and have an open and real conversation, because that is not always as simple as it sounds.

The man says, love God and love your neighbour as yourself.

"Great," says Jesus, "Do this and you will live."

Now the story could have ended there, but the teacher of the law has just had a conversation where he set out to test Jesus, but at the end of the day, Jesus turned the situation on its head and turned it into a test for the man. One that he passed, which left him embarrassingly congratulated and associated with Jesus, which he obviously did not want him to be. So in a search for some clear blue water he asks another question, "And who is my neighbour?"

Jesus could have thrown it back to him, "What do you think?" But he doesn't. Why? Well for one thing if he had not then we would not have had this story, and the truth is that Jesus did not live by rules that say if x then y, but by the Spirit of God and we follow that leading.

So instead of giving a straight answer or asking a straight question Jesus tells a story. A very disarming story.

The story is incredibly dramatic a man beaten up and half dead, naked at the side of the road. There is something about this attack that seeks to dehumanise the man.

A priest sees the man and walks by on the other side.

So too a Levite, again a religious person.

So what will happen to the broken man...

A Samaritan walks past, not the favourite for the Jews, the hated foreigner, someone who would be perceived to be far from God. This man though does not cross over the road and try to avoid the situation. The man does good, the man rescues the man, he becomes for him a secular saviour while the religious just walk on by.

We can focus on the question, and who is my neighbour, but I think it goes deeper than that. The man has just stated that what matters is loving God and loving your neighbour, but what does that mean.

The Teacher of the Law could probably find sound theological reasons for walking by on the other side. The man may have been dead or died on him, therefore defiling him, and meaning that He would be unable to serve God by doing His priestly duties. The man may have attacked him, or someone else may have attacked him, and it is dishonouring to God to treat our lives as of no importance.

The Levite similarly was called to live a clean and pure life, but this theology led to him walking by on the other side. and in reality breaking the law of love.

The Samaritan though did not have the complexity of theology, he same a man in need and had compassion upon him. It was as simple as that.

The problem we have is that often we use our religion as an excuse for poor behaviour. Though we know on a simple level that the King of Love should make us more loving to our fellow man. There is a very real danger it can actually make us worse.

Rather than looking with simple compassion on the hurting, we seek out some thing or some one to blame. Rather than doing the right thing, we do the religious thing. We theologise it and blame the bad on theology. Not only do we not follow Jesus, effectively we are using him as a justification for wrong.

At the end of course Jesus does again ask a question of the man, "Which of the three acted like a neighbour to the man?"

In other words Jesus is going to make the man answer his own question again.

The answer is blatantly obvious, the one who had mercy on him.

Jesus tells him to go and do the same.

What is most profound to me at the moment is the universality of this. The man stripped of his clothes, his wealth and his identity, is quite literally naked humanity in need of help. The creed and the colour and the name really do not matter. It is just someone in need of our help.

The reason why this means so much to me at the moment is that we have been left feeling beaten up and bruised by the way that we have been treated at church. By any simple view of humanity what has happened is wrong, but religion can be used as a justification for what is clearly wrong.

What really hurts though is not the beating up, we know that the people who are causing us trouble, are messed up human beings in desperate need to truly know of God's love and healing in their lives. What hurts is the fact that some people who we would have thought to be our friends have walked by on the other side, embarrassed at our predicament.

To be fair on the priest and the levite the sight of the bruised naked man at the side of the road was hardly respectable. The Samaritan though saw the man through eyes of grace as still a man.

Jesus states that whatever is done for the least of these is done for me. So in a sense the man broken at the roadside is, as is every one broken at the roadside, Jesus.

Religion can be a very great force for good, but it can also be and has also been a very great force for harm, and all too often a cause for someone to act respectably but not lovingly.

At the end of the day the man had said what matters is to love God and love people, yet as Christians we can get so caught up in religious meetings and what we do that we forget that it is love that matters. I suspect part of the motivation in some people who have been rather distant from us is that, they have ministries to serve, and they do do good. Therefore, they would not want to sacrifice fruitful ministry. I wonder if that is exactly what the priest was thinking, he had an important ministry, people were dependent on him, what would they do if he was not there. He was an important man.

Yet the man who is remembered as doing the right thing, the one the poor trapped teacher of the law had to admit was doing the right thing, was the Samaritan.

When in times of trouble I have found at times that sometimes Christians do walk by, when people who are not stop and help you out.

Bad theology gets in the way, and it was to address this poor theology that Jesus told the story.

In other words the simple message of the story is behave like a friend of God, and behave like a friend of everyone. Note I state behave like a friend of God, what I mean by that is that we treat God better than we would treat our best friend, and we treat everyone else in the same way.

We need a world where we behave like friends to all, and do not walk by on the other side.