Life, the universe and burnt porridge

This morning I burnt our porridge. What I intended to do was put the oats in the saucepan, put the water and milk in the saucepan, turn the heat on and quickly go to the loo. I managed to omit the vital step of putting the liquid in before turning the heat on, resulting in a smoke-filled kitchen, and a blackened mess stuck to the base of the saucepan. Life is often like that; we start off with good intentions but somehow, we mess up.

 The Christian life often seems like that as well; our aim is to serve God with a pure heart and mind, but usually our pride and self-love or sheer stupidity get in the way.  Our bodies are created with powerful survival instincts which reward us for actions which enable us to outperform our competitors in the struggle to breed and survive. This is totally at odds with loving our neighbour as ourselves. Paul struggled with the same problem, which he describes in the 7^th Chapter of Romans, when he talks about two laws controlling us. Our minds and spirits want to follow the law of Christ, but we are thwarted at every turn by the natural laws and instincts of our bodies (what Paul calls the “law of the flesh”).

So, we find ourselves doing things we are ashamed of, which we try to hide from God and our fellow Christians, but which produces shame and condemnation in us. This results, in Paul, with this massive cry of frustration. 

  Rom 7:24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 

However, the Christian experience does not stop there. It is the springboard from which we leap into Romans 8. When we offer our lives to Jesus, he doesn’t just reprogram us, He comes to live in us by His Spirit.  When Jesus comes to live in us, He brings with Him all the benefits and attributes that resulted from His death and resurrection.  When we become Christians something very radical happens to us. Jesus talks about it as being born all over again; when we become joined to Jesus, we are joined into His crucifixion and resurrection; St Paul explains it like this:

“I died so that I might live for God.  I have been crucified with Christ. I don’t live any longer, but Christ lives in me. Now I live my life in my body by faith in the Son of God. He loved me and gave himself for me.” Gal 2:19b-20 NIRV.

As far as God is concerned our old sinful bodies are dead, our position in Christ is that all the guilt and condemnation have gone, and we now live a life controlled by the Holy Spirit. As adopted sons and daughters of God, this is the inheritance we are guaranteed by Christ. As Tom Wright explains: "When Jesus died on the cross, everything changed, not only for us but for the whole of creation."

However, as Paul continues to explain in

 Romans  8: 22 We know that all that God created has been groaning. It is in pain as if it were giving birth to a child. The created world continues to groan even now. 23 And that’s not all. We have the Holy Spirit as the promise of future blessing. But we also groan inside ourselves. We do this as we look forward to the time when God adopts us as full members of his family. Then he will give us everything he has for us. He will raise our bodies and give glory to them.

In the present, we still struggle with our old bodies, with impure thoughts and actions. However, we are no longer alone. We have the Power of the resurrected Christ surging within us, to renew and transform us into the image and likeness of Christ. We have the promise of Jesus that He will no longer leave us or forsake us. Our bodies are still earth bound, but our spirits can soar into the heavenly places with Christ. We can live on earth as whole-hearted disciples of Jesus telling others of our love affair with Jesus, and working to bring His kingdom of love into the lives of everyone we meet, but from time to time we still burn the porridge.  

The day our world changed forever

"By six o’clock on the Friday evening that Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic New Temple. God was reconciling the world to Himself in the Messiah (2 Cor 5:19)”                                              Tom Wright

What Christ did for us on the cross is much wider and deeper than any individual can imagine. As western Christians, we have a very personal view of the cross and rightly so: if we were the only sinner in God’s creation Jesus would still love us so much that he would have come and died for us!

However so much more happened when Jesus died and rose again, a new creation was inaugurated. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here! 2Cor 5:17

The physical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ ushered in not just new life for us as individuals but new life for His whole creation, a New Heaven and a physical New Earth joined together in completion when Jesus comes again.

So how does the future reality effect our present-day reality, when we are surrounded by a beautiful but awfully wounded world where greed, pride, war and poverty, among many evils, abound? In many ways, we are people who straddle two worlds.  As Paul says in Romans 8: “you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.” ¹⁶ For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children. ¹⁷ And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.  ⁸ Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. ¹⁹ For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. ²⁰ Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, ²¹ the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. NLT

As Christians, our bodies ache and age. We are called to the same sufferings as Christ, but we have the Holy Spirit living inside us, a powerful source that is released as we pray to see healings and miracles breaking in, as foretastes of our new heavenly bodies, and our heavenly home.  

Likewise, we live on an earth that is ravaged by the greed and all the pollution we humans create. Many starve, and lives are made miserable by war and displacement, living as refugees. As Christ’s representatives, living and shining in the midst of this, we can work, through our prayers, actions and giving, to help create little glimpses of a New Heaven and earth here in our present world.

When Christ died and rose again, His kingdom was established in all power and authority.  All the powers of death and hell were defeated. We can pray with confidence, “thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”, because it is the actual situation with Jesus sitting on the throne of power and majesty, and all things, all principalities and powers, subject to Him under His feet.

 So why does Christ delay His return?  Christ gives us the privilege of helping to bring in His kingdom, doing His will in showing the Love of Jesus to those around and telling them about Him; of caring and nurturing His creation, all the time hastening the day when Christ will come again in His glory to bring us to our new home, where we will live in perfect union with Christ and all His New Creation.

      

Immanuel: God with us

Loves furnace in a little room.

Forget not Trinity holy and glorious

That heaven’s bright prince came down to bestow on us

His love, as babe, into Mary’s fair womb

For nine months, he who is angels lord

Was hidden, love’s furnace, in a little room

Humbler than all, who all adored.

A pure lamb, he stole down to earth

To free us from our sin so blind .

No city home will shield his birth

His mother a stable for bed must find;

There poorest of the poor she lay

Nor wine nor meat for hungers sting

In the rude confines of the cattle bay

Where God was born apostle’s king.

Cold and exile He did not scorn

In the donkey’s manger that holy morn.

Tadg Gaelach O Suilleabhain.

When we contemplate that the fiery furnace of love, who created  the worlds, confined himself to a growing embryo in a poor  young girl we are overcome by wonder and awe.

He identified himself with the poor, the homeless and the refugee. He entered the world that He had created in all its grime, confusion and suffering. The God we worship and adore did not hold himself apart but entered into the very depths of all its sorrows and suffering.

This is who we worship this Christmas, Immanuel, meaning God with us, He enters into every joy and sorrow which we experience.   He is especially with the poor the homeless and the refugee, so we this Christmas each one of us to do what we are able to bring peace and equality into a world which so desperately needs it at present .  So let each of us in the coming year do our little bit to bring about a better world, as we submit to and obey a better king, King Jesus. 

The suffering Trinity

The Son’s obedience and the Father’s suffering would be meaningless without the third person of the trinity, the Spirit. The Spirit, even now, connects us to this moment in history that, defined God’s relationship with us. At the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion, the vision of the Trinity is most available on earth for “the Son suffers death in our God-forsakenness, the Father suffers the death of his beloved Son and the Spirit binds the other two together through unspoken sighs.” The encircling motion, and the divine connection between the three persons, who all feel the anguish of the cross event, binds humanity to the will of God. Sara Loperana

Some moments in our lives we are blessed by a revelation of divine wonder. I remember one such event when I was in a work camp in Italy and had gone down to the beach for a star-lit swim. I dived into the sea and floated on my back to be suddenly struck by the amazing beauty of the awful immensity of the universe shining down compared with my tiny insignificance floating in a dark sea, and amazed that God should be interested and even love me.

Recently Steve has been talking a lot about the love of Jesus for us and our desire and duty to reciprocate that love. Also, recently we had a Trinity connect event explaining a little about the Trinity of the Godhead.

 I think the idea of God as a loving community of three persons bound together in a loving servanthood of love is a life changing concept. God has always existed as a unity of three persons bound together in an inseparable bond of intimate love, pleasure and adoration. 

This continued when Jesus came to earth, we see the three persons of the Godhead in an intimate moment of love when the Father says of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, and I am wonderfully pleased with him.”  (Mat 3:17) and in John 17 we see Jesus’ intimate relationship with his Father, as he prays for his disciples.

However, we have to ask ourselves what happened to the unity of the Trinity as Jesus was crucified and He cried out,” My God why have you forsaken me?” As Jesus bore the full weight of the sins of the whole world he felt the pain of the whole wayward world lying heavily on His shoulders, the pain of separation by sin, (our rebellion and disobedience), from intimate communion with God. What was experienced at the heart of the Trinity at that moment was something we mere humans cannot fully understand. Somehow the unity of pleasure in community and adoration was fractured; to be replaced by a unity in pain and suffering still bound together by that pain and agape love which is prepared to die for the life of another.

As limited mortals, we cannot fully comprehend the depths of what happened when Jesus died, however we can fall down and worship the pure love of the Godhead as we kneel at the foot of the cross and are overwhelmed by all that Jesus did for us on behalf of the Father and the Spirit; knowing that any form of suffering, bereavement or separation has already been experienced by the loving Trinity. We are comforted in the knowledge that as we pray the Spirit helps us with groans too deep for words. The same prayers of compassion with which the Spirit encircled the cross of Jesus.  

Create in me a pure heart

In our advent home groups this week we have been looking at John the Baptist and his call for repentance. The study chimed a note with me concerning a book I have just read as part of our Antioch group discussions called The Prodigal God by Tim Keller. In it he explores the parable of The father and the two sons in Luke 15 . In the parable we usually focus on the rebellious younger son, who takes his share of the family fortune and goes off to spend it on the good life. However, he eventually runs out of money and is forced into the most disgusting of jobs for a Jew feeding pigs. Eventually he comes to his senses and goes back to the loving forgiving father, who welcomes him with open arms. This is a most wonderful picture of the free grace given by a loving God to a repentant sinner.

However that is only part of the story , if we look at the whole of the chapter we see that there are three stories about things that are lost and were found and  it is directed against the scribes and pharisees who were criticising Jesus for welcoming sinners. In the third parable we see a disconnect with the other two; in the first two we see someone going out to search and find the one which was lost. In the third we might ask, "where is the seeker"? We have to look at the elder brother in the story, he was being a good Jewish boy staying at home and working on the farm, but what were his heart motives? We see from his reaction to the lavish feast given for the repentant younger brother that he is more in love with his inheritance than with love for his father.
The story posed a massive question for me; where was my first love? Was it actually for my loving heavenly Father or had the practice of religion become a substitute for the overwhelming love of our heavenly Father who sent his Son Jesus to rescue us by his death on the cross and Resurrection to life in which we can all share? The older son in the story did not share His Father's heart of love, to seek out the one who was lost.
Our stated aim as a community at Trinity is: to see lives transformed by the love of Christ.

Only as individuals opening our hard hearts to be melted and enraptured by a loving Saviour can we pour out his welcoming, transforming love on a needy world. The arms of Jesus are always open wide for us to run in and to be welcomed back by a loving Saviour.

Batter my heart three personed God

Why do we remember on the Fifth of November?

It was a cool autumn evening, a group of people had gathered in the home of Deryk Carver, a brewer, in Black Lion Street in Brighthelmstone a fishing hamlet connected to the county town of Lewes by the Jugg's way. 

 They had gathered as a small house group to study the Bible and read the English prayer book. This would seem to our eyes an innocuous gathering of citizens.
However the year was 1554 Mary Tudor was on the throne and married Phillip of Spain in that year. 
She had restored the Catholic church and forbidden the reading of the bible in English in fact even owning a bible was punishable by burning. So when the Sheriff of Sussex's men broke in they were caught red handed . Bound and taken to Newgate prison in London, he was interrogated many times by Edmund Bonner, bishop of London and eventually condemned to death. He was brought back to Lewes and a stake with a barrel attached was prepared outside the Starr inn. His bible was thrown in followed by Carver himself and faggots where piled around, before the fire was lit he addressed the crowd.
“Dear brethren and sisters, witness to you all that I am come to seal with my blood Christ’s Gospel, because I know that it is true. It hath been truly preached here in Lewes and in all parts of England but now it is not. Because I will not deny God’s Gospel and be obedient to man’s laws I am condemned to die!” 

His dying prayer as the flames were upon him was, “O Lord my God, Thou hast written, he that will not forsake wife, children house, and all that ever he hath, and take up his cross and follow Thee, is not worthy of Thee. But Thou Lord knowest that I have forsaken all to come unto Thee! Lord, have mercy upon me, for unto Thee I commend my spirit and my soul doth rejoice in Thee”. 

 Carver threw his bible out into the crowd and it was not returned. There was a very old bible stained with  blood said to be his, however this was a  so called "breeches" bible.  So called because of the verse in Genesis where it says that they sewed leaves to form breeches to cover their nakedness. It was first printed in Geneva  in 1560 several years after Carver's death.

Carvers bible would have been the work of William Tyndale and fellow translators Miles Coverdale and John Rogers who edited the texts after Tyndale was himself martyred by burning in 1536 .
Tyndale used the Greek version of the texts which had been compiled by Erasmus of Rotterdam who had edited a parallel compilation of the best Latin and Greek manuscripts which was far superior to the rather corrupted Latin Vulgate which was used at the time. He used the Hebrew bible and lexicon to translate portions of the Old Testament.  Tyndale was concerned that there was a lack of biblical knowledge among both clergy and laity and swore to a fellow cleric, "if God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than he did"
We owe Tyndale an enormous debt for his scholarship, determination, and sheer bravery which saw the bible translated into  English.
In Lewes we commemorate the  brave men and women who read and were transformed by his work. They came to a living faith in Jesus having read His words and story in their native English and were willing to follow Him even into the flames, remembering like Carver the words from Wycliffe's bible :

Matthew 16:24-26Wycliffe Bible (WYC)

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, If any man will come after me, deny he himself, and take his cross, and follow me;

25 for he that will make his life safe, shall lose it; and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it.

26 For what profiteth it to a man [Soothly what profiteth to a man], if he win all the world, and suffer impairing of his soul? or what (ex)changing shall a man give for his soul?

Image of God

Genesis 1:27

So God created human beings in his own image.

In the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

The first chapter of Genesis is a beautiful reminder of who God is,  who we are, in relation to God and the creation He spoke into existence. However there have probably been more arguments over  how it is to be understood than any other chapter, however I think that all Christians would agree with the statement in Hebrews 11:3:   By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen. God made the universe for His own pleasure and enjoyment it reflected his majesty and creativity coming to a climax in the creation of humankind in His image.

So what does the image of God mean?  Looking at the verse, the first thing we see is the joint creation of man and woman as one. Separate persons, but the image in unity, a reflection of God as three persons in one. In the garden of Eden, we see Adam and Eve walking and talking with God; the perfect trio enjoying conversation in the cool of the evening. 

We reflect the image as we abide in loving relationship with other people in a mutuality of love, whether that is as family, church or just a group of friends in some sort of bond of love with each other, a love empowered by the Spirit living within us. 

Every human soul living is made in the image of God, so we have a special duty to love care and respect every human being, regardless of race class or creed. 

It is often helpful to understand a passage to ask, how the writer and the first hearers of the passage would have understood it. The people of the ancient world would have understood an image of God as an idol in a temple. However, the ancient Hebrews understood from very early on that God, a pure spirit, could not be represented by anything made by human hands and the first clauses of the Ten Commandments forbid the worship of any man-made image.Exodus 20 
So, we become the image as the breath of God is breathed into us. Genesis 2:7  As Christians, we are filled with the Spirit who makes us alive in Christ. Our job as image bearers is to reflect the loving character of God to the rest of creation with our own Christ inspired love to a world that has lost sight of God’s presence and character. We are to be the image of Christ to everyone who we meet.

In the next verse in Genesis we are commanded to rule over the rest of creation. This does not mean using creation to our own, ends wrecking it as we do so. It is a command to care for it and look after it just as God himself would, in a sacrificial manner.

However, I think it means much more than this.  At the fall Satan took that authority away from humankind, and Jesus had to come as the second Adam, the perfect image of God, to win back all that was lost. In Christ, we now have the power and authority to change the fallen creation bringing it back into the state God meant it to be through prayer and our own loving and prayerful actions.  

Every soul living is made in the image of God so we have a special duty to love care and respect every human being regardless of race class or creed. 

I close this blog with a fragment from a Celtic liturgy:

Leader: I open my heart to Christ in the stranger,

People: To Christ in the face of colleague and friend,

Leader: I open my heart to the one who is wounded

People: To Christ in the hungry, the lonely, the homeless

Leader: I open my heart to the one who has hurt me

People: To Christ in the faces of sinner and foe

Leader: I open my heart to those who are outcast

People: To Christ in the broken, the prisoner, the poor

Leader: I open my heart to all who are searching

People: To Christ in the world God’s generous gift