mark-markspace: dalai-lama-and-inter-faith-dialogue

(NB. You will need to scroll to see the post.)

It was the new fortnightly Wednesday night gathering at West Preston Baptist Church. Mark, the pastor, had set it up around the communion table. There were only about six of us there and the content of the service was almost entirely responsive readings and prayer. Thanks to Ridley, I’ve developed a healthy appreciation for such things.

What I liked about it was its simplicity. Mark spoke to us briefly about how the communion table can be inappropriately sidelined, particularly by western protestant churches. I see his point. So often, communion is a tack-on to a church service where the sermon is a highlight. Sometimes I think the time is used in church services to allow people to reflect on the speaker and how that person’s words have impacted their emotions - rather than being a meal that symbolically enters us into a spiritual connectedness with our God. In the process, I think communion can become ritualistic.

The contrast on Wednesday night was marvellous. There were no little pansy 15mm squares of bread to place on your tongue and swallow whole. Similarly we had glasses of grapejuice (wine) that had a bit of volume to them, instead of those little ones that you could possibly use to give a child a dose of demazin.

The effect wasn’t lost on me. John 6:53-57 …

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.

If I was reading that for the first time, without a fair idea of the whole picture in the book of John, those metaphors would be extremely confusing… so if that’s you, don’t stress. It certainly hit me in a new way. As my jaw moved, tearing away at the big chunk of bread roll and as I gulped down the large cup of grapejuice, it actually required some physical effort. I couldn’t just slide communion down my throat. And in those moments I reflected on Jesus’ actions on the cross in a new way.

I came away from the service feeling refreshed. I felt like I’d been part of something alive and real. I didn’t feel the emptiness that comes with a stage-produced church service. I felt more like we were cutting to the chase. No one cared that I didn’t have the music for the one song we could have sung. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t about that.

I long for the day when I’m part of a community that is willing to put “what we do” aside and, instead, asks “why are we here?” When worship - when church - is just another churchy song, why do I feel so disconnected from it on the inside? Where’s God?

Have you experienced anything like this?

Here’s the paragraph I read over a couple of times:

God does not wish for us to take the easy way out or avoid tough issues and struggles. He wants us to tackle these challenges head on with unflinching loyalty and faith out of love for him. Not only does he want us to take on the challenges that present themselves to us he wants us to seek out the battlefield on which he needs us to fight. He will support us and give us the strength we need to succeed and achieve our life’s mission but this does not mean he will keep us safe.

What I took away from his post, was this question:

To what extent should Christians go looking for a battlefield?

You could play with those words in a number of different ways and end up with very different results, mostly based on how you defined “go looking” and how you defined “battlefield”. In weighing up the alternatives and extremes, I have the following observations to make:

1. It’s really important that we don’t make ourselves the hero.
It’s the same old story that’s been playing itself out in human history since Adam played at centre-half-forward for the Eden footy club - people trying to put themselves in God’s rightful role. If we go looking for the battlefield, we can’t let our own ego, or our own identity get caught up and defined by the task. I have seen this happen to people in ‘professional’ ministry and I’ve done it myself. If we’re on the battlefield, if we’re struggling, or if we’re serving, we have to keep the goal of making disciples in focus. It shouldn’t be about how nice a guy your church’s pastor is. It shouldn’t be about how phenomenal your youth music team can sound if they practise really hard. In Western-world suburban church life, it’s so easy for secular doctrines of excellence and performance to creep in. It’s far easier to make ourselves or our activities the champion in the battle. They’re not. If Jesus isn’t the hero, then whatever you’re doing has nothing to do with him.

2. It’s really important that we measure progress properly.
God wants us to live out our faith. In doing that, there are most definitely, obviously going to be sacrifices that have to be made. Sometimes we might need to do things that are uncomfortable or stretching. The unfortunate reality is that we still live in a world where some churches measure progress in terms of numerical growth. I struggle to define what progress for Christian mission and ministry really is? How can you determine what the measures should be when you don’t fully understand God’s plans? So, with that in mind, it has to come back to obedience. We need to know what God wants us to do. We need to seek Him to find out. And then we can give it a go. The second we start making up our own ideas of what it means to “risk enough”, we start to try to earn our worth. There is no point in trying to earn your way towards God. That’s just a guilt-ridden spiritual desert waiting to happen. In that sense, we don’t ‘make progress. We simply grow in a spirit-based knowledge. (Reminds me of the second half of 1 Cor 13.)

3. It’s important that we aren’t hyped up to the point of being unrealistic.
To see a sense of allegiance to something that’s so important and real to me, is something that I really love to see forming in others. So that’s great. But at the same time part of me feels a sense of loss, or grief, or something, when I see a bunch of people at a loud, concert-style event with a big band, responding to messages that encourage passionate expressions of promises that “I will live for the cause”. I’d like to be able to promise God something like that. Under my own steam though I’m never going to be able to make good on it. If we’re too easily swept up emotionally by the prospect of surrendering to something greater than ourselves, there are risks. We risk forgetting to think critically and logically about the things that we’re choosing to believe. We risk committing to something before we fully understand it. And, when the experience fades, when the great book about fighting battles is gathering dust, when the youth rally is over, when it’s time to come home from the campsite and go back to the daily grind… will the cracks start to appear, or will we stay 100% true to our word?

One day I hope I’ll find the balance, somewhere in the middle of all three.

One of the things that we looked at quite a bit in my first semester at Ridley was the worship/church service stuff. With three weekly chapel services to practice/practise in, my eyes were opened to a world of prayer books and meticulous attention to eloquent readings of scripture. My church seems much more haphazard in comparison. We’ve got a decent bunch of bible readers now, who even pre-read the passage before they drop it on the church… but we don’t use prayer books… and sometimes even the pastors say stuff, that, if you took it back to the letter of the biblical-theological law, wouldn’t actually hold water.

I was in one chapel service at college where a fellow student said, in passing, during a closing prayer, “Thanks God for showing up today”. At morning tea following, there were 5 stiff old Anglicans there to remind him that God is actually omnipresent. Now, for an ordination candidate in a theological college, that’s probably not as tactfully horrific as it would be in a church laity context. The point, however, remains… and I think this is the source of Geoff’s underlying ponderings.

Language is one of the key means through which we express and understand theological ideas. The thing about words, is that they are merely a representation of the concept that the communicator is trying to explain. The quality of that representation, is influenced not only by the lingual/literary education of the speaker… but also by the decoding processes of the listener.

So what does that mean for Geoff and the Third Day song? Well seeing as I’ve actually sung live on stage with Third Day, I’ll dig a bit deeper into the song lyrics. I agree that the phrasing of the lyrics over the music leaves the obvious misnomer surrounding what the beautiful thing is. But the words aren’t just “You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet song”… the bridge says this:

You are my strong melody
You are my dancing rhythm
You are my perfect rhyme
And I will sing of You forever

Anyone who has ever tried to write a song will tell you, from the experience that these are all components of a beautiful song. I think that’s where the words of “You Are So Good To Me” are coming from. That’s what I take away from it anyway. It’s an analogy. And it’s a largely emotional/experiential one, rather than a strongly theological one.

Now, to drive my point home, I decided to pick on one of Geoff’s favourite songs, which I actually really like as well. “How Great Thou Art”. It is a really nice song. However, I kind of struggle with it sometimes, particularly singing this verse:

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

I understand what the song is getting at here. It’s reflecting on God’s creation as a revelation of His greatness and trying to express that. It has a more staccato melody compared to a Third Day song where the chords tend to ring out and flow together. That, for me, really brings out the “ye olde english” feel to the verse as it talks about “forest glades and woods” that “I wander” through. I get what the song is saying… but I’m an Aussie. I don’t wander through forest glades. I walk. I walk through the bush.

I could start a rant about how crap I think songs are when they talk about Jesus and his “fame” just because of it’s sheer literary Hollywood-infused stupidity… yep… I just did start a rant.

Words are awkward. Theology is complicated. That’s about to become my tagline.

Are churches right to say ‘Jesus loves Osama’?

Out of the 185,000 odd clicks that the poll had received when I last looked, I was unsurprised but at the same time kind of intrigued, to find that about 82% of respondents voted “No.” (If you’re a uni student, that’s a HD… so “No” did pretty well for itself.)

You wouldn’t have thought that something like this would surprise me. But it did. Maybe it’s the church kid in me. See, I’ve grown up in an environment where, even if people did an absolutely pathetic job of practicing what they preach, the essence of the Christian message - the Gospel of grace and forgiveness - was always something that I’ve been hearing about. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that most people actually don’t have the same experience. After 23 years as a church participant, I’m very accustomed to the idea of forgiving the undeserving and the guilty. In fact, if Jesus doesn’t love Osama, then he isn’t who Christians think he is. That’s how deep it goes.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity says:

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

I’m only just beginning to feel like I understand what it really means to “Love your neighbour as yourself”. I guess I expected more from everyone else. I guess I expected people to see that, as humans, we really stand to benefit far more from hating actions rather than hating other people.

I’d like to take a moment to introduce a friend of mine, or, more accurately, his blog.

Mark-MarkSpace

By way of introduction, Mark was the interim youth pastor at my church for a while, which gave me the chance to get to know him pretty well. Mark is now the full-time pastor at another baptist church and the blog, for the moment, seems to be an online rendition of his Sunday sermon text. I recommend that you RSS it for now. I’ll try to get him to let me fix up the tech side of it (including the URL).
By way of a real introduction, Mark could quite easily get himself a reputation for being a bit of a liberal theologian if he put his mind to it. He was the interim youth pastor who got into trouble for wearing a soccer jumper with a Heineken logo on the stage at church. We were thinking about burning him at the stake for it but no one could find a copy of the church constitution to work out how many votes we’d need to do it. Personally I find Mark far too interesting to box him like that. He has a unique way of drawing connections between scriptural concepts and suggesting some application to our present context. (As opposed to wrapping the bible around our present day presuppositions, which he regularly does a good job of avoiding.)
I’m not afraid to say that in the past, the exegetical amateur in me occasionally wants to red flag some of his ponderings when they appear to draw a bit of a long bow. In practice though, when I’ve thought about it, the long bow usually just means he’s tried to skip over an otherwise overcomplicated tangent, or that he’s made a conceptual jump that I wasn’t ready for just yet. Mark is also smarter than me and has spent a lot more time with his head in books, so I generally don’t mess with him on theological grounds and stick to criticising his poor attempts at web publishing to make myself feel better.
If you’re a 20-something single theological student who goes to a church where most of the preaching is focused on newbies or married people, then Mark’s blog is certainly for you.

The first way we tried to deal with our dishes in the bachelor pad, was with a fool-proof system, designed to take care of our every dishwashing need.  We agreed to stack the dishes on the sink as they were used.  Then, every second day, on a rostered basis, we would take turns to deal with the dishes for the entire bachelor pad community.  It worked for about a week and a half.  Eventually it degenerated into petty arguments.

Whose turn was it to do the dishes?
Who made more dishes than someone else?
Who didn’t do a good enough job last time?
Who did their dishes too late?

We each ended up pointing the finger at the others, feeling completely justified that we had contributed and frustrated at the obvious faults of the other two.  We blamed the others in our community for our dishes.  We insisted that before we contributed any further, that the other party live up to our expectations.

When I’m not feeling great about something at church.  I’m not proud to admit that I often have the same response.  I point the finger towards the community and say “It’s the church’s fault.  The church has so much wrong with it!”

Do you ever feel like that?
Have you been unhappy with a decision made by the church?
Are you still feeling a sense of loss or hurt?
Are you disappointed about something?
Do you have any regrets from the past?

The solution came in the form of a new dishes system.  A system that is yet to cause a single argument. We now have 3 separate spots for dishes in the kitchen.  And an amazing thing started to happen.  Once we were able to see which dishes belonged to us personally, we dealt with them ourselves.  We didn’t insist upon our rights or the responsibilities of others to conform to our definition of fair.  In fact, one day I was delighted to come home to find that my other housemate, Nathan, had dealt with his own dishes and then taken care of mine as well.  Community works when we give the best of ourselves to others.  I believe that this is what it means to bear one another’s burdens.  “…and in this way…”, says Galatians 6:2, “…you will fulfil the law of Christ.”

In the same way, Jesus gave up the fair and just result for himself.  Motivated by love for others, he gave his life on the cross.  His blood being shed to cover the price of our rebellion from God.  And allowing us to come back into relationship with our Creator.  Without a Christ-inspired approach to our community, we hurt ourselves and we hurt those around us.  With the love of God the Father as the source of our relationships, as the Holy Spirit unites us in love for one another, together we enter into our promised inheritance, joined as one body with our Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Philippians 2:1-11
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

From adelphoi, comes the Greek word philadelphia (no cheesy jokes please!). Philadelphia means “to love with a familial affection”. It points towards the underlying motive of some of the practical things that the New Testament asks us to do in the Christian family. Because we are a family, we are to:

• Give honour to one another (Rom. 12:10)
• Live harmoniously with one another (Rom. 12:16)
• Admonish one another (Rom. 15:14)
• Wait for each other (1 Cor. 11:33)
• Demonstrate equal care for one another (1 Cor. 12:25)
• Serve one another (Gal. 5:13)
• Bear burdens of each other (Gal. 6:2)
• Give comfort to one another (1 Thes. 5:11)
• Build up each other (1 Thes. 5:11)
• Maintain peace with each other (1 Thes. 5:13)
• Do good to one another (1 Thes. 5:15)
• Lovingly bear with each other (Eph. 4:2)
• Be subject to each other (Eph. 5:21)
• Forgive one another (Col. 3:13)
• Confess to and pray for each other (James 5:16)
• Exhibit hospitality to each other (1 Peter 4:9)

This stuff isn’t easy to live out because it comes at a personal cost.

1 Corinthians 12:14-20 (NIV)Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

This reminds us of the interdependent connectedness that is necessary for real Christian community. Everyone has a place here as part of it. You have a God-given role to play in the community, if you choose it. But why? What has God got in mind for us as we’re thrown together into this mix? What have we been placed into communities to do? Ephesians 4, has our answer. We are called to be part of a body where Christ is the head - a body that is growing into maturity.

Ephesians 4:11-16 (NRSV)
The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

To experience true Christian community, we must first know Christ and then grow in that knowledge. What happens if we don’t grow in our knowledge of Christ? As richly as Paul’s “body” metaphor tells of our interconnectedness when the parts of the body are not working together
it also exposes our vulnerability.

When I was in high school I had this problem with my knees called Osgood-Schlatters disease. Have a look at the site. Basically, due to different muscles, tendons and bones growing at different rates, there’s a tendon that can start to pull away from the bone below the knee. It absolutely kills. You can’t run because the impact just sends pain shooting up your leg. If you do try to run, it starts hurting when you walk. Because parts of my body weren’t working together properly, my whole body was in a lot of pain. In 1 Corinthians, Paul explains that:

1 Corinthians 12:25-26
there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

But the metaphor for the church as a “building” in the New Testament, isn’t talking about the products of the construction industry. This is something that we often forget simply because of the way we use the word “church” in modern English.

“I’m going down to the church on Saturday to help with the working bee.”
“Which church is the wedding being held in?”
“That church over there looks very nice.”

The “building” described in the NT is not a physical one. When Paul (not me, the apostle) talks about the “church” he uses the Greek word ekklesia.
According to the commentary I looked at (see my Community Resources page) ekklesia refers to “an actual gathering of people” or “the group gathering for a regularly assembled meeting”.

Biblical commentators qualify the idea of ekklesia, proposing that Paul wasn’t referring to the church in an institutional sense either. The early church was most certainly linked in organic ways between the different gatherings. But here, Paul’s use of the word didn’t intend to carry an undertone of an earth-bound, organisational sense of federation, beyond their shared faith in Christ. When Paul wrote to the ekklesia in Corinth, or the ekklesia in Colossae, I don’t think he had the different gatherings listed on a database as member churches of the BURE (the Baptist Union of the Roman Empire). So, in my context at Essendon, I tried to imagine what it would be like, if we didn’t have our physical building.

I imagined what church would be like, if, at 5am every Sunday morning, Heath and Simon, our music guys, got up and put up a marquee made from about 80 sheets of blue tarp in Lincoln Park, just in case it rained… and we had church there every Sunday with musical instruments that don’t need electricity… Doug, who’s been worship leading for decades, whips out an old broom handle with bottle caps nailed on to it… the drum kit got stolen last week because someone forgot to pack it up… so Gary, my favourite drummer, is unloading a couple of upturned rubbish bins from the back of his car like that guy who busks in the city. Joan, everyone’s favourite little old lady, is getting into it with the tambourine. There’s no overhead projector. Just one of the tallest guys at church, Bruce, with a big whiteboard and a step ladder. When I picture that, the only things that are strikingly similar to the regular gathering I call church, are the smiling familiar faces.

Paul wasn’t writing to buildings, nor to organisations. He was writing to Christians who met together, living out real faith in a community. The community gathering is the building that Paul is referring to in Ephesians 2, as he writes to Gentile believers, extending to them the invitation for all believers, to enter into the church community.

Ephesians 2:19-22 (NRSV)
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.