Both sides of the brain: 2010 in retrospect

To complement the twelve doomiest stories of 2010 I linked to a few days ago, Desdemona has now also posted fifty doomiest graphs (for the left side of the brain) and fifty doomiest photos (for the right side). Of course, such links don't highlight various pieces of good news from this year, but they have been relatively few and far between in comparison with our developing grasp on our deteriorating global situation.

Abandoning false hopes is part of what it means to take up our cross and follow the man of sorrows. As 2010 draws to a close and 2011 dawns, possibilities for faith, hope and love remain abundant. But we must pursue them in the real world, which is increasingly filled with groans and sighs - as well as the promise of the coming glory of God.

The Word became flesh: looking again at Jesus X

A sermon from John 1.1-14: Part IX
Conclusion: GLORY
What do you see when you look at Jesus? You can hold the book just so, squint your eyes, look into the middle distance, clear your mind and stand on one foot and still all you see is some guy, a teacher from Nazareth, a Jewish peasant, an inspirational healer.

John invites us to take another look.

The Word became flesh … and we have seen his glory, … full of grace and truth. John says, “keep looking!” Suddenly, our eyes might focus and an image leap out from the page: the Word of God made flesh, the light shining in darkness, the glory of the only Son, full of grace and truth, right there in 3DM. Do you see it?

Will we learn from John how to look at Jesus in such a way that we too can say: "we have seen his glory"? If we have the courage to open our eyes – watch out! – the glare may be dazzling.

Father,
Open our eyes. Lighten our darkness. Break our silence with your word.
Open our eyes, we want to see. We want to see Jesus,
         and be filled with his grace and truth. Amen.

Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X.

Jesus and climate change XV

Conclusion
Speaking of carbon-emitters and carbon-sufferers reminds us – what has the church got to do with climate change?

I submit that only a community based on love can sustain a genuine concern for justice and sustainability in the face of ecological crisis. Lots of other movements and groups do great stuff and I thank God for them. I thank God for the IPCC: on the whole, they do us all a great service, as do many others. But the desire for change, the impulse towards justice and living wisely, cannot be sustained merely by guilt over past mistakes. Even fear, which is a great motivator, in the end can just compound the problem, because we get so terrified that we’ll buy any solution, even if we have to sell our souls to get it.

Only if we are secure in the knowledge of being held in a love that will not let go, can we step out on the risky path of putting the needs of others first. Only when we know that we are deeply loved by a God who made the heavens and the earth can we move heaven and earth out of love for our neighbour. Only when we stop thinking individualistically and start thinking as a global family can we face global problems, when the ones who are suffering from our greed or thoughtlessness are not faceless strangers, but brothers and sisters. Only when we are not paralysed by fear can we be released from the chains of denial and be honest about the scope of the problem and think clearly about creative solutions. Only when staying alive is not our primary goal, can we avoid be paralysed by threats. Only when the environment is not treated as either a resource to be exploited or a god to be worshipped can we live in harmony with it. Only when we understand ourselves as God’s image on earth, a good part of the created order with the task of enjoying and serving the creation will we stop acting like we own the place, or thinking that we are a disease that needs to be purged. Only when we see the world as a gift entrusted to our care, as the realm of God’s coming glory, as our future home, will we make more than cosmetic changes to our behaviour.

In God’s grace, there are many people doing good things in response to the threat of climate change and certainly most of them do not yet think of Jesus as a brother and God as their father, or believe that God raises the dead. That too is a gift from God. But only a community based on love, not guilt and fear, can sustain a genuine concern for all of God’s children, and for all of God’s world. As strange as it may sound, I believe that the church is the hope of the world.* The church is what God is doing now. God likes to work in surprising ways. He used a poor marginalised Jewish peasant on the outskirts of the Roman empire to turn the world upside down. He won his greatest victory through a shameful death. What is God doing now? He’s building a community full of broken and hurting people, but a community that has started to taste what it’s like to be healed.

If you’ve never done so, then I’d like to invite you to come and taste this community at your local church. If you've had disappointing experiences before, remember, this ought to be the community that does failure and repentance and new beginnings well. Come and see whether God might be at work in surprising ways. Come and be healed. Come and become a healer. Come and be part of God’s renovation.
*Of course, Christ is the hope of the world, but the community of his followers is the sign and foretaste of his coming presence and rule.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

Jesus and climate change XIII

The renewal of all things
The renewed creation will be the full realisation and perfection of the present order, as well as its transformation into something even more wonderful. The writers of the Bible struggle to describe it, in language limited by present experience. Nonetheless, they paint a picture of a place where we will be completely at home, with recognisable physical bodies, where we will know one another, will love and be loved, where we will be at rest and yet will have fruitful things to do in serving God, where life will abound without the threat of extinction and decay. We sometimes get a fleeting taste of this now, but then it will be the steady settled reality.

Many people have a mistaken idea of disembodied spirits going to heaven at death. This is not the hope presented in the Bible and is a sub-Christian idea. The Christian hope is actually for heaven to come to earth, that is, for the reality of God’s gracious and gentle rule to become as established and evident on earth as it is in heaven. This is not going to heaven when you die. This is heaven coming to earth at some point in God’s glorious future.

And nor is this a return to a garden paradise like the one we read about in the opening chapters of the Bible. The Bible’s final picture of our ultimate destiny is not a garden, but a garden city. The city is a place of creativity and technology, yet also of human community and relational intensity. The human task of ordering, blessing and caring for the earth finds its consummation in a flourishing human community in which all living things flourish. In the images offered us in Revelation, we are told of this harmonious city that "the glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it" (Revelation 21.26). This seems to imply that nothing that is good will be entirely lost, that God will honour what is honourable in human creativity and endeavour. Part of humanity's destiny (and so task) is to enrich the good things in the world. This is not, on the one hand, to leave them untouched as though our mere presence pollutes, yet on the other, nor is it to dismiss created things as irrelevant, distracting or corrupting.

And so the Christian hope that God will renovate the created order is not a license to trash the world in the meantime. In fact, the opposite is true: because God will redeem his entire groaning creation, how we treat it now ought to reflect its importance. Because the earth will one day be filled with God’s glory (Numbers 14.21, Habakkuk 2.14, Psalm 72.19), we ought to glorify him today in how we care for it.
Twelve points to the first person to guess the Sydney building in the picture.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

Jesus and climate change VI

And God made us to enjoy and care for his world. The picture in the opening pages of the Bible is one in which humanity was intended to extend God’s good order in the garden, to make God's good world more fruitful. Humans were to lead and join with the rest of creation in bringing glory to God through the abundant and thankful enjoyment of all that is good. This means that caring for the non-human created order is actually part of worshipping God since we are allowing creation to give glory to God as he intended.

Many people think of spirituality as downplaying the importance of the physical in favour of the ‘spiritual’. For Christian spirituality, the physical and what we do with it is spiritual, because it is God’s Spirit that brings life to all that lives. Or put another way, matter matters.

“In order fully to access, enjoy and profit from our environment, we need to see it as something that does not exist just to serve our needs. Or, to put it another way, we are best served by our environment when we stop thinking of it as there to serve us. When we can imagine what is materially around us as existing in relation to something other than our own purposes, we are free to be surprised, educated and enlarged by it. When we obsessively seek to guarantee that the environment will always be there for us as a storehouse of raw materials, we in fact shrink our own humanity by shrinking what is there to surprise and enlarge, by reducing our capacity for contemplation of what is really other to us.”

- Rowan Williams, Ecology and Economy lecture (2005).

UPDATE: Fixed broken link to RW's article, now that the Archbishop's website has been re-arranged.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

Human rights: a stop sign, not a road map

Much contemporary discussion of ethics takes the form of claims about human rights. Yet the popularity of this mode of discourse threatens to narrow the range of ethical reflection. Although rights have a limited usefulness as a warning of imminent (or present) danger, by themselves they are a woefully inadequate conceptual resource for structuring reflection and behaviour. Rights provide a negative limit of obligation, borders beyond which one must not pass. But they lack a sense of a positive project, of growing a community, maturing a self in caring and variegated relation to others. The strongest positive statement in the widely cited UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is that "human beings... are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Nearly all the rest of the thirty articles outline protective measures restricting the power of the state over against an individual. This declaration is rightly important, and does serve a very useful function. But it is not and should not be expected to be a comprehensive basis for our life together. And this is not simply because it is a product of its age and culture (notice that we are to live in a spirit of brotherhood, and that - understandably after WWII - the main fear is of state-initiated oppression of individuals); it is because rights themselves are a backstop measure, not the main game.

When a relationship has reached a point where both sides are standing on their rights, we are already in damage-control territory. If you have to claim your right to something, the positive goal of the relationship has broken down and it has now become a question of harm-minimisation.

In 1 Corinthians 8-14, Paul argues for the priority of love over rights, of thoughtful passionate concern for the other over the unrestricted exercise of my freedoms. God's love for us in Christ liberates us, not to do whatever we wish, but to do good to others, to serve them for the common good.

Often, our cultural assumption of the good life comes down to each of us pursuing our own agenda as relatively free from outside interference as possible. But there is so much more possible. Others are not obstacles to be negotiated in the fulfillment of my desires; they are opportunities for growth, visible signs pointing to God's coming presence and glory, the primary way in which we love God. The other is a gift to me; indeed, a significant part of that gift is that in the other I too can become a gift.

Rights are merely a stop sign; only faithful, hope-filled love gives us a map.

God with us? IV

Immanuel

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning ...The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

- John 1.1-2, 14.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling – or literally, ‘tabernacled’ – among us. This one who is the expression of God, set up his tent of flesh and blood. He lived amongst us humans, as a human. Just as God’s glory had dwelled amongst Israel in a tent in the wilderness, so John says we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.

The disciples did not see a pillar of fire or God’s glory in the tabernacle like the Israelites. They saw the glory of the One who had come from the Father. According to John, this glory was seen in his obedience to his Father (17.4), in his betrayal (13.30-31), suffering and death (12.23-24). This was a surprising manifestation of God’s glory: he was crowned king (19:14, 19), but with a crown of thorns (19:2). He was lifted up (3:14; 12:32), but upon a cross. This is God’s glorious presence. This is what it looks like: a peasant being unjustly executed by a brutal regime. This deconstructs all our assumptions about God’s presence. If God is on our side, perhaps this is what it will look like. Not fame, success, security and comfort, but difficulty, pain, loss and humiliation. Grace and truth are costly. Obedience is not an easy road. To walk with God is to carry a cross. If God is with us, it might look and feel more like dying than victory. If God is on our side, or rather, if we’re on God’s side, we ought to expect to often seem to be losing. We ought to be surprised and wary if we seem to be always amongst the powerful, if we find ourselves rich and comfortable. God’s glorious presence was found most decisively in one who lived amongst the outcast and was himself rejected and despised.

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known.

- John 1.17-18

Jesus has made the invisible God known; he embodied God with us. He was even called Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’. God has been on the side of humanity and that is what it looked like. We need to keep on putting our ideas of what God is like, of what it is like for God to be with us, through Jesus, who has brought grace and truth. We don’t get to decide what we think God is like, what we think God’s presence might be like. We might like to think of God in a particular way, but unless he looks Christ-shaped, cross-shaped, then we’re fooling ourselves. To ignore Jesus, even to honour him as one among many, is to ignore God amongst us.
Five points for the identity of the statue. Five more to translate the Greek. Five more to give the NT reference. And fifteen if you can guess the city in which the picture was taken. No more than one correct guess per person.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI.

Gloria Dei vivens homo

The glory of God is a living human.

- Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses. IV.xx.7

God loves life. He made it. His Spirit sustains it. His Son died for it. The Author of life, the Spirit of life and the Living one: Father Son Spirit live and share their life.

Blessed be the name... II

Does God have a name? Jesus Christ is Lord!
In my last post, I briefly discussed how in the Old Testament God revealed his name: YHWH. Yet out of respect, his people chose to call upon this one as Adonai, 'my Lord'.

Then came Al the Greek,* also known as Al the Great. And so people everywhere** started speaking Greek, including many of the scattered Jews (and not a few of the unscattered ones too). Before too long the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians call the Old Testament) were translated into Greek. The translators, however, faced the issue of what to do with the divine name. Would they transliterate YHWH directly into Greek or continue Hebrew piety by using the Greek for 'lord' (kurios)? Not having the same symbolic resources as Hebrew (which could encode two words at once: one in the consonants, and another in the vowels), they opted for the latter and so rendered the name of God by using the title kurios.

*Yes, I know he was from Macedonia; save the hate-mail.
**Yes, I know - not everywhere.

However, kurios like adonai was a title, not a name. And so others were also called kurios: like Caesar. Indeed, even Israel's king (when she had had one), was called 'lord'.

Thus, it is no surprise that when Jesus comes and is recognised as Israel's Messiah, this title (kurios) is applied to him. He is king of Israel and so the common use of 'Lord Jesus' throughout the New Testament reflects this.

However, far more common than 'Lord Jesus' is 'Lord Jesus Christ' or 'Christ Jesus our Lord' or 'Jesus Christ our Lord'. Remember, 'Christ' is also a title, not simply Jesus' surname. Could 'Lord' then be implying more than simply 'Messiah'? Perhaps it is simply a redundant tautology, a way of emphasising Jesus' royalty as Son of David and true king of Israel? Possibly, but I suspect not.

To support this hunch, let's take a brief look at Isaiah 45.20-23:

Assemble yourselves and come together,
   draw near, you survivors of the nations!
They have no knowledge--
   those who carry about theur wooden idols,
   and keep on praying to a god that cannot save.
Declare and present your case;
   let them take counsel together!
Who told this long ago?
   Who declared it of old?
Was it not I, the LORD? [Was it not I, YHWH?]
   There is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Saviour;
   there is no one besides me.

Turn to me and be saved,
   all the ends of the earth!
   For I am God, and there is no other.
By myself I have sworn,
   from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness
   a word that shall not return:
"To me every knee shall bow,
   every tongue shall swear."

This is a classic statement of Jewish monotheism, in a section sounding a ringing critique of idolatry. There is Israel's God YHWH (=the LORD), and then there are pretenders to divinity, false alternatives. Now let's compare that with one of the most striking passages of the New Testament:

Christ Jesus, because 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.

Notice that what was God's exclusive right, shared with no other, is here given to Jesus. Jesus is included in the identity of the one God of Israel. He stands with Israel's God over against all created idols. And at precisely this point, it is the confession of Jesus Christ as kurios that is the clincher. Jesus is not simply lord as Messiah, though he is that. He is Lord, the one Lord, receiving the title reserved for YHWH alone.

There is so much more that could be said coming out of this passage (and others like it). And so much more to be said about the identity of Jesus, about the name of God. But for the moment, we'll pause there, noticing that the summary confession of the gospel - Jesus Christ is Lord - answers not only the question "Who is Jesus?" but leads us directly into the further question, "So who then is God?"

PS I realise many of these thoughts are indebted to Bauckham, but I also owe their recent stimulation to some recent talks from Rowan Kemp at Refresh.