Praying for kings and rulers: civic order and the good news of Jesus

A guest post by Ruth Brigden
Ruth is a missionary working with CMS Australia and serving in Numbulwar, a remote indigenous community in the Northern Territory.

“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone – for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”

- 1 Timothy 2:1-2.

This is Kathy-Anne. She is our church treasurer.
Kathy-Anne is also an elected Councillor on the Roper Gulf Shire, which oversees service provision in Numbulwar.

I was challenged by Kathy-Anne recently when she told me that she prays everyday for Numbulwar’s police, school, credit union, and her employer, the Roper Gulf Shire.

Numbulwar’s police station is only a few years old. Before it was built, intervention into domestic disputes, and fights between tribal groups was done by individuals (including Yulki, our church deacon), and they often got hurt in the process. In the event of an emergency, the nearest police came by plane from Groote Eylandt, and by the time they got here, the damage was usually done. A permanent police presence has helped Numbulwar community live more peacefully, and it has helped people like Yulki devote more time to the Ministry of the Word, rather than spending her time breaking up fights.

When Kathy-Anne prays for the police and other local institutions, she is putting 1 Timothy 2:1-2 into practice. I’m sure we can think of many good reasons why well-functioning institutions that promote public order are desirable. But it seems that from a spiritual point of view, this kind of stability is good for Christians who want to proclaim the gospel of peace.

It is in the interests of Christians to pray for “kings” and “all those in authority”, because if under God those in authority govern well, Christians will be freed-up to live out their faith before outsiders, “in all godliness and holiness”.

Living in a small community helps Kathy-Anne to see how integral institutions that maintain the good order of society really are – she has got it right in praying regularly for those in authority in Numbulwar, and she has challenged me by her example to pray more in line with 1 Timothy 2:1-2.

Ecclesial dirt and reputational purity

I have had a number of conversations in the last year or so with new or aspiring Anglican clergy that have revolved around the question of which parish to work in. This in itself is quite unsurprising. I studied at Moore College for four years and so spent much of my time with men and women preparing for a lifetime of service in various Protestant churches, mainly Anglican. At the end of a degree, the question of future ministry looms large: where will I serve God and his people? To talk with one's colleagues and friends while discerning an answer is common sense. Even for those who have decided not to pursue service further afield, the sheer number of churches in Sydney makes for a bewildering variety of options. A range of factors could be taken into account in determining an outcome: the ability to use one's particular gifts in the job description, existing relational ties to a congregation or significant individual, the chance to receive further training, the needs and opportunities of the local area, proximity to family, cultural familiarity, respect for the senior minister, confluence of ministry approach and personality, and many others.

What concerned, irritated and ultimately alarmed me was the extent to which one particular aspect seemed to dominate or feature prominently amongst the selection criteria in more than a few discussions. It wasn't "how much will I be paid?" or "will I get a comfortable house?" If such considerations were functioning consciously or unconsciously, they were rarely admitted. No, the criteria in question was: "will serving at this church damage my reputation and make it more difficult for me to get another position in future?"

The thinking, as best as I can reconstruct it, goes something like this. Some parishes in Sydney are seen by the dominant mindset as "tainted" in various ways. They might be a little more charismatic in worship and tone, a little higher in churchmanship (e.g. they might still celebrate Communion regularly), a little broader in the role of women in ministry, a little more open to certain thinkers (such as He Who Must Not Be Named (let the reader understand)), a little more into eating babies and Satan worship. OK, so maybe not the last one. In any case, and more seriously, such parishes depart from what is perceived to be "Sydney orthodoxy" in one or more respects. For those contemplating future employment opportunities, they represent a dangerous possibility of guilt by association. If I accept a position as catechist (student minister) or assistant there, I will gain a reputation for being charismatic/high church/liberal/soft - better to keep my head down and my name pure.

This is, of course, a caricature, but only just. Such reasoning disturbs me for at least three reasons.

(a) It assumes the world can be divided fairly neatly into white hats and black hats. The former are teachers or churches who are solid, reliable, trustworthy, orthodox, "gospel-centred". The latter are teachers or churches that are dangerously wrong, beyond the pale and from whom nothing ought to be learned lest I endanger my soul (not to mention my future ministry opportunities). Of course, everyone is actually a shade of grey: there is none so pure that I can safely accept her every word; there is none so wicked that in God's grace I have nothing to learn from him. We are all always doubly vulnerable: to sin and to grace.

(b) It assumes that I am passive in the interaction, that I will be infected by their "contagion", rather than their being infected by my "holiness". Jesus was contagiously holy; he touched lepers and made them clean instead of himself becoming unclean (Mark 1.40-42). If I think a certain parish is heading in the wrong direction, might not my presence – my prayer, listening, teaching, sharing, love – in God's grace exert some positive influence?

(c) It is based on fear. This fear is not simply that I might lose my way spiritually or theologically by falling under an unwise influence (a concern which may have some small place in healthy thinking), but a fear that others will think less of me, that I will lose honour by associating with the "dishonourable". And each individual who acts based on this fear feeds it in others by implicitly affirming it as a real fear. Although some interlocutors have claimed that they are "simply being realistic", I can't help feeling there are some parallels to a situation in which a man is being beaten by a small group of thugs and a large crowd watches, each individually using the "realistic" reasoning: "if I were the first to go to the victim's assistance, they would turn on me." What each doesn't realise is that all are waiting for someone to initiate action so they can join in.

I'm not saying that such differences between parishes in theology and practice are irrelevant. But the service of God, his people and his world is too important for us to be distracted by anxiety over reputation.
Fifteen points for each of the buildings.

Williams on celebrating creatureliness

"Arguably what is going on in the work of redemption is, as St Irenaeus first put it, the reversal of Adam’s mistake. Adam’s resentment at not being God is transfigured by Christ into the free acceptance of not being God. That’s what Philippians chapter 2 is all about. The one who is in the form of God delights to be no longer in the form of God but in the form of a slave, and in that slave form of humanity, joining in our unfreedom, our suffering, our tensions and our struggles, the finite created form of humanity is glorified from within. Adam resents not being God and so Satan has leverage upon him: ‘You shall be as gods,’ says Satan to Adam, knowing that the essence of our fallenness is resentment at being creatures (just as the essence of the fall of Satan himself, in church tradition, is the refusal to worship). So Jesus, in not clinging to the form of God but accepting the humility of the incarnation and the death of the cross, restores the glory of creatureliness. The incarnation affirms that creation is good, not that it is nice or beautiful, but that it is good because it is in this relationship of loving dependence on the self-giving of God. And the mystery that we seek to understand when we think about redemption is that restoring of the glory of creatureliness can only be done by one who isn’t simply a bit of creation – the Word in whom creation hangs together, in whom alone is that full freedom which can accept the otherness, the suffering, the death of the created order and fill it with life. ‘He who ascended, is it not he who also descended?’ (Eph 4:9)

"So we in Christ rejoice at not being God. We ought to give thanks daily to God that we are not God and that God is God; we give thanks to God for God’s great glory. And the secret is that only in that rejoicing that we are not God do we come to share the divine life in the way we are made to do – the paradox that only by our completely not wanting to be God can the divine life take root in us.

"Discipleship in the body of Christ is in one sense simply a matter of constantly battling to be a creature, battling against all those instincts in us which make us want to be God or make us want to be what we think God is. There, of course, is the catch. And that’s why discipleship challenges at every level those unrealities which distort humanity, which distort creatureliness. That’s why discipleship challenges those enterprises in our world and our culture which feed the illusion that actually we could be God if we tried hard enough.

"What are those things about? Well you many find them in the deep unease so many in our culture feel about ageing and dying. You find it in our denials of death. You find it in our passion for absolute security, our desire never to be at risk. You may find it in a defence programme, you may find it in the technological exploitation of the environment. At level after level, our temptation is to deny that we are finite. And when I read, as sadly I sometimes do in discussions of our environmental crisis, that we can be confident technology will find a way, my blood runs cold, because I hear in that the refusal of real creatureliness. ‘These limits are temporary, our skills will find a way, we shall at some point be able to get to the stage where we are safe’. And the gospel tells us you never on earth get to a place where you are safe; but you will get to a place where you are blissful and united with your Father in heaven. In the immortal words of C S Lewis, ‘he’s not a tame lion, you know’.

"The outworking then of created wisdom, created Sophia, is this joyful embrace of being created, of not being God, the acceptance that we shall die, that we are fragile, that we are fallible. And it is ‘here on this lowly ground’, in John Donne’s phrase, that we come into contact with the transfiguring, transformative life of the eternal God. ... [O]ur holiness is not the denial but the acceptance of being creatures."

- Rowan Williams, Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness:
the Wisdom of Finite Existence.

God with us? II

God with Israel: Exodus 25
The first half of Exodus is a riveting and rollicking story: a baby saved from the bulrushes and brought up amongst foreigners; murder and betrayal; a burning bush and plagues; dramatic rescue and great rejoicing; suffering and complaining; bread from heaven, a flaming mountain, earthquakes and God himself writing on tablets of stone. It’s the kind of material you’d make a movie out of – or maybe two.

But the movies – and most readers – give up when they hit the second half. After 20 or so chapters of action, most of the second half of the book seems to be building instructions.

My in-laws are architects and so I’m learning to love buildings, but even I find these chapters hard going. First come seven chapters (Exodus 25-31) filled with detailed instructions on making a box (ark), table, lampstand, tent (tabernacle), altar, courtyard, dress clothes for priests and more, then a few chapters on the golden calf incident (Exodus 32-34), before the same elements appear again in similar detail recording the actual construction of each element (Exodus 35-40).

All together, it probably looked something like this or this or this.

The tabernacle was basically a mobile tent with portable furniture. The Israelites traveled with it and set it up wherever they pitched camp while wandering through the wilderness. The tabernacle would be in the center of the camp, and the 12 tribes of Israel would set up their tents around it. There was a fenced courtyard, and then the tabernacle itself was divided into two sections: the holy place, which contained the lampstand, table and altar, and the holy of holies, which contained the ark of the covenant. This ark was a wooden box overlaid with gold in which were placed the tablets recording the covenant (binding agreement) made between God and Israel at Mount Sinai. On top of the ark were golden statues of two winged angels (cherubim) facing each other.

Unless you’re an archeologist or have a thing for tents, it’s all a bit of a slog to read. What’s it all doing here? What’s it all about? The key is in Exodus 25.8: And have them make me sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them. God's presence in the midst of his people Israel - that's what this whole section is about: the concern for holiness; the importance of the sacrifices; the repetition and symbolism of different numbers; the position and orientation of the tabernacle; how the quality of the metals increases the closer they are to Holy of Holies (bronze, silver, gold); the way the ark was meant to represent the throne of God, such that he would sit ‘enthroned between the cherubim’. All this was to highlight what an awesome and weighty privilege it was for the Israelites to have the living God in their midst.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI.

Immanuel

If Jesus is more than an inspired human teacher, more than a rough approximation of God, if in Jesus we see the very heart of God, then this is wonderful news. We are no longer left guessing what God might be like. We are freed from projecting our own fears and wishes onto an unknown God. We can actually know what God is like.

And what is he like? John 1.14 gives the answer: full of grace and truth. And verse 16: From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. This is what God, our Father in heaven, is like. He is not cold and distant. He is like Jesus. If you want to know the heart of God, keep reading the Gospels and seeing the heart of Jesus. He is the kind of God who welcomes little children, the kind of God who hates religious hypocrisy, the kind of God who throws parties for the outsider, who opens the eyes of the blind, who feeds the hungry, heals the sick and raises the dead, who brings good news for the poor. In Jesus, we discover that God’s yoke is easy and his burden is light; he is gentle and humble in heart. He is the kind of God who, like Jesus, is easily misunderstood, but not easily ignored. He is a God who knows our suffering and temptations from the inside, who can sympathise with our weaknesses. He washes smelly feet and weeps over death. He is a God who would rather die than live without you. He is the kind of God who won’t let death stand in the way of his plans.

And all that is good news. Because left to ourselves, we generally assume that being divine is the opposite of being human. But we need to let God show us what God is like and stop imposing our ideas on him. We think God couldn’t become human because that wouldn’t threaten his holiness and perfection. The good news is that in Jesus, that is simply not true. God’s perfection is seen in his coming to live in our messiness; his holiness consists of making us clean.

And so in Jesus, Immanuel, we know that God is with us. Not just any god, not the god of our nightmares, yet neither the god of our fantasies. Instead, the God and Father of Jesus is with us. What wonderful news!
A couple of paragraphs from my sermon today.