I was lying in bed last night fretting when I should have been sleeping and I had a wonderful thought.  I imagined myself creeping out of the house, under the cover of darkness one Saturday night and throwing hand grenades at all the church buildings I could find.  I then wondered what all the Christians would do when they turned up for a church service on Sunday morning and discovered a pile of rubble where the church had been.  What would they do?  How would they think about doing church differently if they suddenly didn’t have the security of a building to retreat to?  While I very much enjoyed this thought I also felt vaguely naughty for doing so, but then I remembered that Jesus got killed for saying much the same thing.   He said He would destroy the temple in Jerusalem and raise it again in three days.   On my pioneer ministry training course http://pioneer.cms-uk.org we have just finished a module about the big story of the bible and it really gave me new insights into the radical nature of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.  For the people of Israel, God’s elect, the temple symbolised God’s presence with them and His blessing and protection in the midst of their struggles for nationhood and identity.  Talking of its destruction evoked cultural memories of exile and alienation, the punishment they endured because of their inability to live in response to God’s love and goodness as revealed to them in Him delivering them from slavery.  However, Jesus is referring here not to the temple itself but to God’s presence as incarnate or embodied in His very personhood.  He was foretelling that it would be torn down in His death and rebuilt in His resurrection three days later.  In fantasising about the ultimate in church deconstruction, I suppose I am wondering have we made the mistake of the Pharisees?  Have we focused on the material reminder of God’s goodness rather than seeking to be a flesh and blood manifestation of His love and transforming power in our world?  This morning I got in the car and looked down to find a water pistol in the shape of a hand grenade.  What is God saying?

There is one question that we seem obsessed with.  Have we made our God too small?  I must have heard it a million times and it is a particular favourite at the beginning of a new year.  However, whenever I hear this question posed it always strikes me that this is not really what is being asked.  The question is actually are our plans sufficiently ambitious and audacious so that God will be shown to be totally on our side and appear mighty and powerful when He blesses us and makes them happen in a miraculous way?  If this is the case, then I would suggest that behind the question is actually a lack of trust in God which those who pose it would be shocked to concede.  The issue for me is rather than trying to make God do what we think He should in as high profile a manner as possible, we need to acknowledge where He is already at work in His world and partner with Him to see His transforming plan for humanity fulfilled.  Just one example of how this operates is in seeing people come to a saving faith.  We sing how God is the author of salvation, yet when we get into a conversation with a non-Christian feel the need to explain the gospel and seal the deal with the sinners’ prayer in case they die that night and go to hell because we have not done what we should when we got the chance.  Yet it always amazes me how when you listen to someone who has not yet acknowledged Christ as Lord, more often than not God has already begun to reveal Himself through their questions and search for meaning, in conversations with others or in dreams and other spiritual experiences that cannot easily be explained away.  Thus if you are ever tempted to ask if you have made God too small, a better question might be are you willing to let God be God?  And are you ready to be obedient in whatever He asks of you so that you can help fulfil His amazing, life-giving plan?  Size really is not the issue, surrender is!

There is nothing worse than seeing the person you love most in the world in pain and torment.  I remember when I was a child seeing my Dad in the depths of depression and just wishing with all my heart that I could make the hurting stop.  I felt so utterly powerless and yet knew that somehow by just being there I was helping.  I was at least in it with him and was a witness to the rawness of his grief and despair.  The worst of times as a parent is seeing your child in pain, whether that is physical or emotional, and knowing that you cannot do anything to take it away.  You do not have the power and sometimes it is actually right to let them experience the consequences of mistakes or deliberate wrong choices in order to save them from worse later on.  It is in this context that I have been meditating on the verse, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him should not perish but may have eternal life.” 

I have spent a good deal of my Christian life railing against God for my own suffering and those of others and yet in this one verse is the ultimate statement of His death-defying love and all-consuming power to intervene to relieve our misery and hopelessness.  Perhaps rather than being sidetracked by the ‘cosmic child abuse’ lens to Christ’s death on the cross, we should focus on the depths of God’s love and His willingness to take responsibility for all that is wrong with this life by dealing with it personally and decisively, once and for all.  We may not enjoy the fullness of this now, but one day the full magnitude of it will hit us like a train and we will spend eternity marvelling at its enormity.  With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, there will be the usual hollow and often obscene pronouncements of love which can cause us to despair at the shallowness and baseness of humanity.  But maybe it should actually just reveal to us with greater and truer clarity the One who is love and faithfulness and be motivated to more faithfully embody and demonstrate His love and goodness to others.

It has always been a huge frustration in my Christian life that I feel I have to make choices between concepts and styles when actually I don’t want to.  For example I loved the freedom of thought and belief of the Anglican Church but found the worship dull and irrelevant.  I enjoyed the exuberance and confidence of charismatics but longed for beauty and mystery.  I was moved by the otherworldliness of the Russian Orthodox Church but felt I was a passive observer.  I wanted the social action of the Salvation Army while still enjoying a pint!  But why do I have to choose?  In order to fulfil the greatest of the commandments, which actually encompass all the others, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and your neighbour as yourself (Matt 22:37-8) surely all these attributes and expressions of faith are equally valid and necessary?  In David Dark’s book, 'Everyday Apocalypse' he addresses this very question.  He says, “We apparently have the word ‘apocalypse’ all wrong.  In its root meaning, it’s not about destruction or fortune-telling; it’s about revealing…When we bring our wits to bear upon apocalyptic expression, we find that it has a way of unmasking the fictions we inhabit by breaking down, among other things, our constructs of public and private, political and religious, natural and spiritual.  It’s annoyingly resistant to our short-sighted either/or propositions and refuses all abstract…divisions such as sacred/secular.”  So I am no longer going to except the choice between asking the difficult questions or getting excited about praising God, awe or engagement, love in action or enjoying a drink with friends.  I am a both/and follower of Christ – both weeping with those who mourn and celebrating with those who party (Ro 12:15)!

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This has always struck me as an odd thing to say about Christmas.  It seems to me that actually the very opposite is true.  We definitely do not tell the truth at Christmas.  You don’t believe me?  Well how about when you open that hideous gift, what do you say?  “It’s lovely” or perhaps “it was just what I always wanted!” How about the fight for the remote? Are you prepared to relinquish control, smile and say, “No I really don’t mind what we watch.” Or what about the classic, “I couldn’t eat another thing”, as you reach for the Quality Street. And one for the men, “No your bum definitely does not look big in that!”  Do you still think you always tell the truth at Christmas?  The reality is that in order to get through the festive season a lot of little white lies will have to be told and then forgotten. 

However, there is a truth that we can be sure of at Christmas.  In the Bible in the book of John, Chapter 3, verse 16 it says, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son.  And this is why; so that no one need be destroyed; by believing Jesus, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.  God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the whole world how bad it was.  He came to help, to put the world right again.”

I always find it amazing at Christmas to think about how the mighty, powerful, holy God who made the entire universe and created humankind in His image, allowed himself to become a foetus carried in the womb of a teenage, unmarried mother. He was born in an animal shed.  The angelic host that heralded this cosmic event appeared to men working out in the fields.  His parents then had to protect the baby from death by fleeing to another country and becoming refugees.  So this then is the ultimate truth to tell at Christmas, summed up in one word, Emmanuel – God is with us.  God with us in our vulnerability; God with us in our fear; God with us in our pain; God with us in the filth; God with us in our shame and God with us in our homelessness.  I hope and pray that whether you have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year or not, you will know the truth that whatever your circumstances, God is with you.  Not because any of us are worthy of Him but because He loves you so much that He gave his Son, his one and only Son, so that you will not be destroyed but by believing in Him you can experience a whole and lasting life.

I recently went to church and heard a sermon where I was encouraged to ‘man up’.  Presumably this is because the popular misconception is that man is the stronger of the sexes.  While there might be some evidence to support that in purely physical terms men are indeed stronger, in every other sense men are whimps!  Oh that’s a bit harsh I hear you say on what basis do I make such a provocative statement.  Well, let’s go back to the Garden of Eden – the woman was deceived by the serpent but Adam deliberately chose to disobey God, his response? “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.” (Gen 3:12).  So he not only blames Eve but also God for providing him with her.  Men have been refusing to take responsibility ever since.  So why is this?  Well I had an interesting conversation with my Dad about my birth this week and he said that in the same way that chickens are involved in providing eggs but the pig is committed to making bacon, so he was involved but my mother was committed!  So maybe the majority of men think love is pleasure, women know love is pain.  Thank goodness we have a saviour who is a real man!   At Christmas we celebrate Jesus taking ultimate responsibility for us and our sinfulness – by entering into our humanity, becoming totally vulnerable for our sakes and being prepared to love us literally to death.  So boys if you are going to ‘man up’ this festive season, please do so in the model of our Lord and not some macho Christianity that has more to do with ‘Call of Duty’ than the Kingdom of God.  I am really getting into Franciscanism which Simon Tugwell describes as, “the radically unprotected life; a life that is cruciform in shape”…”It’s to live dangerously open, revealing all that we genuinely are and receiving all the pain and sorrow the world will give back in return.  It’s to be real because we know the Real.  Maybe living the unprotected life is what it means to be a Christian.” (p67-8, ‘Chasing Francis’ by Ian Morgan Cron)

Here I am giving the Mayor of Kingston a hand massage at the Surbiton Festival on Saturday.  I had a great day with lots of good conversations about life and faith.  One encounter in particular has left me wondering if we try to answer the question that people aren’t actually asking.  I met an amazing lady who wanted prayer because she described herself as a healer. She felt depleted because having given out to others she needed to be spiritually replenished.  Before allowing us to pray, she checked that we were Christians and described how she had had a vision of Jesus 18 months ago. She recounted how wonderful it had been and that in that moment she would have gone anywhere with Him had He asked.  My fellow Christian then began to explain how Jesus had died for her sins and asked me for a ‘Why Jesus?’ booklet to give her.  Since, I have begun to wonder whether rather than ‘Why Jesus?’ we should be seeking to express ‘Who Jesus?’ It was the Pharisees who questioned why.  Jesus’ friends and followers wanted to know Him and imitate His example.

My son had his first match of the season at the weekend.  Unfortunately his team lost 8-0!  Part of the problem is that all their kits are the same size but boys come in all shapes and sizes.  As you can see, this oversized kit can really impede speed and agility.  Anyway that was their excuse!  This reminds me of David going to fight Goliath in armour that was not his own and way too big.  Fortunately he had the sense to be himself and use what he knew in a different context, that of defending his sheep, to defeat the Philistine. But how often do we try and use models that others have had success with to do what God is calling us to?  Maybe a large part of the fun and the challenge of our journey of faith is to allow God to work through our creativity to find new and more appropriate ways to outwork His Kingdom where we are.  That is what I will be doing at the weekend as we seek to bless and reveal God’s love and goodness to those who come along to the Surbiton Festival.  This also makes me wonder about how our one size fits all mentality applies to the way we do church.  Didn’t Jesus say something about the need for new wineskins for the new wine?!

I loved a seminar I went to at the weekend as part of Inspire church network day out.  It has introduced me to the world of open theology which I am looking forward to finding out a lot more about.  But as part of the experience I also had to endure the bit I really hate, worship.  Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time with God but I find it so hard being in a room full of people who are so confident that they can change the world.  Sometimes it is as much as I can do to get out of bed.  So when those who wondered if they could ‘go again’ to make a difference were invited to be prayed for, I reluctantly went to the front.  I hate standing there waiting for someone to petition God on my behalf but soon I was surrounded by kind friends along with my 11 year old son, Dan.  People prayed and encouraged me.  Then Dan spoke words straight into my situation which I knew could have only been revealed by the divine.  A couple of days later a friend recounted a conversation she had with a child about how lots of things that were in books which we wished could be true were not, and yet how some of those things we are told are not true really are.  This got me thinking about how the older I become the less sure I am about having any answers to the big questions but also the less it seems to matter.  Maybe this is what it means to be like a child in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is less about understanding, more about wonder – running into the light with the anticipation of limitless possibilities. 

Thanks to Jonny Baker for the inspiring image.