Faith in Your Damnation

I don't have faith in your damnation. You whose Christianity doesn't meet some standard of "good enough". Or you who are a Jew, a Muslim, a Bahai'i, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Pagan, or maybe "spiritual but not religious", I don't have faith in your damnation.

Don't get me wrong. You and I might both very well be damned. But, thanks be to God, it's not my job to decide who, if anyone, is damned. That job belongs to God.

However, you might very well have got the impression from many of my fellow Christians that the main meaning we Christians derive from our faith is that you are damned and we are not. And I don't blame you if you've got that impression because I think that's the main message that Christians have communicated.

After all, some would argue, why be a Christian if everyone else is going to get into heaven too?

We've made the "good news" into the message "Good news! God will love you if you are just like us and believe exactly what we tell you to believe." But the flip side of that belief is "Bad news! God doesn't love you for who you are."

The only people who can't seem to see through this message is us.

That's a funny kind of faith - a faith that mainly focuses on the question of who is outside the Holy Fence. To talk to a lot of Christians, it's as if there isn't actually any meaning, reconciliation with God or salvation to be found inside Christianity, so we need to find our meaning in the idea of "Thank God I am not like that sinner." (Oops, didn't Jesus have a parable about that?)

Do we Christians really believe that there is good news at the heart of Christianity? Can we stand before God, just me and God, and find forgiveness, reconciliation, transformation of life? Or can we only feel "saved" if we have the comforting knowledge that there are some people who God just doesn't like - not now, not ever?

God is a Woman and She is Growing Older

This is a stunning sermon and well worth a read: God is a Woman and She is Growing Older by Rabbi Margaret Wenig.

(Hat tip to Rachel Barenblat at Velveteen Rabbi)

Sunday 30 May 2010 - The Servant King

I was asked to supply-preach this morning on the general subject of "Memorial Day". I chose to use the assigned Epistle reading from the lectionary, Romans 5:1-11 but I departed from the lectionary for the Gospel reading and chose the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet from John: John 13:1-9

The sermon can be found on my sermon blog.

Blame, Shame and Learning

I want to pick up on some thoughts from a sentence that I heard this morning. The sentence is: "I am less interested in placing blame than I am in learning what went wrong so we can fix these problems"* (please see the disclaimer below)

This is a worthwhile sentiment which can also be a tricky one and those who read this blog-post today will likely recognize the very "tricky" context in which it was said. The most obvious objection to this sentiment is does this mean it's perfectly OK to be sloppy, incompetent or uninterested in doing a good job? If you are not pulled up for being sloppy, incompetent or uninterested, how will you learn to do better next time? And what about those individuals who may end up unintentionally victimized by your incompetence? Don't they deserve the satisfaction of seeing you punished?

I acknowledge these objections. I acknowledge the fact that sometimes individuals have responsibilities that, for whatever reason, they are uninterested in fulfilling and which they deliberately shirk. I acknowledge that there should be consequences for irresponsibility and that people who are deliberately and willfully irresponsible should not be constantly let off the hook.

But the thing is that things do go wrong in life. There are many times when failures are systemic and the failure is not really a matter of an individual being uninterested or incompetent. Sometimes there can be systemic failure even with everyone doing their job correctly. And yet we still love to try to single out an individual on whom to place the blame, whether or not they could reasonably be said to have caused the problem or even had the power to stop it.

We are often more interested in finding a scapegoat to punish than we are in learning from our mistakes and fixing the system. I think I might go out on a limb and suggest that more often than not, we are satisfied when we have found someone to punish and we don't even bother trying to learn anything from our mistakes. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense if we put the majority of our efforts into learning from our mistakes?

I've just started a new job and there is a lot of detail involved in the training. Yesterday, a co-worker worked with me for a few hours and she caught many of the mistakes I made. And this is how I really learned: I made a mistake, she caught the mistake, asked me what was wrong, I removed the mistaken item and placed it in the correct place and moved on. I learned from this because *I* physically corrected my own mistakes. I learned from this much more than I would have learned by watching my co-worker do the job.

I think that there is theology here too. Christianity tells us that God is a God of grace, mercy and forgiveness. God is like my co-worker: catching our mistakes, asking us what we did wrong, asking us to correct our own mistakes and then helping us to learn from our mistakes so we can move on into a new future. God is not like many of us; God is not just waiting to blame and punish us with no care or thought about whether or not we have learned anything.

I want to live in a world where I can learn from my mistakes. What about you?

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* Disclaimer: I am not trying to comment specifically on today's news item about the failure to catch "the Christmas bomber". I am also not trying to signal blanket or uncritical approval for everything President Obama said, says or will say. I am not interested in a partisan conversation here; I'm interested in the idea and the attitude behind this statement.

Sermon Blogging

Catching up again on sermon blogging:

• Sunday 15 June 2008 - A Dangerous Gospel
• Sunday 22 June 2008 - Superior Gifts?
  

James Alison on Forgiveness

Quotation of the day on forgiveness by one of my favourite Girardian theologians:

..this is what acting out forgiveness in the world looks like: it looks like knowing that you are dealing with dangerous people, who are more than likely to be deeply destabilized by your innocence and because of that to seek to lynch you.

I also recommend the Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary website from which this quotation is taken.

Living Together

Following on from my post below entitled A Challenge of Tolerance?, my my friend Will asks a very important question: How now shall we live together?

Will says something that I think is vitally important:

I quite like the Derby Resolutions. As a friend of mine said, they were created for a purpose and not just because some people were bored one afternoon. But, perhaps the document that kept The Methodist Church from the tumult experienced in the Church of England has now outlived its useful life. Where do we go from here? I want a conversation that focuses on how we can trust each other enough to stick together. More than that, stay in fellowship with each other. Where can we have a conversation that attempts to work out how we will be a community of grace without digressing back into old arguments. How can we start to ask the question, ‘How can we live together?’

I actually think the most important thing that any denomination can do is to learn to have a conversation about this issue and other issues that passionately divide us.

I think that many people often misunderstand this as 'Anything for a quiet life' or 'Anything goes'. That's not what I'm talking about. I think that learning how to listen to to each other when we passionately disagree is at the very centre of Christian discipleship. Not at the centre of salvation, but at the centre of discipleship. When passions are high, the process of listening and forgiving and making room for the other view is difficult and painful. Rather than painful listening most of us - myself included - tend to go for avoidance; and avoidance is probably more the 'anything for a quiet life' option.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think 'How can we live together?' is one of the most important questions we face. And we'll have to figure it out sooner or later.

Sermons - Us and Them and One World Sunday

Over on my sermon blog, I've just published:

• Last week's sermon: Us and Them and
• This week's sermon for One World Sunday

The themes of both these sermons are rather similar.

Learning, Growing and Goofing

I don't mean 'goofing off' as in 'wasting time.' I mean 'goofing' as in 'sincerely trying and getting it wrong.'

Will made an excellent comment in a previous post when he wrote about going to a leadership conference:

I heard from a guy talking about how we tend to focus on our weaknesses rather than trying to grow our strengths. I wonder if when we (or those teachers in our churches) focus on what we are doing wrong almost exclusively if we hear a message that God is more of a hatchet man waiting for us to do something wrong rather than praise us, and even more encourage us, in what we do right.

Sometimes we can learn by listening to the experience and the warnings of other people. Other times, the only way we can learn is to do our best, to try something and to get it wrong. This process is part of being human and, I think, it's also a big way that human beings learn.

I think that sometimes I live by a 'better safe than sorry' approach to God. I assume that God's biggest demand of me is that I don't put a foot wrong, that I don't goof up. But when you think about it, shouldn't 'grace' help us to dare in the service of God? To dare to be prophetic? To dare to do things differently? And, if we get it wrong because we sincerely tried to serve God, won't God forgive us? Certainly if we believe that he is a God of mercy and a God of grace, we can believe in God's forgiveness.

Sermon - Judgement and the Light of Christ

Today's sermon: Judgement and the Light of Christ.

Forgiveness & Atonement

I just got my issue of The Living Pulpit - several months late due to not living in the US. (Grrr, but that's another story. It's still well worth getting.)

The current (April - June) issue is on the subject of atonement and I'm extremely pleased that the editors have chosen Dr. Myron S. Augsburger's article Justice in Forgiveness to publish in full on the internet.

In my part of the cyber-world, I've been having discussions with one person on how there can be no justice without retribution and another person thinks that it's our repentance that calls forth God's forgiveness. I think this article answers both of those questions.

The article also answers the question of 'blood' - although I suppose it will not satisfy those who thinks that God demands a literal, physical sacrifice of blood before he will give.

My favourite idea - and one which I will have to mull over - is the idea of God saying (in Augsburger's words):

I care more about you than about what you have done. I really love you, and I will move beyond the issue to the person.

Thinking about Penal Substitutionary Atonement

I've not blogged about all the controversies that have been happening recently around the subject of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). I have, however, been having some rather lengthy conversations on the 'Ship of Fools' Christian discussion board with individuals who support PSA.

As a result of these conversations, I have developed a theory about one central point of disagreement between supportors of PSA and non-supporters of PSA. I throw it open here for any comment anyone might want to make. (And I speak as a non-supporter of PSA.)

I think that one of the central points of controversy is whether forgiving a wrongdoing actually names the wrongdoing as wrong. I say that it does; PSA supporters seem to say that it does not. A related point of controvery from the other direction is whether a wrongdoing needs to receive a punishment in order to be ontologically 'wrong'. PSA supporters seem to think that 'without punishment, wrongdoing has not been named.' I disagree.

Atonement, Justice and Reciprocity

I am currently reading Stephen Sykes' book: The Story of Atonement. There has also been some discussion on Christian discussion groups and in the Christian blogsphere about theories of atonement on the back of Jeffrey John's Lent Talk on BBC Radio 4.

John talked about growing up being told the following about 'how God saves sinners'. I'll bet you'll recognise the idea. I know that I was told that this is precisely what salvation is all about. John was taught that:

God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.

In his book, The Story of Atonement, Sykes talks about how much of popular Christian theology is based on the idea of reciprocity - and on the idea that justice is reciprocity. So, the idea is that if I do something good, God will/should reward me with something good and when you do something bad, God should punish you. When this does not happen, we become outraged. Hence the idea that many people express "What have I done to deserve this tragedy?" or "I cannot believe in a God who would let such bad things happen."

Sykes points out that this idea of reciprocity is NOT part of Christian tradition; Christians do not believe that God rewards good behaviour with good things and bad behaviour with bad things. On the contrary, Christians believe that there is nothing that we can do that is 'good enough' to gain our salvation or other rewards from God and therefore we have to rely on the grace of God. 'Reward for good behaviour' may be hard-wired into the human psyche (as any parent of a two-year-old will tell you), but it is not a Christian idea.

Grace, the popular saying goes, means getting something good that you don't deserve. Well, amen to that.

But where does that grace come from? I think we get into trouble when we start saying that God's 'justice' means that he is not capable of being gracious until he has received some kind of payment. In the event of God receiving a payment, grace is not grace but is rather a quid pro quo reward for good behaviour. It makes reciprocity more important than grace.

But the worst thing about these popular versions of salvation is that they turn Christianity into just another system of those who are in with the in-group and those who are out. There is a reason that the Christian church orginally called itself 'catholic' (which just means 'universal'); because Christianity is not about defining which categories of people are not offered the grace of God. Christianity is about God's universal offer of grace to all people.

We are always in debt to God. There is no system of reciprocity involved in our relationship with God. God does not 'reward' us for believing in him and punish other people for not believing in him. The whole point of Christianity is that the love of God is a free gift.

To quote Sykes, faith is not something that we do; faith is a being present when a revelation takes place. By faith, we enter a realm of the mutuality of love through grace; by faith we are the recipients of unimaginable generosity.

[Edited on 21/4/07 to correct the spelling of Jeffrey John's surname as pointed out to me by Peter Kirk in the 'Commments' section.]

Short Meditation

Here is a short meditation for the Wednesday of Holy Week: link

Palm Sunday and Peace

Here is a link to my sermon for Palm Sunday.

I don't know if this sermon would qualify as a sermon on the subject of peace, but I think that it gives some insights as to why I think that peace is at the heart of the Christian faith.

The story of Jesus is the story of someone who turned upside down all of our usual values. In Holy Week, I think that we see this very starkly. Jesus could have been a conquering, military hero.

But, had he chosen this action that the world would have considered good - we love heros and hate wimps after all - there could have been no forgiveness. You can't forgive someone and crush them at the same time.

If we think that Jesus primary raison d'etre was forgiveness, then peace comes as part and parcel of that forgiveness. Not just the sort of preace that refrains from violence, either. But an all-encompassing peace. Shalom. The peace of God that passes all human understanding.

This is why I cannot separate "peace issues" from Christian theology.

Sermon - Prodigal Son

I've just posted last week's sermon on The Prodigal Son.

I didn't have to preach today! I took part in the monthly United Service at my Methodist / Anglican partnership church and the vicar preached a cracking good sermon. I was grateful for the refreshment of not having to prepare this last week. It's given me a bit of energy in the run-up to Holy Week.