Hurray for questions and doubts!

At Community Life Church we often talk about our walk of faith as being a journey toward Jesus Christ, toward bringing his kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.  Everyone on this journey is coming from somewhere, and everyone is taking steps forward, sometimes slipping up and then taking more steps.

Some have been on the journey longer than others, some have advice to give to others, but all of us on the journey are learning, asking questions, puzzling over questions, getting answers to some which lead to more questions.

Sometimes people think that Christianity has all the answers, when you “become a Christian”, the expression commonly used, you have arrived.  Even the expression: “become a Christian” suggests arriving at a destination.

Isn’t it interesting that the term used for early followers of Jesus was “The Way”?  It wasn’t “The Place”, it was “The Way” which suggests a journey, not a destination.

Which brings us to the question: which is better, to have all the answers or to have questions, doubts and more questions?  Our modern way of thinking puts a lot of stock in answers: if I have all the answers, then I have arrived.

But if I have arrived, I am not going anywhere, just sitting smugly where I am.  I don’t need much faith if I have the answers, just faith in my answers.

At Community Life Church, we value questions and doubts. Questions and doubts deepen faith.  As I wrestle with questions and doubts, I must dig deeper into faith to continue to believe and press forward on my journey.

So let’s celebrate our questions and doubts! It’s through questions and doubts and digging and persevering and talking with others who are also having questions and doubts that we move forward on our journey and become more useful participants in the Kingdom of God.  Hurray for the questions and doubts!

Which comes first: Believing or Belonging?

At Community Life Church, we think that many of us as churches have in the past got it wrong: we always thought you had to get your beliefs all straightened out and then you could belong to a church.  First you had to get your beliefs all lined up with what the elders and the denomination told you was the right stuff to believe, then you had to be baptized and then you could be a member of the church.

Now, at Community Life Church, we want things to be different.  We want people to feel that they can belong first, regardless of where they are in belief.  And if you belong, you can join with us on our journey toward Jesus and the Kingdom he has inaugurated, “on earth as it is in heaven”.  And on that journey you will believe things and then you will doubt these things and you will believe other things and then you will doubt them too, and so it goes as we journey in our conversations with one another and guided along by God’s Spirit.

Think about it, when Jesus invited people along, he didn’t test them for what they believed, he simple said “come follow me”, or put another way, “come go with me”.

Jesus invited little children to come close to him; he didn’t get them to make sure their beliefs were all lined up first; he just wanted them to feel that they could belong.

 

And Jesus got into trouble with the religious people of his day for hanging out with the wrong sort of people, people who were, well, sinners, you know, bad people that the good religious people would have nothing to do with.  Jesus didn't tell them to clean up their act and then he would meet with them; he simply invited them to "come go with me".

In making this change at Community Life Church, we have dropped the importance of church membership; if you want to be a member, that is okay, you are more than welcome to become a member.  But you don't have to be a member to participate actively in all our church does or to participate in our business meetings; and you can work in various roles around the church without being a member.  We want you to feel that you can belong and journey with us.  And on that journey our conversations will help us all sort out our various beliefs.

We have a little video we like to show frequently and the video ends with what we want people to feel: “It’s okay to be not okay . . . really”.

The Biggest Moment in All History

The resurrection of the Son of God changed the course of history like no other event before or since.

 

Think about it. The life of Jesus was quite remarkable, but he never traveled far nor reached a lot of people.  When he has put to death on a cross, a spectacularly cruel death, it is certain that everyone watching thought that that was the end of it: another would-be messiah had failed.

No one was expecting what happened on that first Easter morning.  Not only was the tomb empty, but Jesus, who had indeed been very dead on Friday and Saturday, was alive, seen alive, the same Jesus, alive in the flesh, yet somehow different.

That resurrection made such an impression, on people that the band of followers were able to proclaim with confidence that the risen Jesus was Lord, King of the new Kingdom.

Bishop N. T. Wright has written a massive 738-page book called “The Resurrection of the Son of God”.  He looks at the event from all angles, from the way people at that time looked resurrection, if they believed it at all, which most didn’t - until this one; and they way resurrection was viewed after this special one, from the historical accounts surrounding the event, not just the accounts in the Bible, but what other contemporary historians and scholars had to say, and also he looked at it from the perspective of a Biblical scholar.

Wright (page 730): “Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.  The resurrection in the full Jewish and early Christian sense is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter.”

(Page 731):“The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the ‘son of god’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation.  He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.”

In Wright’s book “Simply Jesus” on page 191: “When Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning, he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel’s God had always intended to make.  That is the first and most important thing to know about Easter.”

In his book “Surprised by Hope”, Wright has a whole chapter:  “Reshaping the Church for Mission: Living the Future”.  He tries to get us excited about Easter: “Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power . . . It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation under way . . . This is our greatest festival . . . This is our greatest day.”

 

Christmas Morning

Christmas morning! What excitement for each and every family! Parents and grandparents pour expressions of love into children and one another. Families visit one another, enjoy a festive meal together, take time away from daily toil and struggles for livelihood. For this day, life is as idyllic as we can each make it.

Many families start their day with a reminder of the origin of this greatest festival of our calendar, gathering children together to reflect on Christmas before opening gifts. Some light the center candle in the family advent wreath (having built up to this moment with the lighting of each of the other four candles on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas); some read famliar passages of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus.  Children might be a little impatient, but they grow up to treasure these moments and will very often maintain these as traditions in their own famlies, anchoring Christmas in its context.
So let us reflect on this context of Christmas. We know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus; but furthermore, we are told in the Gospel accounts of the story that this was a most remarkable birth, in that Jesus was born as God appearing in the flesh, as a human being.
Now let's chew on that for a moment.  God didn't show up in the perfect likeness of a human being, as our nativity scenes suggest - a perfect little doll in the manger; no, God showed up in an actual baby, needing to be burped, fed and changed like any baby, growing up with all the bumps and scars from play as any child would have, facing manhood with all the struggles a teen has.
Think about what this means.  We think of God as perfect, and we all know that we are each very imperfect, subject to change, disease, hurt and decay in our physical bodies.  With a huge gulf between God and us, where is hope? Where is meaning?
But God came to us humans in Jesus; God took the step to bridge that gulf.  And in coming as Jesus, God celebrated being human as being a beautiful expression of God's creation.  With all our imperfections, God still loves each person, indeed all his creation.  When God created the world, he said it was good; when God created human beings, he called it "very good".  When God came in Jesus, he reaffirmed that each human has a value that we haven't really fully grasped.  Nor can we ever.
Christmas Morning.  God values each and every person, just as they are.  And so should we.

Emmanuel

At this time of year, anticipating Christmas, we sing “Emmanuel”, which we have been told means “God with us”.  But what does that look like?  Think “God moving into the neighbourhood”.    And when God moves into the neighbourhood, things look different; there are different priorities than those to which we are accustomed, just like the priorities of Jesus were different than those of the religious people of the time of his ministry among the poor and disadvantaged of his corner of the Middle East.

 

We get a clue of what this looks like when we read the verse of prophecy from Isaiah 61:1 which he quoted at the outset of his ministry, Luke 4:18-19, which, in “The Message” translation says: “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

When we look at what these words meant in the three short years that followed, we get an idea just what it looks like when “God moves into the neighbourhood”.  The self-righteous religious people are shown up to be unworthy on their own proud account, while the down-trodden, those at the edges of society are treated tenderly, lifted up with compassion and given a value they never believed they had.

Richard Rohr, in speaking about this says: “In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society: the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.

“Jesus’ ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club, but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom—to tell those who are “last” that they might just be first! That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of Jesus. Today some call it God’s unique kind of justice or “restorative justice.” God present with us and in us, Emmanuel, justifies things by restoring them to their true and full identity in Himself, as opposed to “retributive justice” which seeks only reward and punishment.”

So, this season as we think what “Emmanuel” means, let us resolve to do our little bit to help our community feel what it is like when God moves into the neighbourhood, when those who are down and despondent start to realize what a marvelous potential and value they really have.

"Follow Me"

Some words from Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr in a recent meditation are sobering and prompt us to ponder over them, as we think about how we have made Christianity into a religion, when it was intended to be a lifestyle.  The first believers referred to their calling as “the way”; for them following Jesus was a lifestyle. 

 

As Father Richard puts it:

“It seems to me that it is a minority that ever gets the true and full Gospel. We just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the exact right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, “worship me!”, but he often says, “follow me” (e.g., Matthew 4:19).

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, inclusive, and loving. We made it, however, into a formal established religion, in order to avoid the demanding lifestyle itself. One could then be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain at the highest levels of the church, and still easily believe that Jesus is “my personal Lord and Savior.” The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”

A religion? Or a lifestyle? Something to think about.

The Authority of Scripture

Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright unpacks this phrase, “the authority of scripture” in a recent book (2011) entitled “Scripture and the Authority of God”, subtitled “How to read the Bible today”.

It is certainly true that for all churches, the Bible is very important; the Bible’s authority is prominent in doctrinal statements, and the western mind in the modern world has set it up to be the answer book of religious information to guide our views and actions, to check on how we are doing compared to the other guy who doesn’t pay heed to the Bible.  Too many of us have used “the authority of scripture” to prove ourselves right and others wrong.

If we look at 2 Timothy 3:17, we see the purpose to be “so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work”; that’s quite different than being thoroughly equipped to prove me right and you wrong.

Wright says “As I have argued in this book, ‘the authority of scripture’ is really a shorthand for ‘the authority of God exercised through scripture’”.

“The whole of my argument so far leads to the following major conclusion: that the shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture’, when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.”

He continues: “We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.”

“’The authority of scripture’ refers not least to God’s work through scripture to reveal Jesus, to speak in life-changing power to the hearts and minds of individuals, and to transform them by the Spirit’s healing love.”

“In other words, if we are to be true, at the deepest level, to what scriptural authority really means, we must understand it like this: God is at work, through scripture (in other words, through the Spirit who is at work as people read, study, teach, and preach scripture) to energize, enable, and direct the outgoing mission of the church, genuinely anticipating the time when all things will be made new in Christ.”

Hmmm, that’s quite different from using the Bible to give me authority to do what I want to do and to give me the authority to judge someone else who sees things differently.  Something to think about.