A middle-aged woman has a heart attack and it leads to a near death experience while she’s on the operating table. She finds herself standing in front of God so she asks: “Is this it?”
God says: “Oh no. You have another 30-40 years to live.”
When she recovers she decides to stay in the hospital and have a face lift, some liposuction, a breast augmentation, tummy tuck and have her hair dyed. She figures since she’s got another 30 or 40 years she might as well make the most of it. She walks out of the hospital after the last operation and immediately gets hit by an ambulance.
She arrives in front of God again and says: “I thought you said I had another 30 or 40 years?”
God replies: “Is that you Shirley? Sorry, I didn’t recognise you!”
Okay, so it’s a pretty ordinary joke with very dodgy theology. But, it gets me thinking. What if we swap things around? If we are made in the image of God as the Bible says we are, when people see us do they recognise God?
This is the go-to text for any mission director worth his – or her – salt. The title given to this passage in my Bible is: ‘The Mission of the Seventy’. Although, there’s a little footnote that says: ‘Other ancient authorities read seventy-two’. Seventy, or seventy-two? Who’s counting? Well, us, it seems. At least that’s what we’re tempted to do when it comes to mission. The harvest is plentiful, but empty is the pew! Is that what mission is about, then? Well, let’s not discount that altogether, but I don’t hear much counting happening in this mission text.
“Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
*Sigh*
You’d be hard pressed to find a more depressingly contemporary question in the Bible. And this from two of Jesus’ disciples!
Well, here’s a contemporary response. A poem by John Roedel . . .
I can’t make the world be peaceful
I can’t prevent children from having to hide in bunkers
I can’t silence the sound of bombs tearing neighborhoods apart
I can’t turn a guided missile into a bouquet of flowers
I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet from turning a wife into a widow
I can’t stave off a schoolyard being reduced to ash and rubble any of that
the only thing I can do is love the next person I encounter without any conditions or strings, to love my neighbour so fearlessly that it starts a ripple that stretches from one horizon to the next
I can’t force peace on the world, but I can become a force of peace in the world, because sometimes all it takes is a single lit candle in the darkness to start a movement
oh, Spirit, let me be a candle of comfort in this world
let me burn with peace.
Whenever I meet with a couple for pre-marriage counselling our discussion invariably gets around to their families of origin. I always ask: “Who was the disciplinarian in your house when you were growing up?” Twenty years ago when I asked that question the couple generally nominated one parent or the other (most often the father). In more recent times the couple are more likely to name both parents, and if the couple are really young they look at me blankly and ask, “What’s discipline?”
I may be a little old-fashioned but I still believe discipline and love are not mutually exclusive, it’s just that we often get them confused, or we conflate them, or we neglect one or the other.
Which is all very interesting. But, of course, what you’re really wondering is: Who is Neil?
It’s Trinity Sunday which means we celebrate God’s triune nature. What does this mean for us? That would be the question Martin Luther would ask. So, I give to you two quotes often attributed to Luther.
“To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation. To try to explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”
‘Risk’ is a dirty word these days so I think this Sunday I will make sure we will avoid any risk to your salvation, or your sanity! (It’s just not worth the paperwork!) Instead, we might go in a different direction. Luther also said, “Of what help is it to you that God is God, if he is not God to you?” Perhaps that is the question for Trinity Sunday, anyway.
This is a page from a 600 year old document known as the Voynich Manuscript. For centuries it has fascinated scholars mainly because no one has the faintest idea of what it says! It may well contain the greatest wisdom ever written but if no one can understand what it says it simply becomes a historical curiosity.
This Sunday we celebrate the 1,992nd birthday of the church (give or take a couple of years). Let us pray that the church never becomes a historical curiosity.
A headline in an online newspaper this week: ‘Aussie sacked and replaced by AI’.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic these days as pundits debate possibilities from doomsday predictions to a scenario where an AI is tasked with procuring you a reservation to a popular restaurant and ends up shutting down all the mobile phone networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table!
More measured voices point out the risk of AI is less apocalyptic and more philosophical (and, I would argue, theological) with AI altering the way people view themselves and degrading abilities and experiences that people consider essential to be human. One writer suggests ‘AI is good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won’t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators’. Does that sound familiar? Hasn’t it always been this way and AI is just another iteration of a perennial issue: In trying to be more than human (in trying to be god-like) we make ourselves less than human.
How different God’s way is from ours! God’s way is to be human; to give up what we regard as power and prestige and control and become human, with all its limitations! And, surely that’s what God wants for us too: for us to be content to be human, for us to find joy in being human, for us to discover, even, what it is to be human.
There’s no doubt about it, we human beings are creative, determined, independent, resourceful. All those things are positive traits to have. We are truly fearfully and wonderfully made! But, there are limits. The self-help life has its limits. To creative, determined, independent, resourceful people that sounds like bad news, and it is. But, when the self-help life reaches its limit the ‘life-without-limits’ life of Jesus begins. How does that sound?
Are you an insider or an outsider? We may consider ourselves as insiders in our congregation, or indeed with God. The stark truth is that we all began life as outsiders from God. Our sin, both original, and actual, disqualified us being part of God’s kingdom, and we faced the future of a life separated from God, and estranged from each other and God’s good creation.
The early church’s ‘Aha’ moment is a word of life and hope for you and me. We are on the inside with God because has also granted to us the ‘repentance that leads to life.’ This wasn’t because God looked at us and determined that we met the criteria for kingdom membership. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Rather, it’s only because of the grace that he has shown us in Jesus Christ. Jesus has transformed us from outsiders into insiders through his cross. He came to live in this world as a human being. God’s insider became an outsider to carry our sin and to suffer the holy anger of his Father against all sin and evil, and taking on himself the sentence of death. The grace of God has turned us inside out.