The Way Ahead - Week 4 - Talking about Faith (Part1)

Dear friends,

Just before we begin, a quick note to everyone to let you know that at the prayer and planning meeting on Monday morning we decided to split week 4 into two parts. This will allow two of the groups to catch up, and for more time to be spent on the wealth of material available for week 4 - any part of which could easily fill a session or a blog.

God Bless,

Ian

There is an old maxim that goes: You should never ask a question if you cannot handle the answer. Many years ago the Youth Group that Karen and I used to lead led a service at Kenton Methodist Church. It included, and please don’t ask me to remember why, a time of getting members of the congregation up to the front and then talking to them about conversations they wished they could have. We said to them that if they could have any conversation with anyone what would it be. The first few were what you would expect, many talking to Biblical characters about what they really meant when they said X or Y. Then we came to Janet Ford, a long standing member of the church, she took a big breath and announced to everyone, “I would talk to the burglar who broke into our house the other evening and ask him why he went through my underwear!!!”. This changed the mood of the worship somewhat and suddenly we were dealing with all sorts of pastoral issues, and real questions that needed to be addressed – what a difference one honest answer can make in the middle of an act of worship.

Jesus seems to have delighted in people who gave him honest answers to his questions, and to people who asked him their real questions. Think of how often we get stories in our Gospels about Jesus having a conversation with someone and it ends up going somewhere exciting. The woman at the well, Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night, unnamed scribes who are just desperate for someone to talk to and to explore their faith with, the rich young ruler, the lawyer who wants to know who his neighbour is, the list goes on and on. Jesus seemed to love talking with people, listening to their real life concerns and sharing the Good News with them, even if they sometimes did not want to hear his answers.

One of the privileges that I get as the minister is that I get to have BIG conversations with people at key moments in their lives. To listen to people ask the BIG questions such as “Why me?”, and “Why did my partner die?”, and sometimes the one people feel that they shouldn’t ask “Where is God in all of this?” is a huge privilege, but it can also feel overwhelming, especially when people push you for a particular answer that I just don’t feel able to give. That said, it does beg the question, that when we sit with Jesus face-to-face to ask all our questions, what are the things that you will ask him first, and what are the answers that you want and/or expect.

In our material this week there are many examples of conversations that Jesus shared with people, who clearly he did not know too well;

1. in Mark 12 we read of the scribe who simply heard a conversation going on and came up to ask Jesus "Which commandment is the first of all?" (verse 28), only to get the amazing answers "The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these." (verses 29 – 30). But now step back and look at the wider story here, these questions came at a time that some Sadducees were asking him dumb questions that were designed to trick him, and so it is that at the end of his conversation we get the verse “After that no one dared to ask him any question” (verse 34) – not referring to the real questions, but instead to the fatuous questions that the Sadducees were asking.

Questions: 1. In what ways do you feel you are able to love God with your mind?  2. Are there questions about faith that you really want answered, but are afraid to ask?

2. in Mark 7 Jesus has a conversation with a Syro-Phoenician woman who seems to persuade him to change his mind, In Luke 7 we have the story of the Roman Centurion whose faith amazes Jesus so much that he heals his servant – which is a story that can be understood in many different ways. In both of these we read of Jesus engaging with people from beyond his own culture who take him by surprise. Jesus seems to delight in how Gentile people seem prepared to both ask awkward questions and trust him on issues that many of his own disciples would not

Question: Have you ever felt like challenging God in prayer? What happened?

3. in Mark 5 we read about Jarius’ daughter and the woman with bleeding. These were people who did not want to talk with Jesus but where through his actions, a conversation became possible that would not have been possible before

Questions: 1. Can you think of an example in your own life when being asked to talk openly about something vulnerable was helpful?
2. What does this story have to say to those who have to deal with chronic ill-health or impairment and are not healed?

So if I was going to ask you a question this week, the question that I would like to ask is what do you think that God has to say about Harwood Methodist Church? I am a fervent believer that God is with us on our journey, and that he causes us to speed up or slow down as we are ready to face the next hurdle, or need more time to sort something out. I also believe that he wants to talk to us as we undertake this journey.

I think that so often we can forget that the Christian faith is much more about the journey than the destination. A classic example of this is the way that we have so often painted a picture of how the point of life is death. Do we really think that God intends us to simply spend our lives getting ready for this life to end – it all seems a bit negative if that was his plan. That is why I would argue that God is much more interested in engaging with us in the journey, and that this journey does not end when our earthly life does. I think God wants to be talking with us and to us as we journey along, he wants us to ask him the difficult questions, he wants us to turn to him when bad things happen and to scream and shout at him when things hurt or don’t make sense – like Janet asking about why her house was burgled and why her most intimate spaces have been violated. You can call it prayer, or reflection, or whatever, but I just believe that God wants to talk to us as we journey on, and I believe that he will do what is required to enable that to happen – right down to sending his son to die on a cross so that we could be in a right relationship with him.

So, as we talk to each other about sometimes trivial things, how about talking with each other about the things that matter relating to our faith and maybe then, like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, we might find that there is someone else sharing in our conversation and making sense of the things that we don’t understand.

The Way Ahead – Week 3: Talk about Culture

I love the band Dream Theater - I saw them in Manchester the other week and they were amazing, but I have also seen them play many times in London, Leeds and on one occasion I travelled to New York to see them playing with Yes at Jones Beach – I was one of 40,000 people watching them in a concert with waves lapping the stage – it was way cool. On one occasion I was at one of their concerts in London with another Methodist Minister and I was suddenly struck by the type of people that made up their audience. It was almost exclusively male, white and with the same balding head and goaty beard I had. They were also about my age, and from the conversation I had had with the people in front of me, and other friends I knew were going, I knew there was a large percentage of IT professionals present, put simply, I was in an audience of people like me who shared my musical taste. To use street talk, I was with “my people”.

I then suddenly found myself asking a question; if I could tell all these people about Jesus, and they all wanted to know more about him, where would they all go to church? We had all gathered to listen to enjoy an evening of the sort of progressive thrash metal that Dream Theater play – how would these people feel if they turned up at one of our churches only to be given a copy of Hymns and Psalms and asked to sing hymns from 150 or 200 years ago in a service that was structured in a way that they may not understand, and which would almost certainly use words that they would not understand, such as salvation, justification, redemption, and Trinity - the list goes on and and on. I suspect that were this unlikely scenario ever to happen, in reality the reaction would be mixed, and it is all hypothetical anyway, but is interesting to ask what the culture is that the church believes it is fulfilling the needs of – and whether this is the predominant culture of the community within which we are placed. I am afraid that I have always nursed the suspicion that in reality we are a small community reaching out to a few people who are just like us, and no one else – but I would be happy to be proved wrong.

In the tradition of the St. Thomas Christians, the Christians who come from Kerala in Southern India, they have adopted the Hindu Caste system within their Christian faith. You may wonder how they can do this, and when I was talking with my friend Father Abraham Thomas, a Priest of the Indian Orthodox church who is of this tradition, I asked him this question. He smiled and said that everyone was welcome in their churches, but that they “only evangelised within their caste”. Just about every person I have told this story to has started by getting annoyed at it, until the follow up question is asked, “so what is the caste that our church only evangelises within?”. At which point a great deal of “hmmm”ing and thinking goes on – as they realise that this is pretty much what we do as well.

Even if I leave out issues of ethnicity, sexuality, and a number of other things that should not divide us, but which often do; there are much more basic things that can get in the way. How many events in the life of our church are arranged for parents with children? How many of you reading this blog are doing so because work prevents you from getting to one of the groups? How do you give time to your faith, your family, and your career? At Royston we had two groups entitled “Guys in a pub” and “Girls in a pub” – they were set up for Dad’s to go out in one night and the Mum’s on a different night. But behind these groups was a group of older ladies within the church who would come and babysit or help out to enable these groups to go ahead. These groups were trying to reflect a culture of young families within the church for whom there was pretty much no other way they could be involved – but they were supported by others in the church who saw the importance of this work of working with a part of the community that they themselves were not a part of.

Now let me further complicate the mix further. I think I can comfortably argue that there is a spirit in our age that means that we are all trying to do more and more, and feeling that life is evermore getting more complicated – again I would argue that these things can be linked, with the sense of not wanting to fall behind making us do more to stay ahead, which means that we have to balance even more our schedules, which makes feel even more out of touch, and so on. Most of us work hard at what we do, and very often it is our families that suffer that it all gets too much. To people for whom this is the culture that they come from, church can seem like a waste of valuable time – time they could be doing something else, or precious time to be with family. If this is true, how does the church reach out into this culture as well?

Pause for a moment and think about these first set of questions from the material:

1.       Many people feel stressed and lacking in time. It has been suggested that our culture has “a distorted relationship with time”. How do you respond to this idea?

2.       How would you describe your relationship to money?

3.       Where is the space for God in your life?

4.       What kind of self do you feel is being fostered within your working life or retirement?

Our material this week invites us to think about how we can speak to our modern culture in a way that is relevant, real and yet where we seek to put forward different ways of viewing the world. This is a path that is strewn with problems; how do we engage with a British Culture where people are used to being able to choose what they want? How do we offer hospitality to a culture that is used to paying for everything and where they assume that if they are paying, they have a right to say how things are? (You may call it the offertory, but you would be surprised how many people think they are paying the minister’s salary and that they therefore have the right to tell the minister what to do!!) It is an issue that we encounter regularly at funerals where sometimes non-church people want to re-write the liturgy to say what they want it to say – because they are paying the minister!! I had this myself only a few weeks ago.

The material asks:

1)      What traditions do you think you can learn from?

2)      Are there spiritualties it is dangerous to get involved with?

3)      Are there dangers in our own way of believing?

Finally, and at the risk of being controversial, the church loves to think that we are counter-cultural and about the business of changing the world. I would argue that history shows us that in fact the church tends to be driven by the values of society and is often behind the curve. I think the slow adoption of change in relation to attitudes towards women and sexuality amongst other things are perfect examples of where the church should have given a lead, but in fact is actually dragging its feet. Those who oppose this point of view very often see the church as the bastion of “old fashioned morality” but I am afraid that I simply can’t see this in so many cases. In our desire to engage with cultures that are different from our own we need to always be open to seeing that God is in that culture ahead of us and challenging us to accept things that we may feel uncomfortable with. Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that everything is negotiable, clearly it isn’t, but I do think that we need to be clear on what is “up for grabs” and what is not. To me at least, changing the music that we use to reflect the cultures that surround us is totally acceptable, and part of how we bridge the gap between “us” and “them” – but something like changing my belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is something that is not on the table. I really would like to have worship that Dream Theater fans would feel at home in, but if I have to remove the Gospel to achieve this then I, for one, am not interested, and likewise if by doing this I drive everyone else away, likewise what does that achieve? We need to have a way of engaging with the many cultures that we are a part of, but also of working in partnership with others to ensure that between us the needs of all people are met; we are not called to be all things to all people; but we are called to be what God wants us to be, to those people that he sends us to be alongside.

Some final questions to think about:

1)      What are the principles on which you base your personal morality?

2)      How can different generations share perceptions?

3)      Why are issues about sexuality the ones that divide us?

4)      How exactly should the Bible guide our decisions?