Salt, light and works

Matthew 5:3-16

Salt, Light and Good Works

13 ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. 14 ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. ¹⁶In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Salt

We are according to Jesus, Salt, Light and Works; we will look at them one at a time and seek what Jesus meant when He taught these principles to His disciples. It goes without saying this is a very important passage of scripture because it reveals the: identity, practices and relationships of the disciple. We live our lives through so many different personas and identities. Our roles in life can be so varied from being a parent and also at the same time a child; from being a teacher to being learner and often, again, both at the same time. It is not the purpose of Jesus to get us to abandon all these very legitimate roles we have in life, which would be impossible unless we became monks or nuns and that would mean the Sermon on the Mount was only for the clergy and not for every disciple. Our understanding is that the words of Jesus have to be taken seriously by every follower of Jesus and that difficulty and challenge in application is not an excuse for disregarding His words when we find it inconvenient or costly to obey them. If we look to the Hebrew Scriptures for the references to salt and what it is symbolically or metaphorically associated with we get a wide range of characteristics: purity, loyalty, part of a sacrifice and others. However, perhaps we are making things too difficult for ourselves. Instead of stopping reading at ‘you are the salt of the earth’, keep on reading and the text makes it plain what Jesus meant without putting any other words or concepts in the mouth of Jesus. If salt loses its taste how can it be restored? Salt ‘loses its taste’ when it’s not just salt but has been corrupted by some other element or compounds. Jesus and His disciples are close to the Dead Sea which is very salty but the salt contains contaminants and was not therefore of much use. The identity of a product ‘Dead Sea salt’ would indicate that the salt was useless. Surely Jesus is teaching His disciples they have to have an identity that makes them useful, practical contributors and participants in the Kingdom Jesus has inaugurated. Don’t get contaminated by the way the culture does things. The politics, economics, sociology and psychology of the times are not to be the character of disciples. The disciples of Jesus are to remain true to the teachings and practices of the Kingdom; not the teachings and practices of the empire of Greco Roman culture and not to the religious system of the Pharisees, Sadducees or Essenes. Jesus is teaching us to live out our own identity as those God has called into His Kingdom; be distinctive, be counter cultural. Are our communities of disciples counter cultural? Do we live out our identities as followers of Jesus? How do we get our identity back? Hear the words of Jesus and put them into practice.

Peacemakers in a world at war...

 Matthew 5

9 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 

The world in which I live knows very little of happiness. It would be easy to point to the great events taking place on the world stage like war and famine as examples of lack of happiness. However, I also mean that it is my local experience of everyday life as a person that bears witness to the lack of the blessed happy state that Jesus talks about. For most people the blessed state, happiness, is a hope rather than a reality.   This does not mean that there are no transient times of enjoyment, good company, family joy and celebrations. In fact I would say that people are addicted to these celebrations and having entertaining experiences; in fact if a church does not entertain and provide diversions from the lived reality it has little chance of being rated as church. The call to discipleship is diluted with the call for a diversion from struggle of everyday life. In short there is little sign in people and communities around me living as the blessed. Let me be clear. I am talking about those who claim to be disciples of Jesus of the Nazareth Sermon not just those who practice other faiths or none at all.   This is striking when we remember that in our country of Scotland the story of Jesus has been taught in one form or another for over 1500 years. Something has gone very wrong indeed. In my own culture, the prosperity gospel, name it and claim it gospel and the return to a reliance on pre-reformation supernaturalism of the miraculous has had some influence in maintaining this discontent. These gospels have to keep their followers discontent to survive; there has always got to be a “deeper healing” that evades us to keep us on the treadmill of seeking that which we do not have. There are also those who have to keep people on the treadmill of their pure theology; those who do not accept it are dangerous heretics the real enemy of the flock. Its all down to your personal belief but it has to be the same as theirs.    However, it would be superficial and ungracious to blame the contemporary aberrant non biblical gospels for the unhappiness experienced by those who genuinely, deep down have a God given conviction to follow Jesus. In the world and culture of Jesus time there were many aberrant gospels. We can all call to mind some of them: conservative Pharisees, liberal Sadducees, violent Zealots not to mention those fickle crowds seeking the meal with a miracle; the first century versions of the ‘deeper healing’, politically correct and the theologically pure. Jesus taught another way. Jesus taught that the fulfilment of the promises of God for the blessed state was inaugurated by Him (Luke 4: 16-30). Jesus taught that this blessed / happiness life experience was achieved through participating in the Kingdom of God; participating in the practice of the values, attitudes and beliefs that Jesus taught.  This is what Jesus called peace-making. It’s a personal, social, psychological and environmental practice of the peace of knowing we are loved and that we are capable of loving. Jesus the Divine Son of God has fulfilled the potential of authentic humanity. Happiness is not just a state of peace it’s a participation in peace-making. Jesus did not just teach about peace He made peace happen. We are unhappy because we will not make peace with God, ourselves or with our neighbours. Jesus came to save us from the aberrant gospels that privatise salvation at the expense of community salvation and vice versa. The authentic Gospel of peace-making is practiced individually and collectively as communities of disciples. We are interdependent. Wholeness of self and community is achieved through the complete work of Jesus’ in His making peace for us in His teachings and in His Cross. He now invites us to participate with Him. Do we need some happiness? Then let us make peace today and every day by putting into practice the teachings and practices of Jesus.  

Power of the poet... p4cm... Poet Jefferson Bethke

Life controlling issues?

Remember the prophets...

Matthew 5:10-12

10 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven 11 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The seventh and eighth beatitudes, the blessings of God and the promise of authentic happiness are revealed by Jesus in Matthew 5: 10-12. It is a pathway of costly, participative commitment. As we have seen, Jesus is in the Sermon on the Mount is explaining the content of the Nazareth Sermon, His exposition of Isaiah 61 that resulted in His rejection and homelessness. Jesus became homeless because of His faithful commitment to the teaching and practicing the good news that the Kingdom of God has come. His detractors continued the resistance to the message of Jesus by putting it around that Jesus rejected the teachings of the prophets. Firstly, they make Him homeless and then they attack His reputation.  Jesus however, makes it clear, that His life is the life of fulfilment of the scripture not their denial (Matthew 5: 17-20). He teaches us at the outset of His work among us, that to follow Him will be costly for us too. Luke 9: 57-62 again finds Jesus clearly teaching that homelessness, rejection and persecution may result in following Him. We should all count the cost before we follow Him. The cost we will all pay will be our part in other stories that teach other gospels. If we come and follow Jesus we will bring nothing with us because we have nothing worth bringing other than the life Jesus died to save; we will come mourning the wasted years and empty strategies of meeting our own needs our own way; we will come having experienced the violence, discrimination and bigotry as the fuel of our suffering and so we will come and embrace nonviolence, gentleness and humility; we will come for the common good, justice and the need of the ‘Righteousness of God’ much more than for our own personal gain; we will come because we need to share what we have received, the generosity of God  too great for individual consumption, it has to be shared communally; we will come because God has revealed to us who we really are in what Jesus has taught and practiced; we will come because our identity is renewed and we have a new name ‘peacemaker’: no more war. This is the message of the prophets and their fulfilment in Jesus. Those who come and follow will like Jesus be made to pay the price of their participation in the cause of bringing peace to the lives we touch.  We should remember and celebrate the recovery of who we are and who God has created us to be because the reward is great; joint membership of the Kingdom of peace, the comfort of community presence and participation, a new earth, a new humanity to fill it, an interdependent community serving each other, seeing Jesus in each other and living under the rule of the peace-making King Jesus. Surely the price is worth paying for such an outcome. 

Pure in Heart: Remade in the image of Jesus...

Matthew 5:8

8 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Remember the temptation to think in an ‘us and them’ way and to individualise the teachings of Jesus at the expense of thinking as a collective people? We can so easily end up blaming the individual (ourselves and others) for what seems wrong in life. We can treat people as if it’s all a matter of their ‘nature’; it’s all about their fundamental make up; it’s all in the genes. Alternatively, we might have a tendency to blame the environment for all that is wrong in our lives. We slip so easily into the blame mode; ‘I blame the government: I blame the parents: I blame the teachers, I blame the Church, I blame God…’ and so it goes on and on. We reduce ourselves to a product of ‘nurture’. But is any of this what Jesus is teaching in this passage here? Ok, let’s think about it in another way. Say, there is no ‘two world view’ no set of binary opposites of nature and nurture where only one can be right. Say there is only one holistic experience available to us. In this way of thinking about life we are one conscious whole and we perceive as a complete human being in an interdependent relationship with our environment and each other. If this is true, Jesus would be teaching something very much more radical for us in our day and time. He would be saying that we need to know who we are as human beings to know the world around us; to truly be able to discern what is ethical.

 In our passage, the heart (kardia) implies the place of knowing, the essence and consciousness of the self; the centre of our ‘"desire-decisions" that establish who we really are’ (Strong’s concordance). And the word pure (katharoi) is a Greek word that means free from mixtures of elements or soiled by contaminants. In other words, Jesus is teaching that to see who we are in the creative work of God, that is, who God has created and continues to create us to be, we need to be free from the plethora of powers and influences that defines us in their interests. We have to be free from the powerful mixtures of ideas expressed in stories that diminish our personhood, casts us as characters in narratives in which we do not belong and places us in the ‘I blame myself’ or ‘I blame you’ debacle. How about, if we, as disciples, experienced ourselves and our community as one ‘holistic’ understanding; where we collectively understood that:  ‘I am’ (this is the heart) who God has created me to be (this is purity) and live among others (other hearts) created by God to, live together in peaceful interdependent communion and covenant relationship. This collective purity is taught in the previous beatitudes. According to His Nazareth sermon, Jesus claimed that He came to fulfil this very  promise for all of humanity. Therefore Jesus claims to  have inaugurated the domain of influence where these truths are accepted as accomplished in Him and among those who wait for the final consummation of this ‘Kingdom of God’ taught by Jesus.  The Bible is the source of the narrative account that empowers us to become ‘pure in heart’, that is, becoming the people God has created us to be. The power of this life transforming and empowering story must be seen in the lives of individuals who accept their part in the narrative and the gathered communities they form. If not, they are living out the characters of some other story defining and contaminating their ‘Heart’. According to Jesus, if we would be blessed, happy deep down, we have to devote ourselves to becoming the people God has created us to be as revealed in scripture. This is the only life worth devoting ourselves to. It’s not what goes into us from some outside world that ultimately defines us but that which can come from our renewed heart; re-made in the image of Jesus and the practice of His teachings.

Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus.... The power of the poet...

Practical compassion the way to assurance....

Matthew 5:7

7 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Have you ever wondered what was standing in the way of the assurance that you were meeting your needs God’s way? That is to say, the assurance that we have received from God that which we do not deserve because of any self-righteousness on our part? Perhaps it’s because we have accepted Jesus as our Saviour but not as our Lord. We are all willing to receive forgiveness of God and others but we struggle with forgiving others. We look to our own lives and the ways we need others to help us live life to the full; but do we become that ‘other person’ in someone else’s life? We cry out for mercy that is to have our needs met when we cannot meet them ourselves but do we pass by on the other side when others cry for mercy. Mercy is not forgiveness. Mercy is the compassionate action to relieve the distress of another despite their state of forgiveness not because of it. Mercy is the way power is exercised in the covenant community of disciples. We know we need mercy; relief from the misery of individualism and its avarice but do we practice mercy; do we meet the needs of others unconditionally? Discipleship is not a private club. If we need assurance that we are at peace with God and His creation we must offer practical compassion, forgiveness and the opportunity of holistic wellbeing to others to receive it ourselves. The practice of practical compassion is a fundamental human need for all of us if we are to live in the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus. 

The charge is disturbing the peace!

Matthew 5:6

6 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Most human beings are motivated for something or someone. Ambition, a personal experience of the want for something as vital for life, a seeking for that we do not have; hunger and thirst is a need. Need is not a sin if it’s a human need because that is how we have been created by God.  We need food and water and if we stop eating and drinking we will die; even if we don’t feel hungry or thirsty. The loss of appetite is a symptom that something is wrong with us. In this passage Jesus defines our true authentic human need; righteousness. If our most basic of human need is righteousness and all other needs will go frustrated in some way or another if we do not possess and practice righteousness, then we better understand it well. The discontent and avarice we see in our lives is due to the frustration of the fundamental human need for righteousness. It is here that we make our first mistake. We individualise and personalise righteousness and rename it self-righteousness, the very state that is personally impossible to attain (Romans 3:20).  When Jesus uses the word here in this passage we have to remember He is teaching how He is the fulfilment of Isaiah 61 and that we are called into the inaugurated Kingdom of God.  Righteousness is used three times in Isaiah 61: 3, 10, 11. It means a ‘justice that restores the welfare of community life’. The community of God is based on a series of unilateral, unconditional promises made by God for example to Abraham (Remember the ‘I will’ Statements of Genesis 17). In this community all the injustices of life outside of community are ended. In God’s Kingdom the hungry are fed and social justice reigns; this is the covenant community. Unless we hunger for justice and continue to meet the need then the bread that we eat for physical and spiritual hunger will never satisfy. It matters how we get our bread. It matters that we all eat! Justice comes first. Justice brings peace (Shalom) with God and each other. No justice no peace. Meeting our needs our own way is disturbing the peace; disturbing the ‘Shalom of God’ that is why it is called sin. Read Isaiah 32: 16-20; the outcome of God’s reign through His promised deliverer is righteousness demonstrated in justice and peace. If we would meet our needs God’s way then we must meet them in a just and community restoring way that practices inclusion. We must be hungry for justice and community wellbeing if we are to satisfactorily meet any of our other deficit needs. Do our community of believers practice justice and social inclusion? Our answer will determine if we are blessed! Righteousness (Justice) is credited to us and our community by God through His Grace and He expects us to participate and practice it: this is how we satisfy our ongoing hunger and thirst.    

Meek is not weak...

Matthew 5: 5

5 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

This is a challenging verse in today’s world; indeed in any world. We have a tendency to want cheap grace; to be able to quote Jesus but have a reason to deny the actual application of His words to our lives and community.  The meek, humble and gentle inheriting the earth seems laughable in a world where people brag about nuclear weapons ‘keeping the peace’ for 60+ years. In the so called ‘Christian world’, Just War Theory is religiously practiced daily as we find ourselves in the increasing twist of local and global physical violence and all sorts of human abuse. Denial comes in many forms; the denial of the meaning of the words of Jesus results in the need to deny the outcome of the denial of the meaning of the words of Jesus. In our current series we are attempting to identify our actual human needs as defined by scripture and we are seeking the way God has designed for these needs to be met. In this verse we need to find out the meaning of the word ‘meek’ and how it is to be applied if we are to faithfully hear Jesus words and put them into practice. Meek does not mean weak, submissive, or unassertive in the face of evil! Jesus is using a phrase from Psalm 37:11 and again used in the now familiar passage of Isaiah 61:1. Jesus is again announcing the fulfilment of the liberation promises through surrender to God’s inaugurated plan for justice for us and our communities. God’s justice is made possible for us to participate in through our practice of meekness; the exercise of surrender to the controlled power of God. In Numbers 12:3 Moses is described in the following words ‘Now the man Moses was very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth.’ . Moses was meek not weak! He abandoned himself to the plan of God.  Jesus invites us in Matthew 11:29 to do likewise through participating in His meekness and humility: ‘²⁹Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’ Jesus was not weak, submissive, or unassertive in the face of oppression and violence. The meek inherit through the ‘resistance of obedience’ to the Word and Will of God. Jesus fulfilled the promises of the plan of God. Whenever the Greek word (prays) that is translated here as Meek or Humble is used in the scriptures it is associated with making peace or peacefulness. Look at the story in Matthew 21 called the ‘Triumphal Entry’; in verse 5 King Jesus comes to His people ‘humble’. This is again a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures, this time from the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9. Jesus is the humble ‘peace-making’ King. The Apostle Paul refers to God as ‘The God of peace’ in Romans 15:33. Jesus calls on His disciples to love our enemies (Matthew 5: 43-48). Not easy, not weak, not unassertive but the power of Devine Justice under the control of God. If we would be blessed and be a blessing then we have to surrender to the God of peace and participate in the peaceful Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus. We need to be peacemakers.  Read Psalm 37.  

BBC JUST WAR THEORY           

Prayer: Loving God and Father make us peacemakers through being humble and gentle disciples of Jesus your Son through the power of your indwelling Holy Spirit and for your glory.  Amen

Poor

Matthew 5: 1-3

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Today we are invited by Jesus to come into His company and hear His words. We have heard lots about Jesus; He is a great teacher to some while to others His philosophy is revolutionary in nature. We have heard so much but what did He say and what did He actually mean? Over the past weeks we have been looking at the message and practices of Jesus in terms of the Nazareth synagogue sermon (Luke 4:18) and the events that led up to it and followed it. We have arrived at the invitation of Jesus to leave everything and follow Him. He does not ask us to become fans; He calls us to become followers. He calls to put into practice His words; to give His words priority and interpret everything in life in terms of His words.  He calls us to make other disciples in the name of the Triune God. He calls us to live out life as part of His Kingdom and based on His values, attitudes, beliefs and actions in the here and now! He offers us participation in the Kingdom of Heaven now because God has inaugurated the Kingdom through His Son.  In His teaching called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus is expanding and explaining the Nazareth Sermon based on Isaiah 61 prophecy. He is fulfilling the prophecy as He said in Nazareth. Jesus is not just teaching a set of do’s and don’ts. The Sermon on the Mount is not a list of the works required to be performed for redemption.     Secondly, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking material poverty somehow makes you holy and with the associated oppression are the precursors to blessing. Poverty is misery and death; the poor die young (Read the Black Report and the Acheson Report both online) and only the blindly ignorant wealthy and totally alienated poor teach otherwise. Without such an understanding we will end up perversely accepting poverty as inevitability and vows of poverty as redemptive. This is the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus. In the beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount we are being called to celebrate the overthrow of the empire of poverty and participate in the realisation of the Kingdom of the blessed. We are blessed not because we are poor in spirit but because Jesus has come and He has set us free from the spirit of poverty. It’s done! The fulfilment of the scriptures has happened; celebrate because we are blessed in Christ; His life His Teachings. God has poured out His undeserved loving kindness on us the poor in Spirit; those who realise meeting their needs their own way leads to poverty and death in the presence of plenty.  God has brought us into His Kingdom through His Son. This is prophetic fulfilment; this is Grace. It is costly to God and us; both God and us participate in the coming of the Kingdom reality seen in the life of disciples. You and I are the poor who have been blessed by God through the liberation of His Son. Jesus has achieved it all; we need to participate in the freedom or remain poor captives of meeting our needs our own way.   Blessed are the people who know they have a tendency to meet their whole person human needs their own way resulting in whole person poverty before God; the blessed serve the needs of the other poor in offering them the opportunity to meet their needs the way God intended.

Buried In The Grave: 'All Sons and Daughters'

The house of mourning

Matthew 5: 4

4 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

We experience a deep and profound sadness at the loss of someone, some role in life and / or a state of being that we love or highly value. We mourn! Have you ever felt that you have lost the person you know yourself to be? This experience of: ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’ is not so uncommon. We can live large pieces of life perhaps thinking we have it sorted; it’s all working out just right and then we experience loss. The fragile and time limited nature of life strikes home. We lose a loved person from our life, we lose our health, job, we lose a child born or unborn, we lose a ministry or a marriage we lose our faith. Suddenly our identity is all in question. Who am I and how did I get here to house of mourning? Don’t despair; loss is the road and mourning is the vehicle out of Denial. The loss of the ‘delusional self’ the person we thought we ought to be to fit the present culture and set of circumstances; the Sadducee, Pharisee, Zealot, Essene, Tax Collector, Sinner or member of the fickle crowed. All the personas that hide who we really are; they are just character faces for the stage play of life. Jesus calls us out of the stage character to let him/her die. We are called to experience the mourning and loss; Jesus calls calls to that place called regret, to the place of turning to Him for the comfort of a new identity of who God created us to be. We have been created to be participants in the liberation Kingdom of Jesus but the route is humility and mourning; we must lose our lives to gain them. Qohleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes writes this in chapter 7:2;

² It is better to go to the house of mourning
   than to go to the house of feasting;
for this is the end of everyone,
   and the living will lay it to heart. 

We are better for knowing that we are not god in any form and knowing that we have a tendency to meet our needs our own way. To experience the loss of the ‘self of denial’ is the first step to discover the person God created us to be. The Kingdom of God is the place of comfort; the comfort that we are loved by our creator God to the point of the Redemption of us personally by His Son Jesus through the cross. We are invited to participate in what is already inaugurated by God: The Kingdom of comfort. We are blessed if we mourn all that is wrong and unjust; if we genuinely turn from it we will meet the God of all comfort (2 Cor 1: 3-5). 

Blessed are the poor in spirit....

Invited by Jesus to participate

Matthew 5: 1-3

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Today we are invited by Jesus to come into His company and hear His words. We have heard lots about Jesus; He is a great teacher to some while to others His philosophy is revolutionary in nature. We have heard so much but what did He say and what did He actually mean? Over the past weeks we have been looking at the message and practices of Jesus in terms of the Nazareth synagogue sermon (Luke 4:18) and the events that led up to it and followed it. We have arrived at the invitation of Jesus to leave everything and follow Him. He does not ask us to become fans; He calls us to become followers. He calls to put into practice His words; to give His words priority and interpret everything in life in terms of His words.  He calls us to make other disciples in the name of the Triune God. He calls us to live out life as part of His Kingdom and based on His values, attitudes, beliefs and actions in the here and now! He offers us participation in the Kingdom of Heaven now because God has inaugurated the Kingdom through His Son.  In His teaching called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus is expanding and explaining the Nazareth Sermon based on Isaiah 61 prophecy. He is fulfilling the prophecy as He said in Nazareth. Jesus is not just teaching a set of do’s and don’ts. The Sermon on the Mount is not a list of the works required to be performed for redemption.     Secondly, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking material poverty somehow makes you holy and with the associated oppression are the precursors to blessing. Poverty is misery and death; the poor die young (Read the Black Report and the Acheson Report both online) and only the blindly ignorant wealthy and totally alienated poor teach otherwise. Without such an understanding we will end up perversely accepting poverty as inevitability and vows of poverty as redemptive. This is the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus. In the beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount we are being called to celebrate the overthrow of the empire of poverty and participate in the realisation of the Kingdom of the blessed. We are blessed not because we are poor in spirit but because Jesus has come and He has set us free from the spirit of poverty. It’s done! The fulfilment of the scriptures has happened; celebrate because we are blessed in Christ; His life His Teachings. God has poured out His undeserved loving kindness on us the poor in Spirit; those who realise meeting their needs their own way leads to poverty and death in the presence of plenty.  God has brought us into His Kingdom through His Son. This is prophetic fulfilment; this is Grace. It is costly to God and us; both God and us participate in the coming of the Kingdom reality seen in the life of disciples. You and I are the poor who have been blessed by God through the liberation of His Son. Jesus has achieved it all; we need to participate in the freedom or remain poor captives of meeting our needs our own way.   Blessed are the people who know they have a tendency to meet their whole person human needs their own way resulting in whole person poverty before God; the blessed serve the needs of the other poor in offering them the opportunity to meet their needs the way God intended.  

THE ACHESON REPORT ONLINE HERE    

Anabaptist Vision

RADICAL REFORMATION

Discipleship

Matthew 9: 14-17; Mark 2: 18-22; Luke 5: 33-39

Matthew 9

¹⁶No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made.

Establishing the life of discipleship is difficult. We all make resolutions to read the scriptures pray and fast our hurts, habits and meeting our needs our own way; but for some it does not last and soon we are back in our old ways. Lasting change? Now that’s difficult! The disciples of John the Baptist and some Pharisees asked this sort of question of Jesus; How can the change you teach about be made permanent if you don’t practice ‘praying and fasting’ like us? Jesus obviously did not insist on these contemporary religious rituals be practiced in order to be a follower of Him. In fact Jesus teaches a break with the religious ritualism of His time and space. Why? Because that for which the people were supposed to be praying and fasting had come! The new has arrived; the old ways of fasting and praying were for a time of promises still to be kept; now it’s time for something new; the prayers of promise the faithful prayed have been answered. Jesus disciples did not need to fast and pray the old way because they were in Jesus very presence; the answer to their prayers. This radical realisation affected their entire lives; they needed to learn how to live a new way. This is the problem; we try and practice the teachings of Jesus into an old perhaps a reformed way of life and then we wonder why it does not last.  The early disciples changed their way of life totally; physical, social, environmental and psychological lives all changed; but how? They heard the words of Jesus and put them into practice. This is how Jesus sums up the Sermon on the Mount; lasting change is achieved by practical application of the teachings of Jesus. Our faith is demonstrated by this obedience, our obedience increases through extending the practice of this faith. Faith is obedience and obedience is faith.  This is the new cloth and new wine that requires a new life and results in a new life.  The Sermon on the Mount is where we must turn to learn our part in this Jesus inaugurated story.                     

The call of Jesus

Matthew 9: 9-13; Mark 2: 13-17; Luke 5: 27-32

Mark 2:17

  

¹⁷When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

I am always surprised by those who respond to the call of Jesus to discipleship. There is in my own culture a massive resistance to discipleship; to living as Jesus did and taught. The preference of the faithful appears to be a dying denominationalism. The paradoxical result is the abandonment of the real distinctive of being a follower of Jesus and the acceptance of an identity imposed by the institutions that regulate Christian belief and practice. It appears we have become reliant on regimes of power and authority outside of God’s word. The Christian distinctive appears to be derived from expressions of powerful institutional vested interests that flow through communities of believers. The people of God appear committed to staying within these powerful rivers of denominational expression. Every now and again we step out of our denominations and gather in conventions to hear from distant people what the Lord has to say to us. We desire to be part of a gathering not generally available locally and a word we cannot hear nearby. For a time, we can see what life might be like and pretend to be one people with One God speaking with one voice. For a short time we are one. Or are we?  When Matthew responded to the call of Jesus he identified with the oneness of those who follow Jesus. The thing that we all hold in common is our tendency to meet our needs our own way; we recognise we are not righteous people with a monopoly on the truth but rather we are sinners. Our tendency is to distort the story to our own ends. The more we know about Jesus the worse sinners we realise we are and we begin to understand how much we really need Jesus, His teachings and His practices.  Only those who recognise they are sick seek medical help. People who actually believe they are well and seek medical help are malingerers; they are pretenders and are not admitting they have a problem they are simply involved in deception. Jesus spent His time helping the sick because the healthy don’t need Him.  How healthy are we? Do we recognise that the sickness of denominationalism displaces the authority of the Word of God? When we meet in this summer’s conventions and festivals and experience being one people under the authority of God’s Word will we bring this truth back to our lives in our local community? Jesus prayed that we might be one in His prayer on the night when he was betrayed.  May it be that we practice the unity and hospitality of being one people who recognise the sickness of division at the end of our festivals of preaching as we do during them. May we unite around the Story of God as revealed in Jesus; take His teachings seriously and live recognising our profound need to live as Jesus taught.  

Say YES to peacemaking through Christian CND and Scottish Clergy Against Nuclear Arms

I received an email this week that I must share.....

A convoy of more than 20 military vehicles drove through the centre of Glasgow on the M74 shortly after midnight last night. The convoy included four special lorries which transport Trident nuclear bombs. The convoy was stopped for one hour near Loch Lomond by protestors from Faslane Peace Camp. One climbed on top of a nuclear transporter. Four peace campers were arrested. 

Scottish CND coordinator, John Ainslie, followed the convoy as it drove along the M74 from Hamilton, through the South of Glasgow, then over the Erskine Bridge. Mr Ainslie said,

"This is an insult to the people of Glasgow and the rest of Scotland. Only 10 weeks before we vote on whether to be independent, the UK Government have sent this massive convoy of Weapons of Mass Destruction through the centre of Scotland's largest city. The convoy was probably carrying six Trident bombs, each one seven times more powerful than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. This should be taken as a clear reminder of why people need to vote Yes - to rid Scotland of these horrific nuclear weapons." 

The convoy left the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Burghfield around 9 am yesterday (Thursday). It arrived at the Coulport nuclear store at 2.30 am this morning (Friday). It was tracked by Nukewatch (http://nukewatch.org.uk) and the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The photo shows one of the nuclear weapon transporters on the A82 near Bowling at 00:50 this morning.  The whole convoy was filmed earlier on Thursday on the M69 near Leicester  - http://youtu.be/HSOxOnF6LqM

The convoy lorries can each carry two Trident nuclear bombs. Normal practice is for one lorry in the convoy to be empty. So a reasonable estimate is that the convoy was carrying six 100-kiloton nuclear bombs.

 The UK government are currently upgrading Trident bombs to a new Mk4A design. The convoy was probably bringing new Mk4A bombs to replace older Mk4 bombs. The Mk4A upgrade programme is a significant enhancement of the capability of the UK's nuclear force.  It makes the bombs more effective.

There is an article on the convoy on the STV website -  STV...

Dietary habits of big fish and social inclusion

Matthew 8:2-4; Mark 1: 40-45; Luke 5: 12-16

Luke 5: 13b:  ‘I do choose. Be made clean.’ 

In the culture I live within in West Central Scotland we tend to compartmentalise our lives; family, work, church, physical, social and psychological. All separate like departments in large shop.  It’s not very satisfactory but we do it. We tend to label people and prophesy about them on the basis of their age, gender, class and a host of other things. We mostly get it wrong because were not prophets we simply describe the world using one set of values, attitudes and beliefs and come up with one set of understandings / meanings. There is a danger in thinking that every culture does the same and makes meaning of life the same way. This of course is not the case. Culture is very diverse and indeed within cultures there is diversity. To be a male, female or transgender truck driver would offer three very different life experiences and very different experiences and meanings of say family, work or church.  In Jesus time and space skin disorders were not only seen as physical disabilities but were used by some to define a person socially, personally and religiously. The psychological effects of skin disorders and how people who suffered from them were treated led to sufferers to be described as feeling and indeed telling their life stories using specific language for example ‘being unclean’. This was more than a physical description of their skin disorder it was how they were seen as people in their culture; physical, social and psychological outcasts. It’s easier to see the physical and to see physical changes so we tend to concentrate on them. It’s much more difficult to talk about the social and the psychological. They are ‘unseen’ like invisible hands moving chess pieces on a board.  The social and the psychological have to be constructed like bodies through language, symbols and expressed ideas. That’s why we miss them and overly concentrates on the physical parts of the stories like walking on water, raising the dead or curing leprosy.  In Jesus day the use of the terms sociology and psychology would not have been used. These ways of compartmentalising the world describing and understanding human life are relatively new, a product of the Enlightenment. They form part of a modern and post-modern way of understanding the world. Obviously people had psycho-social, economic and political relationships in first century Israel / Palestine but they discussed these parts of their lives in different ways than we do. But they are discussed and stories told about them.  First century Israel / Palestine is a very different culture and therefore they make sense and meaning in different ways to us, using different language and series of symbolic headings to describe their life. This does not make their experience out of reach to us. Like using a type of ‘Rosetta Stone’ we can translate complex social settings using their stories: language studies, behavioural studies, social and religious studies to give ourselves an insight into what is actually ‘going on’ in a recorded story within an ancient text. We can look behind, within and in front of the text; we can treat the story holistically, carefully and respectfully and avoid or at least perhaps minimise imposing our cultural meanings on the story.  In the life story of Jesus as told in the scriptures Jesus appears in stories and tells stories in order to make sense of life and of the questions being asked within His culture. These stories, both historical events and parables give us a route to understanding and meaning of who Jesus is and who He calls us to be. The enlightenment gave us new disciplines for understanding biblical stories; we can access more meaning than the physical healings, walking on water and the dietary habits of big fish and their desire to swallow travellers avoiding going to Nineveh going on in the stories of Jesus. Yes Jesus mentions Jonah in one of His stories but the story is not about the dietary habits of the big fish! So, in today’s reading (story) about a man with leprosy; what are the question(s) being asked by the text? What are the social-psychological relationships you can identify, religious practices and what does Jesus bring to the: values, attitudes and beliefs of people in the story?   

Bad theology gets people killed....

Abandon

Luke 5: 1-11

¹¹When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

We have seen that the early Christians had a view of Jesus that He was the fulfilment of the promises contained in the Hebrew Story as they understood it. The recording of the fulfilment statements in Matthew and the landmark sermon at Nazareth give us a good pointer to what these early writers and disciples believed about Jesus. Their view was not accepted by everybody, in fact, the vast majority rejected the recorded New Testament views regarding Jesus and how He answered the question of life. In the referendum regarding Jesus the answer was a resounding no by the majority. The vast majority of people followed for a ‘sign and some supper’; they followed Jesus around as a means of meeting their own needs their own way. Jesus becomes for the majority a new ‘life-style statement’. However, for the few the story unfolds in a very different way.  Stories in the bible that record how a person comes to realise that there is a better way of life possible are named the ‘Call Narratives’. They are all through the bible. From Genesis right to the last chapter of Revelation.  These are the collective life records of the process of turning life around to participate in new possibilities. This culminates in an invitation to participate in life through a better way, a divine way revealed by the scriptural Story of God. This new way of life where God’s way is followed is called the Kingdom of God.   Those called to Kingdom living go on to share this story of possibilities with others even though the story reveals their personal limitations and failures; they keep on living out the ongoing and ever available new possibilities of the story of Jesus revealed in scripture. The call narrative of Luke 5 records how four men start to live out the new possibilities that Jesus offers. They left everything but only after they responded to Jesus say two sentences: “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.” and “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” Peter obeys Jesus even in his scepticism about achieving very much that day. The results speak for themselves; out of what appears a poor day’s work results in a record achievement and a little bit more of a realisation regarding who Jesus is; Jesus is Holy. The call of Jesus was to the sinful, sceptical fisherman who simply obeyed Jesus. Would they have responded without the catch of fish? I believe they would have. Why?  Well the vast majority reject Jesus even in the presence of many miracles. Disciples don’t follow Jesus because of the miraculous they follow because they are effectively called. That is, they know like these fishermen; their own needs are going unmet; they live in a state of dissonance, they have a partial knowledge of who Jesus is through His teachings (verses 3-4), they trust enough to obey and faith grows to the point ‘they left everything and followed him.’ Faith is obedience; obedience is faith. The crowd came to hear the word of God; those who hear abandon everything and follow Jesus. Those who seek an addition to their life-style; a sign, soon get bored and move on.  Will we, the sinful and sceptical hear the word of God revealed in Jesus? Will we abandon everything and follow Jesus? This is the call!     

How do you feel?

Matthew 4:23-24; Mark 1: 35-39; Luke 4:42-44

Mark 1

³⁷When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ ³⁸He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ ³⁹And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

We have a tendency to try and keep hold of the Jesus that seems to meet our own felt needs and wants. Felt need and wants are not necessarily an accurate reflection of our actual needs or what can be described as our normative needs. This is an important point. When we go to the doctor we may have a painful throat and in our own minds believe that we need an antibiotic to kill an infection. However the GP may inform us that we have a viral infection and an antibiotic would do us no good; in actual fact it may make us worse as we would suffer all the side effects of the medication but gain no benefit. We need to know our actual need, our normative need the state that under design conditions would produce health.    People can initially look to the story of scripture as a means of identifying how their needs should be met according to God’s creative plan; so far so good. However, there is a problem. If we do not know our actual or normative needs we have a tendency to experience the story in a self-affirming way instead of recognising how the bible defines our normative need as a first step. We simply pick and choose the prescription of values, attitudes, beliefs and practices that we are attracted to in the story of scripture. If we are angry, proud or have a poor self-esteem we will tend to see the story through those felt experiences. If we live in a culture which is imperialistic and acts as if its wealth and power is a blessing from God we might read certain passages of scripture in ways that affirms our culture while others point to scripture to demonstrate how unethical our culture is. We need some sort of base measure to which we can refer. We need a set of basic definitions and a source to accurately make these definitions clear or at least clearer. As reflective human beings we need to be able to exercise our God given ability to reflect on context from a context. We have to come to the point where we are prepared to allow the Holy Spirit through scripture define our need not just offer us a series of prescriptions to meet what we think our needs are. As disciples of Jesus Christ we follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Our needs are what He says they are and they should be met the way He teaches they should be met. We take the teachings of Jesus seriously and make sense of all passages of scripture through His teachings and practices. We therefore need to understand His cultural context and our own: we need to find the crossroads between His story and our own and live at that crossroads. This means we will not live in the past nor will we elevate the present or idealise the future; we will live in the tension of the story of scripture interacting with our own story. 

In today’s passage people wanted to keep Jesus with them (Luke). Seems an ok self-identified need and action plan; they wanted Jesus to stay that’s got to be the solution.  But Jesus said he had to share the story with others. The people seem to have got their self-assessment of need wrong! They do not understand the story. They want their diseases cured and that’s understandable but they are failing to understand their actual needs and the needs of others. They are confusing symptoms with diagnoses and what real prescription is needed. How are we reading the story of Jesus today? What does the bible say our actual needs are? It’s time for an inventory and plan of action! 

Power

Luke 4: 38-42

40 As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.

The people close to the historical Jesus were divided over Him. Some thought He was a fraud others that He threatened their privileged oppressive position and the power that brought them. Jesus had to be stopped.  The writers of the New Testament believed Jesus was the Messiah: the person God would provide to set us free from all that oppressed us. We have listed these things as poverty, illness, accumulation of personal wealth through exploitation of others and the experience of imprisonment in all its forms. As we have seen, Jesus was portrayed by these early gospel writers as the liberation King, Suffering Servant, Authentic Human and as God in a human form. This is the implication of the Nazareth sermon that causes Jesus to be rejected. His Geography changed but the message did not. He remained known as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This is not just a reference to where He lived and earned His living. I am suggesting that news about Jesus travelled and gave people hope and that He was known as the Jesus that claimed in the synagogue at Nazareth to be the Messiah.  In the story of the healing of Peter’s mother in-law Jesus again demonstrates who He is to the writer and early gathered community of disciples. He is a man and clearly recognised as such but He is also clearly portrayed as having power over the created order; Jesus is the Creator. He is seen as being the person who can not only heal diseases; all good physicians can do that but as the person who can dispense and destroy the powers that rage against God and manifest itself in disease. Disease was eliminated by Jesus as a symptom on many occasions. However, it is the powers that rage against God who in the story are the root cause of our oppression and illness. It’s their system, their kingdom and their strongholds that Jesus has come to overthrow. This is the Jesus that we must recognise; a personal Saviour and destroyer of oppressive regimes of power. One day soon Jesus has promised to complete the story of liberation and as 1 Corinthians 15:6 states: ‘²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ Do we know this Jesus? Jesus is clearly portrayed as the ‘God-Man’ who has become and still wants to become our liberation King through the overthrow of all oppressive regimes. Poverty, illness, death and so on are the weapons of domination of the kingdom Jesus came to destroy.   

Today

Mark 1: 21-28; Luke 4: 31-37

Mark 1

²⁷They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ 

Have you ever thought what would bring the story of Jesus and His liberation good news to the attention of our neighbours and our communities? Let’s face it this is exactly what Jesus asked us to do. Our life purpose is to share the story of Jesus and make disciples. People seem to reject the teachings of Jesus without even knowing them. How can we tell them the authentic story and have them recognise it as relevant in the 21^st century?  Perhaps it’s stating the obvious but we could look to the life and witness of Jesus and what he taught His disciples and take that for an example? After His rejection in Nazareth Jesus moved His ministry to Capernaum; literally ‘the village of Nahum’. This was a busy centre of commerce and community life and again we see Him in the Synagogue putting into practice the fulfilment of the scriptures He read and was rejected for in Nazareth. Jesus taught but with one big and important difference ‘He taught with authority’. He taught the scriptures as they are written. He didn’t teach the rabbinical teachings of the various denominations; He taught directly from the scriptures and explained them. He didn’t dodge the scriptures and use allegory to get out of the tight spot of confronting life styles, economic systems and systems of governance that were oppressing the people. He taught the Truth. This amazed people; they had never heard the scriptures taught like this. The teaching of the truth of scripture causes the powers that rage against God hiding in the community of believers to expose themselves and challenge Jesus. What are the powers that hide in the community of God’s people and why are they there? Let’s keep to the story; Jesus is in this synagogue teaching what he taught in Nazareth. The year of the Lord’s favour has arrived? Remember? The forces that rage against God want to teach an ‘anti-social’ gospel. They teach two types of false gospel. Firstly they teach that the people of God can live like everybody else in the culture; Jesus is a belief system, believe He is God’s son that’s enough, be as good as you can but join in the culture; ‘don’t live like some sort of radical fanatic’; it’s all about grace isn’t it?. Secondly, they teach legalism, that is, we are to live like some sort of fanatics, make as many rules as you can and live rigidly by them, don’t have anything to do with the culture; the gift of grace is the gift of the law.

Both extremes either have us collude with what is wrongly taught and unfaithful about whom God has created us to be as revealed in scripture, or teaches us that we can only be the people God has created us to be in the teachings of Jesus in the future ‘Heavenly Kingdom’ after Jesus comes and uses His transporter to remove us to Kingdom bliss. In other words both ignore the teachings of Jesus in the here and now; grace is cheap as no life changing power is available in the here and now to demonstrate our hope to come. Jesus cast out both these demons in the Capernaum synagogue. How do we know? Because the text tells us that Jesus is identified by the demon as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This Jesus, the Nazarene is the fulfilment of scripture:

¹⁸ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free, 
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ 

Jesus is the fulfilment; the Promised One who has come to liberate TODAY.

The reason the forces that range against God take up residence in the synagogue is to silence this message with the untruth that ‘our culture is good enough to be accepted the way it is,’ or ‘our culture is too wicked to offer its participants redemption and for us to practice freedom among them’.

We follow Jesus of Nazareth who is the fulfilment of the Kingdom in our lives now! This Jesus makes Himself known through the transformed lives of disciples and communities of disciples. This places a profound responsibility upon us to live as transformed individuals in transformed gathered communities of believers.