by James Webb
I’ve been told that every good blog needs a guest blogger now and then. Fortunately, I’ve been able to convince a long time friend, the Reverend Ulysses Giblet, to contribute to my page. Here’s some of his thoughts on preaching.
When James asked me if I’d write something for his blog, I was happy to help. I decided I should write a short article on a topic that James knows nothing about – preaching. Read more
I was out on one of my walks one evening, and I saw something unusual. Down below me, in her front garden, was an elderly woman, wrapped up against the cold, standing behind a lawn mower. It was a strange sight, seeing this tiny old lady about to start mowing her front lawn in the autumn twilight. Read more
I wrote this little verse a while ago. It’s inspired by Galatians 3:23 to 4:7. Read the passage first.
The law is done?
The pedagogue is agog. Read more
I believe in Thin Places. I have two favourites. One is old and one is new. One is inside and one is outside. One is here and one is there.
Canterbury Cathedral is old, at least in terms of this country and its identity. It’s been rebuilt several times over the years, but for nearly one and half millennia it has been a site set apart for the service and worship of God. As you wander around it, you can be thinking about the excesses of the established church, the corruption and insipidity of the Anglican faith at its worst, but why should you not be awed by this building? By the size and the beauty. By the devotion that its construction required. (The idea that God cannot be glorified by good old fashioned ingenuity and hard work is nonsense by the way). Even in this enlightened day and age, hundreds of visitors are daily looking at stained glass windows and reading Renaissance graffiti. There is something special here. Fifteen hundred years of prayer and song and liturgy? That has to leave a mark.
I will stroll down into the crypt and amble to the Chapel of St. John. I may pause to look at the prayers that people have written to be placed on the altar. I will sit and look at the window that shows the harlot drying Jesus’ feet with her hair. Even though there may be tourists, I can be silent and listen. I can meet with God. Fifteen hundred years of prayer and song and liturgy, and I add mine to become part of something greater than myself. A blink of the eye for God, but an eternity of praise.
The second place is on the other side of the world. On a small farm on the Belubula, in a place called Canowindra. Many of you won’t have heard of it, or of a missionary couple named Ian and Irene, who gave part of their farmland over to Cornerstone. Over forty years ago they planted a grove of poplar trees on that farm. I believe that the plan was for the trees to be sold for matchsticks. That was the plan, but those trees are still there, dead and dangerous, and still very flammable. But that grove has seen more than twenty years of prayer and worship and weddings. I have been involved in all three. Australia is a beautiful country, yet so alien compared to England’s green and pleasant fields, and I have sat in the silence of that grove on many a summer morning. I have shed tears and sang songs. I have sat with kangaroos and sheep and birds. I have heard God in some very specific ways, and He and I have wrestled in that place many times. He usually won, but not always.
Thin Places, the Celts called them. Places where the boundary between this life and the next is worn and frail and the freshness of the Kingdom bleeds obviously into the mundane beauty of this world. These places are real, and so is the God who can be found in them.
Evangelical Christians don’t have a Pope, nor believe in papal infallibility, but sometimes you wouldn’t know it from the way that some of us talk about Martin Luther, or John Calvin or our favourite authors or a particular leader or church. It’s par for the course for us human beings. We struggle to hold conflicting things in tension, we seek order and patterns in everything, even when there are none. We are happiest when something is clearly 100% good or 100% bad, black or white, right or wrong; when our heroes and villains are undiluted. When we’re young, and we lack experience, wisdom and courage it’s easiest for us if we can attach ourselves to someone and let them do our thinking for us. We all have this subconscious desire to be discipled by something. For some of us, we buy wholeheartedly into a church and adopt uncritically its interpretation of the Bible on faith, love, sex, prayer and God.
I remember once I was doing some teaching to some visitors at Cornerstone. One of the people listening found something I had said difficult to accept in light of what he had been taught by his church and, to his credit, he came to talk to me about it. I took him through one of the New Testament letters which had been influential in shaping my thinking about the topic. I could see, as we went through the letter together, that he wasn’t convinced. His knew and respected his church leaders, and who was this nobody trying to tell him that they were wrong? At one point in the letter we came across a verse that, to be honest, may as well have said, “That thing that James is telling you? Yeah, it’s right, and that means that what your church has taught you is wrong.” He looked at me and said, without a single drop of irony in his voice, “So I just need to find a way to interpret that verse”. That was when I knew that I’d lost.
I’d seen it before, in victims of cults. You present an alternative interpretation. It shakes their worldview a little and makes them uncomfortable, so instead of unravelling the thought, exploring it and seeing where it takes them, they run to a church leader who performs some complicated exegetical gymnastics in order to be able to say, “That verse that says that thing – it actually means the complete opposite”. And all is right with the world again.
I see it in myself and in others, where instead of letting what the Bible says shape our theology, we let our theology shape what the Bible says. A sad day, when truth knocks on our door, and we just hang out a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.
“Blessed are those who have realised that getting bigger and better stuff doesn’t lead to happiness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who, when they see what’s on Facebook or listen to the lyrics of the latest chart hit, get depressed,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are those who do more than take Selfies and worry about how many subscribers they have,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who walk down the high street, find themselves surrounded by materialism and soft porn, and feel empty inside,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are those who use technology to build something good, rather than to just make life more convenient,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are those who aren’t subscribed to Netflix, Amazon Prime or Now TV,
for they will see God.
Blessed are those who don’t get drawn into petty squabbles on Internet forums or YouTube comments,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are mocked and ridiculed and labelled intolerant because they believe in something bigger than what can be seen,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Once upon a time a well-known author and speaker came and spoke at a Christian Union event. The speaker would say something profound, and then end his sentence with something like “Amen?” or “Hello?”. It was obvious that he wanted some kind of response, something like “Preach it brother!” or “Hallelujah!”. Unfortunately we were the wrong audience. We were a mostly white, mostly middle-to-upper class group of mostly students, some of whom came from fairly conservative church backgrounds. All the speaker got from us was silence. Not one to take defeat lying down, he persevered in an attempt to mould us into his own image. Eventually we got the message that we weren’t fulfilling our end of the social contract, so some of us played along a little bit, but you could tell that our hearts weren’t in it. It was serious business to him though, and after one of his little pearls of wisdom was met with unsatisfactory enthusiasm he said, “Not many believers here tonight, are there?”. What did he mean? That you weren’t a Christian if you didn’t vocally agree with him? I was not impressed with this encounter. The whole experience just left me cold. I wonder if he knows how arrogant he came across that evening?
I’m not sure that he would care. He didn’t strike me as someone who was particularly approachable or open to what anyone else thought. He just struck me as arrogant. Arrogant and humourless.
I have a saying: Never trust a Christian who can’t laugh at himself.
Amen?
I’ve been thinking a little bit about fear recently. I don’t really want to write about Britain’s decision to leave the EU, but I feel like I should at least say something. It’s too big to ignore; too massive to just carry on and pretend it hasn’t happened. I’d rather write something else, some spiritual reflection or humourous observation, (like the fact that my spell-checker lets me write ‘humour’ but wants me to write ‘humorous’). But, as I said, I’ve been thinking about fear recently.
The referendum debate revolved around fear. Fear of economic uncertainty, fear of immigration, fear of eroded sovereignty, fear of the future. Fear seems to be the only tool that our politicians have, and if that’s the case – regardless of the referendum result – we’re in trouble.
There’s no doubt. Fear is a powerful motivator. You can make people do outrageous things, things totally against their character, if you can just make them afraid enough. Yet when I read through the gospels, I can’t help but notice that Jesus never seemed to act out of fear. I never get the impression that fear was a factor in his motivation. He did some pretty crazy stuff and upset some powerful people, but he never seemed to be afraid, and if he was then he never let it control his choices.
There was a time when fear came out to play, and that was in the garden of Gethsemane, where he pleads for a different route. He doesn’t want to die, especially not like this, and he asks God to spare him. And yet…”Not my will, Father, but yours”. Even in his darkest hour, his greatest fear is not death or suffering, but rather the fear of not being obedient.
Imagine living a life where that’s really the only thing that you are truly afraid of.
I find it hard to feel optimistic about the immediate future right now. There’s all kinds of ugliness and uncertainty surfacing in the Island of the Mighty, but I have decided to not be afraid. Whatever the future brings and whatever actions I take, I will try to not let fear be the thing that drives me. Not my will, Father, but yours.
If you’ve read my blog/heard me preach/seen my book, you are by now no doubt saying to yourself, “Wow! This guy is AMAZING! Why is he not a world-famous blogger/preacher/author who is, quite rightly and correctly, making an absolutely fortune from his work?”. The truth is that I have no-one to blame but myself. When I was a young man I remember hearing a quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones – “The worst thing that can happen to a man is for him to succeed before he is ready”. Even though I am foolish, I saw that there was wisdom in those words and, as such, one of my prayers over the years has been ‘Lord, don’t let me succeed before I am ready’. Funnily enough, God’s been 100% on board with that prayer.
Success, as most people perceive it, is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It promises much, but behind that sharp-toothed grin is a monster that will destroy you if you are not strong enough to tame it. By contrast, failure can be the making of us, even though we do all we can to keep it at arm’s length. Few things test the strength of our foundations like good old fashioned failure, and few things are better for us than when all the stuff that we’ve built is knocked down so that God can start His own Great Project.
But no-one wants to fail at everything that they do, and neither should we. The issue is really how we define success and what it looks like in a framework of faith. The wise among us already know the truth. The story goes that Mother Teresa was once asked how she measured the success of her work. Her response was, apparently, to look puzzled and then say, “I don’t remember that the Lord ever spoke of success. He spoke only of faithfulness in love. This is the only success that really counts”.
Talking of managing anger, there was once a time when Ruth and I were going through a stressful situation, but we were confident that it would all work out because we had Boris on our side. Boris (not his real name) had said that he’d make sure that everything was sorted out. There was a problem though – namely that Boris wasn’t following up on this, and he wasn’t delivering on what had been promised. I was feeling let down, anxious and quite angry about it all. Then one morning, as I was waking up and before I’d had the chance to erect my defences for the day, a thought sneaked into my head, like the last sentence of a dream. “You’re putting your trust in Boris rather than in Me”. I tell you, it’s really something to start your day with a divine slap across the wrist.
It’s easy to talk of ‘trusting God’ when the bank account is full, no-one is sick and England haven’t yet been knocked out of the tournament, but the reality is that, when these unconscious supports erode, many of us find our ‘trust in God’ evaporating in the face of panic. It turns out that our trust wasn’t really in God in the first place, but rather in our own resources, in our savings, in our clever plans or in Boris.
Larry Crabb, in his excellent book Connecting, calls this ‘Fire Lighting’.
Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the word of his servant?
Let the one who walks in the dark,
who has no light,
trust in the name of the Lord
and rely on their God.
But now, all you who light fires
and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
You will lie down in torment.
Isaiah 50:10-11
Crabb suggests that the only cure for this malady is a period of intense darkness where we have no choice but to reach out into the black and take God’s hand. Then we come to learn that He is the only one worth putting our trust in. Painful lessons are best learnt once.
