We’re just lingering a bit over Eccl.5:10 and this issue of loving money. It is such a significant issue for us as Christians… I mean, what does it look like to love money anyway? How would I know if I did love money?
In the video I mention a really helpful book by Paul Tripp, ‘Redeeming Money’. I have a few cpies of this, so if you know someone who would benefit from a copy, let me know and I’ll get a copy to you.
…while stocks last!
following on from this morning’s sermon, here is one last thought I couldn’t resist from John 7, and the pathology of unbelief…
It’s something we hear with surprising regularity… even from ourselves. We defend ourselves against our sense of being judged (by God, by other people, or even by ourselves), with a shrug of the shoulders, and by reciting the old adage: ‘It didn’t hurt anyone’. Solomon begst o differ. We are deeply interconnected creatures… and our sin always hurts others.
Another element that became prominent at Birmingham was MLK’s open chastisement of the wider Christian Church. We’ve already thought briefly in our series about the ‘prophetic’ role of the Church, that is engaged with proactively building justice and virtue into the legislative and cultural life of a society. But as King sat in a prison cell in Birmingham, he read in a local paper an open letter from various local Church leaders castigating him, and complaining that his protest was both unwise and untimely. His response is captured in his famous ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, written initially in the margins of that newspaper and on toilet roll.
He began to speak more forcefully of the role of the Church in wider society. In order to prevent the Church becoming an ‘irrelevant’ social club, she must speak fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace. A Church guilty of social neglect is ‘blemished and scarred’, and is under the judgement of God. And where a state or society is structured in a way that is unjust, and that perpetuates injustice, the Church is called not just to speak, but to act to defy that state, in order to restructure society. King saw the Church acting as a conscience, calling society into accordance with the revealed will of God.
King cast the civil rights struggle in these terms. He refused to separate out the political, moral and spiritual elements of that struggle. He sought to stir the conscience of the nation as well as change its laws. And in the meantime, he would break those laws … en masse. At Birmingham that articulated itself specifically in breaking a court order refusing permission to march. The decision to directly disobey a manifestly unjust law still caused King signifcant heart-searching, but he concluded that the responsiblity for the situation fell not on those who protested, but on those whose abuse of authority necessitated such protest. Scripture, King reasoned, commands us to turn from sin. Co-operation and compliance with a government which legislated evil was sin. That, King could never reconcile himself to. When the city government obtained a court injunction against the SCLC protests, campaign leaders decided to disobey the court order: “We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction which is an unjust, undemocratic and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process”. And so they marched.
Before the public marches however, a carefully planned schedule of smaller, co-ordinated and localised direct action (but non-violent) protests had begun; along with a two month long series of mass meetings, which included training in the principles of non-violence and teaching about civil disobedience, and which culminated in appeals for volunteers to ‘serve in our non-violent army’. The sustainable programme of lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall, and a boycott of local businesses and institutions that segregated, both raised awareness and prepared the ground for the larger scale protests and marches that were to follow.
Three factors magnified the effectiveness of King’s decision to break the law on such a massive scale:
The first was the patent and contrasting aggression of Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner (a role that gave him oversight of both police and fire departments). In 1961, during the Freedom Rides, Connor had ordered Birmingham police to stay away from the bus station while Klansmen attacked the arriving buses and Freedom Riders. This history partly lay behind King’s decision to target Birmingham. Connor met the non-violent protest with undisguised violence, ordering the use of fire hoses and attack dogs to disperse the marchers, eventually incarcerating over 3,000 demonstrators. The willingness to submit to the consequences of breaking the law was both (as we have seen in our series) embedded in the Bible’s teaching relating to the relationship of the Christian to the state; but was also a deliberate and pragmatic ploy. The justice system simply couldn’t cope with hundreds being arrested on a daily basis, and created an urgency for the protests to be resolved.
The second factor was the SCLC decision to allow young people, and even children to join the marches. This accentuated the effects of Connor’s use of violence. Hundreds of students and young people were arrested. The emotional and psychological impact of Connor’s violent tactics - met as it was with non-violence - was huge both on the citizens of Brimingham, and on a watching world. King meanwhile offered encouragement to parents of the young protesters: “Don’t worry about your children, they’re going to be alright. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job for not only themselves, but for all of America and for all mankind”.
The third aspect of the situation that massively increasd the impact of the SCLC’s campaign, was the presence of the Television cameras and reporters. During those few days images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses (which were sufficiently powerful to hospitalise adults), being clubbed by police officers, and attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, triggering international outrage. King’s vision of the Church awakening the consience of the nation (and the world) was realised.
With a tragic irony however, the Church was among the most reluctant to engage with King’s struggle. This was true of Christians across the racial divides. King explores both aspects in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’. In it he laments that ‘[t]he Negro in Birmingham has been skillfully brainwashed to the point where he had accepted that he … was inferior. He wanted to beleive that he was the equal of any man, but he did not know where to begin, or how to reist the influences that had conditioned him…’. The result was disunity amongst those who should have been marching and boycotting side by side. King saw himself as a Moses-like figure, who had to bring his people to an awareness of the reality of their own existence. He met with small groups of people, addressing their fears and concerns, challenging their thought and answering their accusations of interference. ‘Somehow, God gave me the power to transform the resentments, the suspicions, the fears and the misunderstanding I found … into faith and enthusiasm’.
King was equally distressed at the response of many white Christians. He had believed that because his cause was just, he would be able to count on the support of the wider Christian Church. King was disillusioned with the reality. ‘As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to the white ministers’ he explained in a Playboy interview, ‘most folded their hands - and some even took stands against us’. There were notable exceptions. But such opposition from within the Church re-inforced King’s sense of being a prophet, who must expect and overcome opposition from within the community of the people of God.
As I’ve said before in this series of articles, it is simply too easy for the Church in our own day (i.e. us) to look back and see - with the benefit of hindsight - where Christians should have stood in solidarity. As we have noted several times , it is often much harder to see clearly in the moment. That isn’t to legitimise the mistakes and the sin of the past. But realising how badly the Chuch in the past has missed the way, should cause us to address such questions in our own generation with renewed diligence and vigour. Where is sin and injustice perpetrated by the laws and policies and traditions within our own context? And the more costly question: where - as Christians - ought we to be breaking those laws, and bearing the consequences?
These are not always straightforward questions, but my own sense is that they are ones we need - with some urgency - to learn to ask… and more importantly to answer.
Turns out, if you aren’t really worshipping God, you really are worshipping something else…
The arrest of Rosa Parks thrust the young pastor into leadership of a city-wide bus boycott. He persuaded his own congregation, and others who joined them, to engage in the struggle exclusively through the principles of non-violence (in this of course, he came to very different conclusions to Bonhoeffer). Only through such means, King preached, would the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association win the battle for social change. On 20th December, 1956, the buses of Montgomery were integrated following a Supreme Court ruling that local laws requiring segregation were unconstitutional. King was propelled into national, and world, prominence.
In 1957 he was elected president of the ‘Southern Christian Leadership Conference’, whose aims included co-ordinating the strategies of non-violent civil rights movements across the south. Not all of its early campaigns were successful, but they did all prepare the movement for its assault on Birmingham, Alabama. King saw Birmingham as a stronghold of racial oppression and segregation, and instinctively understood that ‘to win here was to break the backbone of segregation in the South’. It was a battle he was determined to fight without violence. He was adamant that such a strategy ‘is the only viable means for resolving conflict’.
In book after book, speech after speech, sermon after sermon, he re-iterated his basic vision. He rehearsed the history of abuse, before calling for action: ‘there comes a time when people are tired of being segregated and humiliated … of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression’. He realised that freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; and he rejected the myth of time, ‘social justice never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability’. He called for action, but rejected calls for ‘Separation’, or ‘Black Supremacy’. He argued that these were superfiical and inadequate responses, and worse, they were every bit as evil in their own way as segregation and Jim Crow laws. ‘God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society … where every man [sic] will respect the dignity and worth of human personality’. King wasn’t satisfied with a merely political solution to the question of segregation. He wanted something that would go beyond what was legally enforcable and that would change the hearts of a divided nation so that there would be a genuine acceptance and an authentic integration. For King, the spiritual and the political could not be divided.
‘The basic question which confronts the world’s opppressed is this: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged'?’ The means would shape the end, and he dared to believe that the example and teaching of Jesus Christ would alone bring about the end that God desired. Indeed it must. ‘The arc of the universe is long, but it tends towards justice’. King reasoned that if he worked towards God’s goal, employing Christ’s method, then victory was inevitable. King took from Christ both a commitment to non-violence as a response to the ‘enemy’, and a conviction of the necessity of ‘redemptive suffering’: a non-retaliatory suffering that absorbed evil and would lead to the redemption of society. Retaliatory violence could only lead to further and more complex problems, ‘creating bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers’. Few others, even in the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, followed King to the point of adopting non-violence as a lifestyle (King’s home was bombed, and his life and his family were repeatedly threatened before his eventual assassination in 1968) - but they could at least see that it had been vindicated as a political method; and it appears that King managed to convince them of its inherent logic: ‘the end is inseparable from and pre-existent in, the means… a moral end could never justify the use of immoral means’. History suggests they were right to be convinced by him.
It is worth pondering King’s determination to develop a strategy of loving his enemies and seeking to be reconciled to them, rather than defeat them; of turning the other cheek; of praying for those who persecuted him. When we read the Sermon on the Mount (and other passages in the Scriptures that are built on it, e.g. Rom.12:9-21; I Pet.2:19-23; 3:8-14), we can easily assume that such teaching is ‘idealistic’, and that it simple wouldn’t work in ‘the real world’. King’s example and experience show how unfounded such assumptions are. Jesus understands the world better than we do, and just because we can’t see how His teaching would work, says more about our spiritual short-sightedness than Jesus’ wisdom.
At Birmingham Alabama though, King’s thought took an unprecedented step. Until now the SCLC had operated within the law. Boycotts, sit-ins and marches had been the order of the day. But here, faced with Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses, King was driven to the realisation that where laws are unjust and where they perpetuate injustice, they must be broken. “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”.
We can easily look back and see where conscience told (at least ought to have to told) the Christians of a bygone era where injustice had been legitimised by being legalised. What is much harder is to ask where that injustice is perpetrated in our own laws. And of course, the much more costly question of whether and where those laws must be broken.
It’s one of the most common ideas around our expereince of corporate worship: We have to mean it. Well, yes - but that isn’t what makes our worship authentic! As is so often the case, the Bible takes us much further than our common copper coins of perceived wisdom!!
Martin Luther King Jr. could almost be considered the modern day patron saint of Civil Disobedience. His election to the leadership of the ‘Southern Christian Leadership Conference’ catapulted him into what many consider to have been one of the most profound spiritual conflicts of the 20th Century. Racial segregation was embedded in American legislation, and he quickly understood that to struggle against one would be to defy the other. But the path MLK took in that defiance was far from obvious or uncontested. Others were vying for leadership in the civil rights movements of 1950’s America, and the ends they had in view - and the means by which they advocated pursuing those ends - were very different from King’s.
One such protagonist was Malcolm X. Looking out from the sectarianism of ‘Black Islam’, Malcolm X demanded racial separation, prophesied a ‘bloodbath’ and called for ‘coloured people to arm themselves with guns and rifles’. This, he declared, was the only way the African-American could be liberated from the oppresion of segregation. MLK looked across the same social, political, economic and spiritual landscape and it inspired a dream: ‘…that the sons of former slaves, and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the same table of brotherhood … that [people] will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. King knew that such a dream could never be realised through violence. The ends do not justfy the means. Rather, the ‘means’ determine the ‘end’. He knew he must choose hismeans wisely; that the only moral and practical route to integration would lie along the road of non-violence. Malcolm X spoke of King’s dream as a ‘tragic fantasy’. King, who once described himself as ‘an extremist for love’, recognised that ‘…violence is not going to solve our problem … [it] can reap nothing by grief’. Later in his thinking he would reflect that the way of non-violence (and therefore of love) required far more of its protaganists than those who walked the path of violence.
For King, much depends on what our goal is: domination or reconciliation. This is as true in personal as in political conflicts. His point is as simple as it is profound - if you want reconciliaiton, choose the means that lead to that end. And those ends will not include violence.
MLK experienced racism early in life, and it left him struggling to reconcile a growing hatred of the white man with the teaching of Christ to love his enemies. His refusal to simply deny the teaching of Jesus, or to justify his disregarding of it, is indicative of how influential that teaching was to become. It was at his father’s church the young Martin learned ‘God is not only love, but has the power to finally overcome all forces that operate contrary to that love’. It would prove to be a guiding priciple in his own ministry and political career. This belief in God’s ability did not make him passive. Rather it empowered him to fight for justice, through love…
When Martin Luther King was installed as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery in October 1954, he could little realise that he was about to be given America in which to test his belief.
Here’s the recording of this morning’s overview of Gospel of Matthew.
I caught up with Marilyn earlier today and had a chat about a new ministry at MIE that has launched during Lockdown. What is a Pop-Up shop? How does it work? Why is MIE running one? how can we support it? All this and more in the video below…
So, the God we call Father is the Sovereign Lord of all the earth... and intimacy with Him doesn't do away with the need for reverence and awe. And according to Solomon, one of the ways reverence and finds expression is in a reticense to speak! He calls us to diligence in making sure our focus stays off ourself and on our God.
Surely worship is meaningful? Well, not nececssarily... We’re going to spend a few sessions looking at Solomon’s thoughts on how we should come to public worship. He’s made some big mistakes on this front over the years, and we have a chance to learn from them…
For some, the temptation isn’t so much looking for meaning and purpose in work, but in popularity and influence… turns out that is a pretty dangerous place to land.
Bonhoeffer’s early warning about the inevitability of idolatry was well founded. Himmler was head of the SS, and in 1935 he ordered every SS member to resign from any religious organisation. Later the same year Himmler and Heydrich met with Hans Gisevius, a military leader, a Christian, and someone who would later be involved with the conpiracy against Hitler. ‘Just you wait’, he was told, ‘You’ll see the day, ten years frmo now, when ADolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same postion in Germany that Jesus Christ has now’ (Metaxas, 2010, p.170).
This was no idle (idol?) theory. The Nazi party made strident attempts to control and neturalise the German Church. Their plans included the cessation of publishing and disseminating the Bible in Germany; that a copy of Mein Kampf was to be displayed - along with a sword - on Church ‘altars’; that the Christian cross must be removed from all Churches, to be replaced by the swastika (Metaxas, 171).
Hitler’s contempt for the Church, and it’s leaders, soon became more evident: ‘You can do anything you want [to Christians] … they will submit … they are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them’. It wasn’t long before pastors who dissented were being arrested, exiled, or forbidden to preach. They began to see Gestapo officers in their congregations. Some were audacious. Niemoller (another leader in the Confessing Church) would ask his congregation to pass ‘our policeman friend’ a Bible. Bonhoeffer - with his usual prophetic prescience - saw that ‘the question at stake in the German Church is no longer an internal issue. It is the question of the existence of Christianity in Europe’.
It didn’t take long before most serious Christians understood the situation they were in. The famous theologian, Karl Barth, spoke for many when he declared that Christianity was separated ‘as by an abyss from the inherent godlessness of National Socialism’. In such a context it is perhaps unsurprising that Bonhoeffer found himself identifying with the propeht Jeremiah. In early 1934, he preached a famous sermon on this Jewish prophet. That in itself was inflammatory. Bonhoeffer painted a picture of a reluctant prophet, held captive by the call of God. God will not let him go, and he will never be rid of God. It’s hard to see whether Bonhoeffer is explaining the mind of Jeremiah, or of himself. ‘[His] path will lead right down into the deepest situation of human powerlessness… [He] is taken for a fool, but a fool who is extremely dangerous to people’s peace and comfort, so that he must be locked up, if not put to death right away. That is exactly what became of the man Jeremiah, because he could not get away from God’. It is also what became of the man, Deitrich Bonhoeffer.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer’s course was set: ‘There is no way to peace along the way to safety … Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment … battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross’.
It becomes apparent that for Bonhoeffer the way of the cross is not the way of passivity. It is the way of death, but not passivity. He remained in Germany in spite of the opportunity to escape, he worked tirelessly training and supporting pastors for the Confessing Church, he established semi-monastic communities in which Christians could find the strength to remain faithful in the face of increasing hostility, he preached, and he established international relationships with the Church elsewhere in Europe. And at some point, he became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. It is unclear when or how this happened, and for many it has seemed an enigmatic decision. But Bonhoeffer himself seems to have had little doubt that it was the right thing to do, or at least the less-wrong thing to do. When the decision was made to plant a bomb close to Hitler, Bonhoeffer gazed pensively out of the window. Finally he muttered ‘Those who live by the sword…’ (a reference to Matt.26:52). Rather than hearing Jesus’ words as a prohibition, he took them to mean that he needed to be willing to live (die?) by the consequences of his decision to take up the sword. He was. ‘Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it’. He confided to his diary:
‘I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of confusion, of inner dishonesty, or is it a sign that we are guided without our knowing..? The reasons one gives for an action to others, and to one’s self are ceratinly inadequate. One can give a reson for everything. In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us. So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us … ’.
As we have seen, Bonhoeffer believed the very existence of the Church was imperilled. Such a situation brought unprecedented obligations for Christians. In such a situation to confess Christ is to resist the State. Failure to appreciate this equation was to cooperate with the State - a State that Bonhoeffer considered to be criminal. Bonhoeffer’s decision to join the conspiracy had some unexpected conseqeunces. Among them was a startling change in his behaviour. At a superficial level, he shifted from being an antagonist, to being a model citizen. He knew such behaviour was open to misinterpretation, but he also had bigger fish to fry. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself and so risk the larger conspiracy.
This opens for us a deep question about ‘truth’ and ‘deception’. It’s worth saying up-front that many of his contemporaries, even in the Confessing Church, felt unable to follow Bonhoeffer in his convictions. He didn’t ask them to. Each must make up their own mind.
Bonhoeffer felt that truth should not be reduced to the easy legalism of only saying and doing that which accorded with fact. He wrote an essay whilst in prison, exploring what it means to tell the truth. Our obligation is not fulfilled simply by ‘not lying’. There is, argued Bonhoeffer, a deeper level of truth, a way of being true to God that was relational. Being a Christian in the midst of the Reich meant going beyond the inadequate ‘rules and regulations’ version of Christianity into a living faith. Sometimes truth and deciet were perilously close, and a truthful way to behave could only be discerned by considering the wider context. Many Christians felt Bonhoeffer was trying to justify the unjustifiable. Bonhoeffer’s response was that being true to the Church’s call to take direct action against a manifestly criminal State, embodied a truth that ran deeper than the deceptive pretense of political subserviance the State demanded. And so he raised his hand to salute, and worked in Military Intellegence, whilst helping Jews escape to Switzerland, and plotting the death of the Fuhrer.
The conspiracy failed.
On 5th April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested, initially on the charge of corruption. But following the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, documents were discovered that linked Bonhoeffer directly with the conspiracy. He was hanged 9th April 1945. His final words: ‘This is the end—for me, the beginning of life’.
When it comes to Christians wrestling with the question of Civil Disobedience, few have given us such insight into their soul’s struggle as the young Lutheran pastor Deitrich Bonhoeffer.
Born in Germany in 1906, Deitrich’s theology of the Church’s relationship with the State was anything but theoretical and academic. As he witnessed the rise of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer sensed from an early stage the acute tensions that were over the horizon. To begin with he was almost a lone voice. In fact, many Church leaders were initially positive toward the policies of Hitler, feeling that he was perhaps restoring a moral context in which the Church would feel at home. Hitler would explicitly (though duplicitly) promise that his government would make Christiantiy the ‘basis of our collective morality’.
But in spite of the rhetoric, Bonhoeffer and others recognised the peril Christians - and Christianiity - would face under the Nazi party. He was appalled at the powerless state of the Church which he sensed would be unable to stand against the coming terrors. He railed against the spiritual blindness and moral weakness of pastors and theologians, preaching as early as October 1932 that the Protestant Church was in its eleventh hour, and that its congregations needed to realise they were attending its funeral service. He saw that many were sleepwalking towards a terrible precipice in thier refusal or inability to recognsie the dangers that were looming in the future. The Church’s unwillingness to speak and act in the face of growing darkness was spiritually catastrophic.
The Nazi policy of total politicisation of life in Germany still didn’t raise the alarm for many pastors and theologians, and some even saw their seeking to create a single national Church as a positive move. The theological and spiritual issues are complex, and it is easy for us to be bewildered at how badly many seemed to mis-interpret the signs of their times. I’d caution against taking the moral high ground, which is often a temptation that accompanies hindsight. I wonder what, in future years, the Church will look back to and be equally bewlildered that we didn’t speak up against or act on. In 1930’s Germany there were powerful theological and cultural forces at play that meant the issues weren’t anything like as clear cut as we might assume (in part because of the Lutheran heritage of the German Church). The hideous enormity of Nazi policy was only incrementally revealed; the German Church was devestatingly weakened by theological liberalism and ethical confusion; and many Christians felt that certain compromises were justifiable in terms of perceived gains in the public life of the nation and the prestige of the Church. Amongst those who did recognise the danger signs, there was no clear agreement on how to best respond. This is an important point to meditate on. The question of how and when to disobey civil authority is rarely asked or answered with any degree of unanimity, even in situations where in retrospect it may appear to have been obvious. Often many Christians will still believe the state should have their loyalty and support, while others will maintain that critical spiritual, political and theological issues hang in the balance. The question often divides the Church at the key moment.
None of this is to legitimise the mistakes some Christians made in 1930’s Germany. Tragic and costly errors of judgement were made, and they led the Church into sin. But it is to recognise that it requires a prophetic insight and uncommon courage to look past the superficial cultural and religious milieu that is often the limits of what others see. In the moment, things are rarely as clear cut as they seem like they should have been when those from later years look back. But some pastors possessed both the insight and the courage. When Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor, it took all of two days for the 26 year old Bonhoeffer to write and deliver a speech on the radio in which he explained that such a leader would inevitably become an idol and a ‘mis-leader’. Immediately, Bonhoeffer was anxious to show that political leadership in a nation must recognise the limitations of its authority.
By the end of 1933, it was clear that democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, had ceased in Germany. Hitler became de facto dictator when Hindenburg signed an emergency decree in the wake of the Reichstag fire. A nation surrendered its civil and personal liberties in the name of national security.
As the reality of Nazi-ism slowly became apparent, the German Church was in turmoil. Open division, with allegations of schism, quickly came to the surface. In May 1934, a group of dissenting theologians and pastors met at Barmen and brought into existence the ‘true evangelical Church of Germany’, known to posterity as ‘the Confessing Church’. At its foundation was the famous Barmen Declaration (primarily authored by Karl Barth), which understandably focussed on the question of the relationship between the Church and the State. The logic of the Declaration is brilliant in its simplicity. It affirms that the message and order of the church should not be influenced by the current political context; that the Church should not be ruled by a Fuhrer (or any civil government), or made subordinate to the State, but that both Church and State should function within their legitimate sphere of authority and God-given responsibilty. Bonhoeffer developed this point: ‘The Church must reject the encroachment of the order of the state, because of its better knowledge of the state and of the limitations of its actions’.
It was, for Bonhoeffer, entirely appropriate for the Church to question the state, and to challenge the legitimacy of its actions. And further, the Church must stand with and aid the victims of unjust state action (this obviously in the light of Nazi-ism’s persecution of the disabled, Gipsys, the Jews etc.). But Bonhoeffer’s final step was the most dangerous. It is not enough, he argued, to help those who are oppressed by a ungodly state. When the Church sees its very existence as threatened by the state, when the State ceases to be the State as defined in Scripture, then the Church must take direct action against the State to stop it from perpetrating evil.
Where this led Bonhoeffer, we’ll see in the next article.
In the second half of our conversation, John helps us think through why our support for the Persecuted Church is such an important part of our own discipleship. …and how it can be unexpectedly enriching for our own discipelship. There are aspects of our faith that we may need to re-learn from Christians elsewhere. And that need may be more urgent that we first realise.
If you are interested in understanding how the siutation in the UK is changing for Christians, you might find it helpful to visit:
The Christian Institute at: www.christian.org (If this is new to you, the video higlighted key issues from 2020 is a good introduction to their work, or go here for a recent Newsletter: https://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/news_winter20_england-wales.pdf)
Or
Christian Concern for our Nation at: https://christianconcern.com/
I caught up with John Gillett earlier this week to have a chat about his role as an Open Doors Speaker, and about the importance and the benefits of cultiviating a concern for the Suffering Church. In this first part, John talks about how his exposure to the suffering of Christians because of their confession of Christ elsewhere in the world has impacted his own thinking about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and of his role in the life and mission of the Church.
The Open Doors website can be found at :www.opendoorsuk.org
Youll find a host of free resources to help you understand the reality of the Church’s experience throughout the world, and to think through your response.
Thanks Jean for being willing to share your story of reading through the Bible this year. For those of you who don’t know Jean, she worships at Bixley Farm, and was very involved in getting MIE Christmas Cards produced and delivered to every home in our community. Over to you…
For me the story really started earlier in 2019 when I came across a book entitled ‘The Gospel according to Judas’ giving a different version of Judas Iscariot to the one commonly read in the gospels. Discussing this at some length with my next door neighbour, a retired Methodist lay preacher, led to some interesting Christian literature novels based on the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 written by two people, one of whom was a Christian novelist and the other a professor of Jewish history. It was interesting to me because my late father served in the then Suffolk Regiment for 21 years of his life and what was then the British Protectorate of Palestine in particular during a larger part of the second world war. Although he was back in England by 1948 his regiment was the last to leave Jerusalem in 1948 when they handed the keys to the gates of the Jewish quarter to the Chief Rabbi, the first time a Jewish Rabbi had held those keys since 70AD after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. Thus my interest was gained and as I love history I wanted to find out more about recent Jewish history and their beliefs.
Roll forward a few months towards the end of 2019 and the discovery that we were going to study the bible in a year and to do it in a chronological order offered a chance to discover the more distant history of the Jews and their relationship with God. Yes we have all read parts of the old testament, some are very familiar passages, but what did it all mean to the Jews at the time certain events happened and as a historical record to them later particularly at the time of Christ.
So starting off on 1 Jan I did have some misgivings about whether I was reading just for the history interest. However I soon realised that reading the passages and books chronologically was so liberating and the familiar stories came alive for me in a new way, especially with the bible study Saturdays each month in Jan to March. All was well until we got to Leviticus where I came unstuck. So many why questions in my mind! Why would God treat his people harshly, particularly striking down Aaron’s brothers and Aaron not allowed to mourn for them either? And, the exacting details of the wilderness tabernacle and the rules for the people. I got to the point of not wanting to read more, but feeling compelled to find out what God was saying. After praying about it I decided to take Mark’s advice and obtained a copy of ‘Exaltation of Jesus in Leviticus’. Even this book took me months to get through way past the time of us reading Leviticus. But the first few chapters did turn my thinking around and I realised I was looking at Leviticus from a purely human point of view and I needed to look at it from God’s point of view. From this point on it became much more than just a history with familiar readings at various points. God was saying so much more and I was praying more for guidance as I was experiencing frustration and even anger at times, sometimes at the Jews and sometimes with God.
And then COVID struck with what some might say biblical thoroughness and all our lives were turned upside down. Just like the Jews in the bible some people blamed God for what was happening forgetting that he gave us freedom of choice on this earth and that all actions have consequences. And yes the prophets suddenly made more sense in this different world, Isaiah’s well-known and wonderful prophecies concerning Jesus almost a comfort blanket. But then came Jeremiah another stumbling block on my journey so I decided to read ‘Exalting Jesus in Jeremiah’ which again took me a long while to read and made me feel very uncomfortable. I realised I was holding back some things from God, not trusting him enough. He could see all my thoughts even the ones I didn’t really want him to see. The crunch came when I was getting towards the middle of the book and I had to keep going back to Jeremiah in the bible. I remember remarking to Mark one Sunday afternoon at Tower Hall how uncomfortable I felt about it all and his reply that I was not alone and was the reason that not many sermons were ever preached on Jeremiah. Here I feel I must repeat part of a chapter in the book based on Jeremiah 21:1-22:10 because this was a particularly uncomfortable session for me but took me deeper into prayer for forgiveness and resolve to change with the Lord’s help. I certainly couldn’t do it on my own.
Steven Smith the author of Exalting Jesus in Jeremiah writes:
‘Imagine that you are taking an elevator down into your soul. You go down and down all the way to your heart. You get out and you look around. And there you see all that God sees. You see the areas you have blocked from God. Some rooms say, “Keep Out!” God is not allowed to see what is in there. You see the things you pray no one else sees. Down in the locked closets and deep crevices of your heart, you see everything God sees. Do you see it? Now that you see what God sees, will you repent?’
‘As these words form on the page, I can imagine that those not raised in my tradition of altar calls and invitations will cringe at a rhetorical strategy intended to probe the heart so deeply. I get that. But it’s no matter. God used the evangelist that day. And if no one else needed it, I deeply needed the challenge. Sitting here years later, I remember the metaphor like it was yesterday. Sinking down, down to the place where no one sees but God. Wow! Even now it is convicting. The metaphor helps me to visualise the dark crevices, closets I have closed off to God and to spiritual introspection. It’s really scary what lay down there, down where there is no spiritual oxygen. If I were a miner, my canary would be dead.’
‘In Jeremiah 22 the Jews have reached a tipping point, they have been accused of idolatry and now injustice. . . . Their heart is turned away from God and therefore from others. It is clear that they are unwilling to take the elevator trip down to examine their hearts, so God warns them to change their behaviour.’
‘In the end it’s easy to be dismissive about all of this. The excuses are legion: “God does not care that much about this issue. Think of all the money I give to the church. With that money others can do this. We all have our gifts. I’m good at serving the church. I’ll be gracious to people after they get here, but I’m not going to go and get them.” Yet in one story Jesus destroys all of that, Matthew 25:31-46, separating the sheep and the goats . . . . “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. . . .” In the story the sheep do not understand what good they did and goats do not understand what bad they did . . . . the difference is mercy. It’s not that mercy gets us into heaven, but mercy demonstrates that we have heaven in our hearts . . . . the kind of people who have received mercy are the kind of people who show mercy. It’s a hallmark of salvation’.
The following bible books on the prophets made me realise just how great was their faith despite the ridicule heaped upon them in their own time. History now regards them as great men, but in reading the books in the bible, parallels with today’s world are very much in evidence. As another Christian friend said to me in the summer ‘God didn’t cause COVID but maybe he allowed it to try and turn us to Him again and teach us that our decisions have consequences for all’. And so onto the Gospels where there are so many parts that are familiar to us all, BUT reading them chronologically again and with the benefit of having read all of the old testament brought new insight into the words of Jesus particularly when he references old testament quotes when replying to the Pharisees. All human action and emotion is there both good and bad, and again parallels can be seen with what is happening today. It is amazing that God does not give up on us.
The other important point that struck me forceably again is that just how small a part of the bible the gospels are, detailing His birth and just three years in Jesus’s life. But what treasure and promise in those few pages. God chose a time when an empire had advanced so much that travel to far flung places was possible and the words of His Son could be carried to all nations not just the Jews. And here again in Acts we find men and women of faith spreading the ‘good news’ and some suffering for it as did the prophets.
Reading the letters was again a very different experience because of having read the Old Testament. Here was Paul and others trying once again to bring people to the ways of Jesus , much easier for Gentiles than Jews who had many centuries of rules and regulations to change and to accept that the world was full of God’s chosen people and not just the Jews.
Finally as I write this we are coming to the book of Revelation which I know I shall struggle again with, so have once more ordered an Exalting Jesus book to help me through. I started this year and the Bible 2020 cause with some misgivings, but have found it a truly enriching experience especially through the year we have all just had. In fact I have just bought a second hand chronological bible which gives a reading and some explanation for every day of the year and which I am sure I shall find equally rewarding.
All through this experience the following verses from hymns have been reverberating through my mind.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
O my soul
Worship His Holy name
Sing like never before, O my soul
I’ll worship Your Holy name
The sun comes up,
It’s a new day dawning
It’s time to sing your song again.
Whatever may pass and whatever lies before me
Let me be singing when the evening comes.
The Church
Suggested Reading: I Peter 4:12-19
Suggested Carol: Angels from the Realms of Glory
Almighty God
come among us we pray with your power
and help us with your great might
so that, although we are hindered by our sins and wickedness
from running the race set before us,
your grace and mercy might help and deliver us
through the work of your Son our Lord
to whom with you, and the Holy Spirit
be honour and glory, now and forever
Amen
Collect for 4th Sunday of Advent
The Dragon
Suggested Reading: I Peter 4:1-11
Suggested Carol: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
O Holy Spirit,
who in all ages has comforted and strengthened martyrs and confessors;
who has ever been the sustaining comfort and sweet refreshment of the sorrowful and suffering
who sheds abroad love, joy and peace in the hearts of the faithful and obedient followers of Christ;
grant that we may be filled with all the fullness of your gifts of grace;
so that, by your holy inspiration, we may perceive that which is holy and true,
and by your merciful guiding, perform the same,
Amen.
Treasury of Devotion