Category: Theology

Having Hope in an Age of Darkness

In a season of darkness we can keep on choosing life. We can be committed to embracing new life in babies, to making our homes, families, workplaces, friendships as open to life and grace as we can. We can embrace the stranger, care for our elderly, show love and compassion to our enemies. We can resolve never to give in to nihilism or self-centredness and instead keep living for the sake of God and of others. This will not be easy. But it is possible because God keeps his promises.

Do not be afraid! God keeps his promises.

I wrote these reflections on how to live free from fear and anxiety, how to be a people of hope, before last week’s decision concerning assisted suicide.1 In light of that vote, however, these ideas are particularly important. 

One of the famous texts that is read at 9 Lessons and Carols most years is Jeremiah 33:14-16. It is all about hope and fear.

Jeremiah begins his message to Israel with reassurance about God’s faithfulness:

The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will fulfil the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.

It is worth sitting with this for a moment. God makes promises to us. He is a promise making God.

Incidentally, God doesn’t have to be like this. He could be arbitrary – doing whatever he wants whenever he wants it. That kind of God is a tyrant, untrustworthy and unreliable. We intuitively know God isn’t like this. It is written into the very fabric of the universe which, completely unnecessarily, is governed by laws. In that it reflects the character and mind of its Creator.

One of the earliest things we read God say in Scripture is a promise. We can read about this in Genesis 3:14-15.

Through Eve and then Adam sin had entered the world. She had received a message from an angelic messenger – pictured here as a serpent – who tempted her with a promise of power. If only she defied God, humanity would take God’s place. And so she had taken the fruit and ate. It was an act of defiance, of rejection, and it brought a poison into humanity that would eat up and kill generation after generation. They would be cut off from the presence of God and his light. This is always the path when we choose darkness. Man and woman are promised that they will become like God; instead they become less than human. The rejection of light and life is the embrace of darkness and death.

But at the outset of this creeping darkness God spoke a promise of light. One day there would arise a woman who would have a Son and that Son would crush the serpent. He would provide a Redeemer to deliver humanity from the curse it had brought upon itself. These promises are repeated in different forms throughout the Scriptures to Israel and then to her kings and prophets. King David is promised a son who would reign not as one who dies but who lives forever.

We can read these promises, and receive them for ourselves. Perhaps you feel you have had promises from God – that you would flourish, that your friend or family member would come to know Jesus, that he would never forsake you. But at times it feels as if the promise is failing. We wait and wait but still the darkness advances and we come to fear the future, to fear the power of the Serpent, to fear that God has failed.

That was the position of ancient Israel when Jeremiah spoke. The promise to King David seemed in ruins. The kingdom he built had divided, his sons had failed morally, politically, militarily. And his people were going into exile. On and on the darkness marched as the Serpent’s voice seemed the only one that sounded.

It was precisely at this time that Jeremiah reaffirms the promise. He calls his people to hope.

God speaks in the midst of the darkness and what he says is “Fear Not!” “Do not be afraid”. The God of Israel, of the Cosmos, of your heart, is the God who lives and reigns even when darkness abounds.

The hope of Israel may seem to have fallen and been crushed but God is going to make it spring up, sprout from the broken stump of David’s line. Can you feel the imagery? David’s tree has been axed down, felled and broken. But in this moment of death God is going to bring resurrection. 

And so we come to Luke 1 and the story of the annunciation. The familiarity of the verses can blind our eyes to the reality of what is happening.

Here is the second woman, filled with grace (v.28). Your copy will read “highly favoured”, literally, saturated with God’s gifts. She is one who has been prepared and sanctified by God for this moment. While Eve’s sin had separated humanity from God and now to Mary comes the word: “God is with you”. Eve had brought the Serpent to power; through Mary will come the One to crush that Serpent’s head. And where Eve had defied God’s design for her grasping power and equality with God, Mary would reply “I am the Lord’s servant…May your word to me be fulfilled.” To the woman comes an angelic message. The promise is to be fulfilled. David will have his king to sit on the throne.

Suddenly, when hope seemed lost, when Israel was dominated by tyrants, humiliated and oppressed, when the promises of God were a long-held but distant memory, God acted.  He had been working through all the ages even when we could not see it.

He was working in Cain and Abel, in the flood of Noah, in Abraham and Joseph, in David and Solomon, in Ruth and Moab, in Esther in Exile, through Isaiah and Jeremiah and Micah and the Macabees. It was hard to see, darkness seemed to reign, death seemed ever more present. Fear was a natural response. And yet God was working.

And so he brought a new Eve, ready to bear the fulfilment of every promise – the eternal yes, the final word: Fear Not!

Even as Christ battled demons, diseases and demagogues, darkness and death seemed to triumph. But a voice would echo from the despair of Calvary: Fear Not! And Christ would rise triumphant from the grave.

My friends and fellow-sinners. I don’t know what promises you have received from God this year or through your life. Some of us are in that moment of rejoicing, standing with St Mary and acclaiming with joy: How can this be? What a God who fulfils his promises!

Some of us are in exile with Jeremiah, looking at a life which seems marked with pain where the presence of evil is all too obvious. The temptation is to despair, to succumb to fear of the present of the future.  If that is you, you are in good company. But my message to you this morning is the same as Jeremiah’s: Fear Not! 

The God of Israel, the God of Eve and Mary, the God of Jesus Christ has not forsaken you or forgotten you. It is precisely from the place of death that we encounter resurrection power.

The world can seem increasingly dark. There are wars and rumours of wars. The gospel retreats in the West even as it advances in the East and in Africa. At times it feels as if the Serpent is winning and the kingdom of death and darkness are at hand. But even now, especially now, God is at work. He has not forsaken us. He will not forsake us. Fear Not!

There will be a day when you will stand in glory with Mary and acclaim the glorious faithfulness of her Son. When you will stand with Jeremiah and say: I saw the fulfilment of the promises. When the hand that flung the stars and surrendered to nails will wipe the tears from your eyes and speak over you words of love and grace. Fear Not!

If your life is hard, then take heart. God hasn’t forsaken you. Lean into him. Find a good prayer app or practice that you can hold onto even when life is hard. You can try the Bible in One Year, Lectio 365, or Hallow.

Often the answer to our prayers, the fulfilment of God’s promises in our lives, requires our consent, our courage. Mary is our mother in this: we need to resist the temptation to become hardened or so sad that we are unable to say ‘yes’ when the promises begin to be fulfilled.

Finally, we need the courage to live as men and women of hope and life in the midst of a culture that embraces despair and death.

Our culture is becoming increasingly dark. This is likely to continue. Once one has accepted the logic that unborn life can be terminated for reasons of convenience or, to be blunt, finance, the logic of terminating other inconvenient life becomes irresistible. And so it has proved. This is a deeply dangerous trajectory for a society to be on and it can cause us to feel lost and afraid.

The alternative is to have the courage to keep on choosing Christ, to keep on choosing life. We can be committed to embracing new life in babies, to making our homes, families, workplaces, friendships as open to life and grace as we can. We can embrace the stranger, care for our elderly, show love and compassion to our enemies. We can resolve never to give in to nihilism or self-centredness and instead keep living for the sake of God and of others. This will not be easy. But it is possible because God keeps his promises.

    1. I refuse to use the euphemism ‘assisted dying’: words matter and we should not hide from the reality that what was approved last week is physicians giving poisons to patients so that they can kill themselves ↩︎

    Hope, Life and Death

    To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.
    Deep and profound reflections from Heather Fellows.

    To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

    Here’s a brilliant guest post from Heather Fellows.

    Life is hard.  Some days and for some people it may be so hard that they question if it can be endured much longer.  And yet, by and large, our desire to live wins through.  What is it that makes us want to live, even when life is hard?  What keeps us going?  Hope.

    Christianity is all about hope.    Our faith is tied to hope.  We are a people of hope.

    The letter to the Hebrews explains faith in this way:

    ‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’1

    To have faith – to trust in God and in Jesus – is to be a man or woman of hope.

    As St Paul wrote, ‘in hope we were saved.’2

    And it is by trusting in that hope – in Jesus, in his life and the life he has won for us – that we can face our present. 

    Even though that present may be hard, it leads towards a goal that we can be sure of and which is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. 

    But that leaves us with the questions: what kind of hope is this that saves us?

    What kind of hope transforms lives, families, and societies?

    What kind of hope can make our present pain and struggle worthwhile?

    What kind of hope leads beyond the valleys of this life into the light of eternity?

    These are the questions we are thinking about this morning.

    Before I go any further I want to acknowledge my debt to Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to the church, Spe Salvi, Saved in Hope. It is a brilliant and rich document that I can barely scratch the surface of but has something very important to say to us.

    Living Without Hope

    To begin to understand the hope we have in Jesus, we need to start with where we were before he came.

    When St Paul wrote to one of the earliest Christian churches in Ephesus, he reminded them that before they came to know Jesus, they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12).  They had had other ‘gods’ that emerged from the different and conflicting myths they talked about. But those ‘gods’ provided little or no hope for their future or light for their present.  They found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. 

    A dark present, facing a dark future. Does this sound familiar? 

    Why don’t we pause for a moment and consider who the ‘gods’ of our age are.  Let’s start with money.  How often are we tempted to say: ‘If I could just have more money, then I would be happy.  I need to earn more money to buy more stuff.  I need stuff to give meaning to my life.’

    Jim Carey, the famous actor & comedian once said,

    ‘I wish that everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so that they would know that’s not the answer.’3

    Or what about the gods of power and success?  “If I could reach that position or get that promotion, then my life would be good.” 

    Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the rock band Queen put it this way,

    ‘You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man.  And that’s the most bitter type of loneliness.  Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need.  A loving, ongoing relationship.’4

    Hope, Love and Purpose

    There are lots of ‘gods’ in the world, but only one God. 

    The thing that sets Christianity apart from the ‘gods’ of Ephesus, or of our time, is that Jesus promises a future. Wealth is lost or dies with us. Power and success are fleeting. But we have the hope of a life which will not end in emptiness.  Paul said in his letter to the Thessalonians, ‘do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.’ 5

    As Christians we don’t know all the details of what our future holds whether in this life or beyond. But do know for sure that we have a future and this makes it possible to live in the present well. 

    This is because the Christian message doesn’t only tell us something about the world; it does  something in us.  When we receive Jesus’ hope, we live differently.  We are given new life and it begins as soon as we accept Jesus. 

    Benedict tells the story of an African slave girl, Josephine Bakhita, who was born around 1869 in Sudan. 

    She was kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 9, beaten till she bled and sold in slave markets.  She worked as a slave for the wife of a general who flogged her daily.  She bore 144 scars on her body.  Finally in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul who took her back to Italy. 

    After her master had taken her back to Italy, he made the mistake of leaving Josephine at a convent while he went back to Sudan to conduct more business. As she listened to the Nuns, she came to know a new kind of master, Jesus Christ.   She heard there was a master above all masters, the Lord of Lords and that he is goodness in person.  She came to know that she was known, created and loved by this supreme master.  What’s more this master had himself been flogged and now he was waiting for her at the Father’s right hand.  Now she had hope.  No longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope that she was definitively loved and whatever happens to her, she is awaited by this Love.  She said, ‘my life is so good.’ 

    Through the knowledge of this hope she was redeemed, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.  She was baptised, and confirmed in Venice, fought for and won her freedom in an Italian court and spent the rest of her life telling others about this great master in whom she has found hope.

    Christianity brought for Josephine Bakhita an encounter with the living God and therefore an encounter with a hope stronger that the sufferings of slavery, a hope which transformed her life from within and thus world around her.  Through baptism she was joined to the Church as a sister, not a slave.  She was filled with the same Spirit and received from the same body of Christ together with those who were her ‘masters’ in her working life.  Even though the circumstances around us may remain unchanged when we come to know Jesus, we are changed from within and, through us, others are changed too.

    Many early Christians were from the lower social classes and so were very open to the experience of a new hope.  But so too were those from higher social classes.  They were all living without hope and without God.  The shallow state religion of Rome offered them lots of ceremonies, but Christianity offered them God to whom they could pray and enjoy a relationship with. 

    A friend who grew up in a Muslim culture once said to me that it was the most precious thing to discover that she could pray to God for herself; that she could tell Him what was on her heart; that she could ask Him for what she needed and that to do so was not selfish or unholy, but rather that God desired this intimate relationship with her.  Sometimes if we have been Christians for a long time, we can forget the preciousness of this gift.  Jesus invites us into a personal relationship with God the Father.  That’s awesome. 

    Knowing the God who made all things and whose Son loves us and is redeeming all things sets us free. We are not at the mercy of life, of its trials, of chance or the world around us. The future is not written in our stars but in the loving will of our Father.

    Benedict puts it this way in Spe Salvi,

    ‘It is not the laws of matter which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the universe.  It is not the laws of matter or evolution which have the final say, but a person.  And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly we are no longer slaves of the universe and its laws, we are free.  Heaven is not empty.  Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus revealed himself as Love.’

    So our hope in Jesus sets us free. But it also changes how we face life and death.

    Hope, Life and Death

    When archaeologists dig up ancient Christian graves they find Jesus portrayed in two different ways on them.

    The first shows Jesus as a philosopher; the second as a shepherd.

    In the ancient world, the philosopher was someone who knew how to live and how to die.  They would teach this art to anyone who could pay them for it. Many so-called philosophers were found to just be charlatans making money through their words who had nothing to say about real life. 

    I don’t know about you, but this rings true for a lot of ‘philosophies’ about life that are circling around today. 

    How often are we told to ‘Be true to yourself’ and anything less is a fake life?  Or that we need to break free of the traditions that enslave us, follow our own path and think your own thoughts.  This philosophy is everywhere from social media to Disney movies.  But does it help us to live authentically as a human?  Can I really have my ‘own’ truth rather than there being something external which is objectively true?   I don’t know about you, but I find it terrifying to think I am supposed to find ‘the truth’ within myself.  I am fairly sure there is a lot of rubbish deep inside of me and it is a huge comfort to know that I am not the source of truth, but that that is to be found in another, far greater than me.

    But when we come to Jesus we find the true philosopher. He is one who can tell us who we are and what we must do to be truly human.  He shows us, in his own words, the way, the truth and the life.  He also shows us the path beyond death.  And only someone who is able to do this can be a true teacher of life. 

    The second image was that of a shepherd.

    This is most beautifully described in Psalm 23.  The true shepherd is the one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death, the one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude where no one else can follow.  He has already walked this path, descended to death, conquered it and has returned to accompany us on that same journey and give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.

    The realisation that there is one who even in death accompanies me was the new hope which arose over the life of the early church. It is what the world still desperately needs to hear today. 

    Life is hard, suffering happens, death is real and we all need hope to sustain us. 

    Hope and Eternity

    Hebrews 10:34 the writer notes the counter-intuitive freedom of a group of persecuted early Christians,

    ‘You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’

    As Christians, we can give up material possessions, gladly, because we have found a better basis for our existence, one that does not depend on money or power or status.  We have a real hope.

    This enables Christians to live for eternity, not for the here and now.

    Because we hope for eternal life, we can give generously, even recklessly, for the sake of the gospel and in order to bring others to faith. 

    If I told my non-Christians friends how much money I have given away, they would thing I was absolutely bonkers.  At the time we gave up our flourishing careers as barristers to come and work for the church they thought we were mad enough.  I don’t have a lot of money, but I feel compelled to give it away whenever I can anyway.  And do you know what?  That is incredibly freeing.  When you stop believing that earning money and getting a promotion is the goal of life and that serving Jesus is instead, it turns out he takes care of you anyway. 

    Lots of you know our story.  God has provided houses, school places, ballet classes, music lessons, holidays, pushchairs and much for us when we could not afford them.  Some through miraculous gifts in the post and some through the generosity of others as God has moved their hearts.  The future has broken into the present.

    But what does that future look like?  Do we really want to live for eternity?  If eternity looked like this life carrying on forever, many of us would say, no thanks, 70 odd years is enough for me!

    So if on the one hand we don’t want to die, and those who love us don’t want us to die, and on the other hand neither do we want to live like this indefinitely, what do we really want? 

    St Paul says that ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for’ we just know that it is not this life.6 

    This eternity is not an unending number of days on a calendar, but rather it is like plunging into the ocean of love, a moment in which time no longer exists.  Jesus says it like this, ‘I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.’ 7

    Or again,

    ‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’ 8

    And again, ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’9 

    On and on and on and on it goes: Eternal life, our only ultimate hope, is centred on a relationship with One who does not die, who is life and love itself.  We are in him. 

    Whenever we are moved by his love, we experience true life.

    Every day we experience many greater or lesser hopes.  Sometimes they can appear totally satisfying – the hope of a great love, a new job or other success.  But when they are fulfilled it becomes clear that they were not the whole.  We need a hope which goes further. 

    Only God can give us this hope.  And the very fact that it comes as a gift is part of the hope.  God is the foundation of hope.  Not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.  His kingdom is not some imaginary hereafter that will never arrive, but it is present wherever he is loved and whenever his love reaches us.  His love alone gives us the possibility of persevering day by day, spurred on by hope in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

    This is hope and we all need it.

    What Does It Mean?

    So are these just pious thoughts or do they have a practical consequence for the way we live now? How can we know this hope in a way that is personally and socially transformative? 

    Firstly, if you are currently living without hope, come and know Jesus.  Put your trust in him and get baptised.

    He is our hope.  He shows us the path through life and beyond it to eternity with God in heaven.  He enables us to bear the present and to taste life now.

    For those who are already walking this path, thought, I think we can grow in hope in three ways.

    1. Prayer – when no-one listens to me anymore, God still listens to me.  When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God.  When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me.  Benedict puts it beautifully: when I have been plunged into complete solitude, if I pray I am never totally alone.

    In his sermon on First John, Saint Augustine describes beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope.  He defines prayer as an exercise of desire.  Human beings were created for greatness – for God himself; we were created to be filled by God.  But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined.  It must be stretched.  By delaying his gift, God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases our capacity for receiving him.10 

    If you are barely hanging on to hope, pray.  Pray anyway, but especially in the darkness of life, pray.  Through prayer we draw near to God and he to us and he strengthens our grasp on his great hope.

    • Action – We cannot earn heaven through by what we do, it is a gift. But at the same time, our behaviour is not indifferent before God and the infolding of history.  What we do does matter.  We can open ourselves to truth, to love and to what is good. We are called to be ‘God’s co-workers,’ contributing to the world’s salvation.11 

    We must do all we can to reduce human suffering when we see it in our everyday lives. 
    It is not within our power to banish pain and suffering from the world altogether. But through Jesus, hope for the world’s healing has entered the world.  We are healed by accepting suffering, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ who suffered with infinite love. 
    Each of us can live out this when we see those in pain in our families, in our schools, or our work places. 

    Where is God calling you to partner with him in reaching out to a suffering world?  Who needs to know the hope which you have found in Jesus?  How can you demonstrate his love to others today?

    • Words – As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking, how can I be saved? We are given hope in order to share it with others. When we see those in pain or suffering, we should pray for them, we should comfort them. But then we need to share our hope with them. When all else has passed, that is what they ultimately need. That can be as simple as offering to pray with them, sharing our stories of hope with them or inviting them to Church with us.

    To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

    1. Hebrews 11:1 ↩︎
    2. Rom 8:24 ↩︎
    3. 2005 December 16, The Ottawa Citizen, Carrey’s been busted, Continuation title: Carrey—Being rich not the answer by Jay Stone, Start Page F1, Quote Page F2, Column 2, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
    4. https://queenarchives.com/qa/ ↩︎
    5. 1 Thes 4:13 ↩︎
    6. Rom 8:26 ↩︎
    7. John 16:22 ↩︎
    8. John 17:3 ↩︎
    9. John 13:1 ↩︎
    10. In 1 Ioannis 4, 6: PL 35, 2008f ↩︎
    11. 1 Cor 3:9 ↩︎

    The Dignity of Life

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    This week I want to think about one of the most pressing, important and sensitive issues we can: the dignity, value and sanctity of human life.

    Before I write another word, I want to acknowledge that this topic may bring up painful memories, experiences or ideas. In a blog I cannot possibly do justice to the pastoral or emotional issues that arise when we consider abortion, euthanasia, war, or any related issue. For that reason I want to ask for your patience and forgiveness for when I misstep or write clumsily. Above all, however, we must always remember that while it is vital that we speak and think with clarity and courage on these issues, Jesus came not to condemn but to restore and that there is always grace and forgiveness available to us in him.

    [If you’re interested in some Bible passages that relate to these ideas, you can find them here]

    1. The Central Importance of Life

    There is no more important issue in all human ethics – all moral questions – than the dignity and value of human life. It shapes and affects everything. Your view of this question changes your answer to every other question.

    Christians make several startling claims about the value of human life that change the nature of every other discussion profoundly.

    We believe that human beings, both male and female, are created in the image of God. Pause there. That is the ethical point being made in the story of Eve being created from Adam; not that she is inferior to him or an afterthought. Rather that she is inseparable from him. Men and women together equally share in God’s image and his dignity.

    We believe that every human being is, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘unique and unrepeatable’. You matter as an individual. You are not a lego brick, interchangeable with a million others, whose only purpose is to make a bigger model. You are unique. God saw you in your mother’s womb, before you were born. He chose you. 

    As Benedict XVI beautifully put it, while evolutionary theory may picture how God took the stuff of this world and shaped it into people, nevertheless ‘we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.’

    We believe, therefore, that every human being has an inherent dignity and worth that does not depend upon others. Every life matters whether other people love it and cherish it or not. It is inherently worthy because every individual is known to God and loved by him. Every person is, to quote the Psalmist, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’.

    This means that a person’s value, dignity or worth does not increase or decrease as they age. It does not depend upon race or social class, upon intellectual ability or usefulness to a society. It does not diminish upon injury or disability.

    This is one of the major problems Christianity has with ideologies or belief systems that make the individual’s worth and dignity contingent on their value to the rest of society. Communism, Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism are offences against the idea of the dignity and worth of the individual created in the image of God and of infinite value to him.

    It is also one of the major problems with seeing people as a bundle of characteristics, each of which increase or decrease their significance. You are not worth more, you do not have greater dignity, if you are black or white, male or female, attracted to men or women. That kind of thinking leads inevitably and inexorably to the oppression of groups and divisions between people. 

    All human lives are possessed of God-given value and rights from the moment they are conceived – when God knits them together in their mother’s womb and begins to plan the adventures he has for them – until the moment they die.

    We do not, we dare not, violate that dignity in others or in ourselves. To do so is a crime against the person and, most profoundly, against the Creator whose image they bear.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    1. Ethical Implications

    What then does this mean for our moral lives?

    It means that to be a Christian is always to be pro-life. 

    I am going to explain what I mean by that in a moment. Of course it is nuanced. But it is not negotiable.

    The witness of the Christian church from its beginning today, in almost all places and at all times, is that to follow Christ means to be for life. 

    That is why Jesus came for us. He came in order that we might have life, and life to the full, life that extends to the ends of the earth, to the depths of hell, and beyond the limits of time.

    To be a Christian is to be pro-life because Jesus is radically pro-life.

    This has implications that are uncomfortable to talk about in polite British society.

    Because Christians believe in the dignity and value of every life, irrespective of age or gender or race or class, we should work to reduce and then eliminate abortion and oppose euthanasia.

    Human dignity and worth do not start at a low level, increase until a point of maximal productivity in mid-life and then decline as we get older. Putting it as baldly as this might sound odd. But that is functionally how much contemporary ethical dialogue proceeds. It is common to come across the sentiment that the very young are inconvenient, unnecessary and it would be better all around if they weren’t born at all and there were fewer people. Or that the views of the old should be given less weight and less priority because they in some sense count for less than those of the young.

    The creeds begin their narrative of Jesus’ life by recording that he was ‘conceived of the Holy Spirit’. The gospels speak of how John the Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb in celebration of the presence of Christ. That is a reflection of one of the great joys of expecting a baby – to feel him or her move while still within the womb.

    Abortion is a direct attack on the weakest human lives. Intentionally ending the life of an unborn human being represents a rejection of the dignity and value of those seen only by God, loved by him, and yet treated as disposable by others.

    Now I will concede immediately that these are profoundly painful issues and if anyone is struggling with this, I am happy to listen, to pray and, if needed, to extend God’s forgiveness. 

    But we have to confront this painful reality. 

    More than seventy million abortions occur throughout the world each year, significantly more than the whole population of the UK.

    Every. Year.

    This is almost as far from God’s desire and plan for us as it is possible to get.

    We will think about the broader questions in a moment. But being pro-life does not mean only that we work for the elimination of abortion.

    It means opposing the intentional taking of life in other situations.

    Euthanasia is not compatible with Christianity. We do not have the right to take another’s life from them. Nor do we have the right to take our own lives.

    Suicide, whether assisted by others or not, is a subject of extraordinary pain. Who truly knows the anguish and illness that afflicts someone who would take their own life, except God himself. 

    We address these issues not to condemn those on whom we pray God has mercy and compassion but to protect and care for those who are in pain now.

    I can offer many pragmatic arguments against assisted suicide from my time as a lawyer, times when I have seen people take major decisions because of perceived pressure or depression about their worth to others. We protect them against the effects of those decisions because we recognise that they are not thinking clearly. 

    Or the fact that the vast majority of those who attempt suicide and survive (between 90 and 95%) do not end up killing themselves. To quote the New England Journal of Medicine, this suggests that ‘many suicidal crises… including attempts that were expected to be lethal’ are actually of a ‘temporary nature and fleeting’. In other words, the evidence we have suggests that the majority of people who try to kill themselves regret it and, if they survive the attempt, do not try again.1

    The idea of a settled suicidal wish, for the vast majority of cases, is just not true. And it is a profound and awful tragedy when, instead of working to make that person’s life better, society colludes in ending it.

    Yet these are not the most basic arguments. Most fundamentally, euthanasia is wrong because this is a person made in God’s image and neither we nor they have the right to end their life.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    We could go on to talk of other examples of affronts to human dignity such as war, capital punishment, poverty, discrimination and so on. We will return to these ideas later in this series.

    1. Putting It Into Practice

    What should we do about this? How should it affect the way we behave?

    As Voters

    As voters, there is realistically no mainstream option among political parties for those who want to work to eliminate abortion.

    However, we can campaign on and ask candidates for their plans to reduce the conditions that make abortions attractive.

    In the UK, this takes the form of policies such as removing the limit on child benefit, to build more homes, to increase access to adoption services. Each of these might have a measurable effect on the demand for abortion.

    We can write to MPs and campaign on the issue of Euthanasia when it comes up. The same applies if the nation is being taken into an unjust war.

    As a Church

    As a church we should continue to promote a culture that embraces life. That means being clear that caring for the elderly is a priority for us, within our church community and beyond.

    It means welcoming children and supporting families with babies. This means going beyond Sundays to the work that we do with midwives, health-care visitors, toddler groups and so on. 

    As Individuals

    As individuals, the most important thing we can do is to pray.

    Beyond that, however, let us challenge ourselves: do we see all people as created in the image and likeness of God? Do my actions and interactions with others reflect this belief?

    What about the people who bother us at work, at home, or at school? Do we care for them as made in God’s image? 

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    1. Matthew Miller and David Hemenway, ‘Guns and Suicide in the United States’, N Engl J Med 359.10 (2008) < https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923#:~:text=The%20temporary%20nature%20and%20fleeting,on%20to%20die%20by%20suicide. > ↩︎

    Christian Social Ethics 1: Christians and the Environment

    How do Christians think about the ethics and politics of the environment? By caring for and using creation with love for one another and respect for God.

    Christians should care for and use creation with love for one another and respect for God.

    Introduction

    Often when we come to talk about ethics- how we should behave or treat one another- we focus on the very personal (such as how should I treat the neighbour I don’t get on with?).

    For the next few weeks, however, I want to take a step back and think about how the Bible and the Church speak to the big questions we face.1

    The Church has a long and beautiful history of thinking and teaching about how we should view social issues – how we should think about the environment, about the value and dignity of life, about care for the poor or work or the family. These are big questions that we need to learn to think about from God’s perspective and then to act, pray or vote in accordance with what we believe to be in accordance with the way God views the issue rather than the tradition, prejudices or perspectives we inherit or absorb from others. 

    Before we start, I want to give a health warning.

    Christian social teaching does not fit neatly into our political categories. Sometimes it might sound left-ish, sometimes right-ish. It sits in the middle or, more precisely, embraces and challenges them both.

    My aim is not to tell you how to vote or anything like it. Rather I want to suggest the types of questions we should be asking of our politicians and proposing some of the values we can use to evaluate their answers.

    More profoundly, however, questions of creation care, race or care for the poor are not just political, they are deeply personal. One of the most important principles in Christian social teaching is that solutions should always be as local and personal as possible – we are first of all asking not “what should the government do?” but “what can I do?”

    This week I want to think about how the Bible and the Church help us to understand how we should relate to it and, in particular, what it means for us to be stewards of creation.

    1. The Heart of Christian Teaching

    How things go wrong

    Human attitudes to Creation go wrong in two ways.

    First we can have too high a view of nature. At its most extreme this takes the form of a paganism that worships nature as a God. More often in the modern world this distortion tends to place care for the environment as the highest good, above the welfare of human beings or anything else. 

    This attitude can tend to lead to a knee-jerk hostility to development or scientific progress. In its more extreme forms it explicitly prioritises ideas or policy solutions that are anti- human for the sake of being pro-environment.

    All of these distortions here at their heart the error of valuing creation too highly – of making the created world on the same or higher level as its Creator.

    In the opposite direction we can have too low a view of the natural world. Here creation is not worshipped but despised. Its value is found solely in its usefulness to humanity rather than being worthy of love and care for its own sake. It is significant and worthy of care only if, and to the extent that, we can use it to make our lives more pleasurable.

    This attitude can lead to an uncritical consumerism and expansion, seeing the natural world as a resource to be exploited for human convenience or luxury. 

    These distortions have at their heart too high a view of humanity-as separate from, and lord of, creation and too dismissive a view of the created world itself.

    The Christian Perspective

    All Christian approaches to creation begin from the idea that God made the world and it is good. It is valuable not because it is useful to us but because God made it and he loves it. It is intrinsically good.

    Yet the fact that the world is created also means that it is not God. The environment, the natural world, is not the ultimate end or good – it is something that was made by God and it exists to serve him.

    God made human beings as part of that creation, formed from within it. In the beautiful picture of Genesis 2, God takes the stuff he has made and uses that stuff to make people. We aren’t separate from nature or the environment; we came from it. 

    And yet we are also different from it. Humans are set apart from the rest of Creation. They are, in a sense, higher than all of the other things he has made. He sets them apart as made in his image. He breathes his life into them.

    Pausing there, isn’t it amusing how accurate the poetry of Scripture captures who human beings are?  At once the dust of the earth and yet also bearing the print of heaven.

    Creation is given to humanity to use. Human life is of greater value than anything else in the world. In that sense it serves them. Yet they are given it to use as stewards, nurturing it, caring for it and bringing it to a sustainable life. We don’t own the created world-it has been entrusted to us and, while we are entitled to use and develop it, we will have to account to its the Owner for how we do so.

    1. The Implications of the Teaching for Ethical Judgments

    What does this mean for us as we think about how we shall treat the world?

    We should be willing to use the world around us to sustain and develop human life. It is good to do so. Part of the foundations of modern science was the Christian insight that the world is not God and therefore we can experiment on it. There is a hierarchy in creation in which human beings are at the top, with the privileges and responsibilities that implies.

    However,  we should always be suspicious of behaviour or policies that become exploitative or unnecessarily exploitative. We should be careful to avoid destructive behaviour, particularly where it is driven not by need but by greed, for the desire for “more” that can never fully be satisfied.

      So how do we apply this as voters, as churches and as individuals?

      As Voters

      When Christians are thinking about creation care and environmental issues as they consider who to vote for, or how to lobby, they should be asking these sorts of questions:

      • How will this party or person’s policies affect the natural world? This is a bigger question than just setting targets etc. It involves a wisdom judgement about what is actually prudent or workable.
      • What is the human cost of these policies? Is it justifiable given that human lives are the highest priority?

      As a Church

      As a church we should be asking how we can care for our environment. That is everything from not being unnecessarily wasteful to considering whether together we can care for the natural world of our village or locality in some way. It is part of good stewardship and it is also a good witness to Jesus.

      As Individuals

      Finally as individuals we can take steps in our own lives to be good stewards. It is tempting to get caught up shouting, posting or campaigning about things that are remote and ultimately need other people to take action for us. But what about nurturing and managing a garden? Or litter picking on your road? Or trying to walk instead of driving?

      These aren’t the exciting or fashionable things to do but they are all acts of faith and obedience, caring for the Creation and carrying out God’s command.

      A Prayer

      Here’s a prayer to get you started this week:

      God our Father and Creator, 

      Your glory is expressed in the light of the stars, the roar of ocean waves, and the majesty of mountains. You have created a home for us in the goodness of the earth and have provided for us through its resources. Give us a right and proper attitude in our relationship with creation. Give us wisdom to build a culture that reverences nature and its resources, that preserves it for the sake of future generations, and that prioritises the good of all in what we make and how we consume. May we reach out to you, our Creator, through a right relationship with your creation. May wonder and discovery lead to innovation that glorifies you, reverence for the dignity of human life, and respect for goodness of the earth that you have made. 

      In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

      1. These ideas are found throughout the Christian Tradition. For these articles, however, I’ve found the materials published by Ascension Press on Catholic Social Teaching (these ideas as they have developed in a Catholic context) very helpful. The prayers are taken directly from their course entitled Connected: Catholic Social Teaching for This Generation. ↩︎

      How Does God Love the World?

      This is how God loved the world, he gave his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

      Love is a big deal for Christians. It’s because of the centrality of love to Christianity that it appears so prominently in our culture. We all love to love.

      But as soon as we say this, it begs the question: how? How does God love the world? What does ‘love’ mean in that context? In culture, ‘love’ is often a synonym for sex. Yet at the same time grown men will say they ‘love’ their football teams.

      When Scripture talks about God loving the world it has something very powerful and particular in mind. It isn’t something that can adequately be summed up in words – it has to be shown rather than told.

      The best I can do is to say that love consists in choosing to give oneself completely for the good of another. Thus, in John 3:16 we read that, God loves the world by giving his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

      That’s an idea that is quite easy to repeat. It is sufficiently well known that the wrestler, Stone Cold Steve Austin, used to parody the endless references to it on signs at Wrestlemania with his own version: Austin 3:16.

      The rest of this post is trying to explain what these verses actually mean and why they matter.

      I’m not going to quote John 3 here. But the rest of this post will make a lot more sense if you have read it.

      1. What’s Going On Here?

      Our scene opens at night. That is significant. It is dark. As you read John’s gospel you will notice that he often mentions light and darkness as symbols of a spiritual or mental awakening. For example, we are told in John 1 that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness.

      So we are on the alert for someone who does not understand – who is, so to speak, “in the dark” and to whom Jesus is going to bring light.

      Into the scene comes Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a very senior leader and religious teacher in Israel. He is part of the council that runs Jewish religious life and is a brilliant man.

      I find this story so poignant.

      Here is someone who is faithful, who is clever, who has worked hard and achieved an enormous amount. But even with all of that he knows he needs Jesus. He has seen something in Christ that goes beyond all the power and all the prestige and all the wisdom he has acquired. And he knows he needs it.

      Whether you are the Teacher of Israel or a street Prostitute, eventually you have to come to Jesus and ask for help.

      I love Nicodemus. I love his humility. I love the way a supreme official in the religious hierarchy has come to sit down with a provincial street preacher in order to ask him about the Kingdom of God. He reminds me of the best of brilliant people.

      Nicodemus comes to Jesus and asks him about what Jesus is doing. He and his colleagues have seen Jesus at work and they get there is something going on here. But they don’t quite grasp its implications.

      Maybe that is how you feel about church or Christianity. There is something you have seen that you recognise as good. It might be a feeling you get in worship, a peace that comes when you pray or hike, or a deep hunger you can’t quite understand (like an itch you can’t reach) but which seems to be satisfied when you listen to the Bible. 

      If that resonates with you then you are the type of person Jesus is speaking to in this conversation.

      1. Why Jesus Came

      Jesus tries two ways of explaining this to Nicodemus. 

      First, he says, getting into God’s kingdom is like having a fresh start, almost going right back to the beginning, like you are born for a second time. But instead of this being a physical birth, it comes from two things: God’s Spirit moving on you and you being baptised; from Spirit and water.

      Nicodemus doesn’t get that metaphor. So Jesus reaches for something he is very familiar with – the Old Testament.

      There is a story of the people of Israel in the desert after God had set them free from Egypt and before they had entered the land they would call home. They were bitter and angry and complained about God, about being set free, about the food they had and the lives they lived. They began to reject God as provider and leader and look back towards the slavery of Egypt.

      And so God allowed an invasion of snakes to come into their camp. They were biting the people and causing pain, even death. The people were sick. 

      God provided a way out for them. He commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Moses lifted it in the air. Whoever looked up to the bronze snake was healed from the effect of the snake bites.  It was as if the bronze snake had taken all the effects of the snake bites into itself and the people could be healed.

      This is what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus says. In fact this incident was put there in the Old Testament so people like Nicodemus could recognise this moment when it came and know what they should do about it. 

      Human beings are sick and they are dying. They are dying from the inside out – spiritually killed by the decision to reject God and to turn inward to selfishness and pride. This is what we call sin – the human propensity to mess things up, particularly our relationship with God and each other.

      And so Jesus has come, and would be lifted up on a cross and die, punished as a sinner, taking all the world’s sin on himself and offering healing to everyone who would look to him.

      Notice three things about this description:

      1. The people aren’t condemned by Jesus.
        They are sick already. It is their choices, our choices, which kill us. That is why Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. The world is already dying. Naturally we are already dying, mortally wounded by a thousand rebellions, petty hurts, treasured prides and self-centredness. 
      2. It is God who takes the first step to redeem us.
        Jesus came to us, we didn’t go to him. The point about the bronze snake is that God (through Moses) gave it to the people so that they could be healed. This is what we call grace – the free gift of healing and forgiveness and a future. It isn’t earned, like exchanging a day’s labour for a fair wage. It is given, like receiving medicine.
      3. It has to be accepted and trusted.
        The gift has to be received. It has to be trusted. The people had to look up, away from themselves, away from the snakes, away from their staffs and solutions, and trust the provision God made.
        This is what we call faith. To paraphrase St Thomas Aquinas, it is the response of trust to the testimony of someone we believe. The way Jesus (and the Church after him) teaches we should exercise this trust is by turning away from ourselves and being baptised; be born of Spirit and water.
      1. Why Do We Choose (or Not Choose) the Light?

      The conversation finishes with John (or possibly Jesus – the Greek is unclear) explaining how people react to this. 

      We can react in one of three ways.

      1. We can hold on to our sin because of shame (misunderstanding what the light is there to do – he came to save, not condemn).
      2. We can refuse the light because we actually prefer our sin. This gets worse the more we choose darkness. When we refuse the light, it gets harder to choose it next time. 
      3. We can choose to say yes to the light and find it brings healing. This has the opposite effect- we find the light is pleasant and good and so the more we choose it, the easier and more desirable it is to choose it again.

      Application

      What does this mean for us?

      • The first response is for those who haven’t yet trusted themselves to Jesus. Maybe you’re one of those, like Nicodemus, who senses there is something good, vital, even divine about what Jesus says and does. God’s word to you is that he loves you and came for you.
        But you need to know that the yearning you feel is a symptom. It’s like a hungry body’s craving for food, a thirsty man’s need for water. Your soul is sick and it craves the cure.
        Put your trust in Jesus, be baptised, and you will receive a new start and a new life.
      • What about showing hope to others? Here we need to remember that Jesus came to a world that hadn’t asked for him but needed him. He came in love, to bring help and healing to people who had rejected him.
        Ask God to show you who needs your help. And then give it. That is the way of God.
      • Finally, what about sharing hope? Learn from the way Jesus deals with Nicodemus. He listens to him, knows him, and talks to him in a way he can understand. The first step to sharing Jesus effectively with others is to listen to them.

      Is Christianity Good for Diversity?

      Jesus creates, commands + delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.

      This year I’m writing a series of talks thinking about big questions that lots of us have about Christianity, Jesus and faith. Some of them are about how we can live well, some are doubts we often have but don’t know how to express.

      In preparing these talks I have used a book that I whole-heartedly recommend: Rebecca McLaughlin’s, “10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (And Answer) About Christianity”. 

      Everything I’m saying, Rebecca said first and better. In fact, more than that, I want to urge you to get and read, particularly if you are under 25 (but also if you’re older than that).

      Summary (TL;DR)

      I always try to give a summary of what I’m going to say in one or two sentences so it is easy to remember. Here is today’s:

      Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.

      1. Jesus Creates Diversity (or why believing in the dignity and equality of all depends on there being a Creator).

      For Jews and Christians, the equality of every person, whatever their race, ethnicity or background is rooted in our belief that every person is made in the image of God. That is why they are worthy of respect.

      To be made in God’s image doesn’t particularly mean to look like him physically. It means to be like him, to reflect something of his character and what he is like. Jesus did this perfectly. St Paul tells us that he was the exact image of the invisible God.

      If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

      That applies perfectly to him but in a distorted and different way to every human being.

      This belief is the foundation of all modern movements for equality, inclusion or justice.

      Secular society takes for granted that everyone is of equal worth and dignity. But that idea comes from the Christian (and Jewish) commitment to the concept that everyone is made in God’s image.

      This is a historical fact.

      Historian Tom Holland explains that the idea of human rights – that human beings are equal and all of value arose specifically out of Christianity in Europe.

      It was Christians, reflecting on the central idea of Genesis 1:27 (that humanity is made in God’s image), who argued for this. And in doing so they changed the world. Without that, and without the idea that human beings are made in God’s image, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

      In case you think Tom (who isn’t himself a Christian) and I are making this up, we know what happens when you reject the idea that human beings are made in God’s image.

      In 1859, Darwin published his book, commonly called On the Origin of Species. It’s full title was actually: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

      In it Darwin specifically commented that:

      The western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilisation … The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races through the world.1

      This led to the Eugenics movement (getting rid of the weak), to scientific racism and then inevitably to Nazism and the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.

      This isn’t to reject evolution as a scientific idea. It may well be a brilliant description of a tool that God, as the great designer and Father of all, has used to shape the world around us. (For what it’s worth, I can quite see how the development of speciation fits with Genesis’ symbolic description of humanity formed from the earth and yet filled with the presence of God but I wouldn’t insist upon it).

      But a solely material picture of human origins without God in the picture gives us no reason to believe in equality or dignity – and every reason to reject it.

      Without the Christian commitment to the idea that God made us and that we all bear his image, then we are left with no reason to believe in equality, in dignity, in diversity at all.

      This has been taken up by the contemporary historian, Yohann Harari. Harari rejects the idea that human beings are made in God’s image. He is a materialist. And that means he doesn’t believe in human rights or equality as anything other than a nice idea:

      “The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’?”2

      We believe in equality, in diversity, in the rights of all, because we are Christians. 

      Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.

      1. Jesus Delivers Diversity (or why Jesus is the root of movements for justice).

      So it is a Judeo-Christian view of humanity, made in God’s image, which is the foundation of modern commitments to equality and human rights. It is the root of why we value diversity.

      But what about Jesus?

      Jesus’ Teaching

      Jesus explicitly taught and demonstrated that his kingdom went beyond ethnic, racial or class boundaries. It was truly diverse.

      The most famous example of this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. We tell this story as an illustration of how we should help one another. That is a part of its meaning. But it is more profound than that.

      When Jesus said that the second greatest commandment was to ‘love your neighbour’, he was immediately challenged by another teacher: but who does that mean? The other guy wanted to keep his obligations narrow – I love them, because they are like me but I don’t need to love them because they are not. 

      In particular, in that period there was an ongoing religious and racial conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. They hated each other in part because the Samaritans were ethnically different.

      Jesus’s parable is designed to cut through that. The one who shows mercy, who keeps the commandment, is not the pure, religious Jew. It is the unclean, alien Samaritan.

      The whole parable is about welcoming in a stranger and recognising that all are equally in need of God’s grace and all can equally receive it. It becomes the ultimate anti-racist message.

      Early Church Teaching

      This wasn’t just Jesus. St Paul explained the logic of it in his earliest churches.

      The gospel, St Paul explains, requires that we treat all people equally.

      • Everyone, without exception, is made in God’s image and is loved by him.
      • Everyone, without exception, sins and needs Jesus.
      • Everyone, without exception, is made a Christian only by trusting in Jesus. 

      So no-one can be treated better or worse because of where they come from or their ethnic background or their social class.

      This was taken up by the later Christian leaders. The church fathers always accorded equal rights to people irrespective of whether they were slaves or free. Augustine, a Bishop working in an African city and probably the third most influential man in Western history after Jesus and St Paul, denounced slavery as against God’s intentions in creation and tried to organise for the church to intercept slave traffickers and set the slaves free.

      St Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great theologians of the church condemned the institution of slavery outright and called for its abolition.

      The Horror and Rejection of Slavery

      Now I want to acknowledge later on, some Christians were complicit in the horrors of American slavery.

      Historians and sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith have shown that that came about because men and women bowed to the pressure of their society to turn their back on the teachings of Jesus and the early church in favour of the apparent progress of their society. The dominant view, the view of the elites and of business, was that slavery was necessary to build their empires.

      And so elements of the church bowed to the demand to get with the times, to move with the forces of progress, to change their faith to gain favour with society because it was apparently outmoded.3

      My friends, in passing, never forget – never – that when we change the teachings of Jesus to keep up with the changing mores and values of society, the world is a worse place. Christian involvement in slavery was a progressive heresy. And the ones who overturned it were Evangelicals and Catholics who wanted to return to the old-faith, the faith of Jesus.

      Even then the movement to stop the slave trade and liberate slaves will fight for equality was led by committed Christians who acted not in spite of their faith but because of it.

      Time won’t permit me to name them all but here are just a few of the fathers of the anti-slavery, anti-racism movement who named Christ as the reason for their work:

      • William Wilberforce, the MP who campaigned to end the slave trade:
        “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners”.
      • Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave, nicknamed “Moses” for helping others to escape:
        “I always tole God, I’m gwine [going] to hole stiddy on you, an’ you’ve got to see me through.'”
      • Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights campaigner:
        There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul.

      In other words, where parts of the church gave into the temptation to go along with slavery, and even baptise it in Christian language, it was Jesus and the Christian tradition that led to the error being corrected and overthrown.

      The Diversity of the Church

      But did it work? Is the church actually a place for every race and ethnicity?

      Yes.

      According to the researchers at the Gordon Conwell Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, the elite, the cream of religion researchers, “[i]n 2000, 62% of Christians globally were of colour (1.2 billion). In 2015, 68% of Christians were of colour (1.6 billion).”

      In other words, Christianity is incredibly diverse. It could not be more so.

      This isn’t just an abstract idea. We live in one of the whitest, most British parts of the UK. Yet a couple of years ago I counted the number of different nationalities in this church. We had people regularly attending from 15 different countries, from 4 different continents while our material is regularly read and watched on another 2. I’m working on Antarctica but it’s harder than you’d think to convert the Penguins.

      That is just our little church. But it is typical of other, bigger churches too.

      The average Anglican is a Sub-Saharan woman in her 30s.

      God made diversity, Jesus commanded diversity, the Spirit delivered diversity in his Church.

      Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.

      Application

      What does this mean for us as we try to know hope, show hope and share hope:

      • First, don’t feel challenged or threatened by contemporary criticisms of Christianity as intolerant or anti- diversity. They are founded on ignorance and reliant upon the values given them by the faith they despise.
      • Second, don’t form in-groups and out-groups. Everyone has a measure of dignity + value because of their Creator. Everyone is a potential brother or sister in Christ. There will be times they need to be resisted. It doesn’t mean being weak. But it does mean being merciful even when we have to be strong, playing the ball and not the man.
        As part of this we must be as clear as possible: discrimination or hatred on the basis of race or ethnicity is morally wrong, against Christian doctrine and has no place in the Church or society. For the avoidance of any doubt, that includes antisemitism.
      • Finally, think about those you find hardest to love or to include and set your heart to pray for them regularly. That might be someone with a different ethnicity. It might be someone with different politics or a different faith. It might be a bully.
        Pray for them because they need Jesus just like you need Jesus.

      Jesus creates, commands + delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.

      1. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol II, pp. 796-797 ↩︎
      2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Vintage, 2015), p 109. ↩︎
      3. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith. Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford University Press, 2000, p.24] ↩︎

      How Can We Understand the Bible?

      For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. This is a quick guide to how we can understand it’s deep meaning and know God better.

      For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. There are bits that seem easy to follow (like when Jesus teaches people), that seem irrelevant (tell me again about eating shellfish in the desert), that are obviously picture language or poetry (the trees in the fields don’t literally clap their hands), and that just seem weird (all of Revelation). 

      Then there is the way Biblical authors use other bits of the Bible. For example, John the Baptist looks at Jesus and describes him as “the lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), St Paul writes about the stories of Israel finding water in a rock only to say “the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). It is perfectly reasonable to ask: what on earth is going on?

      The church has always believed that the Bible is a book that operates on a number of levels. I recently came across this summary of how this works in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 109-118). It really helped me to categorise the different ways we engage with Scripture. I’ve reproduced it below (with some of my explanation at the end of each section) in case it helps you too.

      First, read what the authors meant:

      109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

      110 In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”

      This means that we can’t always simply read the text literalistically. Instead we need to work out what the original author meant and how his readers would have understood his words.

      We do this all the time in English. If I said “it’s raining cats-and-dogs outside”, you get an umbrella. You don’t call the RSPCA. You know that in English that is an idiom or metaphor, not literal. And it would be completely inappropriate to treat it like it was.

      Sometimes it’s appropriate to read the Bible like a history book (for example when dealing with the Gospels or biographies). Sometimes it’s obviously not (for example when dealing with the poetry in the Psalms). Sometimes it’s complicated because the Bible uses types of books that we aren’t familiar with (like collections of Proverbs or Paleo-History).

      Things that can help with this are Pastors and good Bible commentaries.

      Second, read Scripture as a whole, assuming that it is coherent and bearing in mind that Jesus is the point of it all:

      112 Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”. Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.

      The phrase “heart of Christ” can refer to Sacred Scripture, which makes known his heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be interpreted.

      This means that as Christians we believe that the Bible has lots of human authors (all writing in their own personalities and using their own styles) but one divine mind behind it. To put it another way, Scripture is loads of books but together they tell one story. And that story is ultimately about Jesus.

      This means when you take two texts that seem hard to reconcile or contradict one another, they can almost certainly be read as complementing each other or as talking about different things. If you find something that troubles you in this way talk to a Pastor (or read a good commentary).

      Third, read with the Church:

      113 2. Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church”. According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (“. . . according to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church”).

      114 3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith. By “analogy of faith” we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.

      The Bible is a book that is meant to be read in community. Jesus promises that as we live together as the Church, we are guided by his Spirit and learn how to read the Bible correctly (eg John 15:26). This goes for the Church in the world now but also throughout time. We want to hear how the Spirit has directed us to read Scripture, and that means reading it in the community of the Church. It also means that sometimes we have to have the humility to accept that we may have misunderstood something from Scripture and to be corrected.

      Four, pay attention to the different senses of Scripture:

      115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

      116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”83

      117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
      1. the allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.
      2. the moral sense. the events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.
      3. the anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

      118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:

      The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
      The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.

      This is the hardest bit for us to grasp but it makes sense of how the apostles and other Biblical writers used Scripture and unlocks a lot of what God is wanting to tell us through it.

      Put simply, there are four ways that we can interpret different bits of the Bible. They aren’t contradictory – they are like levels of meaning (kind of like a Russian doll). They are:

      1. The “Letter” or “Literal” sense.
        This doesn’t mean taking everything literally. It means asking what a passage would have meant to the original readers. This is what we talked about above. It means reading bits of the Bible according to the type of book they are (poetry, history etc). It is the basic question: what is the writer trying to say here. For a lot of modern Bible scholars, this is as far as they go (which is a shame and means we miss a lot of meaning that the ancient church understood).
      2. The “allegorical” sense.
        This means way that the bits of the Bible we are reading teach us lessons about Jesus even when he doesn’t explicitly appear. This is what John the Baptist is doing when he describes Jesus as the “Lamb of God” or what St Paul is doing when he describes a Rock from the Old Testament as being about Jesus. It realises that when God inspired the Bible he was always pointing us to Jesus, even when the original authors didn’t realise it. So, for example, the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is designed to teach us about Jesus and the church (see Ephesians 5:31-32). Another word for this is Typology.
      3. The Moral sense.
        This is obvious. Bits of the Bible are designed to teach us how to behave. When it says “don’t steal”, you don’t need to reach for a commentary (particularly if the commentary isn’t yours). Other narratives can also teach moral lessons. So, for example, the story of Cain and Abel can teach valuable moral lessons about the danger of anger, jealousy and the destructive consequences of violence.
      4. The “anagogical” or “mystical” sense.
        Stories we find in Scripture can ultimately teach us something important about our eternal destiny in Jesus. So, for example, the story of God bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt, through a time of trials and testing in the desert, over a river (literally through something that kills people) and into a promised land is a picture of the way God rescues souls, leads them through life and brings them through death to heaven.

      You don’t need to be an expert at spotting all these levels of meaning in Scripture right away. One of the good things about being part of a Church is that many men and women have spent their lives meditating on Scripture and explaining to us what they saw so that we can see it too. It’s also part of why God gives the church teachers – so that we can grow in understanding him and his word to us.

      Suffering, Joy and Evangelism

      The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering.

      Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) is one of my favorite writers. Almost everything he produced is gold: joyful, wise and saturated in Jesus. Here he is on great form, preaching about suffering, joy and Christian evangelism:

      “When a person receives a great love, when he is privileged to know that he is loved by someone who is good and powerful and absolutely reliable, then this is no guarantee that something terrible will not happen to him, too, and remain terrible. Nevertheless, it will not be able to destroy him, because there is something in him that all these terrors cannot touch: a light and a strength that are stronger than all that. The Christian, though, is such a person; for to him is granted the gift that he is loved by God, who is absolutely kind and powerful, whose love does not depend on any moods and whose fidelity never wavers. And therefore resignation, joylessness, sullenness, humourlessness, and cynicism do not suit one who is Christian… Joylessness in this most profound sense is the repudiation of the faith, the repudiation of the God whose Yes is still the foundation of our life, whatever may happen. “Rejoice” therefore means: be believers, immersed in the certainty of what the Gospel has proclaimed to us: God loves with a love that is not fickle…

      But someone who is resigned or embittered himself cannot be a bearer of Good News. The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering. Only someone who is an evangelist in this way can hand on the joy that we need, which is not a surrogate, a brief anesthesia, but withstands the truth of this world.”

      Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.139-140

      The Wisdom of Hating Sin

      It is much harder to warm a cold heart than to cool an overheated one, as it is much harder to light a fire once it has gone out than to change the direction of the air heated by the fire by adjusting the air vents. It is harder to make a saint out of an ice cube than out of a firebrand, just as it is harder to start up a car that is stuck than to change its direction once it is moving.

      One of the most interesting and helpful authors I’ve read this year is Peter Kreeft, the Charismatic Catholic Philosopher. He’s written a wonderful book on the Psalms which, even though I haven’t agreed with every word, has consistently provoked questions, worship and delight on almost every page.

      Here is Kreeft on the challenge to late Western indifference and relativism presented in the very first verse of Psalm 1:

      We must clearly distinguish sins from sinners, for we are commanded to hate sins and not sinners, and to love sinners (our “neighbours”, all of whom are sinners like ourselves) and not to love sins. But we are impressed more by concretizations than abstractions; that is why examples impress us more than principles, why saints are more powerful teachers than scholars, why stories impress us more than sermons, and why great teachers always use parables. The danger is that we become so fixated on the concrete example (the person) that we take the attitude toward him that is appropriate to the principle—that is, we hate the sinner because we confuse him with the sin. This is a mistake that is natural and common to children and primitives, and it is correctable by a later sophistication and maturity of mind, when the mind becomes abstract enough to distinguish the sinner from the sin. 

      The opposite mistake is much harder to correct. That is the mistake of failing to begin here, with passionate and concretely real hatred of sin, as embodied in sinners. It is much easier to correct an intellectual mistake (confusing the abstract with the concrete) than to correct a mistake of the heart, and it is a mistake of the heart not to love or hate anything passionately but to be bland and indifferent, “lukewarm” (see Rev 3:16). It is much harder to warm a cold heart than to cool an overheated one, as it is much harder to light a fire once it has gone out than to change the direction of the air heated by the fire by adjusting the air vents. It is harder to make a saint out of an ice cube than out of a firebrand, just as it is harder to start up a car that is stuck than to change its direction once it is moving…

      We are all sinners, of course. But “the scornful” do not admit it or do anything about it, and they scorn and pity and sneer at those of us who do. The damned do not go to Hell because they sin but because they scorn and sneer at the idea of sin and repentance. They are scornful to those of us who hate the sins that they love. The difference between the damned and the blessed is not that one class sins and the other does not, but that one class scorns and the other repents, that the one class is happy with their sins and the other is unhappy with them.

      (Peter Kreeft, Wisdom from the Psalms, p.21-24)

      You can get a copy of the book here. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

      Why Get Baptised?

      Why get baptised?
      Jesus died because he loves me and gives me new life. Baptism is how I receive that gift.

      Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say…

      “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

      When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

      Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:14, 36-38)

      Introduction

      The gospel is amazing news. Jesus died because he loves me and offers me new life.

      Think about that for a moment.

      The Son of God loved us, saw us in our sin, guilt and shame, came to live with us as one of us, took the punishment, the stain, the poison of sin, and then buried it in the ground. He releases us, cleans us, changes us, forgives us, and defeats the Devil for us.

      Basically it’s brilliant.

      But why do Christians get baptised in response to it?

      After all, it is on any view a strange sight. An otherwise sane boy or girl, man or woman stands in a massive bath, fully dressed (thankfully), and then allows a pastor or leader to dunk them under the water. They emerge, drenched, for a room full of Christians who are clapping, cheering and (occasionally) crying.

      Ancient Roots

      It’s weird, properly weird. But it is also ancient.

      It is the earliest recorded teaching of the Christian church that we receive new life by believing that Jesus rose from the dead, acknowledging that we need his love and forgiveness, committing ourselves to follow his teaching and being baptized into his church. Everyone who wants to follow Jesus is commanded by the apostles and their successors to be baptized.

      We could give loads of examples from the New Testament. Here are just a few:

      • Jesus got baptized (Matthew 3:13-16; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22).
      • Jesus’s followers then baptized new believers while Jesus was alive (John 3:22).
      • Jesus told his followers to go and baptize people all over the world (Matthew 28:19-20).
      • When the first church began at Pentecost, Peter commands new believers to be baptized (Acts 2:38-39).
      • That pattern is replicated over and over throughout the early churches – people hear, they believe in Jesus, they trust him, and they get baptized (Acts 8:34-40, 9:17-19 etc).

      These are just a few references that you can look up to see the way baptism is a central part of the start of a Christian journey. That pattern carried on after the New Testament. Everywhere people became Christians, they got baptized.

      But Why?

      There is an enormous amount that could be written about baptism. At its heart, though, baptism has both a spiritual and practical effect in our lives as Christians.

      Spiritual Effects

      We believe that baptism is about what God has done and is doing in us through Jesus Christ.

      When we are baptized we receive God’s grace and are united to Jesus and to the church.

      Two pictures help us understand this: burial and bath-time.

      When we go under the water we are identifying with Jesus dying and being buried. That is what St Paul means when he says “we are buried with him through baptism”. Then when we come up out of the water we are identifying with Jesus rising from the dead.

      It is as if we are looking at what Jesus has done for us and saying ‘yes, I want to be a part of that’ and in response God says ‘OK, then I’ll make you a part of that’.

      This isn’t just a sign or an act; it really changes us in our spirits. When we are baptized, we receive God’s grace and are united to Jesus and to the church. 

      This brings me to the second picture: a bath.

      I love to play football. When I do I end up covered in dirt and sweat and (sometimes) blood.

      I come in from a game and before I can get on with the rest of my life, I need a bath or a shower. I need to soak in the clean water to get all of this grime and grease and stain off me. Then I can start afresh.

      Part of the symbolism of baptism is that of a bath, of washing. I don’t mean that we clean our bodies. It’s about a deep cleansing for our souls.

      Baptism, as a part of the whole process of identifying with and trusting in Jesus, is how God washes us clean of all the dirt and grime of sin – of the human propensity to mess stuff up, the unkind words, acts of temper, moments of violence and bitterness, the selfishness or snideness, the dishonesty or disrespect – that cling to us through our lives.

      Practical Benefits

      But there is a practical benefit too.

      Following Jesus can be a life of great joy and peace and purpose. It is to live in tune with the moral and spiritual music of the universe, to find community and comfort and peace.

      But it can also be really hard. There are times when we mess up, times when others hurt us, times when we are rejected or bereaved, times when we doubt God’s love for us, our faithfulness to him, or even his existence.

      When we go through these experiences, God has given us something concrete to cling to.

      Whenever you feel like this, you can look back to today and remember the feeling of being wet. You can remember the way the water touched every part of you. That was real, it was tangible. And it is a promise; that God will never leave you or forsake you, that, in the words of St Paul,

      neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.[1]

      So What?

      What does this actually mean for us?

      Some of us may never have actually responded to what Jesus did for ourselves.
      Jesus lived, and died and rose again for all of us. But we have to accept it and make it our own. It’s a bit like being given a cheque for a huge amount of money. It doesn’t benefit me unless I cash it.  You might have been in church your whole life or this might be your first time. If you’ve never consciously responded then take a moment to do so even as you read this.

      Others might have become followers of Jesus recently or in the distant past. But maybe you haven’t yet been baptised. If that’s you, I want to encourage you to get baptised. It is commanded by Jesus, it is good for you now, and it will help you in the future.

      Jesus died because he loves me and offers me new life.Baptism is how I receive that gift.

      [1] Romans 8:38-9