Hey God, Do Something

We all want God to intervene to get things done to free people and the world of injustice, unfairness, bad leadership, evil influences.  The list is long.

We regularly read promises in the Bible that God gives or provides all kinds of good things such as justice and freedom and joy.  Then we pray and hope to that end – that God would intervene and actively do those things, often assuming God will make it happen independent of us. There's expectations for a divine intervention, a gift, a miracle, an answer to prayer. Sometimes it happens.  God can and does intervene outside of our involvement and even despite our inactivity.   

However, there’s another way to read these statements about God’s provision.

Our Creator God has set out a way of living and being.  When we follow those ways and means, is that not then “God” doing those things?  This doesn’t ‘disempower’ God.  It embodies and incarnates God’s presence and power in us who live and act out those ways in the world.  This perspective releases the ‘gospel’ from a disembodied and purely spiritual ‘message’ and incarnates it into every single aspect of how we live and move and exist.  Nothing is out of reach or left untouched by the ways and means of God.

So, when the scripture describes God as giving freedom to the prisoner, or relieving those who are weighed down, or giving justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry, etc., put your name in there. 

Jesus Christ said that we, His followers, would “do the same works I have done, and even greater works…”.  

 

We all want God to intervene.  So then, get up and intervene.

Is the Christian Gospel Any Good For the World?

Christians talk a lot about this thing called the Gospel, and that it is ‘good news’.  However, just how good is it when it is often encountered as a demoralizing message of shame and guilt over things people have done wrong, and that behind all this is a God who will punish you if you don’t conform (but hey – accept Jesus and you’ll be saved).  The church as the corporate purveyor of this so-called good news hasn’t had a good run of it lately either.  Public perception of the church (warranted or not) is coloured by many things that detract from the ‘good news’ such as the impact of colonialism, residential schools, anti LGBTQ stances, and in some contexts, Christian nationalism and its related issue-politics. 

This is not His ‘good news’. It makes me sad and frustrated at how far the expression of this Gospel has strayed from its original story. 

It’s only in the last decade I have come to extricate myself from a narrow and truncated version of God’s Grand Story for the world that was so often put forward by some within evangelicalism. Yes, I am deconstructing – and in reality we all should be.  Not to destroy and abandon, but to renew, rebuild and restore.  Our faith is not static.  How can it be if it is focused on the Creator of the Universe????  Can you remain in your knowing, thinking you’ve ‘got it’?

What happened to love?  What happened to inclusion?  What happened to embracing the outcast?  What happened to radical hospitality? What happened to resisting and even challenging the straitjacket that is religion?  What happened to living as a representative of Jesus Christ, who displayed all these things I just mentioned? 

What happened is that instead of living out His ways in the workplace, the neighbourhood, and wherever we go in our lives - and thereby attracting people to that way and truth about real, abundant life -  contemporary Christianity chose to slice and dice the Bible as though it was merely a divine last word theology-text, draw the lines of who can qualify as a Christian, develop the words and the rules of entry into God’s Kingdom and in effect, take on the role of humanity’s judge.

A tragic case of missing the point.

The Gospel is indeed Good News for the world in that ALL THINGS will be restored to God’s original intentions though Christ.  As we live according to His ways, that process of restoration is being enacted in real-time. God’s good news is that in Christ there is a path to abundant living with nature, with each other and with our Creator.

The earth desperately needs good news.  My personal sense is that everyone in this world has a primal sense that things could and should be better.  Don’t we all long for more peace, more love, more abundance and joy?  The Good News is that Christ is the Way to that kind of life.

Let’s show up and show that Way.

The World is Too Loud

I am emerging out of a period of blogging silence.  For the last while I have been in an unplanned, unforced season of quiet. Some of that was due to my waiting for personal clarity on aspects of my vocational and spiritual life.  I was reflective, but just couldn’t write it down for some reason. Sometimes, it’s just good to be silent and sit – especially for those of us who like to comment on things, stir the pot, and challenge conventions.

It’s a pretty loud world out there. The planet is a cacophony of crises.  There’s constant competition for minds, hearts and money.  How about the loud cheering from the opposite poles of political ideologies?   I have tinnitus – but these sounds are even more annoying!

There’s another noise that aggravates me.

I am a follower of the Jesus Way, desiring to reflect and demonstrate how His way of life makes us more authentically human, and our world a healthier, more abundant place.  Yet the noise around Christianity-as-religion largely drowns out that message.  When I try to put myself in the place of an outside observer looking into whether Christianity ‘works’ or not, I don’t think I’d join up.  Public expressions of my faith/religion are too often issue-based, politically motivated and sometimes just outright hateful and exclusive. There’s a definite leaning toward ‘otherness’ rather than embrace, towards pointing out the darkness rather than shining a light into it, and towards outreach/mission to the world rather than a participating in and with the world to make it a better place.

Now in the US (and it’s bleeding into Canada), there is an unabashed political movement toward Christian nationalism that completely bypasses the Grand Story of God for humanity & the planet.  It is co-opting Christianity as a political platform for narrow and often distinctly un-Christ like ends.  The noise is deafening.

So what do we do – send out a louder, more positive message to counteract all this?? 

There’s a more powerful, more quiet way.   It’s Jesus’ way, and is more silent that you may have been led to believe if you are listening to public Christian rhetoric.  Jesus the Christ isn’t competing to be heard.  He is silently, quietly and powerfully present (in and through us as His representatives), to bring hope and change.  He brings justice and abundance to the world without raising His voice, without loud speeches & demonstrations.  Rather, He demonstrates persistent acts of gentle love and justice.  In a passage in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 12, verses 14-21, Jesus is described as one who is not quarrelsome, and whose voice is not heard yelling in the streets! He is one who will carefully handle a broken reed so that it isn’t further damaged, and will keep a smoldering wick going so its light doesn’t burn out.  This is a gentle, silent and truly transformative power, and we are to act in this Way.

I am a fan of Robert Service’s poem The Call of the Wild because it ‘places’ us humans in the context of Creation so that we humble ourselves in its magnificence.  One line in particular applies to what I have been saying here, and has implications for how real change happens in this world.  Change for the good is not ultimately reliant on government programs, grand social contracts & movements, public or private initiatives or religious efforts.  These are all helpful, but it’s “The simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things…” that is the unseen, underlying power for transformation.

Be quietly UN-noticeable.  It will truly change the world.

Harv Matchullis

Have we lost the plot?

Love is the greatest sign and characteristic of Christians according to Christ, their namesake.  Yet looking around at some public displays of Christianity lately, you simply have to ask the question, along with the Black Eyed Peas so long ago:  “Where is the Love?” 

Much of society views Christians as unloving, irrelevant, impractical, arrogant, and narrow.  Can you blame them?  “Christ” has been co-opted to advance political agendas, bully the outsider, judge the ‘other’, and justify positions, statements and protests on just about anything.  Tragically many also use Christ as a means to power-up over others and exert superiority over them, including toward their fellow Christians.  There’s a warped theology-of-sorts behind that which I won’t get into here, but it exists and it shows.

Some Christians have lost the plot.

So many Scriptures, like 1 Corinthians 13, repudiate the arrogant and unloving posture of Christians.  Without love, we are like noisy gongs and clanging symbols – noticed, but unpleasant and without a harmony of meaning.  Christ often speaks to the fact that it is not grand displays of our version of spirituality and moral values that draw people to the love of God (see Matthew 6:5).  Instead it’s the quiet, localized and faithful expressions of love that makes the difference.

Don’t think that God needs you to ‘defend the faith’.  Don’t believe the rhetoric that you have to go public or viral with your faith in order to ‘make’ society or individuals conform to Christian principles.  Christ doesn’t give you a bully pulpit. He needs none of that.  He’s  chosen, as Robert Louis Stevenson expresses in The Call of the Wild, “the simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things” to eventually change lives.  The small things, like being yeast, seed, salt and light eventually change the environment in which they are scattered.

Eugene Petersen

Put down your placards. Silence your horns. Stop separating yourself from ‘them’. The thing we are to do is to come alongside others and love - unequivocally. That’s how the world will know we are Christians. But it’s not even our ‘reputation’ as Christians that is the important thing here. Since love is the very character of God, it is through demonstrating that love that the world is changed into the design God had for it from the beginning.

It’s not about your design for what this world should be.  It’s about God’s.  You won’t see that happen without doing it His way – the way of love.  

The Gospel Story has one plot - the Love of God.  Don't lose it.