Under attack

Christianity is under attack! they cry.

I respond inwardly, keeping my thoughts to myself.

Good! It has been ever so,

or at least, it should have been.

I will join in the attack,

there is so much that denies the kingdom,

so much that despises the words

that we declare came from the carpenter’s lips.

He was up-front with his followers,

told how he would suffer, be put to death

for the words he spoke, the things he did.

Said they could expect the same.

We are frightened

watching with alarm as the privileges of our glorious past

are challenged and slowly stripped away.

This cannot be God’s will! Surely this is not right!

But, perhaps it is right;

maybe it is God’s will. When all else is removed;

when what remains of Christianity

is love, bleeding and incarnate,

then we might be said to have arrived

at the gates of the kingdom,

and we should have cause to rejoice.

Ken Rookes 2024

Soft and cloying

 

2000 years

transmuting

into a religion of comfortable raised hands

and reassurance that I,

out of all humanity,

(you too, of course);

have a reserved place

in some imagined paradise.

Soft and cloying.

He spoke of sacrifice and love.

Painful, bleeding;

counter-cultural.

Counter-economical,

giving stuff away.

Of taking the rejection

and persecution.

And of dying.

Love for neighbour,

enemies, too.

With a ratbag foreigner

made the hero

of a story about love.

Baptism into death,

and the cup of suffering.

Families divided.

Not much that can be recognised

in this baptised into prosperity

fearful of strangers

it’s all about me

Sunday religion of happiness and satisfaction;

while the planet grows hotter,

the innocent are brutalised,

and the wealthy grow even fatter

and more obscene.

© Ken Rookes 2020

different ways of seeing God

More different ways of seeing God have emerged with Charismatic, Liberation and feminist theology, and Progressive Christianity entertaining a great variety of expressions of faith.

We are nearing an ending in our journey to freedom from the oppression of literalist understandings of the Bible and from the temptation to worship the Bible rather than the God it points us to. We are coming to the time of being asked which God we are going to choose to follow and worship in the land we are entering, a land of internet and as yet undreamed of scientific discoveries, of healing and health. Tickle points out that in each of these major new things, some old stuff gets thrown away but much is kept, maybe as it is or maybe in an adapted form. It may take many decades for this process. Will God love you less for one decision or another? If you choose to stay worshipping the written word rather than the more dangerous way of following the Word made flesh in Jesus will it matter? It is up to you to decide.

The message of the Gospel reading for today is about being readying ourselves, about being prepared for what is ahead. We, as Christian people, as a nation, as a civilisation, are in a time of turmoil between what was and what will be. We can learn from past times of upheaval that there will be a time of relatively settled peace in years to come.

The young women who were invited to be bridesmaids would have known what preparation was needed for the role. Their lamps needed to be full of oil if they were going to be able to fully participate in the celebrations ahead. We are invited to continue the journey under God’s leadership. What preparation can we do to ensure we are ready for what is ahead? While we may be leaving behind Biblical literalism, I believe every member ministry is becoming more important.

Some suggest that it is the oil of God’s goodness with which our lamps need to be filled. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was shown God’s goodness which surely includes justice, mercy and love. Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic put it that we have “not been created for small things.” May God help us discern which God will bring us renewed freedom in the Emerging Way.

Rev Julianne Parker

(for full sermon see sermons page)

all people are God's body

What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely. It [Christianity] proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.
-Sara Miles
Take This Bread: The spiritual memoir of a twenty-first century Christian (book)

Comfortable religion