FORGET CHRISTIANTY, learn Christ

The word Christianity doesn’t appear once in the New Testament. Why not?

It almost seems we shouldn’t even be Christians, since that’s an unimportant word in the New Testament. It appears only three times.

We should be disciples, because that word, meaning a student, learner, follower in the way, appears 261 times.

When his followers found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him: "Rabbi, when did you get here?"

“At sunrise”, or “just after lunch” we might expect him to reply.

Not Jesus.

Why give a straight answer to a straight question about the timing of a ferry ride when you can say something really odd like:

"You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves.

“Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life."

If our life is not about literal bread, we still don’t get it. UK obesity is expected to have increased 50% by 2015.

Jesus has said: “Man cannot live by bread alone” and: “it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven”.

But according to the US food and agriculture organization, there are currently 800 million undernourished people and one billion obese people.

There are well over two billion Christians in the world, but the top one per cent of the adult population owns 40% of the wealth, while 50% of us own just one per cent of the world's wealth. 30% of us try to survive on less than the equivalent of 60p a day, while the phenomenon of super rich elites is increasing in the new and upcoming powers. In the West we are discussing living on the Moon and Mars but we don’t yet know how to live on the Earth.

So when Jesus says: “I am the true bread” it’s not the metaphorical bread of our free market capitalism.

Jesus isn’t even talking about the manna of the Old Testament, which appeared each morning as the dew evaporated. But that would be closer to the truth.

They didn’t know what manna was or where it came from. If anyone tried to hoard or keep it overnight, it went mouldy and revolting, rather like our world economic situation. In the West we regard a crisis as moving from obscene wealth to extreme wealth.

The miracle of life isn’t grasped but received, accepted. Jesus, like the very gift of life, our life, is to be used today, not exploited and amassed and hoarded.

But our obsession with wealth wipes out three animal or plant species every hour of every day.

Use life wisely or lose it altogether, God may be saying.

Jesus’ use it or lose it cannot be kept by for a rainy day, when we decide he will be useful.

He comes to us today or not at all, and facing our own mortality could teach us this.

But like the people in John 6, we ask: "What must we do to do the works God requires?" Jesus answers: "The work of God is this: believe in the one he has sent."

Is that it? It just all seems too easy. Surely the point is to achieve things, not let God do his work through us, in a living trust, releasing us from the narrative of attainment targets, policies regulations and post-mortem analysis.

But Jesus describes himself as "living bread", which reinforces the point. Bread is no use sitting on the baker’s shelf. To be part of us, to give us strength and grace and wisdom it has to be digested and made part of us and lived.

Christ is no use sitting on a mountain, on the page of the Bible, or on an altar.

That’s dead bread. Dead wisdom.

Living bread and living wisdom gets taken into our lives to make a difference to other people in the outside world.

Jesus declares, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty,” and this may be an illusion to a very contrary statement in Jewish literature, in the book of Sirach, 24:21, when Wisdom is speaking.

She says that her memory and possession is so sweet that: “those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more.”

Jesus on the other hand is wisdom personified, embodied and lived out, and this does satisfy us.

Look at our faces in the average street, any day of the week. Human beings are dis-satisfied.

Dis-satisfied because we work for the things of this world which run down, break down, rust away, crumble, corrode and die. None of us could make a loaf of bread if God was not first making all of nature.

Our daily bread is a gift. Sunshine, rain, good soil, the atmosphere which allows miracle to happen. Our daily needs provided, which is why we say: “Our Father.. Give us this day, or daily bread”. What we don’t say is: “Our Father.. we earn your daily bread for you by charging the going rate.”

So I invite you to think of a challenge you face, right now, before reading on.

Feeding the multitude is one of many challenges for Jesus. It looks like there are no resources as he faces feeding the multitude, but the first thing he does is to acknowledge what he already has.

In the New Testament, the first thing he does, before breaking those loaves, is to give his thanks, his thanks to the Father, for what he already has, just a few loaves.

This attitude of gratitude could be ours, the acknowledgement that life is an unlimited gift from God.

Our very selves are a gift.

But how far are the British from this giftedness.

The British are among the biggest borrowers in the world, personal debt twice as high as any other European.

Genuine happiness is in the giftedness of everything in us and around us.

Our need to: “put the bread on the table”, might be better put in the context of this beautiful prayer:

Place your burden at the feet of the Lord of the Universe, who accomplishes everything. Remain, all the time, steadfast in the heart of the transcendental absolute. God is Love. God knows the past, present and future. He will determine the future for you, and accomplish the work. What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry, abide in the heart. Surrender all your acts to the divine.

Remember that in the New Testament Jesus liked to withdraw to mountains by himself, so perhaps a remote mountain Kingdom still has something to teach the rest of civilisation.

While we pursue Gross National Product by focusing on the material value of goods and services and output and ignoring environmental damage and human discontent, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan’s official policy is to measure Gross National Happiness, which includes spiritual cultural and environmental well-being.

True bread transforms the pattern of this world, it is not conformed to it.

“Bread": is one of many "I am" sayings of Jesus.
I am the vine, the light, resurrection,
way, shepherd, truth, door, life.



These are about guidance, protection, sustenance, renewal, and perspective.

The letter to the Ephesians speaks of ‘Learning Christ’.
Christianity, on the other hand, that is a word that doesn’t even appear in the New Testament.

FEEL MY WRONGTEOUS ANGER

What can Jesus mean when he says that if we are angry with our brother and sister, we will be liable to judgement?
And that if we insult a brother or sister, we will be liable to the council and the hell of fire?

In 2008, a day after his 16th birthday, Jimmy Mizen went to buy his first lottery ticket. Then, along with his brother, he
entered a bakery shop in south east London, so that his brother could buy a sausage roll. He never left the shop.

They had fallen into an argument with an angry 19 year-old, and Jimmy was attacked, wounded in the neck, and was soon bleeding to death.

Remarkably, his Catholic mother was later saying that when people asked why she was not angry about his death, she answered that it was anger which had killed Jimmy in the first place.

"There is too much anger in the world," she added.

"I could be angry now, but what's going to happen? It's going to make me much more difficult to live with, and my family need
me.

"And it's not going to bring Jimmy back."

"But we didn't get here overnight," the family went on, referring to street violence.

This problem is the result of 20 to 30 years of the way society has been living, but we can still change it."

Presuming Mrs Mizen wasn't still in shock, these remarkable words, made 2,000 years after Jesus said them, suggest
that a love which is merely the opposite of anger is a very partial love.

A God of love which is merely the opposite of a God of wrath, is presumably just as partial.

So what strikes me is the way Jesus makes no allowance for justified or righteous anger, but describes anger as a problem
making us liable to judgement.

Even anger towards the devil is not allowed by Jesus. Does this present us with a decision to make between
Jesus' recommendations about anger, and those of Judeo-Christian scribes both before and after Jesus?

And if it does, and we are to chose the tradition or the book over Jesus, are we, like the Pharisees, replacing relationships with rules?

Because Jesus is emphasising relationships for us when he says that if we are offering our gift to the altar, and we remember
that our brother or sister has something against us, then we are to leave our gift and first be reconciled with them before
offering it.

The saviour emphasises the importance of relationships over ritual. He tries to shift our attention away from the outward act and places it firmly on the inward state.

Because it is so easy to spot faults in another person, and so hard to be aware of the person who is doing the fault spotting.

Jesus urges us to come to terms with accusers on the way to court. Perhaps he knows the effects on society of attempting to solve differences with a conflict, however civilised. Or perhaps Jesus is urging us to go beyond our own little concerns and body and see the bigger picture, God's perspective.

Once we focus on inward states, there may be no end to it.

The beautiful thing about Jesus is that he doesn't seem to think he is any better than the sinners - rather, this is what others think of him. So does he live on in his followers?

Barking mad and loving it, my dear St Dawkins

Tommy has just got back from the beach.

“Were there any other children there?” asked his Mum?

“Yes.” said Tommy.

“Boys or Girls?”

“How should I know? They didn’t have any clothes on!”

Tommy sees only what he is trained to see.

The television-watching children of a man who wanted to foster the love of music in them were bought a piano. When he got home, he found them looking for the plug. People see what they want to see.

Herod was no different. A client king of the Roman Empire, he knew John the Baptist was a righteous and holy-man with an unusual message, but he saw only a threat.

The Jewish historian Josephus corroborates this in his Antiquities. Josephus describes how Herod knew people were massing around John the Baptist, greatly moved by John’s words, exhorting them to virtue, to justice, and to reverence for God.

He feared that such a strong influence over the people might lead to a revolt, and had John killed.

Mark’s Gospel puts John’s execution down to a bizarre request by Herod’s scheming wife Herodias at a family banquet. Bur both authors agree, John communicated an authentic experience of God.

Herod killed him but he couldn’t kill him off. Later on, according to Mark 6:14, when Herod heard what Jesus was doing, he was unsettled, haunted by the thought that John had been resurrected.

The God experience was living on.

For a King with a guilty conscience, here was a greater presence. Unable to risk the insecurity this experience entailed, Herod had beheaded John, and what he was intrigued by was now returning.

And how different are we? Do we want someone else to do our questing and questioning and struggling and thinking and praying and faith sharing, while we look on from a safe distance like the husband, who, after 30 years of watching television, says to his wife:

“Let’s do something really exciting tonight.”

Instantly this conjures up visions for her of an all night trip into the heart of the unexplored city, maybe galleries and nightclubs, and maybe a river trip, a hotel, or even a flight. Who knows?

“Great, she says!” “What shall we do?”, and eagerly awaits his response.

“Well……. we could swap chairs.”

This presence we don’t control, we try to tame or ignore.

Herod couldn’t be sure that his attempt to kill off the experience of God in John the Baptist would work, because trust in God is never final or certain, neat, safe or controllable. It seeks and moves and asks and explores. It opens itself and finds itself beyond its comfort zone, entering the uncertainty of a living faith outside the security of a dead religion.

In other words, we can’t put God into our box.

It’s worth remembering this when we want to tame God and make God understandable for our own purposes, treating God like our ideology, or our errand boy, or even an old lady who needs helping across the road.

God transcends us, banking up on all sides.

I wonder how often we trust God?

I was re-accquainted with an old friend recently. I found myself discussing faith with her. She said to me: “OK, so I’m prepared to accept there was someone called Jesus, and he was good to people.

“And let’s just imagine,” she added, “just for the sake of the discussion, that I am also prepared to accept that Jesus came back from the dead - because I won’t say anything is impossible.”

Modern physics suggests matter is energy, so why should it be? But that wasn’t her point anyway, so I waited for her to get to it.

“Even if Jesus did come back from the dead,” she finished off: “then, so what? What does it mean?”

Like anything else in life, in order to ring true, faith has to have a bearing on our experience. If it doesn’t, it is irrelevant.

I take seriously the perception of religion given out on television, because it reaches hearts and minds and it’s the only theology some people ever get, if you can call it theology.

So inevitably I end up watching people like Richard Dawkins, who was recently theologizing on Channel 4. In his own words then, he says this:

“According to scientific views of pre-history, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place … An awkward fact, which undermines the premise of St Paul’s whole sado-masochistic theory. Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic wasn’t it? Symbolic? So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual. Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad.”

Powerful stuff, but what St Richard doesn’t appreciate, if you’ll forgive me canonizing him, is that Jesus doesn’t have to mean to Saints you and I what Jesus meant to St Paul or St Augustine.

Because a living faith has never been a pinned down set of time bound ancient propositions received on authority, it is a personal encounter with a timeless God, here and now.

In the spiritual life, letting someone else do our thinking and questing and sharing for us is like being thirsty and asking someone to drink for us.

Anglican Bishop Hugh Montefiore, who died four years ago, was brought up in a Jewish family, but when he was 16, he was sitting in his study when he saw an apparition of Jesus saying: "Follow me." He converted. Experience is a basic truth. It can’t be disputed, and it should be shared.

I remember reading the entire New Testament for the first time whilst recovering on a train. Christ seemed to leap off the page and join me in the carriage.

I remember driving home from a hospital visit where someone was dying, and feeling shot through with God’s beyondness connecting people.

I remember sitting against a gatepost in Herefordshire, and suddenly had an awareness at a sub-atomic level. The narrative of 'I' had gone, and with it all sense of separateness. It was an experience of the dissolution of the whole ego construct and the body, which St Paul may have described as: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’.

The point is not me here, but that narratives and experiences are basic truths we should be sharing by letting our trust in God gently enter the ebb and flow of our everyday lives and conversations.

It’s not easy I know, and I can understand and sympathise with Richard Dawkins. “The Old Testament,” he says, “is the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” he says. “Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide.” But there were no Richard Dawkins figures when the Old Testament was written. The question in those days wasn’t: “How can you believe in God?” but: “How can you believe in that God?” The ancient world had so many Gods that tribalistic primitive images of God were inevitable. But when he reveals himself to people, God has got to work with what is there, and progress to something truer.

God has to be allowed to purify our ideas about God.

In an unstable world with freedom to evolve and grow, things are unpredictable enough to go belly up. So a God who enters this suffering and goes beyond it and redeems it is a God worth keeping.

This is the God in the man Jesus, which Pilate’s authority tried to kill off, just as Herod’s authority tried to kill off God in John the Baptist, so we need to be careful where we place authority today.

Take for example the view that there is nothing to life but solid mechanical physical matter, and our consciousness is accidentally dependent upon it. This popular science is unsupported by evidence. It is untested dogma, and the belief that mind is solid physical matter leads to another dogma that we are born for no reason and extinguished for no reason.

That is mindless science, while mindless religion, on the other hand can lead to idolatry. Our word idolatry comes from the Greek word eidolo-latria, which means image-worship, and the images in our minds are far more powerful than any statue or graven image, so I suggest we stop worshipping ideas about God, and start worshipping God.

There is a well-worn joke about God being a builder. God is a builder, the joke goes, because God is coming back, but no-one ever knows when.

The joke is on us until we stop waiting for God to show up in the future. Let us let God be God and be here and now.

WATCH OUT FOR THAT DITCH...

"Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?” says the parable.

A blind priest I know recently recalled how he was told that this parable was offensive to blind people. But he just finds it funny.

You don’t have to miss the point, even though it is embedded in a fairly ancient cultural context.

Religious revelations are always time bound, but Jesus parables ring eternally true.

Take this one, for example: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

If we have our attention on the faults of others to the exclusion of our own weaknesses, then even with the best possible motives, we will be unable to help anyone into the clear.

In the spiritual life, it’s like a man whose arm is on fire. A second man spots him, and sees the urgent need to put out the fire, but rushes to the hosepipe without being aware it is connected to the petrol pump. Both of them will start to burn.

It takes proper awareness to be a positive influence in any situation, because whichever situation you enter is changed by the very fact that you have entered it. You don’t just observe, you participate. And wherever you go, there you are, taking the weather along with you as you go.

So we need to be aware of our own prejudices and emotions in the sacrament of the present moment. They affect the way we see things. People say 'Love is blind', but they are talking about human emotional attachment. Spiritual love is actually very clear sighted, because it is aware of its own emotions and attachments, rather than being controlled by them.

Jesus is open to what is there, and this encourages an open response, while blind prejudice encourages more of the same.

And how often do we set out to find whatever confirms our own prejudice, and then try to convince ourselves that we are discovering some objective truth?

Whether it is rushing into a pre-emptive war because we have projected our own fears outwards, or finding faults in our business competitors because we are insecure about ourselves, or failing to be compassionate with our fellow human because their neurosis and misery affects us.

We needn’t pretend, or shut ourselves away. But be aware.

With these parables, Jesus is trying to tell us that in the spiritual life, the attitude that: “I am OK only when the world around me is OK” simply won’t do. With that attitude, I won’t be OK, and nor will those around me.

But if our response is clear sighted, then it will also be accurate, and the world can be transformed, not because we absolutely must be there for people out of some compulsion that we feel, but because we are capable of being there for people without leading them into all our own ditches.

The rest is all detail.