Healthy living blog V


How do we sift what's true out of what's new? 

I suppose by experience first of all. This works for individuals as for example my own sifting of modern technology to gather its help in serving to communicate the truth of Christ through Twitter and Facebook.

 How does the Church sift what's true out of what's new? I think of those pushing in my own Church for homosexual marriage. We need the Holy Spirit to guide us to a common mind so together we discern proposed changes as sound or false development.

The Reformation thinker Erasmus warned that if we call new things learned about the world heresy that would be to imply orthodox belief is held in ignorance!

 Traditional faith needs stating afresh in every generation since God wants learning - but re-stating isn't re-placing!

 The pace of change and obsession with novelty is such that Christianity is struggling to be heard at present.

 We urgently need to recover trust and collaboration between the main blocks of the Church so that together we can authorise the essential elements of our creed over against secondary aspects.

To sift what's true out of what's new you need to know what you're about truth-wise. Until our Churches regain clarity about our common faith our capacity to deal with a fast moving world will be insufficient. 

Lord send your Spirit to make your people one and equip us to speak your eternal truth with one voice to a confused and fast-changing world.

Do you still read from left to right or do you treat book pages like web pages and look all over to glean what you can? 

Internet use is making enormous impact on human skills - and on relationships too. Saying to people ‘See you on Facebook’ rather than down the pub shows you're living differently. 

Virtual contact may serve human contact it's no substitute. I picked up these thoughts reading a book called 'The Scent of Lemons' by a priest called Jonah Lynch. The book title applauds the touch, scent and taste of lemons, three senses that can't yet be transmitted across the internet. 

Fr Lynch tells how his attempt to care for lemon trees brought to light an impatience bred from his involvement in the speedy processes of electronic technology. That involvement builds us as hunters searching for data but weakens the patient and deep attention required to do things like farming.

The capacity to give focussed attention is a vital tool of the human spirit. The weakening of that capacity among internet users is of great concern.

 Writing positively Lynch celebrates the way his missionary order now has effortless international conferences on the internet. So much good comes from the internet alongside its negatives. Twitter and Facebook are fast moving but they’re also platforms to share Christ’s timeless truth. 

Jonah Lynch’s book left me feeling more thought and sharing of good practice is needed on best use of the Internet. We need wisdom and careful action to master technology before it masters us. 

I once visited a brilliant novelist with a brain tumour in hospital. As we got talking he said early on I should watch my step as he wasn't a believer.  It happened I'd just read Mother Teresa's Autobiography which gave extensive cover to her doubts. (Yes - you can be a great believer and still have doubts). Anyway I mentioned he wasn't alone in his questioning - even the holy nun had doubts - and as we talked a doctor walking by and stopped in his tracks. 'Mother Teresa', he said. 'I knew her personally. I trained with her medical team in Calcutta'. Then, to our amazement he unbuttoned his shirt and showed us a holy medal she'd given him. We both touched it.

 As the doctor passed on I asked my friend if he wanted me to say a prayer for him and, atheist that he was, he readily agreed!

 It was pure serendipity, which means a happy coincidence - the mention of Mother Teresa bringing us a doctor's advice that led us to pray together!  I never met the man again but sense that three way meeting of the doctor, he and I went to four. I mean, just like the way Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego in the fiery furnace of Daniel Chapter 3 were seen to be four because Christ came by them. That sight changed the heart of King Nebuchadnezzar and I pray the same for the novelist I met, the doctor met and, I believe, Jesus met. Lord Jesus may this day bring us happy surprises like this. Amen. 

According to legend when they beheaded St Edmund for not renouncing Christ they threw his head into the forest. It was found later on by friends who followed the cries of a wolf calling, 'Hic, hic, hic' which translating from Latin means 'Here, here, here'. 

It's a good story, and a parable as well, for there are many issues around I'd like supernatural help to address and hear an 'eureka' - to switch my Classical languages - let alone a 'Hic, hic, hic'.

 Take the CoronaVirus epidemic, the carnage in the Middle East or, nearer to home the people I come across whose minds are decaying so they no longer know who they are, where they belong or any purpose they have in life.

 Where's my hic, hic, hic - here, here, here's the answer? 

Issues of natural catastrophe, human cruelty and mind decay are no mere hiccups - excuse the pun! They're seriously real, don't go away and make an invisible loving God look metaphysical in a bad sense. In his book 'The Reason for God' the American Christian writer Timothy Keller has these wise words: 'If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn't stopped evil and suffering in the world... you have... a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can't know... you can't have it both ways'.

 I thought ‘hic, hic, hic’ – thanks, Tim, for reminding me to let God be God, to spend less time questioning evil and more time countering it. 

I have never left a plane for earth in a parachute.

 Nevertheless I accept those who stand at plane doors with a parachute on their back can't know for sure their parachute will open.

They can never experience their parachute opening unless they take that extraordinary step out of the plane door into empty space.

The nearest I can think I've ever been to that experience is when I first dived into a swimming pool when I had to put faith in the decelerating power of the water beneath me to ensure I didn't get a big headache!

 Diving, or skydiving, requires what the letter to the Hebrews defines as faith, namely, 'conviction of things unseen' (Hebrews 12:1). The commitment to act as if the invisible God were at hand demonstrates that reality, as surely as parachuting captures the invisible air for deceleration, or diving is slowed by the water under you. 

If you want to find God you have to commit to him. You have to bow down before him in worship, and as you worship you'll engage with him as surely as a diver engages the transparent medium of air or water. 

'The eye of God is over those who fear him' writes the Psalmist (Psalm 33:18). Putting faith in God, respecting his presence through the exercise of your faith, is allied to the experience of his protection. 

The life of faith takes you, as diving does, into a new dimension. Lord, increase our faith, so we can reach beyond the material world into your life, the life of the Spirit which is life to the full! Amen

Do all religions lead to God? 

I often hear it said and want to believe it, but it gets alarm bells ringing inside of me.

People say all religions lead to God to counter those using religion to divide the world through a conviction their brand’s right and all others wrong, but what if that’s the case? My first question to those who say 'all religions lead to God' is 'how do you know so? By whose authority - do you know what God knows?' 

My second would be 'who says religion leads to God anyway'? Jesus Christ showed by his words and sacrificial deeds we humans aren't worthy to enter God's presence since we're sinners and God is holy. If anyone leads us to God it's God himself in so loving the world he gave his Son Jesus for us.

 All of that being said I recognise there’s some holiness in all humans, and therefore in practitioners of every religion, so something of God is to be found outside Christianity. God is clearly bigger than all of us including our religions. Jesus was harsh with nit-picking religious leaders. He all but said to them 'your God is too small'.

 Which brings me to a last question - if 'all religions lead to God' what sort of God would matter to me. Having caught a glimpse of the God and Father of Jesus I have no intention of being sold short on God as less than the good, joyful and loving God I’ve come to know as a Christian - and that would make me look twice at other faiths!



A businessman on a train was preoccupied with reading his paper in peace after a hard day at the office but was disturbed. A young man and two children joined him a few stops into his journey. The children ran up and down the carriage and disturbed everyone. Such was his anger the business man tackled the man about the lack of control of his children. ‘We have just left hospital’ the young man explained. ‘My wife has died suddenly and the children don't know how to react’.

The commuter’s heart melts as he enters a new perspective. His anger turns into compassion as he sees the truth more fully.

 How often we judge without making allowance. The ultimate allowance we make for our neighbour is that, like us, they're destined to die or, as with this young family, to suffer bereavement. It is a truth that should be at the front of our thinking and it kindles compassion.

 None of us knows the hour of our death or that of our neighbour, yet as John Donne says ‘no man is an island... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

 We live for so long in time before we pass into eternity. The word of God invites compassion for all mortal beings so destined.

 

‘As we stand under the sky everything falls into place and one finds his own place in the midst of it all’ wrote Thomas Merton. 

This monk so loved the outdoors he asked for a hermitage in the woods. There in the middle of the 20th century he wrote letters full of spiritual wisdom to people all over the world that are valued and read up to today. 

It’s my own experience too that ‘standing under the sky everything falls into place and I find my own place in the midst of it all’. Is it yours? When you get outdoors and away from it all you feel the immensity of God above and the way he chimes in with the motions inside of you.

 When we go walking in the great outdoors there's a sort of resonance between our inner and outer space.

 Immanuel Kant, the great eighteenth century German philosopher, reflected a lot on our inner capacity for reason and the spiritual realm and how these relate to the outer world of creation. These words of his are carved on his gravestone in Konigsberg:

 'Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe.. the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.' 

This resonance of outer and inner worlds is a pointer to God who’s both over all and yet in all who welcome him.

 To get our inner world straight we sometimes need a walk outdoors, or a look at the stars, so we see God outside of us and re-establish inside of us what's important to him and hence to us.

One Open Day I went into the Treasury building or GOGGS as it’s known. Government Offices Great George Street was built a century ago and has been heavily restored in recent years. The inclusion of eleven light-wells has massively improved this building so vital to our national well being through what goes on in it. Light-wells are unroofed spaces provided within the volume of a large building to allow light and air to reach what would otherwise be a dark, relatively unventilated area. They’re lined with glazed bricks to increase the reflection of sunlight within the space. Light-wells at GOGGS not only save lighting costs at the Treasury. They’ve made for a more pleasant and spacious environment for all who work there on our behalf. As I was thinking about this transformation it occurred to me that the gift of faith operates just like a light well. We lose our roof and welcome the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6b) By the gift of faith we’re drawn up into God’s eternal perspective. The darkened rooms of life are lit up.  We look to the Lord and gain radiance (Psalm 34:5). May such transformation be ours this day from light wells of the Spirit, accessed by faith, that give space and perspective to the dark corridors of our life.

Can the future affect the past? Australian scientists recently passed helium atoms through one or two laser grates. Every time two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, which was random, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The helium particle “knew” whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first. The possible future presence of that second grate was determining the past state of the atom as it passed through the first grate. Whether it continued as a particle or changed into a wave depended on something that might happen in the future. The thought of time running backwards is mind blowing and it’s a pointer to God. As time bound beings we best progress in the light of the eternal destiny God has for us which is the ideal we should grow into. ‘

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ God says through Jeremiah (1:4) To know this, that you come from God, belong to God and go to God, with your  future, present and past all tied together, is the best knowledge of all

. Why not take a moment to ponder where your life is heading and the possibilities of God waiting to be opened up to you as you seek them? 

Lord of time be Lord of my time this day. Place me in situations where I can welcome and be a pointer to the gifts you have up your sleeve for those who keep faith in you. Amen.


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