Pentecost: Fire lights on Babel Tower

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...

What emerges from Acts 2 is the original Multinational — founded on absolute Equality, universal in scope, affirming particularity, non-Imperialistic (but welcoming to Roman tourists like anyone else), minimally and functionally hierarchical but inwardly driven by the Spirit. What’s wrong with that?

Sadly this simple vision conflicts with some dirty little habits:

• Inequality
  usually expressed as the feeling of entitlement you find in racists, bigots and sexual predators of all stripes, mild and strong, ancient and modern. It’s all about power, not sex.
• Narrow Tribalism
  even the corruption of the Pentecostal Community into a tribe. The idea was that all instincts of particularity that used to express themselves over and against each other should become a symphony of disparates. The Church’s calling was to transcend tribalism, not become a specialist faith group that revels in its habits and routines and, literally, idolises its particularity.
• Homogenisation
  because birds of a feather flock together. The herd instinct turns in on itself and opts for safety in numbers, the tyranny of the tidy-minded, groupthink and doubletalk. The Institution takes itself far to seriously. The Sprit is subjected to the letter of the law, bureaucratised and neutered

Perhaps the big crises the Church faces are not intractable issues in themselves, but the inevitable result of losing touch with its roots. The outward and inward predicaments the Church faces often draw out instinctive pragmatic love, especially at street level. Difference is no more than an invitation to love even enemies. 

Sadly, the same predicaments also produce flashes of inequality, bigotry and discrimination, imperialism, institutional inertia, complacency and self-obsession. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees says Jesus. “Be watchful of yourselves, whitewashed tombs, brood of vipers!”

We can't fix the problems beyond us, but we can attend to the rot within us and among us. Then, in the light of such repentance, we could look outward in the light of all we had learnt and, in Wendell Berry’s unforgettable phrase, Practice Resurrection. Who knows? Engaging and transformative vision could go viral as it did on the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. 

Starting here. Couldn’t it?

Revelation: Saving Faith

Speaking on Newsnight last week, John Broadhurst suggested that current disputations among Christians are really all about revelation, and I think he has a very useful point. Rosie Harper picked it up on the programme by pointing out that “Revelation is something which evolves; tradition grows in response to the work of the Holy Spirit.”

For some people, revelation is the process of handing down a fixed corpus of doctrine, a wrapped package that we label “the faith once delivered to the saints.” Faith is the work of protecting, propogating and defending that deposit against all comers. That’s where Saul started out, a Pharisee of the pharisees, zealous in his defence of the faith in which he had been brought up, a persecutor and zealot.

Then Saul encountered Jesus on the Damascus Road, and even though some of the rags and cultural assumptions of a persecuting zealot clung to him thereafter, the whole course of his life was changed. Faith was not slavishly adhering to works of the law, but exhibiting the courage, vision and hope of Abraham whose faith was accounted to him as righteousness. Once someone was in Christ they could not simply carry on using the old absolutist auto-pilot. They were subject to the Spirit who gives life, not the letter of the law that kills.

For Paul the Apostle, the faith once delivered to the saints is not an ideology but life in the Spirit by grace through faith, a revolutionary process of renewal by the Spirit. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counted for anything but grace working through faith, a new creation, to incorporate someone in Christ. This is the work of the Spirit, not human agency. In this way of looking at things Revelation is a dynamic personal process, not an instutional or ideological fix.

This renewal process didn’t nullify the law, but it did set it in a radical new perspective in a way that painfully exposed its limitations. The law was good as far as it went, but Grace accomplished what the law, weakened by sin, never could — the constitution of a new humanity in Christ where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.

Looking back at the law which had been his everything, Paul did not rubbish the concerns of those who stood where he had been, hanging onto various kinds of legalism, obsessing over meat sacrificed to idols and the like. But still he insisted, the reality of being in Christ transcends all else, and every decision now needs to be interpreted in the light of its over-riding significance.

In this perspective, the disputes that arise between Christians are a means of proving the genuineness of their convictions. Factionalism is part of human nature, but if indulged, it becomes Cancer in the body of Christ which needs to be watched and stamped on hard. Therefore erecting any Apostle, even Cephas or Appollos, into a rallying point for intra-Church exclusivism or disunity is profoundly abusive, however well-intentioned.

The challenge is to incorporate the vision of Pauline Christianity in our consciousness consistently as a way of life, and not to produce a new Pharisaism. Make no mistake, this was the big issue for early Christians, and concern about it runs through pretty much every page of the Epistles. Had the broader transformative Pauline vision not won through, the Church would almost certainly have survived only as a minor Jewish sect. The transformative stuff comes from the Spirit, and against its justice there can be no law.

Confronted with causes that divide people today, as then, what we need to do is reflect on the realities of the context in which God has set us, the mystery of Christ and the call of the Spirit, and then go figure.

The radical willingness to do this is saving faith, and by its fruits the world shall know Christ for who he is.

Gary Haugen — Micah 6 Man

The person I am most glad to have encountered at this Leadership Summit has been Gary Haugen — lawyer, genocide investigator in Rwanda, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. Quite simply, Gary is one of the most impressive and inspiring people I’ve ever met in my life, lawyer or not... his great priorities are Micah 6 — to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

Martin Luther King used to say that the first claim of love is justice. We can only exert leadership that matters if we apply ourselves wholehartedly to issues that matter to God. Pharisees were well-briefed Biblicists. They failed because they tried to lead people into priorities which mattered more to them than to God.

Why should the man shot artbitrarily by police on the streets of Kenya, or the child prostitute in India, believe that God is good and loves the world? What is God’s plan to make his word believable? Incredibly, we are! IJM deploys skilled local people to contest slavery, trafficking, exploitation and violence around the world. It’s dangerous work, but infinitely rewarding. It’s grounded in prayer, and requires undertaking major risks daily.

Mr Haugen talked of a childhood trip up a mountain — a climb he missed, because he chickened out and stayed in the visitor centre, then tried to kid everyone else it was as good as the real thing. Is our Christian commitment about endeavouring the harder climb, or just looking at pictures down in the visitor centre?

If we want to grow in authentic faith, we need to exercise it about the things that matter, not trivial pursuits and in-house niceties.