andygoodliff

ADVENT Journey #1 Waiting

Last night at the first advent journey evening I was speaking about how advent is a time to slow down life, maybe even put it on pause, instead of the usual fast-forward pace that it normally operates at. The irony being that I don't feel like I've stopped - or paused - in ages. I have a full plate at the moment, part of that is my doing, the other part being the life of a teacher (and only a part-time one at that!).  Teaching is all consuming, there is always another lesson to plan, book to mark, parent to see, scheme of work to write, staff meeting to go to. Sometimes I wonder if I could just pack it all in, not because I don't like teaching (although there are those days), but because it feels like the rest of life gets squeezed. There's always something I want to be doing. Hopefully I can create or find some space through advent to wait and rest. Church meeting tonight with children and communion, problem of space, and church plant all on the agenda, so should be fun.

blogging through advent

I'm running an advent blog with my friend ashley over at our blog hopeful imagination. We've got a great group of bloggers together, including brodie, yasmin, jason (aka gower street), maggi, laurence (aka post liberal) as well as some others whose blogs are new to me and some friends and family in steve, helen and miriam. I'm really looking forward to it, because it's such a diverse group of people. It all starts tomorrow monday, so do check it out.

Alongside the blog, I"m doing 4 monday evenings where I'm creating an advent space (see earlier post here), which hopefully will come together. I've been spending some of this week gathering together some advent ideas.

christian ethics, the church and postmodernism

Christian ethics claims a foundation and confidence in our identity as Christians and our ability to act ethically. People can find a foundation in the church and a confidence in the church’s story, i.e., the story of Christ. This is a story shared by those in Christ, that is, through baptism we become part of the church community. Therefore, instead of the moral self being a self without a foundation, Christian ethics argues the self has a foundation in Christ – the person and story of Christ, by means of the Spirit, shapes our morality and our freedom. In the midst of the noise of postmodern ethics, Christian ethics claims the sufficiency of the Spirit and the distinctiveness of the church community as the means to which Christians can maintain faithfulness to their story in Christ. The Christian church in combating postmodernism must resist trying to do postmodern Christianity, (if such a thing could exist) that is, to be held captive to a false story or stories; rather, like Paul to the Corinthians, we must hold tightly to the fact that the church is the antithesis to the world, and in our case, postmodernism, so that it might be a better witness of God's salvation to the world. As Hauerwas repeatedly says, ‘the church serves the world by being the church,’ by which he means, the church is not called to be a micro-version of postmodern culture, but is called to be the church, the sign and agent of God’s kingdom. The danger in the church is we forget that our role is not to make Christianity acceptable to the world, but to build the church. This inevitably means Christian ethics will come into conflict with postmodern ethics and if doesn't we've gone wrong somewhere.

10 Challenges for this Christmas

As people start shopping and planning Christmas about this time ... I thought I'd post this now, earlier than perhaps I would like ...

1) Having a spending limit per person (say £20) and give any extra money you would always spend to Tearfund or such like
2) Give friends and family an unusual gift from oxfam unwrapped
3) Control the amount of time you watch television
4) Attend christmas eve midnight communion - usually the best service during the christmas season
5) Enjoy food that is fairtrade where ever possible or locally grown (remember that where the average weekly food budget in the UK is £155.54, in Chad it is £11.27)
6) Invite someone to share Christmas with you
7) Read the Christmas stories (Matt 1:18-2:23; Luke 1:5-2:49) together and listen
8)  Get an credit card from an ethically-minded bank like the coperative bank and support a charity like Tearfund (and cancel all your other credit cards)
9) Don't get drunk on christmas eve (or christmas day or boxing day)
10) Remember Jesus is for christmas, not just for life

Children, Church and the Family: some reflections

Has the family abdicated its role in nurturing faith in their children to the church children or youth worker? What kinds of things does the family do together as an expression of their faith? Is God something only talked about on a Sunday in 'sunday school' or youth group or does talk of God and experience of God find itself into our homes? Has our faith become so privatized that we even keep it from our children? Or is it something open and shared with them? For those who are Baptists, how seriously do we take or live out the promises we made when our child/ren were dedicated?

Hannah and I are close friends of a fantastic family who live out their faith as a family together. Talking about God, praying to God, reading scripture is not unnatural in their house. The children - ages 6, 3, and nearly 2 -  know God. This family also have loose boundaries, by which I mean, they welcome others to share in their lives - family is important, but not at the exclusion of others. They practise the theological belief that the church is God's family, which transcends biology and where you live, to recognise all who live in Christ. There should be a tension between spending time with our family and recognising that our family first is the church, which means no one should be alone in the church - everyone is part of the family.

The church should be a place where God's family is together, too often we are pulled apart into our respective age groups and so our faith is never experienced or proclaimed together. Of course, there are important reasons why this is so, but I wonder - more than wonder, I believe - that perceived practical reasons should not replace or usurp more theological ones.

Children are going to grow in faith not 1-hour on a sunday morning with their friends, it is not enough to root God's story in their lives. The 1-hour on a sunday morning is not unimportant, it's vital, but it can't be what we sometimes wish or want it to be. Children are going to grow in faith when they see that following God and living the Christian story (which means first knowing it) is something public, wholistic and costly. It's something that as a family shapes family life and goes beyond mother, father, daughter, son, brother and sister to that which we call the church.

The Constant Gardner

We went a saw The Constant Gardner last night. I read the book by John Le Carre on which its based a few years back. This is an excellent film (based on a brilliant book) - well acted, well directed, well scripted and a cut above the usual hollywood fare.

Remembrance Sunday

Earlier this year I found a sermon by Sam Wells called Three kinds of sacrifice, preached at St. Mark's, the church where he was priest-in-charge, on Remembrance Sunday 2004. (Sam Wells is now Dean of Duke Chapel at Duke University.) His words are still powerful this year:

When we gather together to remember those that have died in war, we share stories and strive to make meanings. And certain words recur--words like noble, and honour, and freedom, and dignity. But perhaps the most common word of all is a religious one: sacrifice. I want to reflect briefly on three kinds of sacrifice in our minds today.

The first is the sacrifice of the unwillingness to kill. When we send soldiers to war we ask them to overturn everything we teach them about life ...

...  And this is the second sacrifice we expect of our soldiers. We expect them to enter a level of experience that separates them from community, to enter a world of silence, because nobody that hasn't had to make that sacrifice really understands. Comrades in arms have a level of intimacy that is enhanced by the sense of suffering for the pursuit of a higher good. Soldiers often form bonds with one another that are stronger than the bonds they have with their wives. And Remembrance Sunday is a recognition of the dignity of this intimacy, but also of its cost. For it is not just the fallen we remember today: it is those whose lives were never the same again--soldiers, families and friends. We hear the echo of the veteran's words 'nobody understood'. Remembrance Sunday is a small gesture to say, 'at least we are trying'. Our silence is a silence of gratitude and an effort to understand.

... But there is a third sacrifice we recall today. And that is the sacrifice of the cross. Jesus went to the cross as one who knew that his embodiment of God's never-ending love meant he was going to have to face death. But the whole shape of the Old and New Testaments presents Jesus' sacrifice as only making sense as the last sacrifice, the one that finally took away sin and inaugurated the peaceful flourishing of all creation in God's company. The sacrifice of the Son of God is the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. So the war to end all wars was not the First World War: it was the cross. The good news of the cross is fundamentally that the war is over. When we gather at the altar, when we recall the cross by breaking the bread of Christ's body, when we share the banquet of Christ's resurrection in bread and wine, we celebrate the good news that the war, the real war--against sin, death and the devil--is over.

And that is a truth to die for. But not necessarily a truth to kill for. For how can we share that good news with someone we have killed? And yet, 90 years on from the war to end all wars, 2000 years on from the resurrection that proclaimed the war is over, we are still asking our soldiers to make these awesome sacrifices. And with astonishing courage and dignity, they continue to do so. Sometimes I think if we asked our heavenly Father what was the worst part of the cross he would pause for a long time and say 'the sacrifice of my only Son . . . that was half of it.' And if we waited in a terrible silence and finally found courage to ask "What was the other half?", he would say, "The other half was that 2000 years later, nobody understood."

Advent

Corinne Bailey-Rae

Tomorrow sees the first release from corinne bailey-rae.  Hannah and I saw her at Greenbelt and she was fantastic. A member at Revive Baptist church, Leeds, I first heard her on the 'revive' albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. She has a breath-taking voice and the album will be worth waiting for.

Household Codes cont ...

Google print is absolutely excellent. It's allowed to read almost every book which writes about household codes. It's interesting the variety of opinion. Most scholars think Paul (or whoever wrote Colossians) has borrowed the code from the social morality of Graeco-Roman culture, but there is huge divided opinion other whether Paul has substantially altered them or actually  ended up merely given them a Christian endorsement. The use of the phrase 'in the Lord'  (18, 20, 22) with reference to the behaviour of wives, children and slaves (notably the phrase is not used when talking about husbands, fathers and masters) feels theologically-lite and does not reflect the depth of argument Paul elsewhere employs.  If Paul did write Colossians you wonder how committed he is at this point to what he is saying.