My sermon yesterday at Moortown Baptist Church, Leeds, finished with this from Curtis Freeman's wonderful book, Undomesticated Dissent (Baylor, 2017).
For the heirs of dissenting Christianity to contribute
to the building of a just and good society in the world today,
it will demand fostering conscience and recovering convictions,
but it will also depend on cultivating communities of resistance.
Such communities grasp that seeing the world apocalyptically
is not about predicting the future
but about living in the light of a revelation
that causes the world they inhabit to appear in an entirely new way.
They promote habits of an imagination
that equips members with the capacity to see the world
through the lens of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
They read history backwards, seeing their own lives
retrospectively in continuity with the story of Israel’s God
And God’s servant Jesus.
They understand God’s disruptive action in Christ
not as a future event
but as a reality that is always present and new.
or accommodate to institutional structures of secularity
but seek a good life together than participates in
the new creation and exemplifies what God in Christ intends for all humanity.
They recognise that they do not bring God’s reign in history
but reach out to meet the new world that is on its way.
They do not simply mirror the secular politics of left and right
but seek to practice the politics of Jesus
though forgiveness and friendship.
They refuse to regard distinctions of race, class, gender, or sexuality
as determinative of standing in society
but see only one new humanity in Christ.
They seek the peace of the earthly city,
telling the truth about what they see
and advocating for the healing of its brokenness,
but they recognise that their citizenship is in heaven.
They see themselves as pilgrims in a secular age,
answerable only to the law of another city
toward which they journey by faith
on the wings of the love of God and neighbour.
Curtis will be in the UK in March talking about his book in London (12 Mar, Wesley's Chapel) and Oxford (8 Mar, 7.30pm, Regent's Park College).
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