Over a month since last update:
Sorry, no new posts for a while- I believe I should only blog when I've something worth your reading time.
I've not forgotten this place though- I should post soon.
There will be something of note on the other channel- it gets updated daily.

A guest blogs: today's post is written by Sorrel Wood

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I believe that the statements about God’s character in the bible are true for all time: they were true before creation, they were true when God walked on the earth as a man and they’re true when I’ve missed a lecture, run out of vegetables and lost my coat.

 

The trouble is that the language used to describe God’s character; the similes and metaphors are often specific to the time and place when they were first used.  For example, the Lord is my shepherd, a farmer was sowing seeds, the sheep and goats will be separated speaks to a rural audience.

 

At best such comparisons are hard to understand (I can barely tell the difference between a sheep and a goat) at worst the meaning can be altered. When Jesus first told the story a Samaritan was an outcast, the equivalent of a mudblood whose ancestors had deserted the wizarding world to marry muggles. Now a Samaritan is a polite, listening persona on the end of the phone.

 

I think the place where biblical analogies can be most damaging is when we are told God is our father.  And to people whose experience of earthly fathers is indifference, neglect, or abuse this makes trusting God and believing in his goodness that bit more difficult.

 

Because God isn’t the same as an earthly father and he’s not completely different (in the way a cricket bat and a fruit bat are different) either. He has lots of the qualities fathers do: he teaches you to grow as a Christian by gently placing you in a scary situation, like when my dad taught me to swim by slowly moving backwards in the swimming pool so frustratingly I never quite reached him. But he was always right beside me to pick me up if I had a panic.  And, sixteen years later, he was there to grab the steering wheel if I panicked while learning to drive but he didn’t just drive the car himself because that would have been pointless.

 

God is the ultimate, perfect father you never had. The one who gets the balance between protection and letting you grow up just right. The one who will give you what you need, the one who’s never out when you call him.  Sadly, this means psychologists have a field day with Christianity: our beliefs fill the emotional hole in our psyche. What they miss is the fact that the hole is there in the first place because we were designed to have a relationship with a perfect God.

 

So where does this leave us? How do we delve into the muddle of Ancient Middle-Eastern analogies that is the bible? I suppose it means studying the bible is important, because finding out what life was like in Jesus’ day helps us to understand what he was talking about it.   Luckily, God saw this coming before He’d made the world and gave us the Holy Spirit to, among other things, help read the bible.  Not that I’m good at bible study. I’m hopeless. But I’m trusting in my good and hopeful Dad. 

It has been an interesting few weeks...

A few weeks ago I was sent (to my utmost surprise) an invitation to the Premier Christian Web and Blog Awards. My thoughts on the event I will share in a forthcoming blog (so hang on till then, folks!). Since then I have returned north to Durham, where I'm reading Chemistry. In the last few weeks, in which I've reassuringly found out I shall be without decent access to the net (and therefore no photoblogging) until the end of October, I have had a mad rush of business.

A college rep for this years Best Fund-raising Team (as decided by the Third Sector Awards), the Student Community Volunteering Body and of course the new freshers, I've spent the last while running from one office to another preparing stalls and fund raising events, bodily moving the freshers' (many) possessions into uni, rigging stuff for copious freshers' ents and generally making sure that folks are having a nice time.

Yesterday the Durham Induction program featured pub golf, and a little before this morning I found myself in Europe's second worst (and Durham's finest) nightclub* with sick on my shoes. Sober as a stick I found myself tending a poor fresher who couldn't quite take the alcohol her house mates insisted she drank. Between myself and the handy welfare officer we managed to get her home, get most of the putrid brown mess off her chin, and put her into bed.

It's not really that significant a story in fairness, but the point of this blog isn't to embellish the evils of drinking or the virtue of those who wipe it off their trousers shortly after. When I got in myself a little later I realised the metaphor it was for me and God. Just like patient friend He wipes away the mess from my chin and the dirt in my hair, without casting judgement on my character for how I got here. He perseveres, with more patience than any college parent, focusing his attention not on my indignities or mistakes. The person I mentioned was charming and thankful (if a little uncoordinated), yet I, so often, treat God with the utmost rudeness, impatience and ingratitude, not even aware of the depths of love he needs to persevere with me.

I'm now going to clean my shoes.

*Apparently a recent survey proved the fact. The absolute worst one burnt down soon after).

I'm reading Tearfund's weekly prayer letter, which focusses this week on the Iraq debacle. Since the most recent unilateral action by America and it's puppy more than half a million Iraqis have lost their lives. Reading about this and so many other stories from around the globe, it becomes very tempting to ask the natural question; why doesn't God do anything about it?
A Christian's response might be 'look at the charities acting in the area, the missionaries working in schools and communities trying to rebuild dignity and security... but this seems an inadequate response to all of it. How are people and their relationships going to make any kind of impact on this travesty? Why doesn't God move, old testament style, thunder, hail and lightning?

To be honest, this summer it's a question I've been asking, not in an intellectual thought process way, but a desperate, 'how can my faith be real in the face of this?' kind of way. And I've been asking it very loud.

I was reading the story of Noah's ark; goodness knows why they teach it to children: a boat full of horse dung, one family chosen to be saved because of their righteousness and a lot of water. But look what happens after: Ham disgraces his father in his drunken-ness. Thereafter follows cursing, division and warfare. In that story (whether you believe it actually happened or not) shows that God can intervene, but the problem is people. When the water has dried up, we revert to (rather bad) type.

Further back, there's that mess in the garden with Adam and Eve, then the ruckus with Cain and Abel (one pops the other's clogs in a bout of jealousy). It seems 'the heart is deceitful above all things.' People look into the bible to find out about God, but I think it's got a fair bit to say about people, too.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the same conclusion; the world's problem is that it's keys are in the hands of man. God may, has and will intervene, but we've seen that washing everything away and starting again wont cure our sickness of heart. America tried (ill thought out) divine intervention in Iraq, and found that deposing one dictator wasn't going to change a country (in any real sense above oil supply), because we are all dictated to by our selfish desires, which entice us and drag us off (cue photos of American liberators hooking up prisoners to car batteries).

We don't need an interventionist God to fix our world. We need heart transplants.

Which is why a small band of Jordanian churches struggling in a backwater of Iraq teaching kids their ABCs gives me hope.

When the go-fish homepage tells me gently that it's been "three weeks since last post" I get that niggling feeling that I should post something new again. Which is daft, because there's no point in blogging unless I feel I've learnt a little scrap of knowledge worth sharing, or a pearl to share. Blogging for the sake of it is worse than not blogging at all, it's a waste of all our time. But all the same, I feel the pressure to post something, and it's hard not to post something contrived, some lengthy ramble about obscure theology.

Sermons get written 'because it's Sunday and there needs to be one;' blogs get written 'to keep traffic up.' And the two upshots are that a) the content is bobbins, and b) we tend to over-complicate things. Which is a disease the church knows and loves. Audio Adrenaline came onto Pandora and said it best (as they so often do):

Broken widow
And fatherless child
I've turned my back on you
I missed the point here
I over analysed it
Somewhere I missed the clues

Audio Adrenaline; Are You Ready for Love?

You can go to bible college for three years and miss the point of the good news:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
      because he has anointed me
      to preach good news to the poor.
   He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
      and recovery of sight for the blind,
   to release the oppressed,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.

Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)

Rick Warren, pastor of an American mega-church in his book The Purpose Driven Life recalls how, only after years of leading a church were his eyes opened to the fact that the bible makes 'over 2000 references to the poor and destitute'

What we don't need are more intellectuals expounding spiritual truths hidden in the original greek. Well, not till we've got 'love your neighbour as yourself' down, anyway.

 

Compromise doesn’t really sell, does it? Contention, 'middle ground' and 'compromise agreements' sound like the outcomes of spats between visionary church leaders and their wayward congregations, or makeshift peace agreements between heady leaders. Not the kind of thing you'd want.

I think compromise is way underrated. And I think it is the life blood of successful communities. People just don’t think the same, and if you think you don’t have differing opinion in your community, then it's because you scared people into running or silence. Compromise is everything.

Balance between the visionaries who see the future, who want to jump on the latest parts of culture and God’s plan, and stalwarts who know that communities need consistency to grow, who know that change for change’s sake is wasted effort, who know that the elders ‘did things for a reason’

Compromise between those who want emotional connections through vibrant worship, and those who want intellectual liturgy to reason their experience of God.

Symmetry between meeting people’s physical needs, positively impacting their society, following Jesus’s example of healing, and those who appeal to people’s spiritual need, of abstract salvation, and following Jesus’ example of forgiveness and challenging a relationship with God.

Combinations of cultural relevance and marked lifestyle difference.

It’s because we need wisely tempered development, we are people of head and heart, word and deed. I’ve been going to churches for 20 years, and I think I’ve seen that God doesn’t want us all to agree. God doesn’t want an army of Christians who all occupy a middle ground. God wants people of conflicting ideas to gracefully accept each other, and, in tension between us, live out a kingdom worth more than the sum of our parts.

Because I think that if we are luke-warm about social justice nothing will get done. Unless innovation is your heart’s fire you won’t make the effort. The blended and balanced portrait of God’s kingdom isn’t made of an even stroke, but a myriad of stippled dots – fiercely black or white, but gracefully harmonising for a bigger thing. The bigger thing is the kingdom of God.

I’m way on one side of some things- my heart beats for mission to be un-contrived (non-evangelistic) social justice, for world change and cultural relevance. But somewhere deep down I know that even if I don’t always fight for it, an emotionally thick gospel is vital for God’s kingdom. If we want to stand when playing tug ‘o’ war we have to pull- both of us. We must (having tested them in searching out God’s heart) bring our passions boldly to the table- then humbly compromise with our opposites to create the patchwork of the bigger thing.