I lose the notes. brb.
Oh, is cool, I find them again.

In our society, we are used to talking about money, sex and power. In a sense even by these titles, we have already shrunk the issues. Really instead of money we should be talking about resources; instead of sex, we should be talking about relationships and instead of power, we should be talking about responsibilities. We need to remember that all of creation belongs to Jesus.
Jesus comes to bring forgiveness and healing in all our relationships and at every level; and to do the work of healing and reconciliation. Because of this, we should not talk about power, but stewardship.

Returning to Psalm 2, we see ourselves in a world that wants more rules and regulations. Just take, for example the amount of forms you need to fill in to visit America nowadays. Instead of this society of rules, we need a society of character and virtue. We’re not used to using this language any more. We need to re-inhabit it. Often people swing from one extreme of legalism to another extreme of spontaneity. We need to realise that what comes naturally is so often a mess.

When we worship, Jesus does something which is character-forming. But we must still remember love with the heart, and not just the mind.

I believe that Psalm 2, not a modern version of Song of Songs, should be our inspiration in worship. We need to move away from the ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ type of worship. We shouldn’t downgrade love. Jesus loved the rich young ruler. That’s what God and his kingdom are like. If we take this seriously, there will be a huge change.

Learn in reading scripture to worship Jesus. Not a Jesus in a box, but the one who talks to Pilate about truth, and then ends up dying for that.

Just one more (Q&A section)…

At the end of Mark 10, we see James and John’s mother approaching Jesus and requesting that one may sit at his right hand in the kingdom and one at his left. It almost seems as if this may be a pre-emptive strike against a possible similar request by Peter and Andrew’s mother. They have completely missed the point of what Jesus is talking about. If we read Matthew, we see how terrible a request this is, as Jesus divides those on his right and his left.

Jesus responds that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, but that they should be servants; to live not to be served, but to serve. In our modern thinking, we have often lost a lot of the point of this passage. We move straight to the point about atonement and forget about the point concerning politics, because we only understand the point about atonement when we understand the new view of power.

The Kingdom of God is basically about a crazy young man speaking about God, loving and dying. He had no need to terrify. This is not to detract from the importance of those who turn away needing to be terrified. We certainly do not want to forget that.

We know about the Kingdom of God through the cross. God made the world out of overflowing generosity. When humans rebelled, this didn’t mean God had to stop, but continued in his overflowing love. When approaching the problem of human sin and cosmic disaster, he did not act out of character, but entirely in character. This is of course hard for us to understand , but we have no chance of understanding it, except through Jesus.

More and more, I have found myself turning to Psalm 2. Particularly at times such as those we find ourselves in, we ask,

“Why do the nations rage,
And the people plot a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together.”

God’s response is that he has put his king on his holy hill, and that they should be wise and be warned. All their plans must be seen in this new light.

John begins with the message, “You are my son,” and ends with God setting his king on Calvary. This is how Jesus wins the victory against the forces arrayed against God. It is not the love of power, but the power of love that we see in action. The cry is, “It is finished.” What does this mirror? It echoes the end of the creation story. God has finished his work.

What God did in Jesus cannot be seen simply as an escape hatch or as an example. Having Jesus as an example is something like me having Tiger Woods as an example for golf. How he plays is brilliant, but I can’t hope to follow his example. Jesus did something which changed the world. God dealt with the forces of evil.

After the 7th day Jesus rested, and Luke is careful to remind us that the next day in the first day. It is the beginning of God’s new world. Jesus’ resurrection is not just about a message that we have life after death, but it is a proclamation that new creation has begun.

In this New Creation, we are now not just beneficiaries, but the agents of his new creation. All the evil that was preventing new creation has been dealt with, and this is alone through the Spirit. It is not just as if there is a world out there which is convicted of sin, and that somehow we are not affected.

In John 7, anyone thirsty is told to come and drink freely of the living water. What are we told is the result? Do the waters end up flowing in? No. They end up flowing out. We are channels for God’s blessing to flow through us.
So what does all this mean?

Today, we face a number of crises. Many of have been told how to live the Gospel in a particular way. We are called to live as people of Jesus and to go out and do new creation. We shouldn’t always be playing catch-up. We should be ahead of the game. We should live lives so that although people do not know what they are about, they want it.

I’m going to give two examples of this work that I have seen. The first is in the area of South Shields. In this area, the shops had started to shut, and then the banks shut because with no shops, no-one was using them. At this point, the church approached one of the banks that were still open and started a credit union, a mother’s and toddler’s group and a community centre. This group is still running. It is wonderful to see people running these schemes and becoming human again.

Another example is an old school on the edge of Durham that was shutting down. There were a number of severely mentally handicapped people in the area. This school has reopened as a place for these people to be involved in works of creating beauty. One of the things I am most touched about is that one of the jobs these people will do is to mend broken furniture. It is incredible to think that these people, who themselves are physically broken, are involved in mending furniture.

In this context, debates about secularism will start to look very different, and it will make sense to talk about believing in Jesus. This is because of the reality at the core of both of these works.

Continued in Part 3.

Intro

NT Wright has written a number of books.

Tommorrow’s World

There is a need to re-engage with Jesus all the time. The Gospels are bigger and more explosive than any tradition will say. None of us have gone deep enough. Jesus is always surprising and will never fit into our frameworks.

In our modern world, we must engage with people for whom the name of Jesus sounds distant or is merely a swear word. I have a friend who is a primary school teacher. Upon telling the story of the nativity, the children were allowed to ask questions. One child loved the story, but asked why Jesus had been named after a swear word.

For most people, the message of Jesus does not register, and we must ask how we will tell the basic story of Jesus today. For many Christians, there is a problem, because to believe the creeds you merely have to believe in the virgin birth, the death and the resurrection. This makes it difficult to make sense of the bit in the middle. Was Jesus’ ministry about good teachings? Are they just miscellaneous teachings that anyone could have given, or are they something more? Was his ministry about healing? So were the ministries of others. How does all this relate to the cross?

For most of us, our hope is too vague. We hope in a heaven which is completely separate to the earth, but Jesus’ promise referred to a whole new Heavens and new Earth. This is counter cultural, but we must wrestle with the truth because, while tomorrow’s world will have great struggles, it will also be a time of tremendous opportunity.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for His kingdom to come on Earth as in Heaven.

What does ‘Jesus is Lord’ mean? When I was young we had a saying: “If Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all”. This is great in personal piety, but what does it mean when it encounters the terra firma of larger reality. Do we really believe it? This is not a case of things being physical or spiritual. It is a political as well as spiritual message. It is very easy to talk about the Gospel in politics, and forget that Christianity is grounded in the Love of God. The message at the beginning was that Jesus is Lord and so Caesar was not. This was offensive, and carried a large penalty. Martyrdom was common in the early church.

We must remember that Jesus did not just speak of a coming ‘Heaven’ but of a ‘new Heavens and new Earth’.

In Ephesians 1:10, we see that God’s design is to sum up all things in Jesus. Where is Paul writing this from? We see him in prison, and it is no surprise. This is certainly not a popular message.
There are many questions for tomorrow. First of all we find the modern conflict between secularism and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism: not just in Christianity, but in Hinduism, Islam and every other faith. On the other hand, we have the virulent secularists who want to remove God from public discourse altogether.

An example was when Rowan Williams spoke against the assisted dying bill. He argued Christianly and intelligently, not just appealing to some Christian ideal. This outraged some people because they didn’t like what he said, but others simply because he was a bishop.

At the moment, many Christians are not very equipped to speak against secularism.

We need to recognise that the present world does matter. God’s purposes are more wonderful than we imagine. We also need to re-read the Gospels.

I was recently at the annual Anglican vs. Catholic golf match. This is an event in which we try to come to agreement on the things we hold in common, and help ecumenical relations. We had this saying, ‘a dogma a hole’. One of the priests at this event was retired. For his retirement, he just goes around performing the gospels, and why not? We’re so used to reading fractions of the Bible. If you went to a concert, would you expect to hear the organisers say, “Today we’ll listen to the first twenty bars of Beethoven’s symphony, and next week we’ll come back and hear the rest?” Of course not. We need to see the whole picture again. Why not try performing the Gospels? If you can’t do the whole thing, why not just start with the Sermon on the Mount? That certainly has enough power to blow your socks off.

If we cut the Bible into small chunks, it removes its impact.

Now we come to the issue of the Kingdom of God. Jesus announced God’s Kingdom, but what does that mean? It was always relevant in the story of ancient Israel, and all the writers show this. Luke and Mark refer to the prophecies of the Old Testament; Matthew does a similar thing with the genealogies; and John masterfully refers right back to Genesis with the words ‘in the Beginning’. The Kingdom of God is the climax of a larger story.

A loving Creator created the world and watched it rebel. He called Abraham to be a blessing for the whole world. This is all a build up to Jesus.

An RE teacher I am in contact with told me about some of the exams that students will be expected to take. Many of them ask questions about how Jesus’ teachings fit into ideas about what is good socially. He asked if the board had lost the plot. I responded that it seemed less like they’d lost it than that they’d never had it.

Jesus is doing the Kingdom of God. He is becoming king. Jesus asks the question, “What would it look like if God was running the world.” His parables are often responses to, “Why is Jesus doing all these terrible things.” He chose the wrong disciples, and didn’t do what was expected. His answer is often simply, “The angels are having a party, why shouldn’t we join in.”

People often criticize Christians for being about Theocracy, and in many ways we are. However, we are thinking of a very different type of God to the one they have in mind.

Many Christians seem to think they basically know all about the message of Jesus and can now bully others with it. Often Jesus criticizes people for being so sure in their ideas about God. The Christian message is often that we do not really know God, but all things about God come into focus when we look at Jesus. Jesus’ message is for the whole world.

Today we often are not expected to believe in miracles. Certainly in my experience, I was raised in a context in which it was very difficult for anyone to believe in miracles. I remember speaking at one particular seminar where a student heard me talking about miracles and said, “Surely we don’t believe in miracles any more, we’re past that.” I remember the pastor’s wife in that area speaking up and saying, “Don’t make me get out my book in which I have written all the answers to prayer God has given us over 30 years. People we have prayed to be healed and countless other examples.” Miracles still happen. It is this kind of teaching which leads into the teaching that ‘Heaven into Earth won’t go’.

What do the Gospels look like? After the Transfiguration, we see Jesus setting his eyes towards Jerusalem. But James and John want to change this to their own purposes, and ask Jesus to call down fire. Jesus responds that this is not what he has come for. It is not out job to call down fire. This is a different type of theocracy.

Continued in Part 2.

I’ll have to admit that this is my least favourite word of all the words in the English language.
This is primarily due to its similarity to the word ’stationary’, a word with which it seems to have no connection. I find the associations this creates completely baffling. I have nothing against words having two meanings, but for some reason this confuses me. I suspect this word annoys me most because you could easily imagine the words having a shared etymology; although in truth they are separate.
I am particularly annoyed at this word today having lost a large collection of the same in an exam. On reporting this to my senior tutor, I was told that I had not lost stationery, but an assorted bag of random crap, and that had I indeed lost what I had claimed, I would be looking for envelopes and sheets of paper. Anyway, I got it back, and my use of the word was valid, but uncommon, so I probably shouldn’t be too bitter.
Do any of you have a least favourite word?

From next year, courses in ‘Art in the 20th Century’, ‘Modern Literature and Drama’, ‘Roman Empire’ and ‘Film Studies’ will be cut as humanities options for Imperial students. Languages will only be taught at higher levels, with courses in Arabic, Italian, Japanese and Russian being cut completely from 2010.
These courses have been cut to make way for courses considered more relevant by Imperial students. Current possibilities being considered are ‘Modern Graphic Literature’, ‘Klingon’ and ‘the life and work of Richard Feynman’.
On a more serious note, I am disappointed at this. I have long desired to learn Russian and Arabic. My perfect 5 language life would involve me speaking English, German, Russian, Arabic and Spanish (listed in order of the possibility of me learning them). Unfortunately, my desire to learn languages is almost certainly an example of this.

Yes, it is illegal to smoke in the Tardis now.

In the nicest possible way, your friend was an idiot who should have stuck up for you more, you don’t have much of a personality, I don’t like you as a person, but I like your music, so I’d like to hear more of it. I mean, we’re talking the ultimate reinforcement of Asian parenting here, surely.

Note carefully the dog collar on the man smoking at the right and read the full story at the Times Online. (HT: Mockingbird)