Helpful words: A Confession

Our pastor has introduced the practice of saying a confession together in church. He used this one recently, and I thought I would share it here as I found the words particularly striking and helpful:

 

Gracious God,

Our sins are too heavy to carry,

too real to hide and too deep to undo.

Forgive what our lips tremble to name,

what our hearts can no longer bear

and what has become for us a consuming fire of judgment.

Set us free from a past that we cannot change;

Open to us a future in which we can be changed,

and grant us grace to grow more and more

in your likeness and image

through Jesus Christ, the light of the world.

Amen.

Time to reconsider the sabbath (Part 2)

If, when it comes to thinking about the sabbath, we're looking for a list of ‘What can I/can’t I do on the Lord's day?’ we have already lost the battle. Our approach should be ‘How can I best make the Lord's Day serve the end for which the sabbath was created?’ This will mean that what we do on the Lord's Day may vary in different situations. There are no black and white rules about what we should do with the sabbath. ‘But the prohibition on work was black and white!’ you may protest, thinking this sounds rather woolly and liberal. Well, no - even the prohibition on work was not absolute – see for example passages like Luke 13:15 or 14:5.  Wrongly, we have been inclined to abbreviate the fourth commandment to ‘Do not work on a Sunday’ but actual command is ‘Remember the sabbath day by keeping it holy’ (Ex 20:8). The prohibition on work is merely a means to that end but we, as we tend to, have made a rule of it because keeping rules is much easier than obeying the spirit of the law.

So, what does God mean when he commands us to keep the sabbath ‘holy’? Although ‘holy’ includes the idea of ‘purity’, its primary meaning is ‘set apart’. God is commanding us to have one day that is different from other days, set apart from the distractions of work to think about and worship him individually, as a family and communally.  

Ok, so now that we've got that straight,  I can talk about how to get the most out of the Lord's day without fear of my suggestions being interpreted as rules to stick rigidly to. Here goes...

Prepare properly!

The Jewish Sabbath actually started at dusk on Friday and finished at dusk on a Saturday. I reckon the idea of including Saturday evening in the sabbath, as preparation time for the following day, has a lot going for it. With no work the following day, it can be tempting to stay up late on Saturday night but it doesn’t put us in the best frame of mind to worship God on a Sunday morning. Can’t concentrate in the sermon? Can’t get up in time for church? Go to bed earlier!

Observe it together

In Scripture, the sabbath is very much something that is kept communally. Keeping the sabbath cements a family together - especially these days when family members can become like ships that pass in the night. We also need to cherish the idea of keeping the sabbath together as a church community. A Jewish writer has said that as much as the Jews kept the sabbath, the sabbath has kept the Jews and I think that is very true. It is noticeable that Christian communities with a strong Sabbatarian tradition have, by and large, a greater cohesiveness and closeness than other churches. It always perplexes me when I see Christians who I know would not work on a Lord's day themselves encouraging their children to do homework on a Sunday. On the Lord’s day we are all learning together to keep the Lord’s commands and to observe his rhythm of work and rest. I know it’s not always easy, but do we only obey the Lord’s commands when they are easy to keep? In our family, we were taught that Sunday was not for homework and carried on that principle throughout school, university and postgraduate studies. On the face of it that seemed to put us at a disadvantage when everyone else was working all the hours in the week, but I can testify that God blessed us for honouring his commandment. A healthy balance between study and rest and going into the exam room on a Monday morning with a clear head after a restful day free from study enhanced our performance compared to friends who had been up cramming until the small hours. God knows what our brains need! It also taught me to trust in God and the wisdom of his commandments and not just on my own ability or effort.

The Bible does say, however, ‘six days shall you labour’. The flip side of not working on the Sabbath is that we work hard all the rest of the week! Christian students should be known for conscientiousness, being good stewards of the money their families / the state have invested in them - not for trying to get away with the least amount of work possible, being last-minute or spending the maximum time on pleasure like other students.

Think about how to use the Sabbath

The Lord's day shouldn’t merely be a day when we desist from doing things. In the Jewish tradition the sabbath is very much viewed as a day of joy. It’s a day to do things together as a family rather than as individuals, whether that be a nice walk, playing games or just having a good catch-up over a cup of tea. It’s a day to share the things of God, both in our church communities and our family groups. It’s not a day for sitting round with dour expressions, telling the children to desist from anything that might be remotely pleasurable, or giving them a grillling about what they remember of the sermon.

Don’t be legalistic, but think biblically about your own boundaries and stick to them

Whether you should do your regular paid work seems to be pretty clear in scripture – but should you watch TV? –use the computer? –cook? We are not given specific instructions about these things. The point is not ‘how much can I get away with?’, however, but what will help me to make the Sabbath a restful, family/ community orientated, God-centred space in my week? A friend of mine has decided that Sunday will be a technology-free day, so no computers, iPads or texting because these are generally a source of stress for him and because they destroy the communal focus of the day. Many Christians prefer not to watch TV because so much of what is on TV would distract from making Sunday a special time to be with God, but for elderly Christians living alone, watching a Sunday service on TV might be a real blessing. That’s why fixed rules aren’t helpful. I prefer not to go in shops or eat out on a Sunday because I don’t want employees in those places to be losing their day of rest. However, if the shop is open and I have some kind of emergency I have, on occasions, gone in. Cooking is a tricky one, because there is a great tradition of hospitality on Sundays in Christian homes but I do try as much as possible before hand, otherwise Sunday can become a very tiring and stressful day. 

Sunday Dinner

Sunday dinner is a tradition which has its roots in the Sabbath meal. At the Sabbath meal, the best crockery and linen would be used to emphasise that this was a special meal befitting God’s special day. One lovely tradition that Christian families could certainly replicate is that Jewish parents traditionally blessed their children on the Sabbath and would also sing hymns and songs. It was also a traditional time to invite strangers, something which continues in Christian homes today. Much pleasant food would be consumed throughout the Sabbath.

Involve others!

Sabbath was a traditional time for Jews to invite strangers. In the Western world we have become far too insular in our exclusive family units which only open up to others. In the Middle East guests call may arrive without warning for meals oreven to stay and Eastern women always keep food in to offer any unexpected guests. The idea of being ‘busy’ or ‘intruding on family time’ would be lost on a person from the Middle East. We need to rediscover that openness once more, and look out for those who have no family, who live alone, whose family are not Christians or who are a long way from home. There can be nothing more lonely as a Christian than eating Sunday dinner on your own.

I am still very much working on how to put this into practice in my life. May God bless you as you seek to foster the spirit of the fourth commandment in your lives, families and churches.

 

Let the Devil look as grim as he likes - God prevails in the Book of Esther

Our pastor recently began a series in the book of Esther. Despite having been written so many years ago it resonates strongly with many situations that people face in the modern world. The book is set in a country run by a ruthless autocrat who has amassed vast wealth. He and his forebears have built luxurious palaces, temples, and awe-inspiring fortifications whilst their people suffered. Despite all our advances in democracy, the activities of men like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussain and Bashar al Assad show that nothing has really changed that much. We then read about ethnic cleansing, mass deportation and enforced conversion of whole people groups. We hear about a drunken king who demands the appearance of his wife, so he can parade her before his political guests as a sexual object for them to leer at. We see a young girl snatched from her family and forced to participate in a deadly beauty pageant where the 'prize' is to become the latest possession of this king. who will expect to have his way with her however and whenever he pleased. Then we learn that the country is run by 'oligarchs' like Haman, men of vanity and ruthless ambition, who show no compunction in bumping off anyone who opposes them.

How could Esther, sucked unwillingly into such a world of idolatry and debauchery, possibly survive or maintain her integrity as a devout Jew ? Yet the book shows that the most godless situations, like a beauty contest, the ruthless and misogynistic behaviour of a pagan king or the hubris of a nasty little man like Haman, can be used by God to further his ends. God enabled Esther, Mordecai, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednigo and probably many others to stand firm in a culture that was hostile to everything they held dear.  

Do you sometimes feel trapped in today's society and want to flee from the impurity and ungodliness that surrounds you every day? Do you despair of your labours for God bearing any fruit in such an environment? Do you wonder how you and your family can survive and maintain a Christian witness when aggressive secularism seems to be everywhere gaining ground? The message of the book of Esther is that there is no situation too evil for God to work in, no environment too dark for the gospel light to shine in and no limit to what he can use to bring about his ends. His purposes will prevail. To quote Luther's great hymn:

And were this world all devils o'er

And watching to devour us,

We'll lay it not to heart so sore;

Not they can overpower us. 

And let that prince of ill

Look grim as e'er he will;

He harms us not a whit

For why?  His doom is writ:

A word shall quickly slay him! 

 

What do you think of your church?

Perhaps it is partly the influence of the culture of today but I feel many Christians tread a very dangerous line in how they behave and speak about their churches. These people never seem to have anything positive to say about their churches. They are acutely aware of everything that is wrong with it and don't hesitate to run it down.  They criticise and grumble about it just as they might about the firm that they work for or the repair garage they use. In fact, they are scarcely less contemptuous of the church than the world is.

I know because I have been that person myself. We need to realise that we grieve God greatly when we behave like this because the church is his most precious possession, the apple of his eye. (Zechariah 2:8) This is how Samuel Stone captures the bond between Christ and his church in his great hymn 'The Church's one foundation':-

'The Church's one foundation

Is Jesus Christ her Lord.

She is his new creation

By water and the word.

From heaven he came and sought her

To be his holy bride

With his own blood he bought her

And for her life he died'

Have you got that? Your church is the beloved bride of Christ. You don't insult someone's bride-to-be unless you're prepared to get a punch on the nose, and yet we have no compunction about criticising the bride of Christ. Yes, your church may be flawed, exasperating, hurtful and even downright sinful at times, but we should still be absolutely passionate about her because God himself is passionate about her! God knows about all her faults and failings (far better than we do) but his response was not contempt but to die a sacrificial death to make her what she ought to be. Too many Christians nowadays walk away from churches at the first sign of problems and, instead of striving to sort things out and make the church better, they leave and join somewhere that subscribes better to their idea of a 'good church'.

I think the example of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians is very instructive here. Not many of us have had to contend with brawls between members, flagrant incest, liaisons with prostitutes or drunkeness at the Lord's table in our congregations but this was all going on in Corinth - and yet Paul still did not feel this was cause to walk away. Instead, his passion for them and his desire to see them turned around leap out of the pages. Paul's undying commitment to the church at Corinth in all its difficulties, and his passionate desire for their secure salvation and sanctification is great example in what our attitude ought to be to our local church.

Houghton's hymn views all the troubles and failings of the church in this way:-

'Though with a scornful wonder

Men see her sore oppressed

By schisms rent assunder

By heresies oppressed

Yet saints their watch are keeping

Their cry goes up, 'How long?'

And soon the night of weeping

Shall be the morn of song.'

 

Believe me when I say that I know how difficult this attitude is to cultivate and how costly and painful it can be, but cultivate it we must because it is so easy for a cynical, bitter mentality to sink in. A number of years ago we made a wall hanging for the front of our church with the verse 'Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.' (Eph 5:25)  It was me that chose the verse, and I chose it because I knew myself that I needed to be reminded every time I walked through the doors of our church just how much my fellow members meant to the Lord Jesus Christ and what a glorious thing the church of Christ is. Might you need - metaphorically perhaps - to write the same thing above the door of your church?

 

'"Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb!'

And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high

and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

It shone with the glory of God...' (Revelation 21:10)

The Holocaust - looking into the Abyss

Seventy years since the end of Second World War, the things which occurred under National Socialism are still regularly in the news. Occurrences like the theft by neo-Nazis of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the entrance to Auschwitz and the recent arrest of a former camp guard for war crimes remind us that these events have lost none of their significance. They have prompted me to read a great deal about the Holocaust over the last few years, in order to try to understand the terrible sequence of events that progressed from the Nuremburg Laws through Kristallnacht and the large-scale internment of Jews into places like the Warsaw  Ghetto, and culminated in massacres like Babi Yar and the extermination camps like Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor. It makes desperately harrowing, virtually unbearable reading. One of the most terrifying aspects is the speed and ease with which Germany descended into this moral abyss, and the how ordinary, previously 'decent' citizens were drawn quite willingly into unimaginable atrocities.

Whilst we could try to examine the seemingly incomprehensible events of the Holocaust according to number of biblical perspectives, the notion that came to my mind repeatedly was that it was almost as if God had briefly opened the mouth of Hell and let us look inside - or, to put that another way, the God who mankind had sought to banish from any role in his world was letting us glimpse what things would really be like if he did remove his hand from the world.

Christians believe that, though this world and the human heart are fallen as a result of man's sin, God in his mercy has not allowed evil free rein. As a result of 'common grace' most societies know a basic level of law, order and decency. The humanists would have us believe this is because man is basically decent left to himself, but I would suggest that the Nazi era shows just how rapidly ordinary people will decend into unspeakable wickedness once restraint is taken away.

The most obvious evils of Nazism, like those listed above, are well known. Nearly 6 million Jews - up to 90% of the Jewish population of many countries - were exterminated in less than 6 years. However, the 'Final Solution' also acted as a cover for every other kind of evil imaginable and it is possible to show how during the Third Reich every basic moral principle was eroded:-

Ordinary people descending to behaving like savage beasts
In the space of just a few years without the restraint of good governance, people who had outwardly been civilised, upstanding citizens had begun to behave in the most savage, primal manner as exemplified by the madness of Kristalnacht (Nov 9th/10th 1938). Fired up with raw hatred and jealousy, ordinary people riotted in the streets and ransacked the homes of their former friends and neighbours. Housewives took their children out to watch the 'fun' as Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were looted and set alight.  From then on, people lived in a deteriorating climate of mutual suspicion, fear and hypocrisy, telling on each other for every thing from misdemeanours such as failing to say 'Heil Hitler' with sufficient conviction, to attempts to hide Jewish people.

The dehumanisation of people and loss of fundamental respect for the human person
The Bible teaches that all people are made in the image of God, but the Nazis reclassified Jews, Gypsies and others as 'life unworthy of life' and  herded them to their deaths on an industrial scale without even the compassion one would show to animals, without a qualm. They deliberately devised the most inhumane and cynical processes of extermination, such as the centrality of the Sonderkommando to the extermination process. The Sonderkommando were a small number of Jewish prisoners kept back from immediate slaughter on arrival at Auschwitz and other death camps and employed to operate the gas chambers, remove and cremate the corpses of their fellow Jews whilst all the time knowing that the same fate would soon befall them. The Apostle Paul's reference to men 'inventing ways of doing evil' (Rom 1:30) fits the Nazis very aptly.

The same dehumanising philosophy permitted the most grotesque experimentation on prisoners. Josef Mengele 'The Angel of Death' personally killed 14 sets of twins in one night so that he could dissect their bodies. He sewed together gypsy twins back to back to see if he could create conjoined twins. Such was the loss of respect for the human body that the Nazis cut off and sold the hair of gassed victims and even experimented with making soap from human fat.

Erosion of the fundamental sanctity of life and abrogation of God's perogative to end life
The Nazis carried out mass compulsory euthanasia of anyone with incurable diseases, mental illness or learning disabilities. Within months they emptied the hospitals and assylums of Poland. Documents refer to the 'disinfection' of people with a life expectancy of less than 10 years. Although this was termed 'mercy killing' (and in the early days some families requested it for children with interminable suffering) no efforts were made to make this painless and most died terrifying deaths in the gas vans or by phenol injection.

Removal of boundaries in the arena of sexual behaviour
Another thing which sets us apart from animals is that we are not merely driven by instincts but have the ability to control our sexual behaviour. Even primitive societies have some concept of this, with some limitations on acceptable kinds of relationship. In the death camps, however, prisoners were subjected to every kind of sexual degradation. The Nazis set up brothels where homosexual prisoners were forced to engage in weekly heterosexual prostitution. The Nazis liberalised attitudes to illegitimacy and its only real concern was the expansion of the population as quickly as possible.

The triumph of expediency over morals
Nazi philosophy lacked any fundamental moral principles; their only principle was expediency. Whatever tended towards the achievement of their ends of Aryan domination and expansion was acceptable. Thus the Nazis justified killing the chronically ill because this saved food for the rest of the population. These people could not work or contribute materially; therefore they were liquidated. Whenever expediency is allowed to justify breaking moral principles, whether in politics or by individuals, it always leads to trouble.

The glorification of aggression and the denigration of compassion, humility or gentleness
Nazi ideology despised weakness and glorified aggression, war and the subjugation of 'inferior' peoples. We see this worked out in the transformation of Nazi doctors from caring professionals to agents of genocide - indeed it has been noted that the betrayal of the Hippocratic oath had a broad basis throughout the German medical profession and without doctors' active help the Holocaust could not have happened. Guards in the camps who treated inmates with any level of decency or compassion were disciplined and the role attracted people of the most sadistic and psychopathic character, of whom the women guards appear to have been particularly warped and brutal like Ruth Neudeck and Irma Grese 'The Beautiful Beast'. Ministers and priests were singled out for systematic humiliation and torture. Most people accept on some level the rightness of the 'Golden Rule' even if they do not carry it out, but the Nazis stood this on its head. No wonder they despised Christianity and harked back to the red-blooded paganism of the past.

Open opposition to God
The Nazis initially attempted to appear to be supportive of Christianity and the main denominations. They soon abandoned this, however, with some key figures espousing neo-paganism outright whilst others sought to rewrite the Bible according to Nazi principles, including modifying the character of our beloved Lord into a more warlike Aryan figure. Salvation by faith in Jesus was expressly attacked. Christians were required to swear oaths to Hitler and the Nazi party claimed to have sovereignty in all matters including over the beliefs and affairs of believers, with obvious difficulties for true Christians.

In the light of all this, while I firmly believe that in the Holocaust the Nazis, in the words of Corrie ten Boom's father, 'touched the apple of God's eye', they also led the rest of society down a path that consisted of the repudiation of every aspect of God's plan for mankind. Thus, when we read about its effects , we find ourselves looking over the edge and into the abyss that is life without the presence or activity of God.