Like Jesus

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Just because you are accepted by God doesn’t mean you will be acceptable to the world.

Just because you do things in line with God’s will doesn’t mean the powers of the world will treat you well.

Just because you are becoming like Jesus that doesn’t mean religious and secular authorities will deal with you any differently to the way they treated Jesus … and Stephen, and Paul, and many, many more followers since.

So why is it that here in Caversham (maybe where you live too?) the authorities just leave us to get on our churchgoing? What is it about our expression of faith that the authorities see as safe and unthreatening to their status and power?

This final beatitude both circles back to the first and looks forward to the next section of Jesus’ teaching in his 'sermon on the mount'.

It circles back by showing that as Jesus’ followers are persecuted, excluded and marginalised by religious authorities, so they are among the ‘poor in spirit’ whose place in God’s kingdom is already given. The world attempts to destroy our hope but Jesus guarantees it.

Those who are persecuted for seeking God’s justice align themselves with the poor and so share in their oppression, but they also share in their reward.

At the time Matthew wrote this Jesus’ followers had suffered a generation or more of persecution from religious leaders of the day and their inappropriately zealous followers. The idea that those who they considered unworthy – “Gentiles and sinners” - might be acceptable to God was just too much for them to accept.

Today, if we want to live like Jesus then we need to be open-eyed and pure-hearted about whose side he was on: the victim and never the bully, the outsider and never the excluder, the poor and never the oppressor.

This beatitude also looks forward in defiance: the world may persecute you for being like Jesus but you remain salt and light, so live as such and don’t pretend or disguise your Christ-likeness. Live in Grace but excel in Godliness, so that all may see Jesus in your faith and in your persecution.

Finally, we are called to love those who persecute us – who but a madman or a Christian would do such a thing?

When We Judge Others We Condemn Ourselves

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

There are a number of places in the Gospels which tell of Jesus healing someone in desperate need, only for those in positions of religious authority to condemn him for it. One example is told by Matthew:

Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to Jesus, and he healed him, so that the man spoke and saw.  And all the people were amazed, and said, “Can this be the Son of David?”  But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.”

Jesus responds that "the mouth speaks what the heart is full of." People whose hearts are full of evil will see evil, even in what is good.

Which brings us to our next Beatitude: blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. It is only as our hearts are purified from the filth which enshrouds them that we begin to see the pure wholesome light of God.

Jesus tells us not to judge others; doing so is a sign that our hearts are not pure. There is a passage in St Paul's letter to the church in Rome which begins by talking about people who are far from God whose lifestyles end up in a mess. That bit is often quoted by religious types, but they somehow forget about the punchline:

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.

Those self-appointed judges struggle with this: how can they be accused of "degrading passions" and a "debased mind"? The truth is that in passing judgement on others they show themselves to have impure and degraded hearts, fully deserving of all the rigours of God's judgement.

If they had pure hearts they would see God present and at work wherever they looked, for God is everywhere. They would see children of God, who he loves and longs to save, and would do everything they could to show these children God's loving grace, not heartless judgement.

If only we had pure hearts, what difference could we make with Jesus?

But how can our hearts be purified? By us praying lots and reading the Bible? Well, it can't hurt ... but remember that the Pharisees did a lot of that. By asking God to change our hearts through his Holy Spirit within us? Probably better, and it does fit in with the words of the ancient prophet Ezekiel:

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

But we are called to more than that. God will do the bulk of the work, of course, but we must do our part as well: we need to actively look for Jesus in the people and situations around us, and join in with whatever he is doing. We must freely share God's grace and God's love.

We must let people know the good news that God wants to include everyone in his family, however unlikely that may seem in human terms. It is as we see Jesus in those who our neighbours scorn, especially those despised by our religious neighbours, that we know we are making progress.

Everybody has a choice, of course, and can turn away from God as easily as they can turn to him. May your choices in the coming weeks always turn you toward the light of God  and may you and yours know the blessings of his wonderful grace.

Justice & Mercy: Back To Back

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Justice and mercy, for Jesus, are like two sides of a single coin. Those who hunger and thirst after justice want the rules to be followed, especially those that protect the poor. Those who are merciful want them relaxed, particularly as they apply to those in desperate need.

If you view Jesus’ words as about rules rather than people this beatitude seems to be a contradiction of the previous one. But if you understand Jesus as speaking hope to people whose hope is lost, it becomes clear that these beatitudes are to be seen as standing back-to-back supporting one another, together revealing good news for the poor.

Like many of the terms used in these beatitudes, ‘mercy’ is a complex concept. It is about compassion and it is about letting people off who have broken an agreement and it is about not demanding that someone repays a debt if they cannot afford it and it is about forgiving someone who has wronged you.

Most fundamentally, mercy it is about giving someone a break with whom you are in some sort of relationship. It is about not holding things against people who matter to us, but instead showing the sort of love Paul speaks about in his letter to the Corinthian church:

Love is patient, love is kind;
Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
It is not irritable or resentful;
It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

That’s the basic idea of ‘mercy’, but Luke's Gospel tells us that Jesus ramps this up to also apply to enemies: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Consider also the ‘Who is my neighbour?’ question answered in the Parable of the Good Samaritan as “The one who shows mercy”. For mercy triumphs over judgement, as James puts it!

Mercy is about attitude, especially our attitude toward people who are different. If someone is in need, it should be irrelevant what their colour, creed, or culture is like: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We are to be merciful as our Father is merciful; helping according to need not according to status, enmity, ingratitude or inability to repay.

As James, a leader of the early church, puts it in his letter, this really matters: “For judgement will be shown without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy.” We have been warned.

But remember that "mercy triumphs over judgement". May you know and show God's mercy this week.

Two Models Of Church

Both models exist; too often the first makes more noise:-

Are you there?
Can you hear me?
I am thinking of you

Are you hurt?
Are you lonely?
Hope my words get through

Did you know nobody's perfect?
We all fall down
See into the heart of you now

When you are lost
I will find you
Through the dark
I can see you
And you are loved
You are worthy
You can't hide
All the beauty
I can see you ...

Let me put my cards on the table
I've been where you are
I'll never see the stain of a label
Or a scar
You need to know that i wont reject you
Let's unbreak your heart
You are not the voices that shame you

I'm coming out
So call your friends and gather round
It's time to judge and pin me down
I'm in the box you put me in
It's dark and I can't see a thing
No air, I need to breathe ...

You label and name
Because you're afraid
Because it makes you feel safe
But here is the sting:
It don't mean a thing.
So everybody sing

Define me, de­fine me, somebody find me
Tell me what I am­ you know you love it
Define me, de­file me, somebody bind me
Make me what I am/ you want
You'll never break me down

Oh my god ain't it fun to judge, ain't it fun to judge, ain't it fun to judge?

Oh my god now I'm covered in mud, now I'm covered in mud, ain't it fun to judge?

Oh my god now you want my blood, now you want my blood, ain't it fun to judge?

Oh my god now I'm covered in mud and you want my blood, ain't it fun to judge?

Actually, I suspect most churches have a mixture of both approaches in their congregations. That's probably fair enough: churchgoers are, by and large, human too, and tolerance works both ways. Up to a point.

But where I do get angry is when leaders - formal or informal - bring the worst out of others. When someone stirs up prejudice and hatred, spreading the poison from their own soul to their neighbours. It's evil and it's anti-Christian.

The job of the church is to follow Jesus, to treat people as he did. Simple as that.

The lyrics above are from the band Bad Pollyanna, off their excellent Broken Toys album.

You Are Loved

Churches can be so frustrating sometimes!

It's a month since the EU Referendum result, when a truly horrible campaign from leaders of both sides led to a situation characterised by anger, despair and terrible division. Churches in this part of the world have talked internally about prayer and reconciliation over this period, but bog-all is visible externally.

Some of that, of course, is down to uncertainty about what can be done on a corporate level. Individually, being nice to foreigners and buying The Big Issue seem to be the order of the day, and the need for reconciliation has turned up in a sermon or two (most fervently in one case where the preacher had witnessed a racist attack in the middle of Reading the previous day). But that seems to be about the lot, in spite of the Bishop of Reading putting out a call for churches to get involved.

I'm not good at grand ideas, even less good at organising people, but surely we could start by doing something as simple and visible as telling people they are loved (even that idea I nicked from the Big Issue).

This is a core belief within Christianity: "God is love", "For God so loved the world", and so on. And the churches in CTM Parish were already being challenged by the PMC team to do something more positive with our noticeboards. It's not brain surgery.

I thought we had agreement to do some sort of poster a couple or three weeks back. So when I drove past St John's a few days ago I deliberately looked at the noticeboard to see what it said. "Thieves beware!" was all I could read from the road. :(

I need to check I am not treading on anyone's toes, that there is nothing already underway, but it looks as though I'll just have to put something up myself. This is my default approach, if I'm honest, and I've deliberately spent the past month trying to do things a better way: to get others involved; to cooperate, coordinate and consult; to seek better ideas and better ways of implementing them. Hmm.

I started this post intending to come from a completely different angle, actually, prompted by this post from HTB which makes the disappointing assumption that all parents feel instant and overwhelming love for their children and, more seriously, that all children are loved by their parents. It seems to me that maybe amongst those who most need to know that they are loved are precisely those who have least prior knowledge of their parents' love.

One role for the church is to show what love looks and feels like in practice, so people can have a starting point for recognising the love of God, whatever their background may be.

The referendum exposed deep divisions and insecurities in our communities. But these were already there, really. People need to know that they are loved, then that love can overflow to their neighbours. As I said before, it's not brain surgery - but it does seem remarkably difficult to do anything about in practice.

Fortunately I do believe in a God of miracles (as well as love)!

Edit 15/08/16:

It turns out that the poster was actually underway. A week or so back it turned up on our noticeboard, which now looks like this:

The person who did the posters is a gifted graphic artist, so I can only assume the brief he was given was somewhat ... unassuming.

One God In Community

The Christian picture of a Trinitarian God does have some important consequences.

A key implication is that the Trinity in some way reflects an important property of God's nature: that he is in an essential way relational; that community is somehow central to the creator of the universe.

One has to be really careful here, of course, not to go confusing a Trinitarian picture of God with some kind of cosy human family gathering. God is much, much more than that; but it is likely that He is not less than that.

Notwithstanding the Western Church, over recent centuries, slowly but surely moving to a focus on individualism and on each individual's relationship with God, the pattern of the Bible is very different.

From Genesis, where it is not good for man to be alone, throughout the Old Testament, with its emphasis on God's dealings with His people, to the New Testament, where the story moves from Jesus with his disciples, to the Spirit working in and through the Church, Jesus' body, the Bible is about communities of people following (or not) God.

One way of presenting the 'big picture' of the Bible is about relationships: broken in the opening chapters and being restored by Jesus' sacrifice and the power of God's Spirit. Relationships between people and God, between people and other people, and between people and the natural world, God's creation. These are still issues in our world today - the Bible story doesn't end with the final page of Revelation, it carries on through the lives and work of Jesus' followers throughout history - until the day Jesus returns and makes all things new.

I would argue that this is how you can tell the true Church, Jesus' real followers: are they in the business of restoring relationships or of harming them? Not that even the best churches don't make mistakes and wander off the path, but one can still question both the overall pattern, and the quality of the hopes and dreams of the members: do they build up and welcome in, or do they knock down and exclude?

The Bible tells us that "God is love", and love is the essence of true relationship. If God is love then his followers must also be love, and must ensure that their understanding and practice of that love follows the radical patterns laid down by Jesus. Love isn't about gooey feelings and sex, but about genuine and practical care for someone else, backed with a willingness to sacrifice oneself to meet their deepest needs. To love is to to take up one's cross for the sake of another.

Love starts with loving God with all that we are, continues with loving our neighbour as our selves - even when that neighbour is strange, foreign, or in some other way 'alien' - and ends with God's people loving one another.

Remember that God's love for you is far greater than any human love.

God loves you, He died for you: he is on your side. God is not out to get you, He is out to save you. But He always gives you a choice: love respects freedom of choice. As a parent of young adults I suspect I have a very faint insight into how hard that must be ... even for God.

Life Matters

If a puppy was born with a badly deformed heart, so it was in pain and distress, if it needed a long series of major operations to have even a chance of growing up, most people would sadly take it to the vet to be painlessly put down, I suspect. It would be seen as a mercy.

I have known two babies born with badly deformed hearts. Both suffered pain and distress and went through a long series of major operations, without a great chance of success. So far, both have made it through: they are battlers. In their short lives they have known far more than their fair share of suffering, but they have also known much joy and love.

Should they have been put down at birth, or even before? I suspect most of us would strongly feel they should be given their chance at life, although some high-profile figures might disagree. Somehow life is important and its quality depends on more than just lack of pain and life's significance lies in more than just its length.

Good Friday is a day when Christians remember the suffering and death of Jesus, we believe for the sake of the world, so that all who put their trust in him may have fullness of life, forever.

I think this has relevance to the suffering that goes on in the world; although no way would I claim a complete answer to this venerable question (recently brought up by Stephen Fry and treated by the media as if it were a new thought).

Why do we live in a world where children are born with deformed hearts? I don't know, but I do believe that their lives matter, and that surrounding them with all the love we can matters, and that their parents are heroes who should be celebrated.

Why do we live in such a world? One answer is that God is either incompetent (or at least not omnipotent) or evil. This is slack logic: these may be two options, but they are not the only two. One other that strikes me is that any alternative may be worse.

Why did the parents of these babies allow them to go through such distress? Because they believed that their lives mattered, and they did whatever they could to allow their child every chance to experience life and love and joy. They could have wiped the slate clean and started again, but they chose not to. That individual baby mattered.

Our lives matter to God: that we find love and joy and meaning is, I believe, his priority. Rather than wiping the slate of the world clean, he gave his son to live with us and to die for us, so that we might have every chance to find that love, joy and fulfilment. Every loving parent knows that there is a price to be paid for their love; sometimes that price is hard to bear. God, through Jesus, paid the highest price, because he loves us and because our lives matter to him.

There may be all sorts of other reasons for the suffering in this world. I don't know, I am not God. But I do know that faith is about trust.

I trust that God is good and loving, and that life is in him. And life matters.

Justice And Peace Together

I added a comment to a recent post yesterday, which I want to expand on a little. It seems to me that there is a really difficult tension between Jesus' call to "love your enemies" and "do good to those who hate you" on the one hand, and God's call to "act justly" and "love mercy" on the other, or even Paul's call to "stand firm against the schemes of the evil one".
On one occasion Jesus was confronted with a bullying synagogue leader:

On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

Jesus unambiguously stood up for the bullied woman and against the religious leaders. He did so publicly and vehemently: "You hypocrites!" So the deference to leadership and the 'niceness' taught by many churches (especially by their leaderships, oddly) is clearly unfaithful to Jesus' example and to the clear teaching of the Bible.

Church leaders are there to serve the people who make up the local church, and that local church is there to serve Jesus in their local community. Many churches, of all sorts of traditions, seem to get this backwards. It is essential for the proper functioning of a church that its leadership is fully, and publicly, accountable to Jesus through its congregation. This means that keeping things secret from the congregation is anathema, and that confidentiality must be seen as being a part of good communication, not opposed to it.

With hindsight I wonder if Caversham Baptist Church could have avoided a lot of pain, or at least made sure it had some purpose, by coming together behind such principles. Other churches in Caversham have had similar problems, one at least as severe. The trouble is that local churches don't seem to be that good at coming together with purpose; possibly because of a lack of clear vision and direction. If you are all busy working to a clear, agreed and common goal, then a lot of the nonsense can be left behind.

Which brings me to Israel and Gaza. If everybody there passively stopped the shelling and the missiles and the shooting, the result would be neither justice nor peace. Gaza would still be under siege, there would still be Palestinians rotting without trial in Israeli jails, and both sides would continue living in fear and hatred of the other.

Not that the killing and wanton destruction is in any way helpful, but stopping them without changing the situation just stores up more killing and more hatred for the future. A ceasefire is good if and only if it is also an opportunity to seek justice and resolution.

There are peacemakers in Israel and Palestine: Christians, Muslims and Jews who come together to learn about one another and to explore ways to live peacefully together.

If enough of the haters become sickened by their hatred, and by the legacy they are passing on to their children, then maybe there could be a foundation for spreading peace and trust, bit by bit. It happened in Northern Ireland and South Africa - haters are still there but the momentum has passed from them to those who would make peace. This creates windows of opportunity to find just solutions to the causes of conflict, and to negotiate the inevitable bumps in the road.

When people stand together to do what is right, for justice and peace, then often they need to take the first steps, to show that progress is possible. That requires showing love for enemies and doing good to opponents. This works best, in my view, if they place their primary trust in God, through Jesus, rather than in politicians and other human leaders.

So much hatred is based on fear and fear-mongering; Jesus died and rose again to show that we can overcome fear, and focus on life and love. May churches, families and nations do so, and may the energy and resources put into creating conflict be turned to building peace, justice and a better world for all.

The Wind Blows Where It Pleases

For many years I found it difficult to really relate to the 'third person of the Trinity' - the Spirit. With hindsight a lot of that is because of the individualistic way in which the modern church portrays it. In the Bible the Spirit is mostly shown through community: in God's people united by the one Spirit into the body of Jesus' followers.

I see 'The Trinity' - one God, three persons - as being about a God who is so big and so amazing that people can't get their heads around what he/she/it/they are like. So instead we separate out three main ways in which Christians have historically found themselves relating to God; although even there the split ends up quite complex.

There is the creator God, the one who made the stone and wood many church buildings are made from, not to mention snowflakes, galaxies and, of course, people:

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

But this creator God, the first person of the Trinity, is also known as a parental God: the New Testament tends to emphasise the 'loving Father', aspect; the Old Testament has more of the 'caring Mother'.

Then there is the redeemer God: Jesus who - somehow - became man, lived and died among us and for us. He had human form, even if we don't know much about how he looked. We do know that, contrary to many pictures, he probably had relatively short hair and a trimmed beard, and it is likely that he wasn't particularly handsome or obviously impressive in appearance.

This Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is known in love that serves others and sacrifices itself for them. But he is also known in fresh starts, in new hope, in life coming out of death, in impossible situations that somehow resolve themselves.

The Spirit, sometimes called the sustainer God, is harder to picture. Images in the Bible include the wind, blowing where it will, and flames, flickering, always moving, never still.

But the big New Testament claim is that the Spirit is best seen through his/her/its (the Bible terminology varies) work within the church. By 'the church' I mean communities of people who follow Jesus, bound together by said Spirit - not a building of wood or stone, and certainly not some religious organisation. A genuine church is recognisable by the signs of the Spirit at work within it:

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
forbearance, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

The Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity, is known by the love of one for another: a love between equals. This love does not exclude, it neither despises others nor puts them on pedestals. The Spirit's love is a dynamic thing, always in motion, always looking for new opportunities to live, love and work together. The Spirit's love is a sign to all that Jesus' followers are at work:

By this will everyone know
that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.

So, God is love: parental love, serving love, and love between equals. One God known in three ways of loving.

What's So Special About Galatians?

Paul's letter/epistle to the Galatians, that is, from the New Testament.

This is an exciting time for Bible geeks, such as myself, as new finds from Bible times reveal new insights into Jesus' world; the world in which most of the New Testament documents were written.

A quarter century or so back, when I really started getting into this sort of thing, the scholarly consensus about Bible writings was based on the views of 20th-century theologians, building on the work of 19th-century writers, responding to 18th-century thinkers, developing the ideas of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation from the 16th- and 17th-centuries, and so on.

It was all very clever, but such a long way away from the simplicity of, say, Mark's Gospel, and it left Galatians itself appearing confusingly inconsistent with the timeline of Acts and the rest of Paul's letters.

Now the translation of high-profile documents like the Dead Sea scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, along with vast numbers of lesser-known smaller finds - individually less-important but cumulatively highly illuminating - have changed all that. They allow us a more direct view of what was going on in and around Judea, to help us understand Jesus' words, as well as in the world of the North-Eastern Mediterranean, which Paul wrote into.

In particular, as far as our understanding of Galatians is concerned, we know more about the southward expansion of the Roman client kingdom of Galatia (which became the Roman province of Galatia in 25 BC) to incorporate Antioch and the planned Via Sebaste (completed in 6 BC), along which Paul travelled on his first missionary journey.

This links Paul's letter to the Galatians to this first missionary journey (around 46-48 AD). Its subject matter - passionately arguing that God's grace supersedes the Jewish Law for non-Jewish Christians - makes it a part of the controversy which led to the Council of Jerusalem (around 49/50 AD). This pins the date of the letter to around 48/49 AD, some 3 years earlier than Paul's next letter, to the Thessalonians around 52 AD.

Which makes Galatians special:

- It is the earliest written New Testament document;

- It is a pivot between the Old and New Testaments;

- It sketches out what it means to be a church, a community united by God's Spirit;

- It is the background and foundation for understanding Paul's later writings.

In theory the Protestant Reformation, back in the 16th century, marked a rediscovery of Paul's message (particularly from Romans) that following Jesus is about God's grace, received through faith, not about following rules. In practice it mostly just changed the rules, particularly once Calvin got involved.

Galatians is about freedom. Maybe, just maybe, a focus on its simpler, more Spirit-focussed, message could lead to a new reformation in our churches: one actually about God's love and grace rather than power politics. You never know ... it's certainly about time.

Proving God

How can you prove that God exists? As someone who trained as a scientist and works as an engineer, I'd say the easiest way to prove something is to see the difference between when it is supposedly present and when it is absent. Except that the classical Christian understanding of God is that he is not just the creator of the universe, but its sustainer too: the one who keeps everything going. So if God stopped doing what he does, then the universe would end. As tests go that's a bit drastic, especially since we wouldn't be around to see the result.

So one could say that the primary evidence for God's existence is a universe that exists and functions in an orderly and comprehensible way. But that is also the prerequisite (presumably) for the existence of intelligent creatures who can look at their universe, describe it mathematically,  and wonder about the existence of God. An orderly universe is barely perceived; in many ways it is just background. Telling the difference between a universe created by God and one which just happens to exist and to be friendly to sentient life is tricky.

Maybe we need a bit more information about God, so we can deduce whether the universe reflects his/her/its supposed characteristics. At first sight that should be easy, for the God described in the Christian Bible is one whose primary characteristic is love. If God is love - and light and life and all that sort of thing - then we would expect a universe, and a world, powered by love.

I trained as a physicist, and a physics view on the universe is filled with 'wow' factors: with wonder at the amazing variety and scale of creation; at the way that it manages to be both simple in overview and fascinatingly complex as we look deeper (it is so implausible that we should be able to describe an infinite universe with simple mathematical laws); and at the apparent 'fine-tuning' which means this world in this universe is incredibly well-suited to intelligent human beings, who can look at, wonder at, and measure all the amazing things around us.

However, I am also very interested in biology, in the natural living world. There the dominant driver is death ... death and reproduction specifically. The living world around us is filled with violence and with insidious and cruel parasites. The 'circle of life', of Lion King fame, is all about living things consuming other living things, around and around again. Yet ... there is also great beauty and great wonder in our natural world. It is not a simple, unambiguous place.

As for people: look at the news, and look at what is going on in your community. There are people doing wonderful, heroic, caring things; and there are people comitting appalling acts of selfishness, cruelty and ugliness.

The Bible explains the inconsistency by saying that God originally created the world to be "very good", but that - somehow - it all went wrong, and death came onto the scene.  It tells us that God has a plan to put it all right, through Jesus, and that in due course that plan will be fulfilled. In the meantime "creation groans", we are told, as it waits for "liberation from its bondage to decay", because God is "not wanting anyone to perish". So there is hope, with the Biblical God, that the world will be made right but, in the meantime, the evidence for a God of love remains as ambiguous as the world itself.

There are a number of philosophical arguments which claim to prove God's existence intellectually, you can find a good summary here. As an ex-atheist - indeed, as a 'grubby-fingered engineer' - I find them unconvincing. Others disagree, so they are worth a look.

Which brings us to personal experience. In my self-description above as an ex-atheist, the 'ex' bit is mainly because I had a powerful experience of God's presence. That is not scientific evidence for God's existence - it's not predictable, nor reproducible, nor even objectively measurable - but it is still evidence. Many other people have also experienced God's presence for themselves. Yet there are also many, amongst those who believe in God and who follow Jesus, for whom God's presence is a vague and uncertain thing: not everyone has had an intense experience; I suspect it is a majority who have not.

Yet for many who follow Jesus - or who believe in God in a less-defined way - there is still a definite feeling of something or someone who is with them, especially when life is at its hardest; someone or something who cares for them and is on their side; perhaps some source of hope that things will get better, that present troubles are not the last word, or, failing that, just a 'hand' to cling to when all else fails.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence, if looked at fairly, is the church, the community of Jesus' followers. Don't get me wrong, I am all too aware that there are terrible problems with organised religion, and fallible people get things wrong, and cruel and evil people use churches as a cover for their cruelty and evil. But behind all that, at a grass-roots level, there are large numbers of people giving their time, money and skills to help other people, often people who are neglected and considered worthless by the wider societies we live in.

Non-religious people care for others as well, of course, as do people of non-Christian faiths, but I would argue that the sheer numbers and dedication of people striving to help unrelated people in God's name is, in itself, a miracle and a sign that more is going on in this world than can be explained in material terms alone.

Love The Sinner But Hate The Sin?

The total transformation that occurs within a chrysalis has always amazed me. A caterpillar ties itself up with a little silk, then its whole internal structure is reworked into something totally new. After a period of weeks or months the new butterfly is revealed, yet it is formed from just the same stuff as the old caterpillar - everything is reused except for a little silk and the outer skin. There's a wonderful description of the process, by Dr Lincoln Brower, here.

Comparisons between the caterpillar/butterfly metamorphosis and resurrection have been made before, of course, but these usually involve the thoroughly unbiblical image of some sort of immaterial butterfly casting off the shackles of material existence to fly free into heaven. It's a pretty image, and I can see why those who just want to escape from the world might like it. The God of the Bible, though, isn't interested in helping us escape from the world, he wants to renew the world, and us as well.

Jesus was the first true resurrection and he is the model for how it works. After he had been raised his tomb was empty and he was recognisably and physically human ... although changed in some odd way, maybe best described as more than human, but never less.

So for us the biggest, most important transformation to look forward to at resurrection is not the change to our bodies, but the change to our hearts and minds. That is where we will soar like a butterfly, rather than an earthbound caterpillar - doubtless the new improved body promised will be great (especially for those of us who are middle-aged or more), but renewal starts with the heart.

So why the post title: 'Love the sinner but hate the sin?' - what does that well-known phrase have to do with butterflies?

Over on Jared Byas' blog, he recently wrote a post with this same title (apart from the '?') which got me thinking and commenting to the extent that it became clear I really ought to do my own blog post. The heart of his argument is that the separation between sin and sinner is spurious, and a denial of the embracing power of God's love:

If we don’t accept that deep down we are still sinners and that sin is a part of our identity and yet Jesus still loves us, then we will keep naively and unintentionally hurting a lot people. By definition, sinners have sin as a part of who they are. So if you use this cliché, what you really mean is that I will love this part of your life but I will hate that part of your life. Or should I say, that’s often what people hear you saying. And you wonder why people find Christians judgemental and not very Christ-like? ... We are all sinners. We are all sin. We are all loved. All of us.

Jesus once said that the things we do and say come out of our hearts, from who we are. So separating 'sin' from 'sinner' is indeed spurious. So how can God love us (and our neighbours)? Does God love sin?

I think a good part of the answer to this lies in the transforming power of the Resurrection. Some churches and churchgoers talk in terms of judgement: God destroying anything that is tainted by evil. Yet resurrection promises transformation: God changing evil to good. It is like the chrysalis: all of the caterpillar is used in making the butterfly, nothing is rejected. So it is that God can see the potential for goodness and beauty in all that we are, even the parts that seem dark and ugly, and so He loves us - all that we are - and sends Jesus to save us, so that we may be made beautifully new.

Losing Weight

I've been skinny and I've been plump; in my experience plump is warmer! But you can have too much of a good thing.

In quick succession back in January: I was told by my dentist that I was probably snoring more because my collar size had reached 16; I started getting a red and itchy line around my middle where my undies had become too tight; and I got a letter from my doctor's surgery suggesting I go for a late-middle-age checkup (not quite how they put it, of course), complete with questionnaire to fill in. The odd thing was that, although I had eaten a lot over the Christmas period without much exercise, my weight hadn't actually changed. Nevertheless, I did feel more tired; worst of all, after I measured my neck following the chat with my dentist I checked my waist as well: 39" ... I thought I was only just creeping above 36!

The trouble is that it is widely recognised these days that dieting makes you fat. So losing weight is a little more involved than the simplistic health messages would have you believe. There is a complicated mix of thermodynamics - energy in and energy out - along with appetite, digestive absorption and metabolic rate. If you just eat less it can, if you are not careful, simply make you hungrier and more efficient in the way your body processes food: lose/lose.

Luckily, I was starting 'clean' - no previous diets to mess my hormones about, and from a stable (if high-ish) weight. So I did a bit of research, applied a bit of common sense (ie no fads and don't believe a word that tabloids say), and started. It seemed to me that the easiest approach was to start with the energy balance - eat less and exercise more - but to try to make sure the side effects didn't undermine me. So I set myself a long-term target of losing half a pound a week, on average, over six months, taking me from 13 stone 2 (184lbs = 83.5kg) to around 12 stone (168lbs = 76kg) by August. As I write, I notice that my arithmetic was out: 16 pounds at half a pound a week will take seven months: so, to the end of August then (or aim for just over the weekly half pound - I'll see how that goes).

That needed me to eliminate around 250 'calories' (kcal, really) per day - basically cut down on between-meal snacks and reduce my portion sizes a little - and add a couple of brisk walks or cycle rides (of around a mile) each week. I found help in setting the target from a fascinating 'Body Weight Simulator' from NIH, which illustrates what changes are needed for a given long term target (NB it emphasises it is "for general research use only and is not intended to provide personal medical advice or substitute for the advice of a physician"). I also liked a simple webpage I found listing 50 Ways To Cut 250 Calories.

Not that it's quite that simple, of course. After a fortnight I had lost four pounds, without really trying hard; I wasn't naive enough to think it was all going to be that easy, but it seemed like a really good start. Two weeks later three of the pounds were back on. Two weeks later they were back off again. Three weeks after that I had reached the half-way weight mark, eight pounds down, at well short of half the time. Now, at around twelve weeks, I'm back up again to just five pounds down - but that is still close to my half a pound a week.

The biggest help I have found along the way is a good breakfast - there has long been research showing that skipping breakfast leads to weight gain, and my experience backs that up. I find a big bowl of luxury muesli (the sort with dried fruit and nuts) and milk fills me up, and keeps me full all morning. The biggest hindrance for me has been take-aways and eating out. Not only do I end up eating more, but I also find myself feeling hungrier over the next couple of days.

Is there a wider spiritual aspect to all this? Weight and body image have become so tied in these days with issues of self-respect and self-worth that I think there is. We need to feel good about who we are, whatever our body shape, and to be motivated by a desire to look after ourselves and look after our bodies. It shouldn't be that we feel bad about ourselves now, yet hope to suddenly feel good if only we can achieve some magic lower weight, but that we feel good and want to treat ourselves properly.

It's all part of a bigger picture that we need to love and respect ourselves as well as we can, whilst loving and respecting those we meet just as much.