Omnibus

For All

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you ...
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

There is a thread running all through the Bible which, in its day, was absolutely revolutionary. So much so that these days it hardly seems exceptional at all. Sometimes it's even practised!

Way, way back, when gods were tribal, or at most national, God calls Abraham to leave his home and to go where He sends him. God says that He will bless Abraham's descendants, but also says He will bless the rest of the world through them.

Gods didn't do that back then. A tribal god was there to look after their chosen tribe, a national god to look after their nation ... if they felt like it, if the correct rituals and sacrifices had been given. Yet here is this (apparently new) god saying He has chosen His people to bless all the other tribes, all the other peoples too.

In many ways the Old Testament is the story of the Israelites determinedly not doing that. But also it is the story of their prophets reminding them, again and again, that this was their special calling: to bless others. Even deadly enemies - consider Jonah's unwilling mission.

Then Jesus comes along:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

It's the whole world that God loves, not just the Jewish bit, not only religious people, or any other sort of aristocracy, but everyone.

Jesus was put to death, and rose again, and then there was Pentecost. Suddenly, not only is God wanting to bless all the world through His people, but He is wanting to include everyone as part of His people. Jews and foreigners, Samaritans, even an Ethiopian eunuch, all invited to become God's people, nobody excluded.

Probably the first written of the documents now called the New Testament was Paul's letter to the Galatians. In that Paul spells out in some detail that all these distinctions and all these exclusions are redundant in Jesus. Jesus isn't just for Jews or Greeks, not just for Europeans, Americans, or Africans, he is for all the world; he is not just for men or just for women, not just for those who are gay nor those who are straight, he is for everyone; not just the rich, nor just the poor, nor even just the middle classes, but all people are invited into God's Kingdom, all people are offered a blessing through Jesus.

So that is the job of Jesus' church: to offer a welcome to all people in Jesus' name, and to offer a blessing to everyone around them. Some local churches do that well, others fall short ... such is life. May God bless you and all whom you care for, this week and into the future.

What's The Point?

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death. 

Pink Floyd
Time

That was Pink Floyd's cheerful take on life nearly forty years ago, in 1973. Slightly less than two and a half millenia earlier, a sage calling himself Qoheleth wrote:

What do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
 
The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north;
round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from, there they return again.
 
All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
 
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes
Chapter 1

More recently (last week) Addie Zierman wrote about the repetitive nature of "this mothering business", on her How to Talk Evangelical blog:

The kids are so little and dependent, and this season of life spreads before me, vast in its sameness. Let’s count the pennies, the socks, the grapes on your plate. One, three…no, we forgot two!…Two, one, three…

It’s No, we don’t hit your brother and Do you need to go potty? a hundred thousand times a day. It’s the only four foods he’ll eat, rotating in tiny, identical circles. It’s the same clothes cycling again and again through the wash, put away in the same place.

Addie Zierman,
When You Can't See It Change

It seems to me that time is like one of those tight-wound helical springs, or maybe a very long spiral staircase, going round and round and each loop looks just the same, but actually you have moved imperceptibly upward, closer to the destination. Or you can imagine (somewhat anthropomorphically) the mechanism in a newly fertilised egg: "round and around I go, base pair to base pair, loop after loop, creating endless proteins, gene after gene, chromosome after chromosome, on and on it goes." But at the end of it all, hopefully, there is the miracle of a new baby, with its own routines and its own cycles.

I'm of an age for mid-life crises, for wondering why I'm here, what has it all been about, what on earth is the point of it all? And would I understand the point, even if I could see it?

The thing is, sometimes things change because of one person making a big decision, but most times it is many, many small decisions, made by many people, each decision seemingly unimportant. Especially when that decision is to not do something, to not stand up for what is right, or to not help someone you see in need. Those are the decisions which can really make a difference, and they happen most often buried in the midst of those routines of everyday life.

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
They'll burn down the synagogues at six o'clock
And we'll all go along like before

Del Amitri
Nothing Ever Happens

Bloggie Ramblings

I'm really rather unsure what to do with this blog.

When I started blogging, more than six years ago, I was editor of a church website and wanted a blog which focussed on real-world issues rather than just the religious, insider stuff. I resigned from that editorship when the then pastor decided to censor me for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, but I carried on the focus in my own blog, and again when I moved to a blog on the blogging community Blog City.

A few years ago, blogging started to die - in part due to the shallow inanities of Facebook, I reckon - and its broad communities with it. Blog City closed its gates and I moved over here. Looking back at my 2010 posts I can see that I initially kept the broad focus for a while. Nevertheless, when I look down at my tag cloud here, I can see that 'Religion' is far and away the most used tag, followed by 'Jesus', 'church' and 'Bible'. And too many posts are far too long. And the most active blogs in my sidebar are nearly all religious. As I said earlier, blogging has started to die: instead of broad blogs of interest it is mostly religious bloggers writing for the converted.

That's not my interest and it's not where I want to be. In many ways all the religious posts have been close to being placeholders: keeping the blog ticking over until I rediscover my enthusiasm. I am interested in religious matters, and I often study and consider them, so having a place to set down and work through my thoughts can be helpful. But it's not really how I want to blog.

There are various factors which might have contributed to my loss of blogging momentum. A house move a few years ago exacerbated my CFS, which has never really bounced back; attending a church which is ever more determined to just be a religious club damages the creative link between faith and life; and - possibly most of all - the ending of Blog City led to the loss of the broader community aspects of blogging.

There is a big wide fascinating world out there, with enormous amounts going on. The exchange of ideas and insights which citizen blogging promised all those years ago still seems wonderfully attractive. If only I could find it.