Emma

Luke 6:39 He also told them a parable: "Can a blind man lead a blind
man? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his
teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his
teacher. 41 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother s eye, but
do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 42 How can you say to
your brother, 'Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,'
when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You
hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will
see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother s eye."

Emma.
Have you been watching the adaption of Emma on TV of a Sunday evening?
It has always been a favourite with me, not least because you can read it
twice and get just as much fun from it on the second or third reading.

First time, you read the whole thing as it were through Emma's eyes; and you have all the fun of being misled alongside her by her own foolish expectations. Because she persuades herself, she persuades us, that Harriet really will marry Mr Elton; because she persuades herself she persuades us that Jane Fairfax is pining for the forbidden love of Mr Dixon.

But then you can read it again and see things from the outside -
you can see just how Emma deceives herself all through the book, how
she fools herself again and again and how she has not the slightest
insight into even her own heart.

This is a book about the human heart and how hard it is to read it. It is
about love and how it makes fools of us. It is about human blindness -
only Mr Knightley is not made a fool of by love in this book. It is a
book about self-deception and blindness - each of us has some area in our
lives where we can't see ourselves clearly, truthfully.

It is the business of the church and individual Christians to play Mr
Knightley to the world's Emma; to stick with the truth and speak the truth
to those who are blind, to speak the truth not in anger or arrogance, but
in love.

But we can only do that if we have allowed Jesus to play Mr Knightley to OUR
Emma. To let him show us how much we have deceived ourselves.
Keep him very near at hand.

Remembering

Over the last few years there have been some wonderful interviews with
Henry Allington and Harry Patch, those two grand old survivors, the last
surviving British servicemen who served in the First World War. They came
home, dusted themselves off and lived very long and, one hopes, contented
lives. Both died this summer, their battles over at last.

Today as I write this in mid-October the Prime Minister warns us, and
his fellow world leaders that we have 50 days to save the world from
global warming and break the "impasse". I don't expect to see panic in
the streets of Torbay over this, nor indeed in the corridors of the UN
summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December. Most will see this,
correctly, as simply overblown rhetoric.

But Gordon Brown has a point - there is a battle to be fought on the
issue of climate change; sacrifices are likely to be required of us
all. The struggle, at bottom, is against thoughtlessness, greed,
selfishness and apathy.

Old battles - new battles - every generation has its own battles. Almost
always those battles are not struggles against impersonal forces of
nature - far more often they spring from the darkness of the human heart,
from greed, lust, anger, hatred, envy, and pride - misplaced pride. Those
things can and do warp and wreck the lives of individuals and of nations.

November is the month for remembering and as we look back at old battles,
around at our current struggles and ahead to the fights of the future
perhaps we need to remember three things.

1. We remember, give thanks for, and take heart from, the straightforward
courage of those men and women who went to fight for something they
believed in. They still go today to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Most of us will not go to war, but we will need that kind of courage
at some point in our lives - the courage to stand up, speak out, to do
or say something difficult, maybe dangerous. Our soldiers sailors and
airmen show us what commitment means.


2. We remember that the root of conflict, wars and battles is sin -
forgive me a theological word! Sin is rebellion against goodness and
love and truth , which is always rebellion against God. The hardest
battle, the never-ending. weary, struggle takes place in our own
hearts and minds, as we try not to give in to the worst in us, the
worst that life's tests and temptations can bring out in us. That is
war begins, where personal and national disaster is averted or
welcomed.

3. When life's struggles are at their most demanding, we need to remember
this promise:-

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest." Matthew 11:28

He will give you rest and more than rest - he will give you victory!

Please pray for our servicemen and women.

Ditchkins dismantled.

Terry Eagleton, the literary critic, has produced possibly the best
response yet to the "new" atheists. Reason, Faith and the Revolution,
Yale University Press, 2009. It is an often hilarious dismantling of the
pretensions of Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens, whom he addresses under the
joint-title of "Ditchkins", alongside a deeply sensitive and thoughtful
exposition of what it means to believe. For many this will be a
difficult read - he assumes a lot of knowledge - but there many passages
which are positively luminous. Here for example, is Eagleton on faith and
knowledge ....

We might clarify the relations between faith and knowledge here with an
analogy. If I am in love with you, I must be prepared to explain what
it is about you that I find so lovable, otherwise the word "love" here
has no more meaning than a grunt. I must be prepared to give reasons
for my affection. But I am also bound to acknowledge that someone
else might wholeheartedly endorse my reasons yet not be in love with
you at all. The evidence by itself will not decide the issue. At
some point along the line, a particular way of seeing the evidence
emerges, one which involves a peculiar kind of personal engagement with
it; and none of this is reducible to the facts themselves, in the
sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them.

Sing!!!!

The Bible tells us time and again to sing! Why? Because singing is good for you!

1. Sing and save your body - lose weight! Sing more and eat less. You can't sing with your mouth full. You can't sing on a full stomach. Singing, really singing - not just mumbling but belting it out like Susan Boyle - improves your posture, your breath control, maybe even increasess your lung-power!

2. Sing and save your mind. You can't be watching brain-numbing, heart-deadening, taste-ruining pap on TV while you are singing. And you can sack your psychoanalyst - what is he/she doing but trying to get your deepest thoughts and hopes and feelings into the conscious realm where you can work with them? Sing a joyful song and release your heart's delight, pour out your grief in a sad song till the tears run down your face, sing a fighting song and find new courage. As you sing you can soak your soul in the wonderful music of Bach, Mozart, and Verdi, you can revel in Gilbert and Sullivan, you can let rip with all your Radio 1 favourites - anything but that chanteuse of despair Lily Allen! Let the roaring bass, the romantic tenor, the passionate alto, the squalling soprano within you out - sing and save your mind!

3. Sing and save money! Think of all the money you will be saving at the supermarket and on psychotherapy - see above. Singing is free - it makes you feel great and it doesn't cost a penny.

4. Sing and find true love!! Well, yes, perhaps that is overstating it a little....... but singing is a great way find friends. All across Torbay there are operatic societies, pop groups and choirs of every kind waiting to hear from you, wanting you to join them in making a wonderful sound. And this is my real point - Central Church's choir would love to hear from you, and you will receive a warm welcome! Give us a call if you want to know more.

5. Sing - because God has given you life and love in his wonderful world, and WILL give you eternal life if you trust him for it! That is worth singing about.

Psalm 96 1 Oh sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth! 2Sing to the LORD, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. 3Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!

A word in season!

A quotation from John Newton’s "A Review of Ecclesiastical History" which was published in 1769.

Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree of clearness with which they have been enforced, the practical duties of Christianity have flourished in the same proportion. Wherever they have declined, or been tempered with the reasonings and expedients of men, either from a well-meant, though mistaken fear, lest they should be abused, or from a desire to accommodate the gospel, and render it more palatable to the depraved taste of the world, the consequence has always been, an equal declension in practice. So long as the gospel of Christ is maintained without adulteration, it if found sufficient for every valuable purpose; but when the wisdom of man is permitted to add to the perfect work of God, a wide door is opened for innumerable mischiefs.

Who is God?

Some paragraphs from a nice review article by that much and unjustly
maligned man Rowan Williams:

   Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the
    universe. To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one
    agent and another in the world. God is not an object or agent over
    against the world; God is the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an
    activity that activates all that is around God is more intimate to the
    world than we can imagine, as the source of activity or energy itself;
    and God is more different than we can imagine, beyond category and kind
    and definition.
 
   Thus God is never competing for space with agencies
   in the universe. When God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in
   the universe by an intervention from outside, but more that the
   immeasurably diverse relations between God's act and created acts and
   processes may be more or less transparent to the presence of the
   unconstrained love that sustains them all.
 
   The doctrine of the incarnation does not claim that the 'theistic'
   God (i.e. a divine individual living outside the universe) turns
   himself into a member of the human race, but that this human
   identity, Jesus of Nazareth, is at every moment, from conception
   onwards, related in such a way to God the Word (God's eternal
   self-bestowing and self-reflecting) that his life is unreservedly and
   uniquely a medium for the unconstrained love that made all things to
   be at work in the world to remake all things. Jesus embodies God the
   Word or God the Son as totally as (more totally than) the musician in
   performance embodies the work performed.

on "doing" church.

One thing that gets on your Black Sheep's goat (n.b. reference to Matthew 25 there!) is talk about "doing" church. It usuall crops in phrases like "in our society we need to find different ways of doing church".

I came across a very nice article about all that this morning ... You can find it here - the Sydney Anglicans site is well worth a visit.

But I add the bulk of the article below for those who don't like to travel ....

Archie Poulos writes:-

During the boom of the Church Growth movement in the 1980s we were called to move our churches from being “modalities” to become “sodalities”. A modality is a collection of people that exist as a mode of being. You belong by just being. Families are modalities. A nation is a modality. Membership requires no or very little commitment, you are part of it just by existing.

Modalities are about “being”.

Sodalities are like partnerships. You have to apply and work hard to join. You join to engage in a task that must be done, and it requires a high level of commitment. Sodalities are about “doing”.

There are huge advantages in being a sodality. Stagnation is overcome. Everyone is involved. All members are working and pulling in the same direction to reach a goal.

The problem in making church a sodality is that the Bible describes church as much more like a modality. The images of church are that of family, where relationships are significant. What matters most for us, as an individual in a church, is that the belong to Christ in a relationship forged by his substitutionary death for us, not what I contribute to the outcome.

I don’t want to say the existence of churches doesn’t achieve anything. Things are achieved by the good functioning of the church family.

As an example take the Chappell family. All three brothers played cricket for Australia. As children they played cricket in the back yard, which is what families do. I am certain their functioning in this way as a family also made them better cricketers. I am also sure part of their success was the athletic DNA they inherited. The modality of their family resulted in them being outstanding sportsman. But they weren’t family in order to become great sportsmen.

The challenge facing us in church is not to do more, or to do it better, but to shape our being a church family together in such a way that we all become white hot in our love and service of Jesus.