So what is summer the time for? In many cultures it’s harvest time. For some of us here it still is. For others it means school’s out, summer jobs, summer camps, perhaps some holidays with family, a little travel maybe. A change in the tempo of life allows us to be a little more reflective than at other times of the year. Time, maybe, to look at the priorities that have dictated the rhythm of the rest of the year. Whose priorities have I been pursuing? My own, or the priorities of the Kingdom, Jesus’ priorities? That’s a tough question, because as a follower of Jesus I would like to think that my priorities and Jesus’ are one and the same. For most of the year in the rough and tumble of a reasonably busy life, and without much time for reflection, the question usually goes unanswered. So when the tempo slows for a couple of months, what am I going to do with this time that I could use (if I so chose) to try and answer it.

It seems pretty clear that Jesus’ priority for us is disciple making. Making the kind of disciples who obey all that Jesus has taught us. Now I find it much easier to agree with all that Jesus taught us than to actually obey it. It seems that Jesus is really not interested in people who merely agree with him: he actually wants us to put his teaching into action. Why else would he end his major teaching sessions in both Matthew and Luke with the cautionary tale of two house builders?

In the old days, when sound recordings were made on two inch wide magnetic tape, using sixteen or thirty-two track tape machines, each day the sound engineer had to realign the recording heads of the machines so that the different tracks were synchronised. If they didn’t do this banal task, the recordings made would be out of phase with the ones made the previous day and the work would be wasted. Summer gives us the opportunity, both individually and as members of communities of followers of Jesus to re-calibrate, to re-align ourselves and our communities with the values and priorities of the Kingdom.

Unfortunately, disciple making is not a quick and easy pursuit. It is better thought about in terms of the whole of life and lifelong discipleship of Jesus. We never graduate from being a disciple: we will be forever learning, forever striving to become more like the one we follow. Discipleship is not a program, nor a course—though both of these can be helpful—but it describes the relationship between us and the one we follow. So even though knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are necessary, they cannot exist apart from the discipleship relationship if we are to be able to claim that we are followers of Jesus. It is the extent to which we are becoming like Jesus that seems to matter in the Kingdom.

Now, all this introspection could easily become morbid and depressing. The Apostle Paul helpfully provides the perspective that lifts the weight from our shoulders, when he expresses his confidence “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Yes, we are very much God’s work in progress, so it’s never all down to me. Rather, we are expected to cooperate with God’s work in us and not obstruct it.

So, how about using some of this down time (if indeed we have some) to do some realigning, to test ourselves, to see if our lives are “in line with the truth of the gospel,” and if we find there has been some “slippage” to make some course corrections and attempt to get back on track?

The Church’s prayer in every generation is always for the people of God to be renewed. When our hearts and minds are renewed it opens us up to the unifying love that is Christ, brings the desire to serve others, and offers peace and hope to our families, communities, and to the world. This, of course, is the Church’s mission and raison d’etre.

In order for the local church to be effective in its mission in every generation, its pastors need to be intentional and systematic in guiding its people—and ultimately its whole region. The people of God need to be loved, cared for, and shown compassion and mercy. And the people of God also need to be well instructed in the Christian life.

In our Canadian context we are living in a predominantly un-churched society, where perhaps only 10 to 15% of the population is affiliated with organized religion. Moreover, the influence of our secular society on that 15% is substantial. Recognizing the church’s mission mandate, and well aware of this societal conditioning, in 1999 the Anglican Parish of the Resurrection in South River, Newfoundland, began a process of renewal, educating our Christian community and re-creating ourselves.

Here is our story.

In the fall of 1999, the parish was a four point charge with small, diminishing, and tired congregations. It was evident that we would have to become one congregation, with all the heartache that would entail, or we would die. This is how we managed, with the grace of God, to recreate ourselves into one vibrant congregation.

We began experimenting by pooling all the human resources from the four congregations in such a way that we would function administratively, liturgically and catechetically as a one point parish. Liturgically, we had one main service on Sunday mornings that moved each week around the parish. The music was more contemporary, and the children’s church was worked into the liturgy. Those who appreciated the contemporary worship and children’s church would “move” to a different building each Sunday morning. Administratively, all four vestries met and worked as one body responsible for the entire parish; and a single financial team was put into place to manage all parish finances.

These “experimental” changes made the running of the parish more efficient, and the liturgy more life giving. But the factor that gave the process deeper roots and the desire to persevere was the intentional, systematic, and ongoing catechetical evangelization of the congregation. If the parish was going to survive, to be renewed and to be made effective in ministry and mission, it was evident that we needed to challenge those already in the pews to learn more about their faith, and to deepen their spiritual practice. In other words, we took as our very first mission mandate to evangelize and educate those already in the pew.

So, at the same time that the administrative and liturgical changes were happening, we introduced the Alpha Course to the parish. All four vestries and others from the congregations were challenged to take part in that first Alpha course. And, thank the Lord, most vestry members responded. This first Alpha was life changing for a number of those who participated, not only by deepening their experience of God, but also by building new relationships across the boundaries of the four congregations. This was a major factor in bonding together in faith and friendship those who hardly knew one before.

The Alpha Course in the fall of 1999 was only the beginning of the catechetical evangelization of the congregation. A Sunday Breakfast Bible study and a weeknight Bible study began right after that first Alpha. In addition, we dedicated two nights each week to Christian Education. Thursday nights was set aside for Alpha, and Monday nights for other Christian education opportunities such as After Alpha, various other programs, and guest teachers who would come to speak on selected themes.

Gladys Harvey writes: Twelve years ago, I was a churchgoer but notacommitted Christian. I decided to do an Alpha course which was offered by our then new priest. That course changed my life and set my feet firmly on a faith journey which has led to a deep involvement with my faith community and with Christian adult education. Alpha gave me the nuts and bolts to begin with, and Lectio divina gave me the discipline of prayer. Christian education , in addition to theology based sermons from our priest, has helped to build a faith COMMUNITY where formerly there were four dying congregations.

As the faith of the congregation was deepening and maturing, many were being prepared to make the hard decisions to become constitutionally a single congregation with one vestry, to sell our old buildings, and to construct a new House for the Church.

During this interim between the old order (with four buildings) and the move to the new House for the Church, the Alpha and other various courses, including Bible studies, continued to renew and transform our people. The Sunday homilies, strategy and visioning workshops, and special lectures also became very important in educating the congregation about the liturgical principles that our new Oratory would embody, and the ideas of hospitality that would direct our new “Emmaus Café.”

Winston Bishop writes: In September 2006 my family and I decided togive church a chance again and take in a service at the newly opened Parish of the Resurrection. We were a family in need of something meaningful to help fill the emptiness that was within us. We received a warm welcome and after several services, an invitation was extended to us to attend Alpha which soon became the single most important event in our family’s lives. Alpha saved us as a family; it introduced us to Jesus and gave us a place to belong, praise God!

After moving into our new community home in 2006, we added to our Christian Education menu a Wednesday afternoon Spiritual Reading Group. This group meets after the Wednesday mass and lunch, and has read and discussed books including such classics as Augustine’s Confessions and The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, and popular works such as The Shack. During the fall of 2010, the Spiritual Reading Group will be reading and reflecting on Three Cups of Tea, the popular story of one man’s encounter with the Pakistani tribes high in the Himalayas, and his response to their great kindness to him.

Another strand of catechesis we’ve been developing over the last four years has been outreach to the wider community: courses on marriage, parenting, bereavement, divorce and separation courses (using resources available through Alpha Canada) and relevant support groups. We’ve moved into this area for a number of reasons: we want to be seen as a resource to our region for people who are not members of our parish; we discerned a need in this area for our region; and there is potential that when folk participate in the outreach programs that we run out of our café, they may decide to explore faith issues with us as a parish.

Finally, for those interested in learning the disciplines of meditation and contemplation, and early in our process of recreating our community, we introduced the practice of Lectio Divina, which has become an important aspect of our catechetical evangelization. This has developed into a regular corporate practice on Sunday evenings, and, when we moved into our new House for the Church, on Wednesday mornings also.

Debbie Kaba writes: When I started attending Parish of the Resurrection at thebeginning of Advent 2007, I was eager to learn meditation and contemplation and  have found them very helpful in my Christian journey. It helps me quiet my mind and emotions and feel the love of God no matter what situation I’m in. Stuck in traffic? I can practice silent prayer until the frustration abates. It has also developed a deep love and connectedness to others of the parish who corporately practice this prayer. The self-discipline it takes to grow in this discipline has been beneficial, too.

Our schedule for catechetical evangelization in the fall of 2010 is full: the new seven week Alpha course; a Bereavement Course; the Spiritual Reading Group discussing Three Cups of Tea; Sunday morning and Tuesday evening Bible studies; corporate meditation on Sundays and Wednesdays; Sunday and Wednesday Mass; and a Parenting Course and a Divorce and Separation Course on request. The winter schedule will be similar, except that we will add the Marriage Course.

As we have sought to develop a mission focused parish, we have discovered that ongoing, intentional, and planned “catechetical evangelization” needs to be a regular component of congregational life. The results, by the grace of God, can be remarkable.

Canada is a significant destination for Diaspora Christians around the world, some fleeing persecution, others poverty and war, and some are on the move (I think) because they’ve been called by Christ to missionize the western world—like the Filipino church planter I met in North York who planted an intercultural church in Mississauga which then birthed another congregation in Etobicoke even before the Mississauga church secured their first pastor.

They are not reticent about their faith.  Like the Christians of the early Roman Empire serving the established classes, I am hearing anecdotal evidence of children demanding to go church because their nannies have told them about Jesus, personal caregivers leading seniors to faith in Christ, receptionists praying with clients in the waiting room, and other professionals I dare not name in print lest we jeopardize their timely unawareness of the need to compartmentalize faith so it cannot seep into the workplace.

Twenty years ago, I thought God had brought us the nations of the world so we could share Christ. Now I think I had it backward.  We are the ones who need to learn that faith is no less a passion than World Cup Football, and spiritual conversations are as natural as discussing the weather.  We are the ones who need to forget that our brand of Christianity had its capital in Europe—perhaps temporarily—and remember that the Church has always been the world’s most truly multi-national, multi-ethnic, inter-cultural corporations.  We are the ones who must adjust to the new reality beyond our cultural borders where it is more normal to purchase a theatre to turn it into a place of worship than to sell a church and turn it into condominiums—and that others are doing just that in our midst.

Soong-Chan Rah, a 1.5 generation Korean-American scholar in Chicago has it right when he says that the real wave of transformation in the North American church will not be ushered in by hip young white guys with goatees and book contracts with the Christian media juggernaut, but by intercultural ministries.  First generation immigrants often arrive with a vibrant faith, but with too many cultural barriers to communicate easily into other people groups. Their children, however, who arrive as young people but grow up with vibrant faith and a Canadian education and accent—these 1.5 generation immigrants are shaping up as a formidable force on the Canadian landscape.

Five years ago, I thought that perhaps 50% of church goers in the Greater Toronto area on any given Sunday morning were in black majority or immigrant churches.  No one knows how many unregistered churches there are, but I suspect the percentage of worshippers is much higher today.

photo courtesy City of Ottawa

fresh expressions canada update

january 12 2010

A very Happy New Year to all of you, and especially to those in the Diocese of Ottawa who have recently joined this list following various Fresh Expressions-related events in your diocese.

It is already shaping up to be a busy year for Fresh Expressions Canada (FXCA), what with two Vital Church Planting Conferences (East & West), as well as the launch of the one year, part time,  Mission Shaped Ministry (MSM) course -a year to be equipped in planting and sustaining fresh expressions of church

MSM is expected to run from Sept. 2010 -April 2011, comprising 6 weekday evenings, 3 Saturdays, and a residential weekend away. Based in Toronto, we hope to have clusters in other cities which will meet at the same time and be conferenced together! For more information email msm@freshexpressions.ca

The newest addition to the FXCA team John Bowen will be our MSM Coordinator, contact him with any questions!

Mission Shaped Intro (MSI)-six weeks to rediscover mission and re-imagine church
This excellent six-session course can be freely downloaded and presented in your neighbourhood. To find out more email info@freshexpressions.ca

MSI Edmonton starts soon! email thomas.brauer @freshexpressions.ca for more details

Peter McCracken, Rev. Christine Piper and Thor Stewart have joined together to start up a Tuesday-night youth ministry based on skateboarding. Melissa Di Costanzo

skateboarding spirituality?

Where signs warding off skateboarders once hung, a new movement to blend skating culture with Christianity is taking root.

Tonight, Christian rock music will blare from the speakers as kids take advantage of the only place in town they can skateboard indoors. When their boards hit the ramps, they will be taking part in a new iteration of a global Christian movement called Fresh Expressions that is making the teachings of the Anglican church accessible to people who haven’t felt a connection to the traditional church… more

The first Vision Dayof 2010 takes place on Saturday, April 17, 2010 from 9:30am –               3:00pm. Hosted by: St. Mark’s Anglican Church, 5 First Avenue,
 Orangeville, ON, L9W 2Z5. Cost: $15.00
If you are interested in holding one in your area contact our Vision Day Coordinator, Sue Kalbfleisch. Contact her at vision@freshexpressions.ca

some more things to watch out for in 2010!

a Fresh Expressions Canada consultation will he held in Toronto, Feb.1-2,  prior to the Vital Church Planting-East conference. Members of the FXCA team will be meeting with Dr. Rachel Jordan and Pernell Goodyer, as well as other ecumenical partners, who are working together to see a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout Canada. Please pray for all those at this important consultation.

Two Vital Church Planting Conferences
“The annual Vital Church Planting conferences are becoming venues where some of the most creative and entrepreneurial leaders of our church—bishops, clergy and lay leaders from across the country—are gathering to network, learn, pray, and strategise together.” more

Toronto Feb. 2-4, places are limited register now!
Edmonton May 18-20, new!

Two Messy Fiestas! – days of fun and learning about Messy Church
Saturday, April 24, 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm.
Hosted by: St. George’s Anglican Church, 60 Guelph St.,
 Georgetown, ON, 
L7G 3Z5. Cost: $15.00

Saturday, May 15 , 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm
Hosted by: St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, 12 Carleton St. S., Thorold, ON, 
L2V 5C2. .Cost: $15.00
Please contact Sue Kalbfleisch at vision@freshexpressions.ca to join the advance mailing list or with questions about Messy Fiestas! If you haven’t heard about Messy Church, go to www.messychurch.org.uk to see a great promo video!

Watch out for “Mission (im)Possible“.   A 5 week course being prepared by Jenny Andison and Stephen Drakeford to help people re-discover and re-discover mission in your context.  It’s purpose is to provide an interactive tool to assist people in beginning a conversation about what it would mean for their parishes to be shaped by the mission of God and for the mission of God. The course will be fun and easy to use and is being designed to be run over a one hour period for 5 evenings. The course would be perfect to use in Lent in your parish. It can be downloaded from the Diocese of Toronto website beginning  mid-January 2010.  If you want more information then please contact Jenny Andison, Archbishop’s Officer for Mission, at  jandison@toronto.anglican.ca

We need your stories of what’s going on in your area, to put on the FXCA website. Stories of attempts to start something new, something which may stand a chance of developing into a fresh expression of church. Here’s an example of what we are looking for, something that started partly as a result of someone attending a Fresh Expressions related event. Could it turn into a fresh expression of church? I guess we’ll have to just wait and see! Please send your story with photos to web@freshexpressions.ca

Please pray for all of us involved in encouraging “the development of fresh expressions of church alongside more traditional expressions, with the aim of seeing a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout the country.” Yes, it’s a huge job, but with God nothing is impossible, even though it is seldom easy!

Thanks so much for your interest in Fresh Expressions Canada. If you would like to support the work financially you can do so by clicking here and filling out the form, selecting “Other,” from the “I would like to direct my gift to:” options, and writing Fresh Expressions in the “Please Specify” box.

^“… let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit. Right now, therefore, every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in the community of faith.” Paul writing in Galatians 6:9 (The Message)

With best wishes for a mission shaped 2010, from the Fresh Expressions Canada team, Ryan, Sue, Thomas, Jenny, John, &…

Nick Brotherwood

Team Leader-Fresh Expressions Canada

nick.brotherwood@freshexpressions.ca

story by Laura Mueller, copyright Perth Courier

Peter McCracken, Rev. Christine Piper and Thor Stewart have joined together to start up a Tuesday-night youth ministry based on skateboarding. Melissa Di Costanzo

Where signs warding off skateboarders once hung, a new movement to blend skating culture with Christianity is taking root.

Tonight, Christian rock music will blare from the speakers as kids take advantage of the only place in town they can skateboard indoors. When their boards hit the ramps, they will be taking part in a new iteration of a global Christian movement called Fresh Expressions that is making the teachings of the Anglican church accessible to people who haven’t felt a connection to the traditional church…

read more

Read more

While there is undoubtedly a sense in which a life with God is better than one without God, it’s not a simple path of magic. Here, ‘better’ has nothing to do with false ‘prosperity gospel’ promises, and it most certainly doesn’t mean that life is easier. It can, in fact, get more complicated and difficult. Jesus also said that following him involved taking up a cross. In one famous phrase, Dietrich Bonhöffer said that when Jesus calls us to follow him he bids us come and die. One biblical writer said that ‘it is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’

I recall one of my youth ministry heroes, Mike Yaconelli, once responding to a parent who asked for help with her wayward child: ‘Yes, I can help ruin his life.’ He meant, of course, that when someone gets involved with Jesus there is no telling where it will lead, only that it will sometimes lead in unknown paths and difficult directions. In the process, it will lead to wrestling with God.

This reality of the spiritual life is clearly pictured in several biblical passages, but perhaps most clearly in the story of Jacob wrestling with the ‘angel of the Lord’ (who in fact turns out to be none other than a manifestation of God). Jacob wrestles with God, is injured in the process, but in the end receives God’s blessing and a new name: ‘Israel’, meaning ‘God-wrestler.’ Eventually not just this one person but all God’s people in the Hebrew scriptures are called Israel—a nation of ‘God-wrestlers.’

Sadly, many young people are unprepared to meet a living God who refuses to dwell in religious boxes, no matter how pretty we try to make them—a God who is a respecter neither of ‘personal space’ nor ‘comfort zones.’ When you expect God always to lead gently like a shepherd, as God most certainly does sometimes, what do you do when this God turns dangerous and wants to wrestle?

To be sure, much of what passes for wrestling with God is not really so much about God as it is with things we think or believe or have heard about God. Sometimes all of us, young or not, confuse things we’ve been told about God with God.  Sadly, too often young people are subjected to attempts at ‘discipleship by indoctrination’ and are not taught how to wrestle through issues and beliefs. As Anne Lamott puts it, in a slightly different context: ‘God forbid that you should have your own opinions or perceptions—better to have head lice.’ [Bird by Bird, 110-111]. A theology professor I had one time told me in class that ‘You will find it much easier to live with yourself if you would just stop asking questions and believe what I say.’ What he really meant was that he would find it much easier to live with me if I stopped asking questions.

The unhappy truth is that this approach to discipleship doesn’t stand young people in good stead when beliefs are challenged, either from within or without. Through years of experience working with youth, I have witnessed far too often how it sets them on a course for disillusionment and disaster. It may seem like hard work, but it is far easier to teach basic navigational skills than to rescue those who have shipwrecked.

Many youth leaders and pastors, however, find themselves ill equipped to deal with the real-life questions, fears, doubts and struggles that young people face. In part, the church is to blame for this situation because we just have not invested the time, treasure and talent we talk so much about in either our young people or those who minister most directly among them.

In another way, we have simply not awakened to the illusion that we have to have the answers—that we have to somehow ‘fix’ the beliefs and ‘counter’ the doubts and ‘reassure’ the fears of young wrestlers. As we learned the true nature of spiritual mentoring as ‘walking with someone,’ we realise that integrity means refusing to ‘play-act religion’; it means admitting that we don’t have all the answers, letting them know that we, too, are wrestlers and committing ourselves to discerning together. Wrestling with our beliefs, struggles and faith can be a lonely experience when we are left feeling like we wrestle alone. How much better to know that we are part of a community of wrestling people!

This is even more important when we are not just wrestling with things about God but actually with God. God is just not some Big Idea out there somewhere. God is not just some Star Wars Force. God is the living God, and the living God engages us in living relationships. Living relationships are not just joyful and full of easy blessing. They’re messy, sometimes difficult, and often involve wrestling with the beloved—even the Beloved. I don’t suppose it’s coincidental that the biblical writers use metaphors of friendship, family, romance and marriage to describe our relationships with God.

Many biblical heroes from Moses and Lot through the prophets wrestled with God in different ways. Even Jesus wrestled with God in prayer to the point of sweating blood. The post-biblical saints frequently describe their relationship with God in terms of a phrase I’ve chosen for my tombstone: ‘I had a lovers’ quarrel with God.’

Young people simply cannot be abandoned in their wrestling with God. Even though we can’t spare them the risk of injury in the process, what better than for them to engage our dangerous God—or to wrestle with the sense of God’s absence—in the community of other God-wrestlers?

Is it worth it? Yes, of course, because, as Mr and Mrs Beaver said of Aslan, of course God’s not safe—but God is good.

So who is Tolle and what is he teaching? I have read most of his book, The New Earth. I have watched videos of him and of Oprah and of the two of them together. (Lots of them are on YouTube.) And I have read a cross-section of what people are saying about him and his teaching. The most helpful I found are a pastor and theologian called Greg Boyd, and a teacher from Tyndale Seminary in Toronto called Jim Beverley. Some of what I am going to say is based on what I learned from them.

First of all, there are things in this book that are very positive.

• Tolle talks about the importance if living in the present. If we are always planning and worrying for the future, or living in the past, we miss out on the good things that are happening right now—the smile of a child, a sunset, or the smell of a flower.

• Tolle reminds us that it’s no use trying to get our sense of self-worth from things or from money or from having influence over other people. It’s a waste of time, because it doesn’t work and it doesn’t last.

• And he reminds us that religion can damage our spiritual health. Instead of being a door into helping us to explore our spirituality, it can actually be a door slammed shut against our spirituality. Many of us have known the kind of churches he’s talking about. Nobody wants that kind of religion . . . and it certainly has nothing to do with Jesus.

I can’t say any of these are new ideas, but it’s helpful to be reminded of them.

But there are things I feel less positive about. For instance, what he says about:

• Religious beliefs

Tolle says he is against what he calls “belief systems”—“a set of thoughts that you regard as absolute truth.”(17). He thinks we should let go of “form, dogma, and rigid belief systems” (18) so we can be free to experience enlightenment. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

The problem, of course, is that on every page of his book he is setting out his beliefs, “a set of thoughts.” What’s more, he’s very dogmatic in his beliefs. For example, he tells you what Jesus really meant, which apparently nobody has understood for the past 2,000 years. And if you disagree, well, you’re wrong—or at least unenlightened. But Tolle never tells you how he knows the things he says: he just says them, gently and with a smile, but dogmatically and with great authority.

It’s ironical, isn’t it? Although he says he is against religions which think other religions are wrong, what is he offering in their place? A religion that thinks other religions are wrong. What is wrong with this picture?

Let’s look at some of his specific beliefs, beginning with the most crucial one of all:

God

Let me read you a very revealing part of this book:

It has been said that “God is love” but that is not absolutely correct. God is the One Life in and beyond the countless forms of life. Love implies duality: lover and beloved, subject and object.

That sounds innocent enough, to say “that is not absolutely correct.” But it’s actually very radical. When the Bible says God is love, it means there is a God who is separate from me, who is my creator, and who loves me and the whole world.

For Tolle, there is no “God” in that sense, no God who is separate from me. In a sense, everything is God, including human beings. In fact, he often refers to people as “I AM” (in capital letters), a name God calls himself in the Old Testament.

Now, the way you think about God is going to affect everything else you believe. That’s true for example about what Tolle believes about:

People

He takes the view that people exist just like waves on the sea. A wave is there for a short time, but then it goes back into the ocean and loses its identity. Human beings are the same: we exist for a time, but really we are a part of the ocean of universal consciousness, and that’s what we return to after death. That’s an ancient and respectable point-of-view. But it is diametrically different from Christianity.

Christians want to say, No, human beings are more than waves on the ocean. They are made in the image of God—not that we are God but that there is something amazing and wonderful and god-like about every one of us. And this fact that we are who we are—our personhood—is a precious gift from God.

And that’s why to say God is love is not nonsense: however much we lose ourselves in the love of God—in the same way you can lose yourself in a good conversation or a good game—we will always be us and God will always be God—even beyond death. C.S.Lewis asks his friend Bede Griffiths why God would bother to make us separate in the first place if God always meant us to lose our identity in him? (Letter, 27/09/49)

* Salvation

Tolle doesn’t so much talk about salvation so much as about enlightenment. Enlightenment means realizing that you are just a wave of the sea, that you are a part of universal consciousness. When you’re enlightened, you can then live in harmony with the universe, and that brings a kind of peace.

But this is not the same peace the Bible talks about. Being at peace with God, as Christians understand it, doesn’t mean that everything is one. No, it means that we can be friends with God our Creator because Jesus has dealt with our wrongdoing. It’s like the peace that comes after a war, when the peace treaty has been signed.

And then there’s Jesus:

* Jesus

Tolle quotes Jesus about a dozen times in this book, and (how can I put this nicely?) I would say every single time he twists what Jesus meant. How can I say that? Am I being dogmatic too? Yes!

I say it because he totally ignores the fact that Jesus was Jewish, that he lived and breathed the air of the Old Testament. For him, Jesus as a real person really isn’t that important: he’s just a guy who said some wise things that can mean whatever you want. So, for example, he quotes Jesus’ words, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” (234) Let me read you the whole section:

When you hear of inner space, you may start seeking it, and, because you are seeking it as if you were looking for an object or an experience, you cannot find it. This is the dilemma of all those who are seeking spiritual realization or enlightenment. Hence, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God . . . is in the midst of you.”

But when Jesus says “the kingdom of God” there is no way he is thinking of “inner space” or “spiritual enlightenment.” He is a first-century Jew and what he meant by the Kingdom was what all first-century Jews meant by the kingdom—the community where people live in relationship with God and with one another and with the world around in accordance to the Creator’s laws—not what 21st century New Age Western teachers mean by it!

Conclusion

There’s lots more that could be said. But let me finish with this: Eckhart Tolle reminds us that people are deeply spiritual, and that they are seeking for some kind of spiritual reality beyond this world to make sense of their lives.

But Tolle also reminds Christians that we really haven’t done a very good job of representing Jesus to the world, and helping people discover true spiritual fulfillment as followers of Jesus.

As we come to the table this morning, and hold out our hands to receive the bread and the cup, it reminds us that we are not God, and that our destiny is not universal consciousness. It says to us that God is our Creator and our Lover, and that we are his creatures, his children, and his friends. It reminds us that he loved us enough to die for us. And that he invites us to live for him. 

The first part of this article was about in-house distinctions of spirituality: what are the different branches of the Christian tree, if you like. In this second part, I want to think about—well, I guess the opposite of in-house is out-house—what distinguishes Christian spirituality, this Christian tree (whichever of the five types we’re taking about) from other forms of spirituality?

Before we get to that, a couple of things by way of introduction:

1. You have probably noticed that the word spirituality is used in our culture as though it is just one thing, the same the world over. But in fact this is not the case. Different religions and traditions actually have different definitions of what it means to be spiritual, and indeed of the idea of spirit. This is one reason the word is notoriously difficult to define!

Some time ago, my friend Faun Harriman drew my attention to an article in Chateleine magazine (that well-known authority on spirituality) which was quoting researchers at the U of T, who defined spirituality as “the beliefs we hold concerning our place in the universe and our connection to a higher power. Spirituality (they say) reduces stress, promotes healthy lifestyle choices and increases a sense of belonging.”

Is that right? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Are those characteristics of Christians? Does Christian spirituality have to do with knowing our place in the universe? Yes, I suppose that’s part of it. Does it have to do with connection to a higher power? Sure, though it makes a big difference whether the name of your higher power is Jesus Christ or The Force of Star Wars!

Does it reduce stress and promote healthy lifestyle choices? Well, that depends. Faun commented that spirituality “didn’t exactly boost Jesus’ longevity.” Did it reduce his stress when he set his face to go to the cross? Was it a healthy lifestyle choice to oppose the Pharisees? What did the families of his disciples say when they went home and said the master had called them to take up their crosses and follow him? “Wow, that’s great. What a healthy lifestyle choice you are making! That’ll really increase your sense of belonging.” Probably not.

Those researchers are not describing Christian spirituality. They’re not making allowances for the diversities of spiritualities in our world.

If there could be a common definition, it would have to be a very minimal one, something like, “those things that connect a person to a bigger reality than the material.” As soon as we move beyond that, we start getting into differences.

2. The second thing is this: how many of us were using the word spirituality twenty years ago? Probably only one or two of us. So why has it become almost universal in recent years, as in the phrase, “I’m a spiritual person, but I’m not . . . religious”? There are at least a couple of reasons to do with changes in our culture:

(a) One change is that people have come to realise that there is more to the world than simply the material. We have realised that there are other parts of us, which for convenience we call our spirits, that also need tending and nurturing. It seems to me that that in itself is a good thing.

But the other reason it’s gained in popularity I don’t find so encouraging:

(b) In western countries thirty years ago, if we wanted to take care of our spirits, where would you go? We would probably have checked out some churches. But now we don’t want to do that, because we are “spiritual but not . . . religious.”

What’s the problem? Why do we make that distinction? I suspect that too is to do with changes in society in general. Church is too restrictive. After all, most churches/synagogues/temples/ mosques tend to have definite ideas about spirituality, and people now are more inclined to want to do their own thing, not accept someone else’s ideas. You’ve heard the kind of statement: “Nobody can tell me what to believe; nobody can tell me how to behave; I’ll decide what’s right and wrong for me.” It’s not rocket science to realise that that kind of attitude is hardly likely to drive people into the arms of organised religion (can you imagine someone saying, “I’m creating my own spirituality, so I’m thinking of becoming an Anglican”?). (It has to be said, however, that those who talk about organised religion obviously don’t have much experience of the average parish council.)

So the concern with spirituality actually comes out of the individualism of our world, it comes out of the idea that spiritual stuff is private and personal, and that if it’s for real it’s unlikely to have anything to do with an institution. (As someone pointed out recently, in our world, formal has come to signal hypocritical, while informal has come to mean genuine and authentic.)

These things should alert us to the fact that what Christian tradition has to say about spirituality may sound quite different, and not necessarily appealing to the average person who is “exploring their spirituality.”

One more thing: you know, don’t you, that the world divides into those who divide things into two categories and those who don’t? I do, so it won’t surprise you to know there are two ways of thinking about Christian belief and practice.

One is that it is like a tightrope—narrow and straight, and if you step even slightly to left or right, you’ll fall off. I know Christians who regard their spirituality that way, and maybe you do too. That’s not at all what I’m trying to do here: to define a tightrope for you.

The other way of thinking about it is that Christian belief and practice are like a field with a fence around it. It’s a big field, it’s a beautiful field, and there’s lots of space in the field for Colin and Astrid and Eddie and Chris and Samantha to run and jump and dance and explore and pick flowers. But the fence is there to say, This is the territory marked out for us by God: there are dangers outside.

So what I’m going to do is list some of what I would say are the fence posts that define the field of Christian spirituality.

Fence post 1: Christian spirituality centres around a relationship with God.

Now, you may ask, isn’t this stating the obvious? No, because this is not true for all spiritualities. Others might say the goal is to be one with the universe. (You know what the Buddhist said to the hotdog vendor? “Make me one with everything.” Buddhists tell that joke, so I think it’s OK.) Others might say the goal of my spirituality is self-fulfilment.

For someone like Shirley Maclaine, it is something else again:

I am God, you are God. God is not something or someone separate from the world or from me. . . . If one says audibly ‘I am God’ the sound vibrations literally align the energies of the body to a higher atunement. You can use – ‘I am God’ or ‘I am that I am’ as Christ often did . . . Each soul is its own God. You must never worship anyone or anything other than self. For YOU are God. To love self is to love God. (Dancing in the Light)

Now it’s her right and privilege to believe whatever she likes. But as a simple observation of fact, her understanding of God and hence her spirituality is not one shared by Jews, Christians or Muslims And all the streams of Christian faith we looked at in Part I say the same: God is in some mysterious sense has a quality we can only call personhood, and God is a “person” who is other than us.

C.S.Lewis describes a young woman whose parents were very concerned that she should not think of God as a person: as a result, when she was asked as an adult what her picture of God was, she replied, God is like an infinitely-extended tapioca pudding. No, as Christians understand God, it’s not like that. Think of the opening scene of the movie Contact, where the camera moves out from the earth, back and back and back, into the infinite vastness of the universe. The Christian claim is that behind all that, through it, in it, above it, is a vast, mysterious, wonderful, awesome Being who loves me and invites me into a face-to-face, I-Thou relationship.

And when we speak of the Incarnation, God being revealed in our world, it is as a person that God is known.

Suppose that Bill Watterson, the cartoonist who created Calvin and Hobbes, wants to communicate with his creations, Calvin and Hobbes. So he creates a new cartoon character, and draws him into the strip. His name is Bill Watterson. In character, he is very like the “real-life” Bill Watterson, but, of course, he exists in two dimensions, and he communicates through speech-bubbles. In the strip, this character shows what the “real” Bill Watterson is like: his ideas, his values, his attitude towards his creation are all consistent with those of the cartoonist. Thus Calvin and Hobbes can know their creator in a way that’s real authentic but of course it’s limited. They are faced with the possibility of a relationship with their Creator.

But this whole idea of incarnation only works because we believe God has this quality we can only inadequately describe as personhood.

Sometimes, you know, we may take it for granted, and talk flippantly about “my relationship with God”, or (to quote the movie Dogma) my “buddy Jesus” but actually it is radical and overwhelming thing to claim what Christians claim.

So this is our first fencepost: for followers of Jesus, the heart of our spiritual life is nothing more not less than to know God, this God, and to be known by this God. This is primary: everything else is secondary.

Here’s fencepost #2: Christian spirituality is not a do-it-yourself faith.

This too goes against the spirit of our age. We tend to say things like, “Do whatever feels good”; “Find whatever works for you”; “My beliefs are true for me but it doesn’t mean they’re true for you”; “Nobody can tell you what to believe.”

And so much current interest in spirituality takes a kind of mix and match approach: a bit of Buddhist meditation, a bit of Gregorian chant, and a weekly Catholic mass. In other words, take whatever practices you want from wherever you find them, and put them together in whatever way works for you (though what it means to say a spirituality “works” is not very clear). After all, who’s to tell you you’re wrong?

But in Christian tradition, the way we express the life of the spirit, the way we nurture our spirits, is not in the first place something we work out for ourselves. In this sense, Christianity is not a grass-roots faith: we don’t arrive at it by personal investigation or voting on it to find a consensus: it’s a top-down faith–by which (trust me) I don’t mean through bishops and synods particularly, but from God. Christian spirituality is, or at least claims to be, a gift from God, and our job is to receive it with gratitude. Now this is not to say there’s no freedom or diversity in Christian spirituality. Of course not—that’s what I wrote about in Part I.

This blend of a form given by God (on the one hand) and yet freedom that is up to us (on the other hand) is explained I think brilliantly by New Testament scholar Tom Wright. He suggests the Bible lets us in on the story God is writing about the world. (He says it’s a play in five acts. Following Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh in Truth is Stranger than  it Used to Be, I think it works better with six.)

• In Act 1, God creates an incredibly beautiful world. At the heart of it are human beings who live in a dance of perfect harmony with the Creator, with one another and with the environment.
• In Act 2, things go horribly wrong. Human beings try to play God. They step out of the choreography of God’s dance. They get out of step with one another, and with the environment, and, most importantly, out of step with God.
• In Act 3, God begins to restore his work of art to even more than its original glory by calling one elderly couple, Abraham and Sarah, to be the ancestors of a nation through whom this restoration will come.
• In Act 4, God writes himself into the script of human life, to model for us what human life should really look like, to die for our sins and to rise again.
• Act 5 is the period between Jesus’ return to heaven and his return; and:
• Act 6 is the end of our world, when Jesus returns and restores the world to more than its original beauty.

Now, says Tom Wright, suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s were found today. He suggests that it’s all there except Act 5, which is missing. What could you do about the missing act? He suggests the best thing would be to get together the world’s top Shakespearian actors, tell them to immerse themselves in the play as we have it, and then let them loose on the stage. They would perform acts 1, 2, 3 and 4 as Shakespeare wrote them, but then they would ad lib act 5! All they know is that their characters have to behave in a way that is consistent with the play up to this point, and (if there are six acts) it has to connect convincingly with the events of the final act.

Now, says Tom Wright: that’s where we are. God has given us a framework for our lives, to understand the story as it was before we came on the scene, and as it will be after we are gone. And it’s as though God says to us: This is my story: do you want to be a part of it? This is the way your spirit will come to life and flourish. It will stretch you, there will be adventures you could never have imagined. Sometimes it will be hard, but it will bring you joy. And it will be the right part for you, the part I dreamed for you before time began and for which you were made.

Fence post #3 really follows from this: Christian spirituality affects every aspect of life

Christianity, you know, is a horribly practical religion. Sometimes it would be nice if it were only a matter of candles and incense and prayers. (I think it was Chesterton who said that Judaism was the first religion in the world to link spirituality and ethics: if you follow this religion, you have to act in a certain ethical fashion. When you think about it, there is no obvious reason why you shouldn’t keep your worship life and the rest of your life separate: it depends on the kind of God you worship.) Christianity, the child of Judaism, is the same.

As a result, our spirituality will invade every corner of our lives, from our work lives to our sex lives, from our reading habits to our shopping habits.

And, if we ask why the Creator of the Universe would care about such everyday things, the answer is simple: because God made the whole of life, not just the religious bits of it, and because God loves us and wants us to enjoy life to the full in this amazing world. You know what the greatest privilege is for any human being? It’s to able to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way 24 hours a day. It’s the most beautiful thing in God’s world. It gives God great joy. That’s why it’s so important for our spirituality.

So:

• If you’re an artist, your art will be different because you love God. Not that it will all be realistic paintings of Bible scenes (heaven forbid! those are not necessarily Christian!). But as you paint a landscape (say), it will be with the knowledge that God made that landscape, and that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” If you paint a portrait, it will be with the knowledge that it is the image of God you are representing. And so on.

• If you are a store-keeper, you will be aware that your calling is to be the channel through which God’s material blessings come to those who need them. So you will sell products that honour the creator—that are well-made, that didn’t exploit those who made them, that are beautiful as well as useful—and you will treat your customers not as your source of income, but as amazing creatures who reflect the majesty of their Creator.

• If you are a teacher, you will teach with the consciousness that you are teaching children how to live in God’s world, how to treasure it, steward it, make responsible use of it. And you will treat your students equally because each is in the image of God, and because Christ died for each one.

We could go on, but you get the idea. This is part of spirituality? Absolutely. Because in Christian spirituality, there is no secular/sacred distinction, as Samantha tried to get through to us in Part I. Our spirituality filters into every corner of our lives, and brings light and beauty, meaning and joy.

After that, #4 may seem rather jarring:

Fence post #4 Christian spirituality is tough

Those researchers at U of T seem to have missed this one. But it is crucial. Think of Christians who are killed for their faith—more, we are told, in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen put together—had they made a healthy lifestyle choice to follow Jesus? Yet Jesus made it very clear that anyone wanting to nurture their spirituality in the Christian tradition needs to know that it will mean some costly and uncomfortable choices, if it hasn’t already done so.

You know the sort of thing Jesus says: “Anyone who comes to me but refuses to let go of father, mother, spouse, child, brothers, sisters—yes, even one’s very self—can’t be my disciple. Anyone who won’t shoulder his own cross and follow behind me can’t be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27)

Jesus, frankly, is not a nice person who only wants us to be happy and comfortable, and his spirituality is probably not a kind of spirituality we would choose, left to our own devices: “Hmm, I’ve got some ceremony here, I’ve got some mystery and some meditation. I think what I’m missing is a little suffering, and I guess I’d better be open to the possibility of martyrdom. Sure: why not?”

It’s unlikely we would do that. But if we begin to explore Christian spirituality, we will quite quickly discover that this is inescapable. After all, the cross of Jesus Christ is the central symbol for Christian faith. And we are told that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” so in the crucifixion God has also suffered. C.S.Lewis even wonders whether the act of creation itself may have been a kind of crucifixion for God: “Perhaps there is an anguish, an alienation, a crucifixion involved in the creative act.” (Letters to Malcolm) In other words, difficulty, suffering, hardship are inseparable from the heart of Christian faith.

But let’s notice this too: Jesus is not being a sadist when he says such things, though it can look like that at first sight; in fact, there can be days when it feels like it. No: actually the opposite: he’s being kind. He has understood something very profound about the way God has built the world. Listen again: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23-25). Did you get it? God’s ultimate goal is not that we should lose our lives: he wants us to save our lives and he’s telling us the way to do that.

Now, this death and resurrection can happen in any one of a million ways. It’s about ten years now since I decided I was meant to be an evangelist (I’m still embarrassed by the word), and, as you might expect, it wasn’t an easy choice. I was doing good ministry, working with students, directing an area and supervising staff. But then there came a crisis: one of my staff burned out and I felt I was responsible and that I should resign. IVCF kindly said, We don’t want you to resign, but maybe there is a different job you should be doing with IVCF.

Well, as I thought about it, two options came to mind: one was that maybe I could be a teacher of the Bible available to students across the country; the other was to offer myself as an evangelistic speaker for students across the country. I had recently read Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, and as a result I was thinking about the importance of taking risks. That would mean the evangelism option—certainly a road less travelled. Bible teaching would have meant appreciative audiences; evangelism could mean the opposite! And what if it didn’t work out? What would I do with my life then? What if no-one wanted an itinerant evangelist (specially an Anglican one!)? Did I even want to be known as an evangelist? What if no-one became a Christian through my ministry? What if there was opposition to the Gospel? Would there be the financial support to do it? It felt a lot like a choice to “give up my life”.

But it was one of those times when I knew Jesus was saying, “Take up your cross . . . If you give up your life you will find it.” To my amazement, within a couple of months, I had received invitations for the following two years. I was involved in that ministry of evangelism for almost ten years, and I have to tell you I have seldom found such joy in serving God. To my faithless surprise, I found that Jesus was right: when I gave up my life, I found my life.

Well, no two stories are identical, and I don’t know how Jesus has called you to give up your life or where he will call you to give up your life. But this I know: if you are a follower of Jesus, it will happen if it hasn’t happened already. It feels like cruelty, but in fact it’s kindness, and it’s central to Christian spirituality.

The next fence post can also feel like a death.

Fence post #5 Christian spirituality thrives in community

Again, there are many spiritualities which are individual and private. You can just figure it out for yourself, you can practice by yourself. There may be no-one else in the world who shares your spirituality, and that may not be important for you. But Christian spirituality is inescapably corporate.

I suspect for most of us this community thing happens on different levels. For myself, it works like this. My wife Deborah is my closest source of Christian community, with whom I read the Bible and pray and share life every day. But then I also have a prayer partner, a male, with whom I meet every three weeks or so, and we share different kinds of things and pray for one another. I have a men’s Bible study group called “Saturday Stuff for Guys” which meets every other Saturday morning, which I wouldn’t miss for the world because it brings me great encouragement. And then there is the larger, Sunday congregation, some of whom I know and love well, some of whom I hardly know at all, and some of whom (if I’m honest) I find a bit difficult.

But if Christian community feeds our spirituality, it can also be a real pain in the anatomy and very destructive. I bought a second hand car recently, and it turned out that the dealer was a Christian. I asked him what church he attended, and he said, “I’m not involved in church right now. I go to my Promise Keepers group, but that’s it. You know, I’d heard the saying that the church is the only army that shoots its own wounded. Now I know what that means.” And he wouldn’t tell me any more, so I didn’t pry.

If it’s any consolation, it’s never been easy. Even when Jesus hung out with the twelve, more than once they were divided over who was the most important among them. And the reason we have much of the New Testament is because letters had to be written to churches that were divided!

The easiest response to problems in the church, I know, is to say, Oh, I’m going to leave this church and go over to the next one. Eugene Peterson in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant says this is why the Benedictine Order added to the traditional three monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the vow of stability. What does that mean? It means you can’t switch monasteries. Deborah discovered this not long ago, when she happened to be visiting a Benedictine monastery, and learned that not only can monks never leave their monastery, they will sit between the same two people every mealtime of their lives until they die and someone takes their place. (You just hope they have good table manners.)

Does it sound extreme? Maybe, but it’s saying something important. Christian spirituality is not nurtured in a community consisting of all the people we like best in the world. It grows by learning to live and work and worship with all God’s people, the difficult ones as well as the easy going ones, the ones who are like us and the ones who are different from us.

This isn’t just something God dreamed up to make life difficult for us. Rather, it’s God saying, This is how you function best. If you work at this, this is how you reflect who I am. After all, if God is a community of three, and we are in God’s image, then it is only in community that we will grow into the likeness of our Creator.

Conclusion

So . . . five fence posts around the field of Christian spirituality. Christians don’t need to be ashamed of their spirituality or apologise for it or water it down. It makes sense, it’s resilient, and, in spite of the abuses, it has produced the fruit of beautiful lives for two thousand years.

But, you know, I have to confess I don’t really like talking about Christian spirituality. It seems to me one of the good things about political correctness is that we call people what they want to be called. So we don’t call the Inuit Eskimo any more, because that’s not what they call themselves; we don’t call First Nations people Indians any more because it’s inaccurate and it’s not how they think of themselves. (I would like to think that one day this principle will be applied to the Welsh, since Welsh is an Old English word meaning foreigner.)

But what of Christians? Even “Christian” isn’t a word that Christians chose for themselves: it was a label stuck on them by other people. And I for one don’t particularly want to be thought of as an adherent of Christian spirituality! Sounds so dry, doesn’t it?

The way I want to think of myself is the way the first Christians thought of themselves, simply as disciples of Jesus, followers of Jesus, students of Jesus. The focus is not on us and our spirituality but on the journey and on him, our Teacher and Friend, our Lord and Guide, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Book Cover

Many people love the Narnia stories. However, not all readers know the deep spirituality that underlies them. In some ways, the stories mirror Lewis’ own wrestling with his spiritual longings, and seek to help others on the same journey. He wants us to feel, as he himself came to feel, that what we long for at the deepest level of our being is to be part of a great story, indeed The Great Story, in which the stories of Narnia and the story of our world and the story of our lives find their true meaning.

“I love C.S. Lewis’ work, and I’ve read many, many books about his life and writings. This book stands out to me because I believe that Lewis himself would have truly enjoyed it. It does what Lewis himself tried to do: make the most important story understandable and accessible to “normal” people. And it does so with a winsome style that has so much in common with Lewis’ own.”
— Brian McLaren, author/activist (brianmclaren.net)

“There is a great deal written about C.S. Lewis but much of it, sadly, is hardly worth the effort. That is certainly not the case here. Original, perceptive, balanced and insightful. Essential reading for anyone concerned with Lewis and issues of faith.”
— Michael Coren, Author of The Man Who Created Narnia

Visit http://www.regentbookstore.com/ to purchase this book

If religious people know that religion damages your health, why be religious? Why are we here? Why do I teach in a religious college? On the whole, people outside the church have a strong suspicion that religion does damage your health—that’s one reason they don’t get involved—but in general you would think that people who are involved in religion (of whom I am one) must not be aware of the danger (rather like the frog in the kettle who gets boiled because he doesn’t realize the water is heating up)—otherwise why on earth would they be religious? May it is like smoking—an addiction that you know is bad for you but you just can’t kick the habit. But then you wouldn’t want to hear why it’s bad for you—right?

But I would argue that a lot of religious people also know that religion can be bad for you—but they are also aware that there are benefits to religion which vastly outweigh the disadvantages, and so they are prepared to take the risk. In that way, religion is not so much like smoking: it’s more like an extreme sport—hang-gliding or bungee jumping—which can also damage your health.

Now, when I say religion, I should explain that I’m not speaking about a generic no-name brand kind of religion, nor am I speaking about the great world religions of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. They may well have a different take on this topic—I don’t know. I can only speak about Christian faith, that religion that is based in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

And I presume to do this only because I have been a serious follower of Jesus Christ for almost 40 years now, and in that time I think I have seen some of the best and the worst of the Christian religion—times when it was like smoking and times when it was like hang gliding.

I want to begin with Jesus himself. After all, he should give us some clue as to what Christianity is all about. Did he intend to start a religion, a church, an institution, such as we have today? The answer is a clear cut, definitive, dogmatic yes and no.

When he came, he preached an apparently simple message: his first recorded adult words are: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

What does that mean? Sounds suspiciously like a street corner preacher at Yonge and Dundas, doesn’t it? So what does he mean? Well, fundamentally, the Kingdom of God is where everything is done in God’s way. The assumption is that this is God’s world, God made it, God knows how it functions, and the people God made would do well to follow God’s directives for human life. Not very complicated, you would think.

But Jesus is also assuming that people do not do things God’s way. As you may have noticed, people hate and kill and deceive and abuse and lie—the sort of things God is generally believed to disapprove of.  This may be God’s world, but none of us are living in it in God’s way.

So Jesus’ invitation—Repent!—means simply, Change your mind, turn around, stop what you’re doing, quit living your way your way, give your life back to the God who made you, and start doing things his way. Why? Two reasons: one, because the world belongs to God, and God has a right to expect that we will treat his property well—whether that’s our own bodies, or other people, or the environment. But the second reason is hinted at in Jesus’ words “at hand” which tell us that with the coming of Jesus, and specially his death and resurrection, God is doing something new to establish his kingdom, and we’d better be ready and get with the program. That’s repentance.

So the Christian religion, the Christian church, began simply enough, with people responding to Jesus’ preaching: OK, Jesus, we believe you’re right, the kingdom is at hand, we are prepared to repent and come back to God. What do we do now? In fact, New Testament scholar Tom Wright thinks that wherever Jesus went, he would leave behind little groups of people who were his followers, his disciples, who would meet and try to follow his teaching. That makes sense.

And at the heart of the Christian religion for 2,000 years, all over the world, has been this same reality—men and women of all races and all ages and all cultures, coming together to learn from Jesus Christ about who God is and what God has done for us and what God asks of us. This is why churches baptize, because that’s what Jesus taught; that’s why churches have communion services (or the mass, or the Eucharist) because that’s what Jesus taught; that why churches read from the Bible, because the teaching of Jesus is in the Bible; that’s why churches pray, specially what is called “the Lord’s prayer,” because Jesus taught them to do so; that’s why churches try to do good—care for the poor and the hungry and the homeless—because they’re trying to follow the teaching of Jesus.

Well, all this sounds very straightforward–which is not the same as saying it’s easy.
So did Jesus intend to start a religion? In the sense that we mean religion, with a lot of buildings and rituals and complicated belief systems, no. In the sense that he calls people from their old lives to live as a community under the leadership of God, yes.

But let’s look more closely at what churches do wrong. The interesting thing is that Jesus’ most stinging criticisms are reserved for the religious people in his world, not those who were considered “sinners,” who were often his closest friends.  So what can we learn from Jesus about how religion can damage your health—and hopefully avoid those pitfalls?
1.  Religious people are often more concerned for appearance than for reality

The scene is this. Jesus has gone for lunch with a religious leader—a Pharisee—and the Pharisee is amazed to see that Jesus, a religious teacher, does not give his hands the ritual washing that religious people took for granted. Jesus sees the look on his face and takes the opportunity to teach about the dangers of religion. “You religious people,” he says, “you’re always worried about outside things—how you look, how people perceive you, you’re worried about your image–and you forget that God is more concerned about what’s going on on the inside of you, in your heart.” (The Gospel of Luke 11:39-41)

This sadly resonates in our world. It makes us think of televangelist scandals, and abuse at religiously run boarding schools, priests who turn out to be pedophiles—religious people who looked good on the outside, but in their hearts there was corruption. Maybe they could have got help for their heart trouble, but their religion said, You can’t do that: you can’t show anyone what’s on the inside, you’ve got to keep up a good appearance.

The non-religious person sees these things, and they say, See, I knew that religion can damage your health.

The Kingdom of God that Jesus announced is in part at least about allowing God to work on the inside of us, to shape us into the people he longs for us to be—this is at the heart of what it means to be “born again”—so that what’s on the outside becomes an expression of what’s on the inside, so that there’s consistency between the two—not a contradiction—and we grow towards wholeness.

Here’s a second danger that Jesus highlights:
2.  Religious people sometimes lose all sense of proportion

Jesus notices that religious people are often concerned over very trivial things. In this instance, they have taken the principle that it’s good to give a tenth of your income—a tithe—to the work of God, but they have taken it to a ridiculous extreme, where they are even making sure that they’re giving a tenth of the herbs that grow in their back yard (The Gospel of Luke 11:42). “There’s 8 bunches of parsley, 9 bunches of parsley—and one bunch of parsley for God. He will be pleased.”

Well, says Jesus, there’s nothing wrong with that in principle. Giving stuff away is good for us. But the trouble is, majoring on the minors like this can mean minoring on things that are absolutely major—such as justice and the love of God. He’s probably referring to the two great commandments, that human beings should base our lives on loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbour as ourselves. And he’s saying, Folks, you’ve forgotten what it’s all about. You’ve lost your sense of proportion.

If you have been involved in church for any length of time, you will know that not too much has changed from Jesus’ time till now, except that now it’s not likely that we’d be bothering to tithe our herbs. But I can think of occasions in church life when communities have divided over the colour of the new carpet, or the price of a new roof, or (in my tradition) which Prayer Book to use.

For Jesus, religion wasn’t about such nonsense. It was about the big stuff: knowing God, love of neighbour, forgiving your enemy; it was about compassion, justice, generosity, and self-sacrifice. The stuff that makes a difference in the world, the stuff that the Kingdom of God is made of. That’s what’s important to God, and it should be what’s important to those who worship God. Churches should be famous, not for their petty squabbles, but for how passionate they are for God and for justice in the world.

Here’s a third danger that may ring a bell:
 3.  Religious people can load others down with burdens hard to bear

Jesus turns to the lawyers—not lawyers in our sense, but those who studied the laws in the Bible. Some translations just call them “religion scholars”, which is close enough. And he says, You load people down with burdens that they can’t manage, and you give them no help to carry them. (The Gospel of Luke 11:46)

I think of a student I knew who decided to give a Saturday morning to help spring clean the church. A significant sacrifice, I would have said. And as he worked, he whistled a Christian song—perhaps “Shine, Jesus, shine.” And an elder of the church fixed him with a steely eye, and said, “Young man, church rule 473, paragraph d, subsection 16, says there is to be no inappropriate music on the church premises—and that is inappropriate music.” I am not exaggerating (well, maybe it wasn’t rule 473, maybe it was only rule 59). Burdens hard to bear.

I was in Kenya in August, and there bikes are the major form of transportation. I remember seeing a pile of mattresses on the back of a bike so high you couldn’t see the rider; or sheets of plywood so wide they took up a whole lane of the road; there was one man who was riding merrily along with about 15 feet of guttering for his roof balanced on his head (longways, fortunately). And then there are thousands of bikes, the boda-bodas, which serve as taxis, so that for most of the day they are carrying two people, though they were built for one. Not surprisingly, bicycle repair is a major cottage industry in Kenya. Of course: those bikes are being asked to carry loads far bigger than they were ever made for.

Sometimes the life of a church person feels that way. Some of you know what I mean: you want to be a follower of Jesus? There’s lots of rules to follow—a whole pile of things you can’t do (starting with the Ten Commandments—the Big Ten) and a whole bunch of rules you’re supposed to follow.

Then there are things that are not actually commanded in the Bible, but they seem to be expected. You want to be involved in our church? That’s great! You can teach Sunday School, help take up the offering, greet people at the doors, serve on this committee, read this book, come to this seminar. Oh, and don’t forget to work on your relationship with God: read the Bible and pray every day. And you begin to feel like the bike with the mattresses and the plywood and the guttering and even a passenger or two. Burdens hard to bear.

What I find interesting about this criticism is that Jesus says it as though it’s perfectly obvious that loading people down with rules and commitments is not the way to go. Of course there are rules, laws, for life in the Kingdom—but that’s not the heart of it. So God has a law that you don’t have sex with someone who is not your spouse: but if I get up in the morning and say to myself, “I really have to remember not to commit adultery today, it’s a law of God, I’ll really be in trouble if I break it,” then something is wrong! The laws of the Kingdom are the fences that mark the edge of the field—and the fences are important—but it’s a big field with lots of room to run and jump and play and dance and be free—so why hang around near the fences?

There is a yoke to be worn in following Jesus, but he says his yoke is meant to be easy—well-fitting—made to give us life not to drain life out of us.

But perhaps the most damning criticism is the last one:
4.  Religious people can get in the way of others getting to know God

The religion Jesus came to bring—if you want to call it that—the community Jesus came to found, anyway—is one that helps people come into an intimate relationship with their Creator, and live in that relationship in a community of joy and freedom. But these religious people, according to Jesus, don’t want such a relationship and prevent other people entering into such a relationship: “You have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.” (The Gospel of Luke 11:52)

Yet these people are religious. What’s going on? Isn’t religion a place to find God? Not necessarily. It’s a little-known secret that religion is a great place to hide from God. After all, whoever would think of looking in church for someone who’s trying to avoid God? You can do all the right things and say all the right things, even believe all the right things, but your heart is a million miles away from loving God. And nobody knows! It’s great! And that’s what these people were doing.

As a result, Jesus, who longs for people to know God and live a life of love with God, is furious. It’s bad enough when people outside the church to lead people away from God—but maybe not surprising. When church leaders do, it makes him see red.

As a result of this diatribe against the religious leaders, Luke tells us, it’s not long before they begin to plot how to have him murdered. Are we surprised?

So Jesus knew that religion can damage your health, and warned us in the strongest terms to avoid the pitfalls. Is there a place for religion then? Wouldn’t it be better for us to avoid the dangers, and just worship God however we understand God by ourselves in private, without all the complications that come from trying to organize a religion?

Let me tell you a story.
The Servant Who Forgot His Place

     There was once a queen who was gracious, wise and generous. She lived in a castle, and she loved to welcome her subjects there at any time, to get to know them and to help them. The entrance to the castle was guarded by a small, gentle servant. His job was to greet the visitors and show them into the queen’s presence.

     One day, however, this servant misbehaved. He began to feel that he was more important than he really was. He imagined that his job was not only to show people into the queen’s presence, but also to decide or not whether they were worthy to meet her. And as his ideas of his own importance grew, so he grew, taller and taller, broader and broader, until nobody could even see the queen’s castle.

     When people came to visit the queen, he would tell them that they were not dressed properly to meet the queen, or that they were too evil to see the queen, or that their nose was too long, or their feet were too big. Some of them tried to change in order to please the servant, so that they could get in to see the queen, though few of them ever did. Others went away sad because they knew they could never be good enough to see the queen. Some decided that maybe there never was a queen at all, and they were the saddest of all.

     But there were a few who weren’t satisfied with the servant’s rules, and when he wasn’t looking, they slipped round the back of the castle, over the wall, and into the queen’s family room, where she always met her subjects. The queen, of course, hadn’t had many visitors for some time, and when she heard what had happened, immediately she went to the front door and demanded of the servant What on earth are you doing? As soon as he heard her voice, he shrank back to his original size, like a balloon which you blow up and then let go. Then everything went back to normal.

     But from time to time, quite regularly, the servant would again forget his job, and become swollen and big-headed and indeed behave like a king. So after many arguments, the queen decided that the servant could not be trusted, and she moved her throne out to the front door of the palace where she could keep an eye on the servant, and where her subjects could always see her and approach her whenever they wished.
    
Right? Religion is a good servant but a bad master. The things we normally think of when we think of religion, at least Christian religion—the services, the structures, the traditions, the doctrines–are actually meant to help us know God and follow Jesus. If you like, they are a scaffolding within which people can construct their spiritual life. But how do those structures—how does that scaffolding—help us?

I want to suggest that there’s nothing wrong with organized religion as such. I realize that on a scale of what is cool it probably rates somewhere between broccoli and orthopedic shoes (that’s how William Cavanaugh puts it). But it’s important, at least in Christian spirituality. The most basic reason is that Jesus did not come to make lots of individual disciples, each happy in the private cocoon of their relationship with God. He came to create a new community. Paul, one of the earliest Christian teachers, said Jesus’ followers are supposed to work together like the parts of a body; he said they’re supposed to behave towards one another like members of a family (in the good sense, that is); one of Jesus first disciples, Peter, said Christians are meant to be as close to one another as the stones cemented into the wall of a temple—and as loyal and as supportive of one another as those stones. So organized religion serves first of all as a way for Christians to come together and learn how to be a community that worships Jesus and follows his teaching.

I think this says something to those of us who are involved in church and to those of us who are wondering whether to be involved in church.

To those of us who are involved in the church, Jesus’ warning of the ways in which religion can damage our spiritual health should cause us to pause and take stock. David Watson once said every church should review its programs once a year, and simply have the courage to cut out all those that have stopped giving life to people, however long-standing those programs are. Instead, they should put their energy into those activities which do help people grow as the community of God. Sad to say, it’s not a popular policy or one that many churches follow. But it’s an important one if the church is to know the blessing of God.

For those of us who are just checking out this church, I would suggest you can legitimately ask of this church (or any church): What is at the heart of this community’s life? Are they just playing religious games? Would Jesus say the same things to them that he said to the religious folk two thousand years ago—that they were more concerned for appearances than for reality, that they major on the minors, that they lay heavy burdens on people, and that they don’t help people get to know God? Don’t hesitate to ask embarrassing questions. After all, that’s what Jesus did to the religious people of his day.

Speaking for myself, I have a love hate relationship with religion and the church.  I have seen the most amazing nonsense happen in churches, in the name of God. But I have also seen Jesus Christ alive and well working in and through the community of people who are called by his name.  When that happens, I find I don’t want to be anywhere else but in the company of those who are honestly struggling to follow Jesus, because it is there that I find truth and warmth, reality and home . . . and it’s where I find God.
Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto
September 2004

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What Sort of Tale?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies and English literature at Oxford from 1925 to 1959. In 1937, Tolkien published a novel called The Hobbit, about a little creature, a hobbit by the name of Bilbo Baggins, who finds himself involved in an adventure with dwarves, elves, a wizard, trolls, treasure, and a dragon. Bilbo brings home from his adventure a mysterious Ring which has the power to make its bearer invisible.

Tolkien then began work on The Lord of the Rings, a three-part story about the Ring. The Ring becomes the property of Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo, who discovers that he is in mortal danger because he possesses it.  The only answer is for him to leave his home in the Shire and embark on a quest to destroy the Ring. That quest is the heart of the three parts of The Lord of the Rings.

The first part of that story, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in 1954, with the other parts, The Two Towers and The Return of the King following the next year. Together they constitute more than half a million words. Even before the first movie came out in 2001, more than 100 million copies of the books had been sold.

So what is it that makes this book, by an obscure professor of Anglo-Saxon, about a world inhabited by strange creatures, so popular? There are very few female characters. (Their role is expanded in the movies.) There is no sex. There are long periods in the book when almost nothing seems to happen. There are about 600 different personal names in the stories, and, to confuse things further, some people are called by two or three different names.  The books are filled with references to events and places and people that happened long before the book opens, and of which we know nothing.

Why do these stories resonate so deeply for so many people? I believe that the main appeal of The Lord of the Rings lies in its spirituality. Not that the spirituality lies exposed on the surface. Few who read The Lord of the Rings think of it as a religious or spiritual work. But it is certainly there, in subtle and powerful ways. Tolkien himself certainly saw the book as spiritual: he once described it as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

Yet how can one look at the spirituality of a book that is over 1000 pages long? One way is by examining its worldview.

A worldview is, as the word implies, a way of viewing the world, an outlook on life, an explanation of the world. A worldview is by nature philosophical and spiritual and religious, in the sense that it offers answers to life’s big questions. We often use metaphors of seeing, such as That’s your point-of-view, or That’s how I see things, or Let’s take a look at the situation, or Try looking through their eyes, or You have a blind spot about that. Seeing is very important in our world. So our worldview is the big picture of how we see the world. It’s whatever big story we happen to believe about the world’s nature, and origin, and destiny.

Towards the end of The Two Towers, Frodo and Sam, the main characters of The Lord of the Rings, are discussing just such a story, and their role in it. They are puzzled about what kind of a story it might be:

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” [says Sam]
“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one you’re fond of. You may know or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

In fact, they find they can make connections with the stories they were told as children, of heroes from long ago. Sam, for example, realizes that the “star-glass” Frodo is carrying contains light from one of the Silmarils, the wonderful jewels created early in the life of Middle Earth, with light from the Blessed Realm.

Thus they come to understand that there is a constantly unfolding story about Middle Earth, and that in some mysterious way they are part of it.  As a result, what they know about the heroes who came before them actually encourages them in their own trials. Sam even speculates that one day their story too may be “read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards.”

Yet Frodo and Sam have to accept that there is not much more they can know about the story they belong to. In Tolkien’s mind, however, Frodo and Sam were part of a much bigger story, a story that describes and explains their world from beginning to end. To put it another way, in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien expresses a very specific worldview. In fact, it is only when one sees this bigger perspective that the story of the Ring, and of Frodo and Sam, makes full sense. What I want to do in this booklet is to show how the stories we are told in The Lord of the Rings fit into this larger story, this worldview. The outline of this bigger narrative is provided by another book of Tolkien’s, The Silmarillion.

The framework I will use for thinking about the story in this way is provided by the writing of Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton on the subject of worldviews.  They suggest that one way to analyze and compare worldviews is by asking four questions:

• Where are we? What kind of a world are we in?
• Who are we? Who are the inhabitants of this world? What do we know about them?
• What is the problem? What is fundamentally wrong with this world?
• What is the solution? How can the problem be put right?

I find it is often helpful to add a fifth question:
• Where are we going? What is the ultimate fate of this world and its inhabitants?

When we ask these questions of The Lord of the Rings, then, what kind of a worldview emerges?

WHERE ARE WE?

If we read The Lord of the Rings only, we would simply say that we are in the world of Middle Earth. We know nothing of where it came from, or where it will end, or indeed whether it was created or just happened, nor whether it came into being for a purpose. But, according The Silmarillion, Middle Earth is in fact part of a much bigger world, indeed, a whole cosmos, created by a supreme being whom Tolkien calls Iluvatar. This Iluvatar has created Middle Earth through the agency of spiritual beings, the Ainur, whom we might call angels. Iluvatar gives musical themes to the Ainur, and, as they sing, every theme, every note, every harmony, takes the form of something in the world of Middle Earth.

Thus, if we ask, Where are we? in The Lord of the Rings, the answer is that we are in a world made by Iluvatar. Iluvatar is good, and the world Iluvatar makes is good. At the same time, for reasons which are never explained, he allows evil to enter his good world. As a result, the world we meet in the book is still good, but it is now a flawed world. Middle Earth is not basically evil with strange touches of good, nor is it equally divided between good and evil: it is a good place to be, full of beauty and goodness, but frequently coloured by violence, corruption and sadness. We will see more of this in answering the question, What is the problem?
WHO ARE WE?

The inhabitants of Middle Earth are called the Children of Iluvatar, the creator, but they are of several different races. When the Nine Walkers, the “Fellowship of the Ring,” come together, they are said to “represent the . . . Free Peoples of the world”—that is, elves, dwarves and men.   Hobbits, of course, are another race again: we are never told the story of their creation, but we presume they too are creations of Iluvatar.

All these Children of Iluvatar are amazing and beautiful. Even the Ainur, the great angels, who have seen so much of the wonders Iluvatar has made, are impressed and are immediately drawn to love them, not least for what they see in them of the endless creativity of Iluvatar.

So the inhabitants of Middle Earth are good and they are free and they are beautiful, but, as we shall see, they are also capable of great weakness and evil.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

On one level, the problem of The Lord of the Rings is the Ring itself, and, behind the Ring, Sauron who made it. Sauron lusts for power, and it is the Ring which enables him to consolidate his power over Middle Earth.

But Sauron and the Ring are only the most recent manifestation of a larger and more ancient evil, and the war between the forces of Sauron and the Children of Iluvatar is a pale reflection of a much older conflict which takes place on a cosmic level. Occasionally there are hints of this in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, for example, refers to “the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron of Mordor was but a servant.”   Yet Lord of the Rings never tells us any more of “the Great Enemy” whom Sauron serves. To understand this character we have to return to The Silmarillion.
Rebellion against Iluvatar

After Iluvatar gives the Ainur melodies and harmonies, we are told that one of the Ainur, Melkor, is dissatisfied with the part he is given, and introduces music of his own devising, music which serves only to draw attention to himself. The rest of the music is almost thrown into confusion, not least because others of the Ainur now adjust their part to harmonize with Melkor’s, rather than with Iluvatar’s.

Then, when Middle Earth comes into being, Melkor comes too. He pretends, even to himself at first, that his motivation is to limit the damage done by his music. Yet in fact he is envious of Elves and Men, and wants to have power over them.
The sin of pride

That is the fundamental flaw in Melkor’s character. It is not just that he rebels against Iluvatar: it’s that he wants to be Iluvatar. The way Iluvatar has created the world, however, is that it functions best when all the different kinds of being co-operate with Iluvatar and with one another, and each one does what it is created to do and be. Words like harmony and co-operation are not in Melkor’s vocabulary, however. In a word, his problem is pride.

There are actually two different kinds of pride. In fact, French has two words for pride. There is fier, the kind of pride that takes pleasure in being who you are. It has to do with dignity and self-awareness and joy. But there is another kind of pride—the French word is orgeuil—the pride that wants to be more than you are, and to do it at the expense of everyone else.  This second is the pride of Melkor.

Melkor has disciples, and chief among these is Sauron, whose one redeeming feature, according to Tolkien, is the ironical one that for a long time he served someone else, even if that someone was Melkor, rather than himself.
Divide and conquer

One of the chief ways that Melkor and later Sauron get their way is by dividing those who oppose them. The world of The Lord of the Rings is a world where goodness draws people together; evil drives them apart. This makes sense, of course. If evil seeks for power for itself, and tries to enslave others by taking away their power, evil is hardly likely to nurture relationships of trust and vulnerability. We see this effect of evil in the way the Orcs, who are Melkor’s creation, are always fighting against each other.

Sauron’s Ring also brings the divisive power of evil into the midst of those who are normally on the side of good, the Fellowship of the Ring. The first occasion we see this is when Bilbo is leaving the Shire after his birthday party, and is reluctant to leave the Ring behind. As a result, he and Gandalf almost come to blows.  Then, much later, after Sam has been carrying the Ring for a time, he tries to give it back to Frodo, and Frodo, like Bilbo before him, becomes angry and possessive about the Ring.  Haldir the elf sums up this divisive power of the Ring by saying, “in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.”
The corrupting power of the Ring

What is happening in these incidents is that the Ring tends to corrupt those who hold it. Those who are strong simply refuse it because they know the Ring would twist them to become evil and self-seeking like Sauron.  For instance, when Frodo asks Gandalf if he will take Frodo’s place as the Ring bearer, Gandalf rejects the suggestion immediately, on the paradoxical grounds that he would have great need of it.  The greater the need, presumably, the greater the dependence on the Ring, and ultimately the greater its ability to corrupt. Galadriel responds similarly when Frodo offers her the ring. Sam protests that she would use the Ring for good, and, though that is so, Galadriel knows that the temptation to abuse its power would in the end prove overwhelming, and so she refuses it.

Others, however, are taken in by the appeal of the Ring and are destroyed by it. Boromir, one of the Fellowship, is one of these. He pleads with Frodo to hand it over for the most altruistic of motives: he is a great warrior who could unite all the forces of Middle Earth to overcome Sauron. Yet his own words betray him as he fantasizes how “all men would flock to my banner!”  Even as he plans what good he would do with the Ring, his own self-aggrandizement begins to take him over.

Unlike Gandalf and Galadriel, Boromir does not realize, or cannot believe, what harm the Ring would do to him. It takes the battle with the Orcs at the end of the first book to show him how wrong he was–and he pays for his error with his life.

One reason Frodo is qualified to be the Ring-bearer is that he seems to be small and weak enough that such temptations do not touch him. Yet by the time he arrives at the Cracks of Doom, he too finds that his desire to possess the Ring overwhelming, and he is reluctant to destroy it.

Gollum, of course, is the one in whom the destructive power of the Ring is most obvious. He has owned it for years, perhaps centuries, and it has sucked the life out of him. His desire to get the Ring back is not wrapped up in any altruistic language. He knows what the Ring is and what it can do, and he wants it. He has a naked desire for power, although the way he expresses it demonstrates how pathetic that desire is at bottom:

“If we has it, then we can escape, even from Him, eh? Perhaps we grows strong, stronger than the Wraiths. Lord Smeagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum? Eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea.”
Abuse of the environment

The power of evil destroys not only community and individuals, however. Its effects spread out like ripples to touch even the environment. As the Fellowship prepares to leave Lothlorien early on their journey, Haldir warns that “The Dimrill Dale is full of vapour and clouds of smoke, and the mountains are troubled. There are noises in the deeps of the earth.”

As Frodo and Sam come closer to the Land of Mordor, the destructive power of evil on the environment becomes ever clearer. The Orcs destroy any living thing that gets in their way, whether animal or vegetable.  Saruman unscrupulously cuts down trees in order to fuel his evil projects. Around the walls of Isengard, his stronghold, a pleasant valley has been turned into “a wilderness of weeds and thorns.”  And Mordor itself is the scene of almost total devastation. Slag heaps, ash, mud, filth and refuse litter the landscape as far as the eye can see, “as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about.” It is “a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing.”

The contrast with the Shire, where all is peaceful and fruitful, and where gardening is a highly respected profession,  becomes ever more stark. Yet the difference is understandable. It is the inhabitants of the Shire, who have so little ambition that they may be trusted with the destruction of the Ring, whose modesty also allows them to live in harmony with nature. The self-centred ambition of Melkor, Sauron and Saruman, on the other hand, means all has to give way to their ruthless self-interest.
The limits of evil

In spite of all this, it is important to notice that the power of evil is limited–indeed, its power is infinitely less than that of the good. Evil cannot make anything of itself because it lacks powers of creativity. In particular, say “the wise”, evil cannot create life: only good can do that.  The most that Melkor can do is to take something good, made by Iluvatar, and twist it to his own ends. Thus, according to Treebeard the Ent, trolls were made as a pale imitation of Ents, and Orcs are no more than a distorted form of elf.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

On one level, the answer to the evil of Sauron and the Ring is in the hands of the inhabitants of Middle Earth. The Ring has to be destroyed, and then Sauron’s power will fail too. In the end, it is their courage, friendship and self-sacrifice which will overcome and destroy evil. As a result, one of Tolkien’s emphases is on people using their freewill to make wise choices.
The responsible use of freewill

For instance, when Frodo complains about the overwhelming responsibility he has been given, Gandalf offers him no consolation except that he must do his best to carry it out: “you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

It turns out that Frodo does indeed have great strength and heart and wits, not least to make good use of his power to choose. Even when he is directly up against the power of Sauron and the Ring, he still has the ability to choose the right. At the end of the first volume, when he has put the Ring on to escape Boromir, he becomes aware that Sauron’s eye can now see him, and is staring at him, and that Sauron’s voice is trying to command him. Suddenly he is aware of himself again, and that he is “free to choose.” He quickly chooses to take the Ring off his finger, Sauron can no longer find him, and the danger is past.
The power of mercy

But strong wills and good decisions alone are not enough to undermine the power of evil. The chief characters are also called on to exercise the “weak weapons” of mercy, forgiveness and pity.

Early on in the story, Frodo has not learned this, and so when he hears the story of Gollum and his evil, his spontaneous response is: “He deserves death.” Gandalf rebukes him for taking upon himself the role of judge and jury and so quickly pronouncing a guilty verdict. Gandalf still has hopes that Gollum may be changed. More than that:

My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that time comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least.”

This is a prophetic word. In fact, as the story unfolds, one after another the main characters show mercy to Gollum: Bilbo, of course (in The Hobbit), Gandalf, the elves (who are supposed to keep him in captivity but take pity on him), Aragorn, and eventually Frodo and even Sam, who hates him most of all. As a result, as Gandalf foretold, Gollum is alive at the end of the story to play a crucial role in the fate of Frodo and of the Ring.
The possibility of conversion

Mercy and pity may have other effects, however. After Frodo accepts Gollum as a guide (against the advice of Sam) and they journey together, it becomes ever clearer that there are two sides to Gollum’s character—Gollum (the “bad” side) and Smeagol (the “good” side—Smeagol was his name before he came under the influence of the Ring), or Stinker and Slinker, as Sam dubs them.  From time to time, Gollum even talks to himself in these two different voices.

Frodo continues to be kind and generous to Gollum, even when Gollum is treacherous, and, as a result, Gollum comes close to what can only be called a conversion. On one occasion, he comes across Sam and Frodo asleep, and, as he watches Frodo, “A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face.” He reaches out to touch Frodo’s knee, and for the first and only time, he looks like what he truly is, or what he would have been had he never come across the Ring, “an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years  . . .  an old, starved, pitiable thing.”

What seems to be happening is that Gollum is responding to the patient love that Frodo has shown him, day in and day out. He appears to have tired of his evil Gollum persona, and is about to be transformed from a monster into the hobbit which he once was.  Just then, however, Sam wakes up, shouts angrily at Gollum, and the moment passes. Gollum is just Gollum again. In the next scene, he leads the hobbits into the lair of the monster Shelob, and we never hear of Smeagol again.
Strength in weakness

To some, this kind of mercy and pity may seem like weak virtues. Revenge and justice come more naturally to us. Yet this is indicative of a deep underlying theme throughout the whole book, that true strength is to be found in weakness. This is why Gandalf and Galadriel refuse the ring: while they know that it would grant them a certain kind of power, they know too that their true strength exists only while they are weaker. This is why Elrond is willing for Frodo and Sam to be the bearers of the Ring. He has learned that sometimes the greatest deeds are done most effectively by the smallest people: “small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

Not everyone understands this, even on the side of good. In the third book, when Denethor learns of the decision of the council of Elrond, he protests to Gandalf that to trust “a witless halfling” with such a desperate mission is “madness.”  Yet it is not madness: it is deep and mysterious sanity. This is a secret that Sauron does not and cannot understand. For him, strength is always strength, and he exercises his wisdom on the premise that others think as he does. He assumes that those who have the Ring will want to set up a rival leader, and use the power of the Ring against him. The idea of not choosing a counterpart leader, and of actually destroying the Ring, never occurs to him. Thus Gandalf calls him a “wise fool”, able to be overcome by those who reject his kind of power, and who find wisdom in what Sauron would consider folly.

The poet W. H. Auden said in reference to this passage:

[evil] has every advantage but one—it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil—hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring—but evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.

That is evil’s weakness and what destroys it in the end. While Sauron is looking out across the plains to where the army of his enemies is gathering, expecting the greatest threat to emerge from that quarter, two insignificant hobbits are struggling up Mount Doom behind him to do the inexplicable—destroy the Ring.

But this conflict between the weak and the foolish on the one hand and the rich and powerful on the other takes its toll. To lay down your life for others, as Frodo does for his friends, is very costly. Frodo never fully recovers from the wound that the Dark Rider gives him at their first encounter, and when he returns home to the Shire after all his adventures, he is never really appreciated.  He understands that one person’s loss is another person’s gain, and that this is the nature of reality.
A supernatural force

It’s not enough, however, to say that Middle Earth is saved by people who make good decisions and practice being brave and merciful, because that would not be the whole truth. There are hints through the book that something more is work here. For example, when Frodo asks why he has to be the one to bear the Ring, Gandalf implies that some sort of cosmic plan is being worked out in the story of the Ring: “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.”  Elrond has a similar philosophy. He tells the council that will decide the future of the Ring that they have not met by chance; indeed, it is “ordered” that they should meet and consult.

Clearly there has to be a mind to create the “meaning” that Gandalf discerns, and an authority to “order” the meeting of the council. So what power or force was it that meant Bilbo and then Frodo to have the Ring? Who or what is behind the coming together of the council? Is it just good luck that everybody has had pity on Gollum so that he is there at the end?

The answer, of course, is Iluvatar. Early in The Silmarillion, Iluvatar warned Melkor at the beginning of his rebellion:

“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth thus shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”

In the end, evil will be made to serve the good. This is because it is Iluvatar’s world: Iluvatar is ultimate reality, and Iluvatar’s desire for good and for life and for beauty will prevail.

One writer, Kenneth Pearson, points out that it is in the scene where the Ring is finally destroyed that the invisible hand of Iluvatar is most powerful. The drama of this ending, when Frodo fulfils his mission, and then he and Sam are snatched away from certain death by an eagle, is what Tolkien calls elsewhere a “eucatastrophe,” a good catastrophe.  It is as though the creator has intervened to reward those who have showed pity on Gollum by showing pity to them in turn. Tolkien actually wrote about this scene in a letter:

Frodo . . . spent every drop of his power and will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point and no further. . . . The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), “that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named” (as one critic has said).

In Tolkien’s mind, behind all the efforts of the human characters to defeat evil is the hand of Iluvatar, without whom there is no guarantee of success, guiding events and causing things to work out for the best.
WHERE ARE WE GOING?

As the story unfolds, there are glimpses of a happy ending. One of the most beautiful is when Sam, unable to sleep because he is overwhelmed by the difficulties he and Frodo are going through, suddenly notices a star. Somehow the constancy of the star speaks to him of the fact that good and beauty are finally indestructible. The Shadow which is Sauron is just that—a shadow—and will pass away. With this reassurance he is able to fall asleep, even though the immediate circumstances have not changed at all.

Once more, The Silmarillion explains what is going on in the bigger picture. All Sam knows is that evil will pass away, and that light and beauty will triumph in the end. Yet is there any guarantee that this is not just wishful thinking on Sam’s part? There is an intriguing note in The Silmarillion which explains the reason for Sam’s intuition. The narrator explains that in the end the power of Iluvatar will overcome all evil, and the Ainur will once again make music, this time even more wonderful than that they made at the creation of Middle Earth.  What will make the music greater at the end is partly that the Children of Iluvatar will be present this time, which they were not at the beginning. But also, now, because of all that has taken place in Middle Earth and all they have gone through, they will have a much deeper understanding of themselves and of one another and of the music–and of Iluvatar himself.

So there are really two happy endings in the world of Middle Earth. The first is the defeat of Sauron, but that is really just a foretaste of the joy that is to come at the end of time when Melkor too is destroyed.  When Sam hears the news that the Ring has indeed been destroyed and the power of Sauron has been broken, his absolute delight is a pale shadow of that final happy ending yet to come:

“How do I feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel”—he waved his arms in the air—“I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

Frodo and Sam may not know how the story will work out in the end, but we know, and, in fact, Frodo and Sam have experienced something which is a sort of dress rehearsal for the end, though they do not know it yet.
CONCLUSION

As I have thought about these ideas, I have realized that one reason The Lord of the Rings appeals to me as a Christian is that it is built around themes that resonate very deeply with Christian faith. Tolkien was himself a devout Christian of Roman Catholic persuasion, and he explained the connection between The Lord of the Rings and Christian faith like this:

The Gospels [the stories of Jesus Christ] contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. . . . But this story has entered History . . . This story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and history have met and fused.

In a sense, for Tolkien, the Christian story “embraces” the essence of The Lord of the Rings. In light of this, it should not surprise us that all the themes that we have looked at in The Lord of the Rings are to be found in the stories and teachings of Jesus Christ and his followers: the fact that the world is created and is created good; the fact that we choose to do wrong; the destructiveness and alienation caused by pride; the answer to the world’s pain and confusion in self-sacrifice and courage and mercy and solidarity.

The stories don’t talk explicitly about any religion: it wouldn’t be appropriate within the world of the story. But they do point beyond themselves. They seem to yearn for a greater fulfillment. It is surely no coincidence that the destruction of Sauron takes place on March 25th, which in Anglo-Saxon Christianity of 1800 years ago was held to be the date of the crucifixion of Christ.

If, therefore, you find that you are drawn by the story of the The Lord of the Rings, if you find that these themes resonate for you—finding strength when you feel weak, valuing the qualities of mercy and pity, using your freewill wisely, turning evil to good–you owe it to yourself to check out the source from which Tolkien drew all those themes—the classic Christian faith, and especially the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
Notes:

1. The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, ed. H. Carpenter with C. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1981), 82. Cited in The Philologist, the Fairy Story and the Faith: Christian Morality and Meaning in J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, by Kenneth N. Pearson (unpublished paper, Regent College 1994). I am grateful to Kenneth Pearson for permission to make use of several of the insights discussed in this paper.
2. The Two Towers, IV:VIII, 739. (Roman numerals refer to the Book and Chapter; Arabic numbers are the pages in the one-volume edition of Unwin Paperbacks (1968). Even at the end of the three stories, Sam is still musing about the nature of their story: “What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we? . . . I wish I could hear it told! . . . And I wonder how it will go on after our part.” The Return of the King, VI:IV, 986-987.
3. J.R.R.Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Allen and Unwin 1977; HarperCollins 1999), 67.
4. Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove: IVP, 1984), 35.
5. The Silmarillion, 15. This singing of creation into being is reminiscent of C.S.Lewis’ picture of the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, chapters 8 and 9.
6. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:III, 293.
7. The Silmarillion, 18.
8. The Fellowship of the Ring, I:XI, 210.
9. The Silmarillion, 16.
10. The Silmarillion, 18.
11. The Silmarillion, 31-32.
12. The Fellowship of the Ring, I:I, 45-47.
13. The Return of the King, VI:I, 946.
14. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:VI, 366.
15. The Fellowship of the Ring, I:II, 75.
16. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:VII, 385-386.
17. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:X, 418.
18. The Return of the King, VI:III, 981.
19. The Two Towers, IV:II, 659.
20. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:VIII, 391.  See also Pearson, 10.
21. The Two Towers, III:II, 440.
22. The Two Towers, III:VIII, 577.
23. The Two Towers, IV:II, 657.
24. The Two Towers, IV:V, 708.
25. The Silmarillion, 50.
26. The Two Towers, III:IV, 507, cf. The Return of the King, 948. In fact, The Silmarillion (50) says that Orcs were made by Melkor out of elves whom he managed to capture and torture.
27. The Fellowship of the Ring,  I:II, 74-75, cf. 64: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
28. The Fellowship of the Ring,  II:X, 421.
29. The Fellowship of the Ring,  I:II, 73, cf. “Even Gollum was not wholly ruined” (68).
30. The Two Towers, IV:IX, 741.
31. The Two Towers,  IV:VIII, 742.
32. Gandalf says of Gollum’s family, “I guess they were of hobbit-kind.” The Fellowship of the Ring,  I:II, 66.
33. The Fellowship of the Ring, 287 cf. “Help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”  The Silmarillion, 301.
34. The Return of the King, V:IV, 845.
35. The Two Towers,  III:V, 518 cf. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:II, 287.
36. Cited by Pearson 13, quoting T. Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth (London: Allen and Unwin 1985), 131.
37. The Return of the King, VI:III, 981.
38. The Return of the King, VI:IX, 1067.
39. The Fellowship of the Ring, I:II, 69.
40. The Fellowship of the Ring, II:II, 259.
41. The Silmarillion 17.
42. On Fairy Stories in Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen and Unwin 1964), 60
43. Tolkien, Letters, 252-253.
44. The Return of the King, VI:III, 957.
45. The Silmarillion, 15-16.
46. The Return of the King, VI:IV, 988. Shortly afterwards, Sam’s desire to hear a story about himself is granted: a minstrel of Gondor sings “of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.” Sam, we are told, “laughed aloud for sheer delight.” (990)
47. On Fairy Stories, 62-63.
48. The Return of the King, VI:IV, 988. Shippey points out that this was also recognized as the date of the annunciation and of the last day of creation, but in this context Christ’s victory over evil through the crucifixion would seem to be the primary reference. Shippey, 151.
49. These are to be found in the four oldest biographies of Jesus, known as the Gospels, which are in The New Testament, the second part of The Bible.

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I want to pick up Bunyan’s image of following Jesus as a journey, and unpack some of the richness of the metaphor.
     
From the Beginning to the End   The Christian journey begins with Christ inviting people to join the journey. He invites everybody, whoever they are, wherever they have been in their lives before. There is a restriction, but it’s an obvious one: to follow Jesus, you have to give up on other roads and to choose this road. The technical terms for that switch of roads are repentance and faith. “Repentance” is literally changing your mind: “No, I don’t want to travel that road any more: I want to follow this one.” And “faith” is not some mystical quality which only religious people have: it means simply trust or commitment. Faith is taking the first step on the new road.

That’s how the journey begins. And the end of the journey? Well, you can call it heaven if you like, though that’s not the way the Bible generally speaks of it. The Bible speaks more often in terms of a city as the goal of the journey, a new Jerusalem; or it speaks of a new heaven and new earth where righteousness lives. Certainly the end of the journey is knowing God fully, and seeing the Jesus who is invisible to us now face to face. If we want to know God intimately, that’s what life is all about. If we don’t want to know God, of course, heaven would feel remarkably like hell. But that’s another subject.

The journey from here to there is long and often difficult. How can we make it? Since the journey is God’s idea, and God wants us to make it, God has also provided resources to make the journey possible.
     
Friends for the road   The first and most basic resource is that God provides traveling companions. There are times on the journey when you feel alone, there may be times when you actually need to be alone, but the normal mode of travel on this road is in a group. There’s safety in the group, there’s encouragement, and there are resources.

For example, among the traveling companions, there are some who are great map-readers. We need that. Some are good at first aid, which is important because people get hurt on this journey. Others in the group can light a campfire, and others can create a wonderful meal out of almost nothing. Still others are great at telling stories when you’ve had your meal in the evening and you’re watching the campfire slowly die down before turning in. In the Bible, these different contributions to the group are called the “spiritual gifts” that we bring to the journey.

Now the Bible doesn’t explore this image of the journey in that much detail, though it is there. But it draws attention to the importance of traveling companions in other ways. It says that the Christian community is like a body, with each limb and each organ playing an important part. It says we are like a building in which we are all stones, living stones, bonded together for mutual support to create a beautiful temple. It says we are a family, brothers and sisters together on the road. It says we are like an army, working together to fight evil and injustice and oppression in the world.

I think you get the idea. On the Christian journey, we need one another. If you have felt attracted by the idea of being a follower of Jesus, and you are beginning to follow the path, you need to find companions for the road.

Personally, I love getting together with my fellow travellers. There’s friendship, there’s lots of laughter, there’s lively conversation, there’s a warm welcome, often there’s pizza and coffee. We can share our joys and our sorrows. We can pray together and sing together. I know I come away feeling stronger because I have been there. I’m encouraged to continue on the journey with Jesus. And somehow, if we are to keep following Jesus, we need to find companions who will continue to help us on the road.

If you’re not sure where to look, talk to someone who’s been on the road longer than you, and ask them where they find their traveling community. That’s the first resource for the journey. It’s a great gift from God.
     
Evenings around the campfire   The second has to do with evenings on the road. In many ways those are the best time of day. The evening meal is over, coffee is served, and as people are beginning to mellow out, someone starts a song ñ a song of the road, maybe a very ancient one, sung by travelers for hundreds of years ñ about the joys and hardships of the road, and about the King and his city ñ and everybody joins in. Then someone will tell a story of the road ñ a story of heroes like Abraham and Sarah, of David or Deborah or Paul or Mary Magdalene, or of those magical years when the king was seen in human form walking on the road himself.

And then perhaps a silence falls, and in the deepening darkness, one of the grandmothers of the group lifts her voice and prays to the King ñ a prayer of thankfulness for the day, for the companions, and a prayer for those who have strayed from the road or never found it, and a prayer for safety and strength and courage for the day ahead. Then perhaps there’s another song or two.

The Bible’s word for this ritual is worship. I don’t know your image of worship, but it’s basically a time when the Christian community gathers from whatever tasks the members have been doing, and they remind themselves who they are and what they’re about. They tell the stories of those who have followed God in previous generations. They sing songs of the faith, and they pray to the King who rules the road.

There is another form of worship on the road. Some groups call it the Mass, some the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion – but it’s basically the same thing. That’s a special form of meal on the road. In some ways it’s just a very simple picnic ñ just bread and wine. But it is special because it is sent direct from the King’s table in the new Jerusalem at the end of the road. And there is always a message with the picnic: “This is to remind you how much I love you, so much that I died for you. This is food to sustain you for the journey. It may not look like much, but it’s a foretaste of what we’ll share together when you get here. Love, Jesus.” That’s why travelers love this meal.
     
The Book   There is a third resource for the journey, and it’s the big Book of stories about the road. If you joined the journey as a child, you probably didn’t think too much about where you were going. Life was on the road, and that was normal, and you didn’t stop to think about it. But as you grew, you began to ask questions: Why are we on this road? How do we know which way to turn? Are there other roads worth following? I don’t like how difficult it is sometimes. Or even, Couldn’t I be the leader sometimes? But how would I know where to lead us?

And at some point, the leader of the group says to you, Listen, when we stop for supper tonight, you come and sit by me, and I’ll show you the Book. And so, that evening, as you sip your coffee, the leader sits by you and opens the Book. It’s huge, it’s very old, and it’s covered in handwritten notes and sketches and diagrams and maps. It tells how the journey began (you hadn’t heard that before), it describes where the journey ends (you knew something about that). It tells the stories of the heroes of faith: how they got on the road, how they slipped off the road, how the King went after them to get them back, sometimes by the scruff of the neck. There are tales of fights with dragons and tales of false friends who misled the travelers.

Some of the old songs you’ve heard are there: the upbeat Jazz ones and the sad Country and Western ones and the angry Rap ones and the dignified Classical ones. There are also the travelers’ reflections on the journey: they discuss the dark valley, like the one you went through a few months back; they tell you how to find the lookout points where you can see for miles ahead down the road.

And as you look through it, you say to the leader, This Book is wonderful. Could I look at this some more? I want to read some of these stories for myself. And she smiles and says, Somehow I knew you’d say that. Sure you can.

Well, there are no prizes for knowing that the Book is the Bible. I don’t know how you view the Bible. At one level, it’s simply the stories of those who have struggled to follow Jesus before us: as we read, we learn from their successes and failures, their battles and their celebrations, their relationships with their fellow travelers, their longing to be home. There is also advice on how to keep on the road, how to live as followers of Jesus when the world around doesn’t even seem to know there is a road.

Because this is so important, followers of Jesus try to read something of the Bible every day, either by yourself or in a group, or by someone teaching it to you. On the days I’m at home, my wife and I read the Bible and pray together after we finish breakfast. On the days when I commute in to work, I read the Bible and pray on the commuter train or the bus. It helps keep my feet on the path, it encourages me, sometimes it sobers me and challenges me, and, best of all, it reminds me of the King, King Jesus, whose road it is.
     
When the going gets tough . . .   There’s another thing I need to tell you about the road, though I think I’ve implied it already, but I want to spell it out because we often miss it, and it’s this: The road can be hard, very hard, and sometimes it’s difficult to go on. Sometimes the path comes up against a cliff, and the only way forward is upward, hanging on with your fingers and toes, and you have to shed some of your baggage in order to go on. Other times the path seems to go through endless bog or thick forest, and the sun never shines, and you just get sick of it. But the stories are clear: some days will be like this, some weeks, some months. The Book emphasizes: it will be tough, don’t be surprised, don’t give up. And you sing the songs, and you tell the stories, you carry one another’s packs, and you get through.

Under those circumstances, the Book encourages a quality our society doesn’t appreciate very much: obedience. The word conjures up pictures of stern policemen, or evil dictators. Obedience suggests losing your individuality and your ability to think for yourself. But it’s not necessarily like that.

My son Ben is a jazz trumpeter. After some years of learning trumpet, he got a new teacher, who happened to be one of the top trumpet players in Canada. And Mr. Oades said, You’re doing it all wrong. If you want to develop in your playing, you’re going to have to start over, and relearn your embouchure. Did Ben do it? He could have said, No way. I’ve spent years playing this way, and I feel comfortable with it. Don’t cramp my style. I just gotta be me! But he didn’t. He obeyed the teacher, and, as a result, he was able to move ahead in his playing, way beyond where he would have got to any other way.

Now Jesus is a teacher, not just of trumpet, but of life. Does it make sense to obey him? You bet. Does it make us feel uncomfortable? Frequently. Does it cramp our individuality? Not at all, because Jesus knows us intimately, and he knows what he’s doing, and obeying him will only serve to enhance our individuality.

When the road gets tough, we obey.
     
An internal resource   There is one last thing. Archbishop William Temple once reflected on the Christian journey, and he said something like this: “If you asked me to live a life following Jesus’ footsteps, and learning to be like him, I would tell you it was impossible. It’s as crazy as if you asked me to write plays like Shakespeare’s. But if by some mystery, the spirit of Shakespeare could come and inhabit my personality, fire my imagination and expand my vocabulary, then, certainly, I could do it. And in the same way, if the Spirit of Jesus could come and inhabit my personality, and change me from the inside, then I could follow Jesus and grow more like him.”

And, of course, the Christian claim is that Jesus is not just sitting comfortably in the castle at the end of the road, twiddling his thumbs and wishing we would hurry up. Jesus is present in the world right now in the form of his Spirit, willing and able to help us follow him every step of the way, until we get home, and the real fun begins.

Why should anyone consider Christian faith today? The author offers an overview of Christian belief in a collection of five short essays, each shedding fresh light on a different aspect of the faith. It has been said that what the church needs today is not better arguments but better metaphors: this booklet offers startling new images which open doors to Christ for sceptic and believer alike.

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Everybody has a story. One of the most interesting things when we came to Canada over 20 years ago was discovering that you could ask anybody, How long has your family been in Canada? and get an interesting answer. Some had emigrated from Europe after the Second World War. Some were descendants of the original New England pilgrims who had emigrated to Canada after the war of independence. Some were first nations, who had a different kind of answer. And so on.

Stories like that are important because they make us who we are. We say things like, Our family have always been hard workers. Or, Our family always did love a good party. If we had no stories like that, we would have a real problem with our identity: it would be a form of amnesia. We need stories to tell us who we are and what we should do.

The story is told of a mother who was trying to get her son out of bed to go to church on a Sunday morning, and it was getting late. “Give me two good reasons why I should go to church this morning” he complained. “Well,” she replied, “you’re 38 years old and you’re the priest. Is that good enough?”
Our stories tell us who we are and what we should do.

But all of us from time to time have a hankering for a bigger story, a story that tells us not just who we are as individuals, or as families, or as nations, but who we are in the universe.

• Why am I here?
• What am I supposed to do with my life?
• How do I know right and wrong?
• Where is it all going to end?
• Where is there a story that will tell me this kind of thing?

Sometimes people ask, Why would I want to be a Christian? I’m a good person. I believe in God. I pray sometimes. I just don’t feel any need of religion. What’s more, I’m very busy and my job and family are very demanding. So why?

One answer to think about is that Christianity is one of these big stories that helps us make sense of our lives, know who we are and how we should live. It’s a story that children can understand, but also a story that can stretch the greatest intellectual.

Think of it this way, that Christian faith is a story in six acts.

In Act 1, God creates an incredibly beautiful world with imagination and intricacy, diversity and vitality, and…love. It is fresh and alive. At the heart of it are human beings, male and female, made to reflect like a mirror image the character of the Artist who made them, with love and creativity. They live in a dance of perfect harmony with the Creator and with one another, and with their environment.

In Act 2, however, things go horribly wrong. Human beings try to play God. They behave as though they’re the centre of the universe. They treat the world as though they were the landlord, whereas of course they’re only the tenants. They step out of God’s cosmic dance and get out of step with one another and with the environment, and, most importantly, they get out of step with God. Instead of love being the thing that binds the world together, now the loudest voices now are often those of self-centredness and anger.

At this point, a lot of artists would simply give up on their work of art and start over. In the film “Waterwalker,” Bill Mason, on a canoe trip across Lake Superior, stops and paints a picture of a waterfall. Bill Mason was not only a great film-maker, but he was also a very skilled painter. Thanks to the way the film is edited, you see the painting build up in just a few seconds. It’s wonderful! Then Bill stands back to admire his handiwork. Unlike us, however, he is less than satisfied, and, to the viewers’ horror, he takes the canvas off the easel…and dumps it into the campfire!” Many artists are like that. God, however, is not that kind of Artist. God is more patient than Bill Mason! God decides, instead of trashing this world, to restore his work of art to its original glory and, what’s even better, God invites human beings to co-operate with him and become his apprentices in the project.

God starts with one couple, Abraham and Sarah, and tells them “Through your descendants I’m going to create a great nation and their job will be to bring my healing to the whole world.” The story of this nation, the Jews, is told in the book traditionally called the Old Testament. This is Act 3.

In Act 4, God’s restoration project reaches a crucial stage. God writes a part for himself in the drama of human life. It’s as if Shakespeare should write himself into the script of Hamlet to be one of the characters in his own creation. That way we can see what God is like in a way we can relate to, and we can learn what God’s dreams are for us and for the world. This character in the play we call by the name Jesus.

And there is Act 6: the Bible doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but it does give tantalizing glimpses of the end of the story, when Jesus will return, the earth will be restored to its original beauty and then some, and God will set everything to rights. J.R.R.Tolkien (who wrote The Hobbit) made up a new word to describe this. Since it was the opposite of a catastrophe, not so much turning the world upside down as turning it right way up, he called it a “eucatastrophe”, a good catastrophe. This is the final act, although, as C.S.Lewis says at the end of the Narnia series, this is “only the beginning of the real story… the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story which no-one on earth has read.” But we’re jumping ahead.

You may have noticed I missed out Act 5. (That was a deliberate mistake! If you spotted it, help yourself to an extra cookie.) The reason is a simple one: Act 5 has not been written. It’s being written today!

One writer, Tom Wright, says this: suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered, but with one act, Act 5, missing. What could you do? He suggests that what you could do is get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearian actors, get them to read Acts 1 through 4, and Act 6 till it is second nature to them, and then set them loose to act out the play, -and when they came to Act 5 they would ad lib! If they’re going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, and it would have to connect with the start of Act 6.

Now, says Tom Wright, that’s where we are in relation to the Christian story. God has given us a framework for our lives in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. All the clues for how to act out Act 5 are right there. And God says to us, Do you want a part in my story? I’d love for you to be a part of it.

This blending of our story into God’s story is illustrated very powerfully in the movie, The Neverending Story.

The hero, Bastian, is reading a book entitled “The Neverending Story,” but as he reads, he discovers little by little that he is a part of the story. When the hero Atreyu is hungry, Bastian decides he is hungry too, and eats his lunch. When Atreyu meets a scary monster, Bastian screams: then he reads in the book, “Atreyu heard a scream, and looked around, but there was nobody there.” Weirder and weirder.

At the end of the book, the land of Fantasia, where the story takes place, is in danger of being destroyed by the Nothing. Nothing can save it except an earthling child who will give the Childlike princess a new name. Bastian realizes he is the boy, and full of fear and trepidation, calls out the Princess’ new name, “Moon Child!” And Fantasia is saved.

In a sense, the Christian story is like this. It is as though God is writing the story of the universe, and invites us to be a part of it. Indeed, many people, as they read the stories of Jesus in the Bible, find they have the same sense that Bastian had, that somehow they are meant to be a part of this story, that it applies to them in a way they did not expect or even hope for.

But there’s one more thing. Among all the Oscars, there is one they never give, and I think they should, and that’s for casting director. So much depends on getting the right actors for the right parts. (Imagine “Titanic” with Sean Penn instead of Leonardo diCaprio, and you’ll get the general idea.)

In the story God is writing about our world, it is as though Jesus is the casting director. And whenever anyone comes and says to him, I’d really like to be a part of God’s story, Jesus smiles and says, “You’re welcome. I have just the part for you. It’ll stretch you, there will be adventures you could never have imagined, sometimes it will be hard, but it will bring you joy. And it will be the right part for you, the part for which I made you in the beginning.”

In the next four sessions, we’ll look in more detail at different acts from this story, and see how they relate to today’s world where we are invited to live out God’s story.

It’s a crazy mixed-up world: but why?

People disagree about most things in our world: whether it’s politics or religion, morality or fashion. You name it. But there is one thing on which there is agreement around the world. It doesn’t matter whether you ask an Aboriginal leader in Australia, a black woman bishop in the US, a rice farmer in China, or a fisherman in Newfoundland. They will all agree about this one thing: something is wrong with our world. I don’t think you would find anyone anywhere who would say, “What do you mean, something’s wrong? The world is perfect just the way it is.”

Our awareness of this starts young. Calvin complains to his father: “It’s not fair.” And his father (like parents the world over) replies, “Life’s not fair.” But Calvin has the last word: “Yes, but why is it never fair in my favour?”

There are at least five possible explanations of why the world is a crazy mixed-up place:

1. The Universe is just a bad place

This point-of-view says, The universe is a sick joke, and human beings are the punch line. The problems of world are really not our fault. If there is a God, well, maybe we can blame God. And if there’s no God, well, we just have to blame the way the world is.

Samuel Beckett wrote a play which expresses this point of view. It’s called Breath and it lasts all of thirty-five seconds. The curtain goes up, and the stage is in darkness. The sound of a newborn baby’s cry is heard, and then two things happen: you hear a breath being drawn slowly in, and, at the same time, the lights slowly go up on the stage, to reveal….a pile of garbage! Then, the breath is let out, just as slowly, and at the same time (you guessed it) the lights are dimmed, until the stage is in darkness again. There’s a second cry, and the play is over.

What is the message? Life is over in a single breath, and at the heart of it is nothing more than a pile of garbage. If Beckett is right, then it’s no wonder we have a hard time hanging on to goodness, truth and beauty. The universe is a pile of garbage: what do you expect?

But it’s difficult to argue that human beings have nothing to do with the state of world. Most people would agree that human beings share at least some of the blame. One way to look at this is to say:

2: Society needs to change

If human beings are party of the problem, maybe we can change the way society functions, and then things will improve.

Maybe what’s wrong is a lack of education. You can think of programs for educating people out of their racism, for example; or programs to re-educate men who abuse their wives. Could we maybe educate ourselves out of all our problems?

What if every country in the world was democratic? That would be another way to improve society. Wouldn’t that make the world a better place and solve a lot of our problems? Then dictators like Saddam Hussein could simply be voted out of office. Unfortunately, problems still happen even in democracies: the Colorado shootings didn’t happen in Iraq or in Kosovo for that matter.

So maybe these solutions don’t go far enough. For one thing, they tend to blame other people: I’m OK, they’re the problem. If only they would be more like us. Other voices, including the Christian one, would say, nobody is innocent in the problems of the world. We are all implicated. It can be a cop-out to blame society, as Calvin discovered. “I’ve concluded that nothing bad I do is my fault. Being young and impressionable, I’m the helpless victim of countless bad influences. An unwholesome culture panders to my undeveloped values and pushes me to maleficence. I take no responsibility for my behaviour. I’m an innocent pawn. It’s society’s fault!” To which his father responds, “Then you need to build some character. Go shovel the walk.” Calvin complains as he begins his chore: “These discussions never go where they’re supposed to.”

So maybe:

3: Human nature is the problem

Victor Hugo, who wrote the book on which Les Miz was based, believed this. He put it this way: “The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.”

Canadian novelist Timothy Findley has a fascinating paragraph in his book,
Famous Last Words. The novel is set in the Second World War, and he comments on those who collaborated with the Nazis like this:

“We should never have done these things,” they will say, “were it not that men like… Mussolini, Dr. Goebbels and Hitler, drove us to them. Otherwise, we should have stayed home by our quiet hearths and dandled our children on our knees and lived out lives of usefulness and peace.” [Findley comments:] Missing the fact entirely that what they were responding to [in Hitler etc.] were the whispers of chaos, fire and anger in themselves.
This is powerful stuff! Nazis are part of our cultural mythology, the ultimate symbol of evil! But Findley dares to say Nazi evil was not caused by the nature of the universe, nor by the structures of society, nor just by a few evil individuals, but by something present, latent, inside human nature. That’s heavy.

The trouble is, once we start blaming human nature, the problem begins to become rather personal. Calvin discovers this for himself: “People are so self-centred”, he complains. “The world would be a better place if people would stop thinking about themselves and focus on others for a change.” “Gee,” asks Hobbes, “I wonder who that might apply to?” Calvin’s answer is immediate: “Me! Everyone should focus more on me!”

If problem is human nature, I am human too, so that makes me part of the
problem:

4: There’s something wrong with me

Earlier this century, there was a correspondence in The Times newspaper of London on this topic of what is wrong with the world. Various famous and learned writers voiced their opinions. But the last letter was also the shortest, and it brought the correspondence to an end. It was from G.K.Chesterton, the Catholic journalist. His letter simply said:

Dear Sir:
What is wrong with the world? I am.
Yours sincerely,
G.K.Chesterton”
Now the trouble with this diagnosis is that it is so radical! If we are the problem, if each one of us contributes to what is wrong with the world, what can we do to help ourselves? Who is left to do anything about it?

That leaves the last circle, and it’s specifically a spiritual one. If we ask what exactly it is that is the problem with me, the answer concerns:

5: My spirituality: I am out of step with God

This view says that the world is in a mess because we have made ourselves the centre of the world, instead of giving God God’s rightful place at the centre.

It’s as though the human race is like an orchestra, capable of the most marvelous music when we follow the conductor. But the reason the music so often sounds chaotic is because we no longer bother to follow God the conductor.

Frederick Nietzsche was an atheist, but he understood clearly the consequences of turning your back on God. In his Parable of the Madman, he writes:

What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now?
Nietzsche sees that we are like planets, designed to revolve around God our sun, which gives us our light and heat. But, says Nietzsche, we have unchained ourselves from that orbit, and made ourselves free, but as we move away from the sun, we move also further and further away from the only true source of heat and light.

Jesus told a story which makes the same point as Nietzsche, but uses a different metaphor. And Jesus’ story has a different ending: he tells us what we can do about our situation.

The story of two sons…

There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father,”Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them.

Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.

When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death? I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven ans against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son: make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him: he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and againt you, and am no longer worthy to be called your son…’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and let’s kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

(The Gospel according to Luke, chapter 15)

Jesus is saying that the problem is this: as a race and as individuals we have turned our backs on God and left our spiritual home. We’ve gone our own way, done our own thing. We’ve ignored God’s norms and direction for our lives

The only way to cure disease is by dealing with what caused it in the first place. Like the boy in the story, we have come to our senses, return to our Creator, and say we’re sorry.

And the good news is that, in spite of all we’ve done, before the speech is even out of our mouths, God is delighted to take us back and throws a great party to celebrate.

The theme of the next Christian Basics session is “What’s So Special About Jesus?” Let me leave you with this thought. There is a strange thing in this story: although Jesus and the cross on which he died are central to classic Christian belief, here Jesus himself tells a story about the heart of Christian belief, and he doesn’t come into it, and neither does his death! Why is that? We’ll pick up that question next time.

What’s so special about Jesus?

In the 1960s, lots of people liked Jesus but didn’t believe in God. I guess Jesus was seen as a rebellious kind of guy, while God was an authority figure. You can see why the 60s might react the way they did!

Now, it seems to be the other way round. Everybody believes in God but a lot of people ask, What’s special about Jesus? Why do I need Jesus? Jesus just complicates things.

I guess now God is a nice vague word, and can mean whatever you want, whereas Jesus is pretty specific: a particular guy in a particular place, at a particular time in history, saying some particularly awkward things. In a world of no-name-brand spirituality he sticks out like a sore thumb.

So in this series on basic Christian spirituality, it’s important to ask this question: What so special about Jesus?

In the history of Christian faith, three things about Jesus seem to have stood out as special, whichever branch of Christianity you look at. The first is to do with:

1. Jesus’ life

As the first Christians reflected on the life of this strange, intriguing, compelling man, they wrestled with who exactly who on earth he was. And as they tried to account for everything they had seen him do and heard him say, they found themselves pressed to a conclusion that seemed unthinkable, a reality that was scary and overwhelming but irresistible, and for which they really didn’t have the right words in their theological dictionaries. Yet what alternative did they have but to try and say it? So they gulped and things like:

“Jesus perfectly mirrors God…” ó so that if God stood in front of a mirror, what he would see reflected back is the face of Jesus?

“… and is stamped with God’s nature.” ó this is a stamp like the face stamped on a coin: the die has the face of the queen on it, and the coin has the exact same face of the queen on it: well, says the writer, God and Jesus are like that.
Or they say this kind of thing:

“Jesus had equal status with God… When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, becoming human!”
Remember these are Jewish writers, who believed passionately in one God and only one God. But their experience of Jesus led them to rethink what it meant to say there is one God.

Think of it like this. Imagine a Calvin and Hobbes strip where the two of them are arguing about how they came into being. One (and in my imagination it’s Calvin) believes they were created by a great invisible Cartoonist and the other (Hobbes is generally the more cynical one) thinks they simply happened through inkblots coming together by chance on a page. They can’t decide for sure.

Bill Watterson, the cartoonist, listens to this argument, and decides to help them out. But how can he communicate with these characters who exist in two dimensions, and who talk in bubbles coming out of their heads? He lives on a totally different level of existence that they could never understand.

Then he hits on a plan. He creates a new cartoon character, and draws him into the strip. His name is Bill Watterson. He exists in two dimensions, just like Calvin and Hobbes, and he communicates through speech-bubbles. And this cartoon says to Calvin and Hobbes all the things the “real” Bill Watterson would want to say; and he behaves towards them in the way Bill Watterson behaves.

This means that Calvin and Hobbes can get to know their creator in a way that’s real even though it’s limited, and, of course, they can decide whether or not they want to relate to him.

Christians believe that this is precisely what God has done. Our understanding of God is limited because of course God is far more complicated than we could figure out for ourselves. But God has written himself into the script of the cartoon strip we call human life, and said those things God wanted to say, and shown his character by the things he did, so that we could understand something of what God is like, and, of course, choose whether or not we want to relate to the Creator. And as Christians understand it, when God did that, the name he was called by was Jesus.

So Jesus shows us what God is like in a way that no-one else has ever done.

This is the first reason Jesus is special: he shows us in a unique way what God is like. We’re not left to figure it out for ourselves. The second reason Jesus is special is not to do with his life but to do with his death:

2. The death of Jesus

In the earliest biographies of Jesus (the Four Gospels), the story of the death of Jesus takes up no less than one-third of the pages. This is rather strange! I have an 800- page biography of John F. Kennedy at home: guess how many of those pages are taken up with describing his death? Ten. A classic biography of Muhammad has 250 pages, of which 6 are devoted to his last year, and one to his death. But that doesn’t seem strange, does it? What’s important is a person’s life, surely?

So what was so special about the death of Jesus that caused his biographers with one accord to make it a major theme of his biography?

Classic Christian spirituality over the centuries has used shorthand explanations for this, such as, “Christ died for our sins”. But what on earth does that mean?

There is no one simple explanation. There are many theories which may help, but none of them is ever going to be adequate. Anything important can’t be described in just one way. Let me offer you an illustration I personally find helpful:

The movie, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? is about a dysfunctional family. There is a mother, two sons and two daughters. The mother, Darlene Cates, has not stirred from the couch in front of the TV for years, and is painfully overweight as a result. The younger son, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, plays a mentally challenged 13 year old whose main joy in life is climbing the water tower in the little town where they live, so that the fire department have to come and rescue him. Finally, the police get tired of dealing with him, and decide to lock him in a cell to teach him a lesson.

His mother decides to do something about it. She goes to the police station, and demands, “Give me my son!” with such passion and authority that the police, breaking all regulations, release him into his mother’s care. As they leave, however, a crowd forms. They stare at the mother, giggling and whispering behind their hands. One man even takes a photograph. But she doesn’t care: she has her son.

Forgiveness is never cheap. The mother had a choice. She could have said,
Well, he did a stupid thing, he needs to pay for it, it’ll teach him a lesson ó all the sorts of things we say when we’re concerned for justice. And she would have stayed comfortably at home. But she decides that although she has not done anything wrong ó the police are not mad at her ó she is willing to go through suffering and humiliation so that her son doesn’t have to suffer, and so she can get him back.

In the same way, we have done wrong. We are like the runaway kid in Jesus’ story we had read in Part 2. We have hurt God and messed up God’s world.
Like the mother in the movie, God had a choice: God could have said, Hey, let them suffer, they got themselves into this mess, let them pay for it. That’s fair. But God chose the other option: to come after us in person to get us back, even though it meant suffering and humiliation. And what we see in the crucifixion of Jesus is the suffering God goes through in order to be reconciled with us. The pain of Jesus’ death was the pain we caused to God’s love.

I asked you in Part 2 why there is no mention of a cross in the story of the runaway boy. The answer is: there is a cross in the story, but it’s not a visible cross. The cross is in the heart of the father, who chose not to punish his runaway son but absorb the pain and keep it inside. That pain in the heart of God is made visible in the crucifixion of Jesus.

That’s the second thing that’s so special about Jesus. The third thing concerns what happened after his death.

3. Jesus’ resurrection

Jesus died on a Friday ó and there seems to be no serious doubt that he was really dead ó but by early Sunday morning his followers, terrified, defeated and demoralized by his death (of course), began to say he was alive again, and got to the point where they were even willing to die for their conviction that he was alive.

This was not like people saying Elvis is alive: if Elvis is alive, it’s because he never really died. Nor is it like people in the 60s and 70s saying about Che
Guevara, the South American freedom fighter, “Che lives” ó meaning, his life is still an inspiration to us as it was when he was alive; or maybe that his spirit inspires us.

No, the followers of Jesus were convinced that he had come back to them in a physical form which was recognizable yet mysterious. They said he had conquered death. They said this showed that Jesus was lord over heaven and earth.

Could such a thing be true? It depends how you think of the world. If there is no God, then no, probably not. But if there is a good God like the God Jesus taught about, then it would make perfect sense. In fact, what would be really puzzling is if Jesus had not been brought back from death!

Yet even some of the first followers of Jesus doubted, and God has kindly given us lots of evidence to help us with our doubts. In 1930, for instance, a journalist named Frank Morison tried to write a book that would show that the resurrection never happened. By the time he had examined the evidence, however, he realized that book couldn’t be written. Instead, he wrote a book setting out the evidence in incredible detail (which, in my humble opinion, makes it a very boring book) called Who Moved the Stone? which is still in print, and the first chapter of which is called “The Book That Refused to be Written”, in homnour of his original intention. (Incidentally, Morison’s book was one my wife Deborah read as a student at Oxford when she was figuring out her personal faith.)

Why does this matter? It matters because, if it is true, then the world is a quite different place from what it is if it is not true. For instance, if it is true, then it means God has put his stamp of approval on all that Jesus did and said, and we should sit up and take notice. It also means that when we face death (our own or others’) we don’t need to be afraid because there is someone available who has overcome death, someone we can trust to take us through it.

What’s so special about Jesus? Lots of things, but in particular, his unique life, death and resurrection.

When my daughter Anna was about six years old, one Sunday morning before church, she said to me, “Daddy, I like Jesus, but I hate church.” It can be a helpful distinction. Many people in our society say things like, “I’m really not into organized religion.” (Though it could be argued that organized religion is a bit of an oxymoron anyway.) That’s OK, but it is a tragedy if they throw out the baby with the bathwater, and miss out on Jesus just because they don’t like church.

The important question for us to consider in figuring out our spirituality is not whether we like church, but as Jesus once asked his first followers, “Who do you say that I am?”

The School of Jesus

Whatever you think of political correctness, it has had some good spin-offs. One of them is that we try to call people what they want to be called. That seems to me a matter of simple courtesy. So we no longer call the Inuit Eskimos because they call themselves Inuit; we no longer call the First Nations Indians because that’s not who they are. (I am waiting for this fine principle to be applied to the Welsh, since the word Welsh is actually an Old English word meaning foreigner. But I’m not holding my breath.)

But by the same token, Christians haven’t always called themselves Christians.

Christian is a label that was stuck on them by people who were not Christians.
(In fact the word is only used three times in the whole of the Bible: it doesn’t seem to have been that important to them.) The first Christians had another word for themselves which they preferred, and which they used far more frequently, and which actually tells you a lot about how they understood Christian faith.

That name by which the first Christians called themselves most often was “disciple.” And the literal meaning of the word “disciple” is actually “learner” or “student.” For them, it seems, when they thought of Christian faith, the thing that came to their mind first was not church or services or the ten commandments or being a good citizen… but learning! Which means that for them the church was first and foremost a school, and the Christian life a process of learning.

Well, that raises some interesting questions. Where is this school? What is it for? What do you learn there? What are the teaching methods? Who are the teachers? And where are classes held? And can you graduate? Is it true that the graduate programs are out of this world?

The easiest question to answer is: who is the teacher? Jesus! Many times in the pages of the earliest biographies of Jesus he is called teacher; and a couple of times he calls himself by the same title.

But what is it that he teaches? What is the curriculum in this school Jesus is running? In the 1940s, Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of plays for radio based on the life of Jesus and called The Man Born to be King. In one of those plays she puts into the mouth of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ first followers, the sort of thing Mary might have said to Jesus as she recalled the first time she met him:

“Did you know? My friends and I came there that day to mock you. We thought you would be sour and grim, hating all beauty and treating life as an enemy. But when I saw you, I was amazed. You were the only person there who was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead ñ making the gestures of life, pretending to be real people. The life was not with us but with you-intense and shining, like the strong sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. And I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning.”

(The Man Born to be King, 186f)
Sayers explains elsewhere: “What she sees in Jesus is the Life, the blazing light of living intensely.”

What did Jesus come to teach? He said on one occasion, “I have come so that people might have life and have it in all its fullness!” (John 10:10) That’s it!

Jesus is a teacher of life: he teaches us how to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way, and in the friendship of God. That’s what people saw in Jesus: it’s what gave him that unique quality of being fully alive; it’s what attracted people like Mary to be his followers. They wanted to learn the life that they saw in Jesus.

In a sense this is true of any good teacher: they communicate much more than just their subject. Think, for example, of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets’ Society: John Keating is supposedly an English teacher, but in practice he teaches his students about life with a capital L.

But then I want to ask: how do you learn this kind of life? I’ll tell you how you don’t learn it, and in this Jesus is different from John Keating . Some time ago I received in the mail a Bible study guide entitled “Jesus the Teacher” with a picture of a classroom on the cover! I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, because it was so deeply wrong. Jesus’ kind of learning never took place in a classroom with a blackboard and a big desk. Jesus’ school is not an academic kind of place. The school of Jesus is not a school for passing on information. (You may know the definition of a lecture as the process whereby the professor’s notes become the student’s notes without passing through the minds of either. Jesus was not into that kind of learning!)

So in the school of Jesus, how do we learn? Jesus has a specially vivid image for this:

“Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light..” – Matthew 11:28-30

There in the centre of this saying of Jesus is his offer to be our teacher: “Come… learn from me…”

But he gives us a powerful image to explain how we learn. He says, “Take my yoke upon you.” Before we came to Canada twenty-something years ago, I thought I understood this image. Jesus was saying he is the farmer, I am the ox, I submit to his yoke, and as I pull the plough he follows behind and directs me. Right? Probably not. Soon after we came to Canada, we went to one of those living museums where everything is done as it was 100 years ago. And I saw there something that completely changed my understanding of Jesus’ words: an ox-cart pulled by two oxen yoked together. And it was explained to us that one use of the double yoke was to train young oxen. The farmer would link together an experienced ox and a young ox, and, as they pulled the plough together, the older ox would demonstrate how it was done: the discipline, the patience, the obedience, the stick-to-itiveness.

That’s what Jesus is saying by this picture. He is saying, I am already wearing the yoke of being God’s person in God’s world. Come and walk alongside me, share the yoke I’m already carrying, and I will teach you what I know.

What kind of learning would that be? It will be very different according to who we are. But just as in those first days, it may well involve such things as:
Learning to be generous with what we have, perhaps more generous than we feel comfortable with at first; learning to express our anger in more constructive ways; learning how to forgive; learning to come alongside someone at work or at school who is a bit of a misfit; Jesus the Teacher may also want to mess with our career plans, or retirement plans, or holiday plans. The list is endless: the lessons of Jesus’ school are as diverse as the situations people can find themselves in in the course of a week!

There are encouragements here.

Jesus says he is a teacher who is gentle and humble. Many of us have had teachers who are not like that: they delight in showing how clever they are, and in putting down their students’ mistakes. Jesus is the opposite: encouraging, nurturing, patient with our mistakes, taking time and trouble with us individually, to help us learn.

Then too he says his yoke is “easy.” For anyone who has been a follower of Jesus more than about 24 hours, that sounds a little strange. Being a Christian is often tough! The original biographies of Jesus, from which this saying is taken, were written in Greek, the main language of Jesus’ world, and I am told that the Greek word for “easy” can be better translated “well-fitting.” My yoke is well-fitting. Actually, we still use the word “easy” this way. If you’re looking for a pair of new shoes, you might try a couple of pairs that really don’t fit and then you find one that’s just right, and you say, “That’s a really easy fit”, you mean it’s comfortable, it’s right for you. This is the sense in which Jesus’ yoke is “easy”, it’s well-fitting: not that it’s no sweat but that it fits us well. After all, in those days, yokes were made one by one for individual oxen, there was no mass production, so Jesus is saying, my yoke is made specially for you. It doesn’t mean there won’t be work, it doesn’t meant there won’t be difficultyñ but it will still be the yoke I made for you.

In Part 5, the theme is “Where do we go from here?” and we’ll think about some of the nitty-gritty ways the school of Jesus functions in practice. But right now, I want to give an opportunity for us to consider what this says to each of us. After all, Jesus was being pretty practical when he said these words. I know that because he begins this saying with the words, “Come to me!” That wasn’t a theoretical statement, and his hearers knew it.

In my imagination, when he had finished, and the crowds were going home for supper, there were some who didn’t leave straight away. They pushed through the crowd and came up to Jesus, maybe a little hesitantly, and said something like this, “Jesus, you know what you said about being your student and sharing your yoke? I really think I’d like to do that. Is there some kind of application form? Do I have to get transcripts?” And whoever that person was, whatever they had done, wherever they had been in their spiritual journey, Jesus said, “That’s great. You’re welcome. We’re just going to have supper. Come eat with us and I’ll introduce you to the others.”

In one sense, nothing has changed since that first day. I talked in Part 3 about Jesus coming back from death and being alive forever. So we can speak to him just as if he were present here in the flesh. And the offer of becoming his student, learning to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way, still stands. And his invitation, “Come to me”, is just as real today as it was 2,000 years ago. And now, just as then, he waits to see what we will say.

Let me offer you the sort of thing you may wish to say to Jesus in response to his invitation. If it makes sense to you, you may wish to echo these words silently in your heart to him.

Jesus -

Thank you for inviting me to join your school.

Thank you for offering yourself as my Teacher, and for shaping a yoke just for me.

I do want to learn what it means to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way.

Please enroll me as a student in your school.

Teach me to share your yoke and to be your faithful student day by day.

Amen

Where do we go from here?

I knew a family a few years back where the couple had adopted twins, and they were proving to be quite a handful. While I was there, one came in from the yard where she had been playing with a friend, and said to her father, “Daddy, was I adopted or adapted?” He said with a wry smile, “You were adopted, sweetheart: we’re still working on the adapting.”

One reason I’ve never forgotten that exchange is that in our relationship with
God also, those two processes take place. There is adopting and there is adapting. I suggested in Part 4 that the Christian life is like a school, but
Jesus also taught his first followers to think of themselves as family, as sisters and brothers, with God as their Father. First we are adopted into God’s family, baptism is the symbol or sacrament of that, but then God adapts us to the culture and values of God’s family.

Paul, in one of his letters, summarizes this aspect of being a follower of Jesus. You can almost sense his excitement as he writes about our adaptation:

All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

(Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3, verse 18)
God’s plan is to make us like Jesus, not with a long white robe and sandals and a beard and piercing eyes (or however you envision Jesus), but in character: God longs for us to have the same blazing compassion, the same impatience with hypocrisy, the same passion for justice, the same generosity and creativity and single-mindedness we see in Jesus.

But how is such an unlikely thing ever going to happen? Think of it in terms of a wheel with four spokes.

The centre is where we start: we are adopted into God’s family, or (to use last week’s picture) we join the school of Jesus. The circumference is when we are fully adapted to be all that God has in mind for us, like Jesus. The four spokes of the wheel indicate four of the most important ways God has made available for us to get from the centre to the outside. So what are they?

Paul says that this change comes about in us by our “seeing the glory of the
Lord.” God’s glory is simply God as God really is. So how on earth do we “see the glory of the Lord”?

One way is through:

1. Worship

Calvin thinks he understands worship. He has waiting for weeks for his free beanie from the cereal company, and he thinks he needs a little divine assistance. He prays ñ sort-of: “Please let my beanie come today! I promise I won’t ever be bad again! I’ll do whatever you want!” Of course, when he gets home, it hasn’t arrived, and he screams at the sky, “WHAT’S IT TAKE, HUH?!” For Calvin, it seems, worship is a way of bribing God to give you what you want.

But no. In fact, one reason for worship is that it helps us see God more clearly as God really is. Every part of worship speaks about what God is like, what God has said, what God has done, whether it’s the Bible readings, the songs, the prayers, confessing our sins and being forgiven, the talk or sermon, or the creeds.

And supremely, we are reminded of what God is like in the service that is the heart of Christian worship, the Communion, Eucharist, Mass, Lord’ s Supper, it has many names. Why? Well, because it speaks of the death of Jesus. And, in Christian tradition, it’s in the death of Jesus that we see in highly concentrated form what God is like: God’s love, God’s patience, God’s opposition to evil and violence, God’s willingness to forgive, God’s welcoming of us whatever we have done.

Worship, then, is spoke number one, whether it is private worship, by myself in my room; or public worship, with others who feel the same way about God.

2. The Bible

An experiment was done a few years back to see how far it is true that married couples get to look like each other. They took photos of the couples when they were first married, mixed them all up, and got outsiders who didn’t know the people to try and pair them up. They failed dismally. Then they took photos of the same couples after they had been married 20, 30, 40 years, and did the same experiment. This time, most of the couples got paired up correctly. Over the years, as those couples had spent time together, cared for one another, empathized with one another, they had come to mirror one another, and, without knowing it, begun to imitate one another’s gestures and body language and facial expressions.

In a sense it’s always true: we become more like those we admire and hang out with and model ourselves on. How can we do that with Jesus? One way is by reading the Bible. In a sense, it’s a way of spending time in the presence of Jesus, watching how he responds to people, how he deals with crises, how he expresses anger, and so on. And as we enter into the stories and see Jesus in action, without our being aware of it, we are little by little changed.

The earliest Christian writers don’t talk about married couples getting to look alike. But they do use other images to show how important they think God’s words are:

Peter says it’s as crucial as milk for a baby (1 Pet.2.2);

James says it’s like a mirror for you to see yourself in, the good and the bad, and can get yourself cleaned up (James 1.23);

Paul says it’s like a sword for the student of Jesus to oppose evil (Ephesians 6.17).

They are all telling us in different ways that reading the Bible provides our essential daily intake of spiritual vitamins. It doesn’t matter how we do it, but it does matter that we do it.

Calvin is not a great fan of books. As Hobbes is engrossed in a book, Calvin taunts him, “While you’re reading that book, I’m going to do something fun.” But when Hobbes suddenyl reads something that makes his eyes bug out and to scream, “AIEE!!” Calvin suddenly becomes interested: “I’ll just kind of read over your shoulder, OK?” Whatever the book is, it’s startling, maybe scary, engrossing. The Bible can have that same kind of effect. I was talking to a student who has recently become a follower of Jesus. And he said that for him, reading the New Testament for the first time was like that scene in The Truman Show (you may have seen it) where he is beating on the wall of his artificial world trying to get out. He said, “Like Truman, I realised there was a world on the other side, and I had to get to it.” Reading the Bible had that effect on him.

That’s why reading the Bible is spoke #2. Here’s #3. Jesus once told a story that went like this:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.” – (The Gospel according to Matthew 7:24-27)

I have asked many groups now what they think the rock stands for in that story. I get a lot of different answers: it’s faith, it’s Jesus, it’s the words of Jesus, it’s the church. Actually, Jesus says quite clearly what it is. Listen again, and I’ll edit it to make it clear: “Anyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like… Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them…” Get it? The difference is what we do about the words of Jesus. In a word, do we obey and follow? So that’s #3:

3. Obedience

Obedience, of course, gets a bad press in our world. If you are obedient, it implies you’re passive, you can’t think for yourself, you’re not exercising your rights, someone’s oppressing you. Calvin knows this well. In response to a request from his teacher, Miss Wormwood, he begins to march zombie-like around the classroom, intoning mechanically: “I have been suc-cess-ful-ly pro-grammed to obey all di-rec-tives. I have no will of my own… my own… my own… my own.” Miss Wormwood is not amused.

But hold on: obedience is not always like this. My son Ben is a trumpeter. Some years ago, after several years of trumpet lessons, he was fortunate enough to have lessons with one of Canada’s top trumpeters. At the very first lesson, Mr. Olds said to Ben:

“Ben, your embouchure is totally wrong. I don’t know why no teacher has told you this before, but you’re going to have to change your whole technique. It’ll be tough, you won’t like it, it won’t come as naturally as the old way. But if you’re going to get anywhere with your trumpet, this is what you have to do.”
Do you think Ben did it? He might have said, “No way. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll do what’s comfortable for me. Don’t cramp my style. I’m not going to conform to your old-fashioned stereotype. I just gotta be me!”

In fact, he didn’t. He worked and worked at what Mr. Olds had said until it became second nature and he could move ahead in his playing. Why did he do that? Because Bob Olds is perhaps the second best trumpet player in Canada and a great teacher. Did Ben obey him? Yup. Was that a good thing? Absolutely. Did it undermine Ben’s individuality and creativity? No way. In fact, it enabled him to develop his individuality and creativity way beyond what would have been possible otherwise.

So why do we obey Jesus? Because he’s a celestial policeman, ordering us around and stopping our fun? Of course not. Because he is (as we thought last week) a great teacher, The Great Teacher, the one best qualified to help us move ahead in our individuality and creativity. Why? Because God made us, and Jesus brings us the maker’s instructions for how we work best.

What might it mean to obey Jesus?

Stuart was a bright young business graduate. In his interview for a job with a top consulting firm, he was asked, “Mr. Allcock, it’s clear from your application that you are a man of… religious convictions. Does this mean that you would not be prepared to bend the truth on occasion for the good of the company?” Stuart smiled, and said, “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t be able to do that.” He didn’t get the job.

One friend of mine told me one day she had just received an unexpected windfall of $1,000. Wow, I exclaimed, what are you going to do with that? Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, you know Fred just lost his job? I felt God wanted me to give it to him. So I did.” Crazy? Maybe. Christlike? Definitely.

It’s different for each of us.

I still remember the first time I spoke to a class of philosophy students.
The professor, a Marxist atheist, had invited me to come and explain why I believe in God. I remember vividly how, as I went in, I said to a friend who came with me, “Going to your execution must feel a bit like this.” And then, when I came out an hour later, I said, “Wow. I feel as though I’ve got a reprieve, almost as though I’ve been… resurrected.” Why do something like that, that made me feel uncomfortable? Because I had a sense that for me this was obeying Jesus.

I suspect that obeying Jesus often involves risk and discomfort, simply because he wants to stretch and grow us until we are like him, and we have a distance to go! Hence spoke #4 is important:

4. Christian Community

If you had to come up with an image or a metaphor for the church, what would it be? A bunch of religious people doing strange religious things in a strange religious building?

The earliest Christian writers, as they watched this new group, the followers of Jesus, in action, some different metaphors came to their minds. They said, this bunch of people works together as smoothly as a body, they are as close as the stones in the wall of a temple, they care for each other like a family, they stand shoulder to shoulder against evil like an army, and they’re as difficult to tear apart as a loaf of bread (1Cor. 10.17). Wow! Those pictures speak of a closeness and an interdependence that is rare these days.

The students of Jesus need one another. David Watson once said:

If Christianity doesn’t begin with the personal, it doesn’t begin. But if it ends with the personal, it ends.

We can’ t make it by ourselves. God hasn’t made us that way. Even Calvin has to acknowledge this: “When I grow up,” he tells Hobbes, “I’m going to live a million miles away from everyone!” Hobbes asks, logically enough, “How will you survive? What will you eat?” and Calvin reflects, “Well, Mom could come by twice a day to cook, I suppose.”

Following Jesus is hard at the best of times, and the current of society is a different direction. Indeed, we need one another not only as we try to obey Jesus, but to help us learn to worship, and to help us read and understand the Bible too. That’s one reason there are so many different groups in this church: we know we need one another.

Well, four spokes to a wheel, all taking us to the same destination. Does it sound like a challenge? Earlier this century, Archbishop William Temple addressed precisely this question. He said:

If I were asked to write plays as good as Shakespeare’s, there’s no way I could ever come close. But if by some miracle the spirit of William Shakespeare could come and inhabit my personality, and influence my mind and fire my imagination, then I could write plays like Shakespeare’s.

In the same way, no way could I ever hope to become like Jesus. Yet if by some miracle the Spirit of Jesus could come and inhabit my personality, and influence my mind and fire my imagination, then it is possible that, little by little, I could become more like Jesus.

And, of course, that is the case: the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, is available to us to breathe life into our efforts to follow Jesus. That’s why Paul says at the end of his statement about adapting: “This comes from the
Lord, the Spirit.” He knew it from personal experience and from watching other followers of Jesus develop.

Being a follower of Jesus, then, doesn’t mean becoming a weirdo or a religious fanatic It means becoming more like two people: we become more like Jesus, a human being as human beings were always meant to be. But, by some mysterious chemistry, as we follow Jesus in these ways, we also become more like… ourselves, more the person whom God made us to be, the person God longs for us to become. There is no more wonderful destiny for any human being.

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Spirituality, yes; religion, no.

Many people today appear to be searching enthusiastically for an authentic spirituality-but with equal enthusiasm they are rejecting organized religion. Magazines as diverse as Self, Mother Jones, Psychology Today and Time have all given front-page coverage to spirituality in recent years. Psychology Today called this trend a ‘massive flight from traditional religious institutions into spirituality,’ and announced that ‘we are witnessing a spiritual awakening unprecedented in modern times.’ (1) Self magazine discovered that when asked, ‘Would you describe yourself as spiritual?’ 70% of its readers replied ‘Yes’, 27% answered ‘Somewhat’ and only 3% said an outright ‘No’. (2)

The first time I noticed the term spirituality in casual conversation was not long ago: a student was involved in arranging the sound equipment for one of my lectures, and I happened to ask him whether he had any religious beliefs. ‘Not really,’ he replied, ‘but I am trying to figure out my spirituality.’ Then I recall checking in at the airport in Ottawa once, and the agent behind the counter noticed that I was reading a copy of The Celestine Prophecy. (3) ‘I love that book,’ she commented. ‘A lot of us feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. We’re not especially religious, but we think there’s something in it.’ People are increasingly aware that they have a spiritual side to their nature, an aspect which neither science nor materialism has satisfied, but at the same time they are not looking to a church or religion to satisfy that need. The fact that The Celestine Prophecy, with its strong pro-spirituality, anti-organized religion message, has been on the best-seller lists since mid-1994 indicates the strength of this hunger for spirituality.

One of the first and strongest voices against religion but for spirituality in recent years was that of Sinead O’Connor. In October 1992, for instance, O’Connor was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. In answer to a question about religion, O’Connor replied, ‘Organized religion is a lie. It’s designed to take you away from God, particularly the Christian church.’ For the interview, O’Connor wore a T-shirt proclaiming herself a ‘Recovering Catholic’.  Yet at the same time she was not embarrassed to say,

I’m still angry, but I’m alive, and that’s because of God. If I hadn’t believed in God, I would be dead now, I would be drunk, I would be on drugs. (4)

Clearly, her sense of spirituality is alive and well. She would agree with comedian Lenny Bruce when he said, ‘More and more people are leaving the church and going back to God!’

Yet the anti-religion, pro-spirituality movement is nothing new. It was dramatically expressed in 19th century Russia by novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, part of his novel The Brothers Karamazov. (5) Like O’Connor, Dostoyevsky was by no means rejecting God or spirituality, or even (in his case) the Christian religion-in fact, he was a committed Christian-but he was attacking what religion has done to spirituality, and specifically to Christian faith.

The story is set in Seville, Spain, in the 16th century, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, when thousands are being burned at the stake by the church for their unorthodox beliefs. Into this setting comes Jesus, unheralded but immediately recognized. Crowds gather. He heals a man who has been blind all his life. He sees a child’s coffin being carried into the cathedral, and raises the little girl to life.

The Grand Inquisitor, head of the Inquisition, sees what is happening and orders his guards to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison. The people prostrate themselves in fear before the Grand Inquisitor. That night, he visits Jesus in his cell, and warns him that on the following day he will be sentenced to death and burned at the stake as the worst of heretics.

Why would the official representative of the Christian church treat Jesus, the founder of his church, that way? The Inquisitor knows that Jesus has come, as Dostoyevsky puts it, to ‘interfere’ with the way the church does things. Jesus, says the Inquisitor, preached love and freedom, but the church has imposed what people really need: mystery, miracle and authority. He calmly tells Jesus, ‘We have corrected your work,’ and removed from people ‘the terrible gift of freedom.’

To this long speech, Jesus says nothing. At the end, however, without warning, he goes over to the Inquisitor and ‘kisses him gently on his old, bloodless lips.’ In response, the Inquisitor shudders, then releases Jesus into the night, warning him never to return.

Dostoyevsky-or rather, Ivan, the atheist brother, who tells this story-focuses the conflict: he argues that there is actually a difference between the spirituality Jesus taught and what the church teaches. Moreover, he says that the church has tried to tame the teaching of Jesus and make it easier for people to be ‘religious’ instead of truly spiritual or truly Christian.

Jesus and religion

When we go back to Jesus, we see that he had a clear definition of spirituality, and understood the tension between spirituality and religion. In fact, in his teaching, Jesus pinpoints some of the areas of conflict in a way that is intriguingly contemporary. Many of these surface in Jesus’ confrontations with the religious leaders of his day-the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes. For instance, in one of the earliest biographies of Jesus, by a medical doctor named Luke, Jesus raises the following issues with them.

Appearance vs reality

‘I know you Pharisees burnish the surface of your cups and plates so they sparkle in the sun, but I also know your insides are maggoty with greed and secret evil. Turn both your pockets and your hearts inside out and give generously to the poor; then your lives will be clean, not just your dishes and your hands.’(6)

The religious leaders were concerned about looking good-spiritual and together. Jesus says, in effect, ‘Don’t you realize that God is more interested in what is inside your heart than with how you look?’ Scandals of televangelists and religious boarding schools would seem to fit this diagnosis: they may have looked good on the outside, but sometimes the reality was very different. Jesus is not impressed with such hypocrisy. For Jesus, true spirituality is primarily a matter of the heart, something that works on the inside and not only on the surface.

In the Genesis song, ‘Jesus he knows me’, Phil Collins puts words which summarize this problem into the mouth of an evangelist: ‘Won’t find me practicing what I’m preaching… Just do as I say, don’t do as I do-get on your knees and start paying.’ (7) Collins is right: Jesus does know such people, and he is not fooled.

Things vs people

‘I’ve had it with you! You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing (8) on every nickel and dime you get, but manage to find loopholes for getting around basic matters of justice and God’s love. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required.’ (9)

Jesus finds religious people arguing over trivial things, significant only in their esoteric system of religion, while the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Today, I imagine him criticizing churches which seem mainly interested in the colour of the new carpet for the sanctuary, or the price of a new roof, or arguing over which Prayer Book to use. This is the ghetto mentality in religious form. Jesus asks, ‘Excuse me, people: what about love? what about justice? Aren’t those more important than these details?’ For Jesus, true spirituality is about the big stuff: knowing God, love of neighbour, compassion, justice, forgiveness, generosity, self-sacrifice.

Archbishop William Temple caught the thrust of Jesus’ teaching when he said that the Christian church is the only club in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members. Jesus, I suspect, would have liked that. His followers, however, have not always remembered it.

Self-centred vs God-centred

Jesus told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people.

Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. (10) The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people-robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’ Meanwhile, the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’ Jesus commented, ‘This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk round with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.’ (11)

In some ways, religious people’s arrogance is more distasteful than anyone else’s. After all, you might expect that the claim to have encountered the Almighty would produce in them some sense of their fallibility and sinfulness. You might expect a certain humility to result from having glimpsed God’s greatness and mystery. The greater the expectations, the deeper the disappointment.

For Jesus, true spirituality means having a right sense of who we are and of who God is-and a right sense of what it means to relate authentically to God. In fact, Jesus’ story must have been deeply shocking to the religious people who heard it. He implies that the non-religious person may be more acceptable to God than they are: sometimes non-religious people, like the tax man in the story, have a better grasp of who they are and who God is, and so their response is more appropriate.

To this extent, Sinead O’Connor is right: there is something in organized religion (the Christian religion, anyway) which easily squirms away from the teaching and spirituality of Jesus. For someone to claim to be a follower of Jesus yet do nothing about it is a lie; to put things before people is a lie; and to be self-centred is a lie. And lying is not a part of anyone’s definition of spirituality.

How did things go wrong?

Jesus said that he came to announce the inauguration of the kingdom of God-the realm in which the Creator’s norms for human life are honoured. His gift was to put people in touch with God and show what it meant to live as God’s community, in God’s world, in God’s way. So he healed the sick, he fed the hungry, he raised the dead. And he drew people into a new community. For Jesus, parties were significant because they symbolized the acceptance, love and community that characterized God’s rule. (12) Jesus’ intention was clearly to set up a community which would signal a new stage for humanity.

This was a profoundly counter-cultural thing to do. If culture is, as someone has said, ‘the way we do things around here,’ a counter-culture says, ‘there is a better way of doing things around here.’ For Jesus, that was the way of God’s kingdom.

Those who study the life cycle of organizations (13) describe phase one in that cycle as characterized by energy, charisma, community, fluidity, no tradition and few rules. What we see in the earliest accounts of the work of Jesus is a classic example of that stage. Phase two, say the experts, comes as the pioneers are dying out or moving on. The second generation says: Help us preserve the past. Write things down. Train us to do what you have done. Let’s build in some structures to make sure nothing changes. That’s an inevitable stage, not wrong in itself. This too is clear from the earliest accounts of the Christian movement. (14) The question is what will happen next.

The third phase of an organization’s life can be good or bad, can mean renewal or fossilization. Either the spirit of the original movement wins or the rules and the structure win. Either the life is renewed and flows through the structures, or the structures stifle the life.

Many would say that for the Christian church, the forces of fossilization won a decisive battle in 313 AD, (15)  when the Roman Emperor Constantine pronounced Christianity an official religion of his empire. He granted tax immunities to clergy and gave gifts to the church. The papacy became a position of political power, and the emperor took an active part in church affairs. One of the first effects was a great influx of people wishing to become priests simply in order to avoid taxation! (16) Thus the community which had started out as counter-cultural officially entered the mainstream culture.

A movement of the oppressed and outcast became respectable. A movement of the poor became an institution of the rich.  You can see why there might be a problem! The contrast was highlighted by a 20^th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who compared his experience of Christian leadership with that of Paul, one of the first Christian missionaries, and complained: ‘Wherever Paul went, there were riots and revival; wherever I go, they offer me tea.’

Consider this parable:

The servant who forgot his place

There was once a queen who was gracious, wise and generous. She lived in a castle, and she loved to welcome her subjects there at any time, to get to know them and to help them. The entrance to the castle was guarded by a small, gentle servant. His job was to greet the visitors and show them into the queen’s presence.

One day, however, this servant misbehaved. He began to feel that he was more important than he really was. He imagined that his job was not only to show people into the queen’s presence, but also to decide or not whether they were worthy to meet her. And as his ideas of his own importance grew, so he grew, taller and taller, broader and broader, until nobody could even see the queen’s castle.

When people came to visit the queen, he would tell them that they were not dressed properly to meet the queen, or that they were too evil to see the queen, or that their nose was too long, or their feet were too big. Some of them tried to change in order to please the servant, so that they could get in to see the queen, though few of them ever did. Others went away sad because they knew they could never be good enough to see the queen. Some decided that maybe there never was a queen at all, and they were the saddest of all.

But there were a few who weren’t satisfied with the servant’s rules, and when he wasn’t looking, they slipped round the back of the castle, over the wall, and into the queen’s family room, where she always met her subjects. The queen, of course, hadn’t had many visitors for some time, and when she heard what had happened, immediately she went to the front door and demanded of the servant What on earth are you doing? As soon as he heard her voice, he shrank back to his original size, like a balloon which you blow up and then let go. Then everything went back to normal.

But from time to time, quite regularly, the servant would again forget his job, and become swollen and big-headed and indeed behave like a king. So after many arguments, the queen decided that the servant could not be trusted, and she moved her throne out to the front door of the palace where she could keep an eye on the servant, and where her subjects could always see her and approach her whenever they wished.

Ideally, organizations of any kind-political, business or religious-are structures to facilitate people’s working together for common goals. Yet human nature is such that organizations can easily become reactionary, bureaucratic, and self-preserving. They are, as the story suggests, good servants but bad masters. Cardinal Newman used a different image to make the same point: he said, ‘Every great movement begins with a prophet and ends with a policeman.’

Yet alongside the tendency towards fossilization in the church has also been a periodic impulse in the opposite direction-towards renewal of the spiritual values that Jesus taught and lived. To see this you have only to examine the lives of those who claim to be followers of Jesus.

Sometimes Christians plead, ‘Don’t judge Christianity by the church: just consider Jesus.’ The humility is commendable, but the strategy is misplaced. I think those who point away from the Christian religion to Christ do so not just because the church is often a cause of embarrassment, but also, more importantly, because Christ is the centre and heartbeat of Christianity at its most authentic. Therefore, if you are considering Christian faith, it is ultimately about Jesus you have to decide. To this extent, the instinct is right.

Yet, inescapably, part of looking at Jesus is considering what impact his life and teaching have had on ordinary people. After all, if no-one who claims the name of Christ ever makes any headway in putting his teaching into practice, if there is never any evidence of the reality of God among Christians, then it would seem to reflect very badly on Jesus. Jesus himself did not seem to hesitate about saying that his credibility, in part at least, depends on that of his followers. (17)

So does Christian spirituality ‘work’? You might start by considering the example of high profile Christian leaders such as Archbishop Tutu, spiritual leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; Mother Theresa, who cared for the dying and destitute in India; Jean Vanier, creating residential communities for adults with special needs around the world; or Sister Helen Prejean, whose story is told in the movie Dead Man Walking. Such people are very clear that whatever they may have accomplished in their lives is because of Jesus. They are, if you like, a very public testimony to what Christian spirituality is really like when it is supported, not stifled, by religion.

While there may be few Christians in the public eye, however, there are millions faithfully living out Jesus’ style of spirituality around the world who will never hit the headlines. I think of sincere Christians I know who are conscientiously studying the teaching of Jesus and trying to follow it: some are organizing food banks, others are making Christmas dinners for the poor, some work in AIDS hostels or help refugees, many bring medical and relief aid to needy parts of the world.

I remember an edition of Ideas on CBC radio, because it is precisely such a story-ordinary Christians, out of the public eye, struggling to be faithful followers of Jesus. Sharon Gretz, the story-teller, was involved in keeping people with special needs out of institutions and in their homes. She got to know Merilee, who had cerebral palsy and cancer. Then, she said:

I called the pastor [of Merilee's church]…and explained to him what was happening to Merilee again, and I said: you know what?… She’s one of yours; she’s a member of your congregation and I want to know what you people are going to do… After listening to me, he said: So what you’re saying is that Merilee needs us to come to her, and maybe we can help support her to keep her at home…

He sent…[a] letter of invitation to the members of the church, and also announced it in the pulpit, that Merilee’s friends would be meeting in the parlour. So we met, and he presented the situation to them again, and he said to them: we need to go to her. And he pulled out this list of days and times, and he said: I expect everybody in this room to put their names down about when they’re going over to Merilee’s place. Everybody can do something. Some people might want to go and talk; other people-you know Merilee enjoys movies, so bring some videos with you. She likes people to write letters for her; some of you can go and write letters. And some of you might want to cook… Everybody can give what it is that they give, what is good, what they know how to do. And that’s kind of how it worked.

People started coming and they came at scheduled times, and then some people would come at unscheduled times. And they kept coming. I remember one time being over there and she was surrounded. They were doing a jigsaw puzzle… And there’s Merilee sitting in front of this table, like a queen. Do you know what I mean? She’s just presiding over a court; there was all this life in her apartment.

Part of this story is that Merilee died. But she died at home, and I believe she died knowing she was loved. And the proof of that was, I think, at her funeral, which almostyliterally filled the church…What Pastor Ed said was: Merilee’s life presented a gift to them. As painful and tragic as the cancer was, it was a gift to them to find out what they were about as a congregation. (18)

To find out what they were as a congregation. The church becoming what Jesus meant for his followers to be be-a wildly diverse community united by a commitment to loving God and loving people. Church structures doing what structures are meant to do: empowering people to live out the spirituality of Jesus. It is ironical, of course, that this took place through the prodding of an outsider, who saw more clearly than the church itself what it ought to be!

Distinctives of Christian spirituality

How does all this help the person wanting to explore their spirituality? Which way do we turn to discover if there is any real spiritual help in Christianity or just more ‘church’ stuff? What if we are curious about Jesus, yet alienated by much of what passes for Christian faith?

First of all, Christian spirituality is fairly distinct. I have referred several times to ‘Christian spirituality’ or ‘the spirituality of Jesus’ but so far I have not defined it. It is important to know that it is significantly different from the spirituality of, say, The Celestine Prophecy. This should not surprise us. Spirituality is not just a generic thing, the same the world over. Different religions and traditions have very varied understandings of what it means to be spiritual. I would not presume to comment on all of them, but I can tell you what is distinctive about Christianity’s approach to spirituality. And I can tell you why I work on my spirituality in a Christian context.

•  Christian spirituality centres around a relationship with God

In some traditions, spirituality is something you work on inside yourself. It may be with the help of a teacher, but basically the search involves just you and your relationship to yourself, to the universe, and (perhaps) to ‘the god within’. God, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the Creator, does not necessarily come into it.

In Christian understanding, everything begins with God, the dynamic, compassionate Artist who designed us. This God is the source of all life and all personhood. Indeed, in some sense, it is appropriate to think of God as person, separate from us. Although we are speaking in metaphors (what choice do we have?), we can say that this God has mind, feelings, and creativity. This God can be hurt, can be angry, can be nurturing. This God wants to know us and to be known by us. In Christian understanding, our longings for spiritual fulfillment are simply one of God’s signals to get our attention. For that reason, our yearning can only really be satisfied by learning to relate to this God.

•  Christian spirituality is  not a do-it-yourself faith

Some people adopt a mix-and-match approach to spirituality, taking a little bit from different religions to create their own unique faith. Religion scholar, Huston Smith, however, points out the weakness in this approach:

[T]he cafeteria approach to spirituality…is not the way organisms are put together, nor great works of art. And a vital faith is more like an organism or work of art than it is like a cafeteria tray. (19)

Generally, we do not chop bits off either an organism or an artwork and stick them together in a shape more to our own liking! Rather, we appreciate that there is integrity and life and artistry in the whole as it is. The analogy certainly holds true for Christian spirituality: it is an organic whole, a work of art.

The way the first followers of Jesus described themselves was as ‘disciples’-that is, as students, students of Jesus and all he had to teach them. To be a follower of Jesus was to belong to his school and to learn his curriculum. (20) With a school, whether a driving school, a golf school or a business school, you join because you want to learn what the school has to offer, you open your mind to learning someone else’s agenda. In the case of Jesus’ school, what he offered was to teach us how to live as God’s people, in God’s world, in God’s way. Following Jesus meant to share in the life of a new spiritual organism which he was bringing into being, to be involved in the creation of a new, interactive, living work of art.

•  Christian spirituality is practical more than mystical

The mystical tradition certainly has been a continuous thread throughout the tapestry of the Christian movement, yet the mainstream has had more of a practical and ethical thrust. This too is distinctive: historically speaking, not all religions have necessarily connected the spiritual and the ethical. Archbishop Tutu, Mother Theresa, Jean Vanier and Helen Prejean are good examples of how Christian spirituality at its best has an ethical vigour and beauty about it. Not that ethics is the starting point of Christian spirituality-the heart is always the student’s relationship with the Teacher-but one way the relationship, the schooling, is lived out is through ethics of compassion and justice.

•  Christian spirituality is tough to achieve

Jesus himself said that in some ways being his student is like a self-imposed death sentence! (21) Why? Because it means putting the priorities of God’s kingdom ahead of my own little kingdom, the needs of others ahead of my own needs. Every time I say ‘no’ to myself, a bit of me dies. There is no getting around that. But Jesus also says that through those deaths comes a new and better kind of life. (22)

•  Christian spirituality has a strong community aspect

It is very clear from the earliest accounts that Jesus meant his followers to be a community. This is in part because, in Christian understanding, we need one another in order to develop our spirituality. We are not self-sufficient in spiritual resources. We need to help, encourage and teach one another. But it is also because in Christian tradition the goal of spirituality is not to become an odd collection of spiritually mature individuals who happen to share the same ideals. The goal of spirituality is to be a mature community. Paul, one of the earliest Christian teachers, likened the Christian community to a human body-in fact, he called it ‘the Body of Christ’-people functioning in harmony together to do the work of Jesus in the world.

Why I (still) go to church

I was brought up to go to church. There I learned the stories of Jesus. I loved the music, the ceremony, the people, and being head choir boy. I don’t know how much I really understood, however. I do remember sermons about the ‘sin’ of wearing jeans and the ‘sin’ of chewing gum. (This was the 1950s in Britain, remember, and these things were not only new, but thought to be ‘American’ and therefore automatically degenerate!)

When I was sixteen, through a teacher in high school, I learned that what was missing in my grasp of Christianity was personal allegiance to Jesus, and I began to try to make that relationship central in my life. I learned to pray by simply talking to Jesus as though I could see him present in the room. I began to learn what it meant to take him seriously as my Teacher and Guide through life-on issues as diverse as my peers’ adolescent interest in pornography and the question of what to study at university. I began to read the Bible and to meet with other students who were also trying to grow their spirituality in relationship with Jesus.

For some years around then, I became very dissatisfied with church. I developed a strong distaste for anything in religion that distracted from a simple commitment to being a student of Jesus, whether ceremony, tradition, ministers, or old church buildings. I fed my spirituality mainly in private with God and in community with like-minded peers.

These days, however, I am more positive in my attitude to church. I have reconciled the search for authentic Christian spirituality with membership in the institution called church. Why? Is it just creeping middle age that makes me tolerant of nonsense that should not be tolerated?

One thing is this, and I must be honest: I have come to recognize that deep down I am very like the religious people Jesus criticized-and I suspect that most of us are. If I had been there for the arguments he had with them, I would quite likely have taken their side, because I too have exactly the same instincts they had-though I am no longer proud of them: to value appearance over reality, the trivial over the substantial, my interests over God’s interests. The story is told of the Sunday school teacher who told her students the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (see above), then said to her class, ‘Now let us pray and thank God that we are not like this Pharisee.’ I still find the story funny-but I ruefully recognize that I have often fallen into the same trap. Sure there are hypocrites in the church, but I am capable of hypocrisy with the best of them. The problem is, as Jesus warned, that it is so much easier to spot hypocrisy in someone else than in myself. (23)

I also keep going to church because, although there are hypocrites there (as in any walk of life), there are also people who are serious about developing their spirituality along Jesus’ lines. I should warn you: they may not be obvious at the main Sunday service. Sometimes I discover these people in a small group Bible study on a weeknight, or organizing the food bank that operates out of the church basement. Sometimes I discover like-minded people in an interdenominational reading group that meets in my city. Sometimes I spot a person from my church on the other side of the room at a lecture by a visiting speaker on spirituality, and we smile at one another, recognizing a kindred spirit.

Not that I dismiss people who do not strike me as serious about their faith. What right have I to judge them anyway? What do I know about what is in their hearts? What do I know of how they have lived their lives with God? They may be giants of Christian spirituality for all I know, and maybe if I saw them as God sees them, I would be tempted to fall at their feet and worship them. So I will honour them and encourage them all I can. But for my own survival I need to find people whose yearning for spirituality resonates with mine.

I have to tell you also that among church people, in and out of church buildings, amazing things have happened to me. In church, I have heard things. God has spoken direct and powerful words to me through the words of others. Sometimes music in church has brought tears to my eyes, and I have known God in the music. I remember hearing someone pray, realising that they know God in a deeper way than I do yet, and being thankful for them. I think of songs whose words I cannot sing because my heart is full of memories of friends now dead who loved those songs. I remember children’s chattering mingling with the priest’s centuries-old liturgy. And I recall an articulate young woman, returning to church after many years, saying, ‘I’m learning about my faith along with my children.’

I have also seen things. An autistic young man and a Member of Parliament kneeling within a few meters of each other. An elderly couple, their arms around each other, going forward for communion. A woman dying of cancer, surrounded by friends holding hands, loving her and praying for her. A child stroking her mother’s hair as she is bent in prayer. Christmas pageants where generation after generation of children play the same parts and speak the old words, and we always laugh gently at the makeshift donkey.

At such times, I know I am glimpsing the Spirit of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, among the followers of Jesus, and it makes me say, ‘That’s what it’s meant to be about.’ When that happens, I find I don’t want to be anywhere else but in the company of those who are honestly struggling to follow Jesus, and to embody his spirituality, because it is there that I find truth and warmth and reality . . . and God.

Notes

1. Psychology Today, November/December 1994, pp 66, 57.

2. Self, December 1997, p 134.

3. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy, (New York: Warner Books, 1993).

4. Rolling Stone, October 29, 1992.

5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), pp 297-316.

6. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 11, verse 39. The wording of all quotations from Luke is from the translation called The Message, by Eugene Peterson, (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993). If you would like to the read The Gospel According to Luke for yourself, please email the Institute for a free copy.

7. Genesis, We Can’t Dance, (Anthony Banks Ltd/Philip Collins Ltd/Michael Rutherford Ltd, 1991).

8. ‘Tithing’ is the ancient practice of giving a tenth of one’s income to God. The Pharisees were even tithing their nickels and dimes.

9. The Gospel According to Luke chapter 11, verse 42.

10. Tax men are not popular in any culture. In Jesus’ culture, however, matters were made worse by the fact that the (Jewish) tax men were collecting taxes from their fellow Jews on behalf of the occupying power of Rome. They would be about as popular as Palestinians today being employed by Israel to collect taxes for Israel from other Palestinians.

11. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 18, verses 9 to 14.

12. For an account of one such party, and the disapproval of the religious folk, see The Gospel According to Luke, 20 chapter 5, verses 27 to 32.

13. For example, David Moberg, The Church as Social Institution, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, Third Edition, 1984), pp 118-124.

14. It can be seen in the The Acts of the Apostles, also (probably) by Luke, and in early letters like those to Timothy and Titus. All these are found in The New Testament.

15. ‘Of course, Constantinianism had begun earlier than 313…but dates, like birth and death, remind us that the way things were and are is not set in stone.’ Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p 17.

16. Kenneth Latourette, A History of Christianity, (New York: Harper, 1953), pp 92-93: ‘[Constantine] granted to members of the Christian clergy…freedom from all contributions to the state… Wills in favour of the Church were permitted. The

Christian Sunday was ordered placed in the same legal position as the pagan feasts… Litigants might bring suit in a bishop’s court and the decision rendered was to be respected by the civil authorities… He built and enlarged churches.’ Cf ‘Constantine, having recognized Christianity…in effect decided to make it a buttress of his State.’ Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p 76.

17. The Gospel According to John, chapter 17, verse 21.

18. ‘Beyond Institutions’, Ideas, CBC Radio, David Cayley, writer, March 16-18 and 23-25, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

19. Huston Smith, Mother Jones: the Investigative Magazine, December 1997, p 42.

20. This image is explored more fully in another Dare booklet in this series, The School of Jesus: a Beginner’s Guide to Living as a Christian, by John Bowen.

21. For example, The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 14, verses 25 to 33.

22. For example, The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 9, verse 24.

23. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 6, verses 41 and 42.

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