APCM Address 2023

Change is natural in any organism; it is a sign of life. There is good change and bad change, planned change and unplanned change. Some get excited about change, some anxious – we need to recognise that. The church was created as a movement – a body that always grows, or dies. A maintenance mentality and church do not go together. But we are not always good at managing change.

From the world of philanthropy and development: “theory of change” to articulate more explicitly

(a) what outcome the organization wants to achieve in the world,

(b) what strategy it is going to use to accomplish that outcome, and

(c) what assumptions are made that lead it thinking that strategy X will result in outcome Y.

What outcome might we want to achieve? What is it we really want as a church?

[NB the use of the first person. If we ask what it is we want from the church, we talk about the church in the third person, in the language of outsiders.]

E.g., do we want for the resurrection of Christ to have a greater impact on us and on our society in the form of  more new births,  more growth towards conforming to the life of Christ?

The parish profile to be written in connection with the search for a new incumbent must be not only about what we want to preserve but about the change we desire.

The strategy depends on the outcome and the assumptions we make. E.g., if we want new births and accept that we are ‘born anew through the living and enduring word of God’ (1 Peter 1:23), the strategy must be for the living and enduring word of God to be released. This is why preaching has been a priority for me although I know of course that God’s word is not dependent on excellent preaching!

My assumption is that truly spiritual work is done by the Spirit of God, through us (God willing) but not by us – we need the means of grace. Prayer is the key part of the strategy: ‘You do not have because you do not ask (or ask with wrong motives)’ (James 4:2-3).

In short, if we want God’s transformation, we need to ask how God works to transform us.

What do you see as the most important part of your Christian life from week to week? What do you look for on Sunday, and what sort of ministry have you found most consistently helpful?

Different clergy have different theories of change. In the early church Pelagius thought that God worked in Christians through two means: Firstly, he had created them with a powerful will. Second, God had given them a blueprint for the flourishing human life in the Bible. His theory of change, then, was to read the Bible and then try very hard to do what it said.

Augustine found this view both naïve and at odds with what Scripture says about human nature. Drawing, e.g., on Paul’s statements about how the divine law which calls for righteousness is unable to produce it, Augustine argued that the core engine of human nature is not the will but the heart and its desires. And he pointed out that it is extremely hard to change hearts—so hard in fact, that only God can do it, through the Holy Spirit.

The way you change a person is by getting through not to their head or their will but to their heart. Which is precisely the work of the Holy Spirit: to fill us with new desires for the things of God, and to make us hate and flee from our bad, self-destructive desires.

Even the best clergy cannot do that. But it is useful to have an incumbent who knows that human beings are driven not by knowledge or will but by desire; who knows that we are creatures of the heart, creatures of love – and who will love you and seek to help you towards an emotional encounter with the God revealed in Jesus rather than just seek to convey accurate knowledge about God and will therefore, e.g., value the place of music.

It is useful to have an incumbent who knows that the human heart strongly resists direct efforts to change it and who will therefore rely on God’s Holy Spirit. (Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind about politics through rational argument? Have you ever tried to talk someone out of loving the person they have fallen in love with?)

It is useful to have an incumbent who knows that human beings are wired in such a way that judgment kills love. When we feel judged, we hide our love away, we put up our walls, we resist. A minister who knows this will not pivot on telling people what is wrong with them and leave them with a moral exhortation or a set of behavioural guidelines.

I make it sound as if the most important thing on the agenda for the coming year is to find a strong incumbent. But if, as I believe, Augustine has seen correctly that human beings are above all else creatures of love, then human relationships and human community are really important and this should not and cannot depend on an incumbent.

Remember also: the more diverse our congregation is the more the glory of God is manifest as the spectrum of his grace is revealed. And the more there is genuine, mutual love across that diversity – not just birds of a feather flocking together – the more evident will be the presence of Christ.

There will be fundraising to be done in the coming year, there will be the search for a new incumbent but the focus must be on remaining and strengthen us as a community centred on Christ.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

(Ephesians 3:20)

The Cruciform Employee

On the basis that 1 Peter presents the the cross as a paradigm of Christian existence with special reference to slaves, Howard Marshall offered guidelines for Christian employees to help them live a cruciform (cross-shaped) life. They are summarised in Scot McKnight's NIVAC volume on 1 Peter as follows:

1. All of our social relationships should find a behaviour that is driven by a desire to do God’s will.
2. Our conduct ought to be consistent with the obligations we assume in our relationship to that person and job.
3. Our conduct ought to be determined by that relationship, not by what we think of the personal traits of the employer.
4. When we disregard our relational contract with its obligations, we do disservice to the gospel.
5. If we suffer as a result of our obligations, such suffering is both commendable and Christian; it is not unchristian to suffer! 

McKnight adds: “In a world driven by litigation (which is itself driven by the desire to sustain personal rights), it is hard for us today to see that sometimes it is best not to assert our rights but to endure some kind of social pressure. That is, it might be best for a Christian man to endure the shame of not being promoted or getting a raise, or of a Christian woman of not asserting her equality or fighting for equal pay, because of the gospel!” (175)

• In the business world, Christians should not be known for their assertiveness as much as for their industriousness, their work ethic, their kindness, their loyalty, their fairness, and their honesty…
• In our personal lives we need to suppress the desire to be noticed…
• Another area of life where we need to let the pattern of the cross infiltrate is that of personal finances…A cruciform lifestyle with respect to possessions is found in persons who do not find their greatest pleasure in shopping, who are not motivated to buy more things when they get their paycheck, and who are not using the credit cards well beyond their limits. (177)

He observes: “It may not work – in the short run. But the way of suffering is the divinely intended manner of bringing the greatest victory of God into the world. What really works is what works with God, and what works with God is the cross!” (178)

Fear-Shaped Love

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of the exile.

! Peter 1:17

Belief in the final judgement often gets a bad press. Does the belief that God will reward the righteous and punish the evil dull our senses to the pain and injustice of the world, helping the oppressed to put up with things with which they should not put up? Karl Marx arguably had more respect for the religious sentiments of the oppressed than some of his successors and perhaps did not use "opium of the people" in an entirely negative sense but he made the notion popular that belief in a God who will sort out everything in the end is harmful to the fight for justice. No doubt religion has sometimes functioned in this way. But distraction by entertainment has perhaps always been the greater threat, cf. "bread and circuses" in ancient Rome.

1 Peter speaks of a new birth through the resurrection of Christ which allows us to address God as Father. It is a new existence which breaks with the inherited ways of life and sets us on a path that takes the long view. No longer focused on short-term benefits which could be gained by silver and gold which are so often acquired at the expense of the life of others (ancient mines were notorious as places of agonising death) but becoming part of a story that begun before the foundation of the world with the predestination of Christ's self-offering as the source of life (his blameless purity embodying the maxim he taught that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," Acts 20:35). This does indeed put value on enduring pain while suffering unjustly but Christ becomes instrumental in defining for us the God in whom we put our trust, our faith and hope and it is not as a God who above all demands submission but "the one who raised Christ from the death and gave him glory." Christ's vindication encourages us to seek God's kingdom and his righteousness,  trusting that goodness, beauty and justice will have the last word. 

Yes, Christians do not believe that all depends on us and may be less in a hurry to bring revolutionary change than those who have not been born into a living hope but addressing as Father "the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds" should not lead to complacency. This is why 1 Peter 1:17 speaks of "reverent fear" for God - being in awe at the majesty, goodness and power of God not in the way of being "too heavenly-minded to be of earthly use" but with trembling that shapes the way we live in this corrupt world in which we are not quite at home.

We tremble before the one who loves the world so much that He will not allow His good purposes and the beautiful order he put in place to be disregarded without consequences. And it is such trembling, such reverent fear which enables true love. How so?

1 Peter 1:22 spells it out. We purify our souls by bringing them in line with divine truth and this purification makes unfeigned, mutual love possible because such love cannot exist with lying and hypocrisy. There is a world of difference between mere niceness and mutual love. You do not have to be born anew to be nice, friendly, smiley but the genuine mutual love to which we are called is only possible through the new birth. We need to have become purified by obedience to the truth for which the living and enduring word of God is essential (1 Peter 1:23).

Niceness will cease, friendliness will pass away, smileyness disappears - love born out of faith and hope in God remains, a love that dares to speak the truth rather than hides in the superficial comfort of niceness, and a truth-telling that is not judgemental (the final judgement belongs to God) but has the other's best interests in mind because this is how God loves.

When you look at the cross, do you see the precious blood of Christ shed for you? (If so, how can we not encounter others in humility and forgive them as we have been forgiven?)

When you contemplate the empty tomb, do you submit to the truth that Christ is risen? (if so, how can we not rejoice in a living hope even in suffering for doing good?)

Let these truths sink in ever deeper and so let genuine love arise deeply from the heart.

A Living Hope

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

1 Peter 1:3

In 1 Peter faith is spoken of as hope, a living hope – not dead, futile, empty hope without reality and validity, a hope that makes alive. Let’s talk about hope (indebted to R. Feldmeier, 65-70).

“We are full of hope throughout our whole life,” says Plato. Having hope is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Human beings anticipate their future. They are ahead of their time.

On the one hand, hope is our strength. Our ability not to go from stimulus to immediate response makes for human development and culture. We can imagine different scenarios of the future and make long-term plans.

On the other hand, as the Latin proverb has it, Hope often deceives (Spes saepe fallit). There is therefore an ambivalence to hope which seems to be expressed in narrative form in the myth involving Pandora’s box (jug). Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) related that opening the container released misery and evil upon humanity. When Pandora hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind. What is left when everything goes wrong is…‘hope’. But is it this a comfort that alleviates some of the suffering or, in the form of  “deceptive expectation” one more evil?

The hope of believers in the Bible is very different. It is not portrayed as ambivalent. It is ‘a hope [that] is not founded upon the unstable foundation of human expectation and fears but on the certainty of the trustworthiness of God; it bases itself not on something that one wishes to obtain or avoid but on God, the basis and content of hope. Right in the prayers of the Old Testament, the Psalms, one continually comes across confessions such as “the Lord is my hope” or something similar…’ Hope is not anticipating what we desire but a synonym for the relationship with God of trusting faith.

The NT builds on this: ‘The Christian hope is … based upon God’s act in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, through which he has defined himself as creator out of nothing and thereby as the death-conquering life force, who thus through the cross has saved from sin, death, and decay. The future is already decided in Christ and, with reference to the gospel, believers are then also certain of their future’

Having or not having such hope is the characteristic difference between Christians and non-Christians (cf. 1 Thess 4:13; Eph 2:12). We have an anchor laid in the future (E. Schweizer). There is a renewed reality (a new heaven and a new earth) which we get hold of by our trust in God. This trusting anticipation of the future is ‘virtually the life principle of the regenerate Christian humanity.’

Do you know the new birth? Are you born again?

The question is not or should not one about American culture politics. The question is: Do you accept that Jesus rose from the dead, that in the resurrection of Christ God has shown himself to be the God who makes alive? If you are alive with this hope, you have been born again.

To find out whether you have been born, you don’t try to dig out a birth certificate. You live, therefore you must have been sired.

But to find out whether you are a child of God, you don’t even directly examine your heart to see whether there is a sufficient level of joy and confidence. No, you look to the cross and you look to the empty tomb.

If at the cross you see blood that was shed to cleanse you from your sins and if you accept that the tomb is empty because God raised Christ from the dead, then you have been given the new birth. You are a child of God. You have a fabulous inheritance waiting for you. You have a living hope.

May God grant us to love Jesus Christ whom we have not seen, to believe in him whom we do not see now, and so to receive the outcome of our faith, the salvation of our souls, when Jesus Christ is finally revealed. Amen.

 

A New Birth

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

1 Peter 1:3

The Easter season helps us to let the significance of the resurrection of Christ sink in. Each year readings from Acts trace some of the impact, the positive ripple effect, the negative repercussions, the shock waves emanating from Christ’s resurrection, tracing the story from Jerusalem to Rome, from east to west. Every third year readings from 1 Peter supplement this. This letter is written to Christian communities in Asia Minor (Turkey) and generally thought to have been sent from Rome. So we have a west to east movement.

Together these readings give us a glimpse of the re-ordering of many lives and relationships, the turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. Are we still aware today just what big a revolution was started “on the third day”? It is of course to be expected that over time the new norms and revolutionarily outlook gets normalised and established. And it is not an altogether bad thing for cultures and societies being shaped by what happened “on the third day” in such a way that it no longer seems unusual. But institutionalisation often means that the message gets neutralised, accommodated and made safe. Are we failing to get hold of the (full) reality? The Easter season is an invitation to take a fresh look.

The Gospel shows us the immediate response which was not very encouraging: suspicion (‘they have taken the body’), confusion (why is the linen left in the tomb?), fear (of the authorities), resistance to belief (on the side of Thomas who does not really have a good reason to refuse to believe). It is like people going around asking “what just happened?!” 

By the time 1 Peter was written the followers of Jesus are no longer disorientated but the revolution is still in full swing. The letter is addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion” which is to say people who have become outsiders in connection with being chosen by God – a theme that runs through the letter.

The author points as to an appropriate response, namely thanksgiving. ‘Blessed be God’ is a typical Hebraic/Jewish way of acknowledging God’s goodness. The author does not ask us to be grateful, he leads by example: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

What just happened? We have been given a new birth. It is hard to imagine a more sweeping concept. What does this language about a new birth mean? Let’s tease it out. First, it points to  God’s initiative. No-one is responsible or contributes anything to their being sired. And just like our natural birth ideally was the fruit of an act of love, so our new birth is attributed to God’s great, abundant mercy. His decision, His love.

Secondly, a new birth speaks of new relationships and identity. Our natural birth relates to ethnic identity, citizenship, socioeconomic class, innate potential and much more. Language of a new birth suggests a new identity, new citizenship, new innate potential. We are taken into the Father-Son relationship, being made children of God. We are given a new home, paradoxically one that makes us in a sense homeless  in this world (as D. Sölle once pointed out), because Christians ‘no longer fit in well with the society in which they were once at home; their Christian faith brings them into conflict with the values and priorities of the society in which they live.’ (K. Jobes). But having God as our Father more than makes up for it. And of course it means that every Christian of whatever class or ethnic identity is our brother or sister.

Thirdly, this new birth brings new prospects: the children of God are heirs to ‘an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.’ It won’t rot away, won’t be spoiled, it won’t fade. It is kept safe for us in heaven while we are kept safe by God’s power. Through the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ the rescue is all ready, our  salvation is secured. We are just waiting for it to be revealed.

Everything happened within three days. ‘It is through the resurrection that God has conquered the world’s separation from himself, a world that is subjected to transience and thereby sin and death, and has made a new beginning possible.’ (R. Feldmeier)

Christian existence is first all about what God has already done:

• He took the initiative.
• He reconciled us to Himself and to one another.
• He keeps our salvation secure.

Christian existence is secondly responding to what God has done:

• thanksgiving (which is the overall context here)
• living hope: a key concept in 1 Peter
•  joy: the risen Christ is not a figure of the past

This response is often summed up as ‘faith’ which is of course more than merely holding something to be true. Faith is accepting ‘the message of salvation, by means of which the human is at once placed into a new relationship to God, into an attitude of trust that embraces and determines his or her whole existence, of commitment, of hope (cf. 1:21).’ (R. Feldmeier) But 1 Peter talks about faith as hope, thus giving us a particular perspective on what it means to have faith in God.

Cur Deus Homo?

Cur Deus Homo? (Why did God became man?) is one of the most famous works on the atonement.

Why did Jesus come into the world? In John 18 we hear Jesus’ own answer: to testify to the truth (John 18:37). He says so in answer to a question about whether he was a king, clearly implying that he is indeed a king. Jesus is king by way of testifying to the truth, by gathering people around him who listen to his voice. He is not a king over people who live in a particular land or over people who are under his military thumb but he is king over those who submit to the truth, who belong to the truth. He thereby implies that a true king is someone to whom people listen, whom they follow.

As autonomous adults, mindful of many bad historical experiences, we, by and large, don’t like to listen to someone just because they are in a position of authority. Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably. We do not trust Him because He is the guy in charge. We acknowledge Him as being in charge because He is trustworthy.

Alas, many post-moderns like their own self-determination so much that they deny the very existence of objective truth. Pilate was a precursor for such an outlook in his lack of concern for truth – or justice, for that matter (ultimately it is hard to maintain a concern for justice without a concern for truth). For him, as for many today, it’s all power play.

In fact we find the same lack of concern for truth being spoken in the Sanhedrin – and Jesus puts his finger on it: ‘If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ (John 18:23)

But it isn’t just the drive for self-determination, the exercise of power that leads people to turn away from the truth, it is also the fear of power, of what might be done to them if they were to speak truth. So we find Peter denying Jesus three times –­ out of fear.

It turns out that turning away from the truth is not a modern phenomenon after all but has a long history. It is because we so readily turn away from the truth that Jesus came into the world. Why did God become man? To testify to the truth.

 

But why does this get highlighted in the Passion story? Why not in connection with the teaching of Jesus? The parables of Jesus speak of God’s kingdom. The Sermon of the Mount offers kingdom ethics. But it is here that the question is raised and answered: What sort of king is Jesus? One who came to testify to the truth. Presumably this is because it is his passion that profoundly testifies to the truth.

How so? E.g., by bearing witness to the fact that our lives belong to God who cares for us which is why it would be wrong, a denial of the truth, to seek our own comfort at the expense of doing God’s will.

The passion of Christ also testifies to the truth by showing up how readily we turn away from the truth, if it does not suit us. Christ’s suffering embodies our rejection of God, of God’s rule, our rejection of truth .It shows us that such rejection leads to death.

Best of all Jesus testifies to the truth of who God is and that He is worthy of our trust even when it leads to suffering and death because suffering and death will not have the last word.

Peter’s attempt at self-preservation at the expense of truth leaves him wretched. Jesus, by contrast, having sanctified himself in the truth of God’s word, as he had prayed for his disciples (John 17:17–18), is vindicated in his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably and by committing his life to the truth, rejecting the use of power to enforce his rule.

 

Can we independently verify the claim of Jesus to testify to the truth? No, not really. But Jesus did not fall from heaven. He was born to a Jewish mother as the culmination of a long history of God revealing Himself to humanity. Jesus fulfilled a pattern laid down in what we call the OT Scriptures. As Ian McGilchrist says about the “argument” he presents in The Truth of the Matter (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021)

And yet it is also not an argument, in the conventional sense, at all. If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.

Come and see! Come and taste! The truth will set you free and the new life vindicates the truth.