This Sunday just gone I lead my first service in German. This involved bringing the different aspects of the service (such as music, preaching, notices, advent candle etc) together, as well as providing the opening and closing prayers, blessing and intercessory prayers.

As this in a second language, and one I don’t yet fully at home in. It meant that I had to think about every single word I used, especially in the prayers.

The question that was continually at the front of my mind was ‘how can the story of Advent best be told through everything that happens in this service?’.

I wanted to reflect on the reality and welcome of God even at times when we feel broken, bent, weak and full of worry.

To put it briefly – I had to relearn how to think liturgically.

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Living as I do in Vienna, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is about why I am a vegetarian. In a country known for many of its meat based delicacies (Wienerschnitzel, Leberkäse and various kinds of Wurst springing instantly to mind), vegetarians are still much more of a minority than in the UK – though this is changing. Therefore, in honour of Blog Action Day 2011, I thought I would spend a while thinking about why I am vegetarian.

I have been vegetarian now for 2 and a half years. To a large extent, my Christian faith was a major driver in the move behind me making the decision to become vegetarian and it is that same faith that motivates me to continue, even when I would often much rather eat a ration of bacon or some chorizo (anyone who knows me knows that when I relapse and start eating meat again, it’s almost always chorizo that is the cause!).

Therefore, this post reads more as a personal confession, an exploration in the factors behind my decision to avoid meat, than it does as an argument about the merits of the vegetarian lifestyle – though it is also true that I think that vegetarianism is the most compelling way to live honestly in the world.

The decision came out of a time of beginning to think critically about the environment, how we treat it and, more specifically, what it means to live as a 21st Century western Christian, especially in a world where there are untold millions facing famine and starvation as daily realities in their lives. I spent a lot of time reading about the environment and the impact on what we eat and what we do. The story I began to read was a depressing one of human greed.

Our method of farming – and especially our method of meat farming – on an industrial scale was listed in a 2006 report by the United Nations as one of the largest contributors to environmental breakdown. Not only does meat farming by many statistics count for nearly 20% of the emissions of all greenhouse gases, but raising animals such as cows needs huge amounts of water and food.

At the most conservative estimates, I read, it needs ten times as much land to feed one human being with a meat based diet as it does to feed one human being with a vegetable and legume based diet. To make 1 hamburger for one person, it would take 24 litres of water. Now read that against a context where the world is rapidly approaching a situation where we will see our first water wars.

The story got worse though – the huge quantities of water, food, land resources and chemicals we are using to produce relatively little and inefficient meat is shared by only a small proportion of the world’s population mostly based in the West (though some in the rising classes in the Indian sub-continent). Seven kilograms of grain are required to produce 1 kilogram of beef – and we eat meat in the West as a standard part of our daily diet. Yet at the same time, there are images reaching our TV screens of people starving and dying in places such as Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Niger and Zimbabwe, to name just a few countries.

To me, the choice seemed obvious – I could not in good faith participate in a daily diet of meat when my meat is being produced and grown at the expense of food that could be feeding humans. I personally could not reconcile my faith and trust in the God of justice, of equality, the God who shows no partiality for people, creed, colour or nationality, the Jesus who scorned systems of power and authority that meant that the poor suffered whilst the rich prospered, and the economic and food systems of evil which allows some countries to produce an excess of meat whilst millions of people in the world are facing daily and real threats of death by starvation. Therefore, vegetarianism seemed to me to be the only responsible, Christian choice in the light of what I believe it means to follow God. 

According to some estimates, if the 670 million tons of the world’s grain that is fed to livestock were reduced by 10 percent, the resulting grain could feed 225 million people or to keep up with growth in the human population over the next three years. The Centre for Global Food Issues recently said that ”the world must create five billion vegans in the next several decades, or triple its total farm output without using more land.” Whatever the exact statistics, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence is clear – the world cannot sustain the spread of Western dietary habits to the rest of the World, the global South can no longer be expected to suffer for our meat fetishes and something needs to change.

Join the change

Therefore, on this World Blog Action Day, I invite you to consider and reflect on your diet, your use of meat and whatever faith or ethical systems you hold to. I invite you to think about the impact of your choices on other people in the world – what does it mean for them that you are able to eat meat as a regular or daily part of your lifestyle? Read further around the issue – there are many resources on the internet and many great books written.

More than anything, though, I invite you to consider changing. Consider taking up a vegetarian diet, or even just reducing your meat consumption down to one or two times a week to start with. And consider sharing the message and taking time to explain to others the impact of our diets – ultimately, I think the only catalyst for change is going to be individual person after individual person refusing to take part in a system that is broken, unjust and exploitative and instead choosing to live a lifestyle that values human dignity and equality and that lives responsibly within limits.

According to a recent report by NGO ActionAid, up to 50% of women living in South Africa can be expected to be raped during their life time. Many of these rapes are brutal, violent and often result in the victim being murdered. Worse yet, a great proportion of these rapes are ‘corrective rapes’, carried out by South African men in an attempt to ‘fix’ lesbians or as an expression of male aggression.

Victims of these horrific attacks include Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa, abducted, gang-raped, tortured and then finally shot in an execution-style killing; Nomawabo, who was raped at school when she was 15 and then abducted and raped again by a gang when she was 17; Eudy, a national soccer player who was raped and then stabbed by a gang of men; and Noxolo Nagwaza, who was raped, beaten and stoned so that her face was left unrecognisable.

More sobering yet, the stories of these women represent just a small proportion of reported cases – and it is estimated that the vast majority of cases in South Africa go unreported.

Legal protection

On the face of it, South Africa should be one of the last countries to experience such a wave of sexual violence. In 2006, it was one of the first countries in the world to legalise gay marriage and there are strong laws against sexual violence.

However, the legal framework and rights of women prescribed in law often don’t match up to the response on the ground. Women are often terrified of reporting sexual violence, police are known for not taking reports seriously and according to some reports 24 out of every 25 men tried for rape in the courts end up walking free. Even when there are convictions secured for murder or torture, judges often fail to recognise the sexual violence that is at the root of the crime.

Normalisation

The motivations behind the attacks are unclear and sometimes random. At times, the motivation seems to be ‘corrective’ – the notion that forcing a lesbian women to have sex will ‘correct’ her sexuality. According to one survey done by a national support group, 20% of men interviewed believed that the women raped enjoyed the experience and ‘were asking for it’.

The idea of corrective rape plays into myths about normalisation – the idea that there is a ‘norm’ to which all members of society should conform. Those that deviate from the norm are seen as abnormal.

This isn’t just a sexuality issue – the issue of normalisation causes problems for mental illness, learning disabilities and other areas, where those who are outside of societal ‘norms’ are seen as being ‘abnormal’ and as a result subject to treatment that attempts to correct the perceived imbalance.

In recent years, there has been a lot of work in medical ethics and pastoral theology, for example, in correcting the assumption that those with learning disabilities should be normalised, instead suggesting that we should instead look to these individuals to enlarge our view of what it is to be normal human beings and pose a challenge to our assumption that normality is best expressed through rationality – and this viewpoint has to a large degree made its way into common public understandings.

However, the same leg work and thinking has yet to fully catch up with the idea of gender norms – feminist criticisms and LGBT action groups have done a lot to raise awareness, but there is still a structural discrimination within many legal systems and perceptions of those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual – resulting in the sort of violence that corrective rape epitomises. It is an expression of violence against those who dare to go outside the boundaries that a misogynist culture lays down: the feeling that lesbian women ‘deserve’ what is happening to them because they are different.

In fact, Archbishop Desmond Tutu went as far in 2007 as to compare the violence of corrective rape to South Africa’s struggle against Apartheid: “We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about; our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given

“We treat them as pariahs and push them outside our communities. We make them doubt that they too are children of God – and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy. We blame them for what they are.”

The church’s response

This gets to the heart of the problem for the church. It is no secret that the question of sexuality is one of the most pressing and tense areas of debate in the church, often characterised by more emotion and rhetoric than solid theological debate and argument. Furthermore, various studies have shown that churches are often notoriously bad at tackling the issue of sexual violence – often, issues of cognitive dissonance (this person we know from a Sunday can’t possibly be doing that to his wife, neighbour, friend!) muddy the waters and prevent the church from acting with clarity.

However, as Desmond Tutu points out, our primary calling is to proclaim that every individual, regardless of race, colour, religion or sexuality, is a child of God and a creation of the God who doesn’t make mistakes.

It is within this framework – and not any other – that the discussion must take place and be furthered, so that even denominations that want to say something more conservative about sexual lifestyles (such as my own denomination, for example) become primarily known for their grace, stand for justice and refusal to accept any treatment, rhetoric or violence that degrades another human being’s status as a loved, valued and accepted child of God.

That’s why I’m also proud to be part of a church, part of the church, that puts money into lobbying for the equal rights of women, that puts money into informing women about their legal rights, that speaks against violence of all sorts, and that seeks to educate women.

However, this is very far from being a solution to the problem and there is so much more that needs to be done. The church needs to do more reflection about the nature of sexuality and its connections to violence, including, for example, being open-eyed about how many constructs of gender are in themselves power-based and political.

Even if this means that we come out of the process still wanting to say something conservative about sexuality (and personally I think we probably do), it means we also become aware of all the other issues that go kicking around when sexuality is discussed.

It means we become aware that when we are talking about ‘norms’, we are bringing in language that is exclusive not just in terms of morality, but often in political, social or event violent terms as the moral discussion is carried through into other spheres of life.

It means that we keep lobbying for international pressure to stop this disgusting, violent and horrific crime wave, both in South Africa and in other countries where sexual violence is seen as acceptable. It means that we keep pushing for structures, programmes and laws that raise the status of women in the world both in legal formalities and on-the-ground realities.

It means that we keep telling stories of women such as Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa, believing that their story is part of our story because we have been called to share their sufferings and pains and make them our own.

It means that when we are talking about one particular lifestyle choice as maybe being the best one, we are equally clear that under no circumstances does degrading oppression or rhetoric, violence or alienation of the ‘other’ belong to the Kingdom of God.

And it means that we remember that when we are engaging in reading the Bible, in thinking theologically, in facing the lived experiences of those who have different sexualities, opinions and lifestyles to our own, the first response we must always face is “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is one of the foremost books to shape the faith, landscape and terrain of Protestant Christian thought. His relentless and energetic work is as majestic as it is challenging, always drawing the reader onwards like a painter who has seen something of the beauty and energy in a landscape and commits it to canvas in order that others might be able to catch a glimpse of the wonders that he has seen.

Throughout my Christian life growing up, I have heard much of Calvin and his thought, much of which has come from groups whose theology I find unsettling and uncomfortable, or in much history which represents the Puritans as being the result of many of the social ills in the world.

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A few years ago now I wrote a post on the role of lament in worship, which proved to be one of the most popular posts this blog has ever had. Today I have the honour to feature a guest post by one of my favourite theological sparring partners, great friend and the best worship leader I know, Jesse Duley, who adds a unique and insightful perspective to the conversation.

Every quarter, Vineyard Music produces a small magazine called Inside Worship. Edited by Dan Wilt, a man who has been a catalyst for great leaps in my own development as a “Worship Artisan”, it regularly explores both ancient and modern expressions of worship, asking how we might grow in maturity as a worshipping community.

The latest issue (Inside Worship Vol 73) is themed “The Heart-Cry of Lament”, and I’m not surprised by this – the idea that lament is a missing element in modern worship is one I’ve heard quite a bit recently.  It’s not hard to understand why – as Ed Gentry states in the opening article of the magazine:

 ”The disparity between Israel’s songbook and a modern worship notebook or hymnal is remarkable. In both you will find songs of adoration, exuberant praise, and bold declaration of God’s unfailing love and faithfulness. What is conspicuous by its absence in our worship corpus – modern or traditional – are songs of lament or complaint.”

It’s absolutely true. It’s also absolutely as it should be! In my humble opinion, of course.

We are people of the new covenant, not abandoned but moving in the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit! I certainly don’t think our worship corpus ignores the pain and anguish we experience in our daily lives, which we often interpret as God’s absence as similarly expressed through the psalms. Some examples….

• “Let the pain and the sorrow be washed away…” (Brenton Brown)
• “Though I walk through the wilderness… on the road marked with suffering… though there’s pain in the offering…” (Matt Redman)
• “I’ve had questions without answers, I have known sorrow, I have known pain…” (Tim Hughes)
• “Broken, I run to you… I am weary…” (Kathryn Scott)
• “Take me as you find me, all my fears and failures…” (Reuben Morgan, Ben Fielding)
• “Without you I am hopeless…” (Audrey Assad)

I agree that it is an essential part of our expression of worship – without it there is no integrity or reality – but is it really necessary to seek it more? Those of you who are fellow Brits surely agree that we have got complaint down to a fine art; we certainly don’t need an occasion to get together to do more of it. It is a relief to have a regular opportunity to surround myself with the sound of truth, recalibrating perspective on all my trials.

Personally, I am no stranger to anxiety and anguish. I have suffered from depression for many, many years. In my own exchanges with God I sound more like the psalmists. “Where are you God? I can’t go on like this. I’m holding on to you as tight as I can but I feel like I’m trying to hold onto the wind.” The beauty of corporate worship is that it lifts my gaze towards the truth and the hope that I know is there despite my experience.

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit”, as the psalmist says (Psalm 34:18). “Never once did we ever walk alone”, as Matt Redman sings on his new live album. Saying these things is an acknowledgement of both the trials and the hope. This is how we have and should continue to frame lament in our worship.

Jesse leads worship at the Kingdom Vineyard church in St Andrews, Scotland. When he isn’t leading worship or asking provocative questions, he is working on his albums – I strongly urge you all to check them out. If you liked the post, why not drop him a comment to let him know!

One of the hard things to get right in WordPress installations is the flow of information and users through the website. WordPress’ default configuration is for everything to be presented to the user at every stage. Every post by default displays categories which the user can click on to show other posts in that category. The same applies for tags. There are menus everywhere, many of which go to the same places or places that are moreorless the same with only minor changes.

The problems with this are two-fold. Firstly, it makes life harder for search engines, because the structure of the document provides a less-clear description of how each link relates to the over-all whole of the website. Therefore, something like Google has to make its own choice – whilst this is often very good, it is not going to be as optimised as a website that is well structured and which has clearly defined flows of information, and which will therefore take the user exactly where you want them to be (which, after all, is one of the key intentions in web design).

The second problem is a more serious one – it’s to do with how well you keep users on your website. To understand this, I need to talk about a topic that is very close and dear to my heart: buying cheese. I love to buy cheese and I love to eat cheese – both are hugely satisfying tasks. However, I frequently experience a feeling which I am sure is common to many people: too much choice. In my local supermarket, there are at least 15 types of cheddar, 4 types of mozarella and a huge array of other types of cheese. The cheese is also kept in three different places in the shop.

It’s too much. It takes me ages to get the cheese I want to get because I have to find it amidst the visual overload that my senses are experiencing. It can take me up to five minutes to select the cheese that is the tastiest and that offers best value for money. On the other hand, when I go to the local budget supermarket, there is only one of each type of cheese – it takes me ten seconds to choose it and I’m done. The cheese is still tasty and good quality – it has just made my shopping experience more enjoyable because I have to think less.

This is what makes a good website – one that takes the user to where they want to be without them having to work out how to get there. It’s also one that doesn’t confuse the reader by giving them all sorts of false positives and links to click that, ultimately, won’t take them to where they want to go. It’s about designing a website that is friendly to the user, a technique known as funneling.

How to improve user navigation: give less false positives

A lot of this is about taking away unnecessary choice and leading the user to where they want to go. I do this in a number of ways on this website.

Firstly, the homepage clearly takes you to all the main pages on the website through the top menu items and the call to actions on the side menu. The posts (which are the main data flow of a blog website) are presented, but there are only ever four of them to stop them overwhelming the user. Additionally, the most exciting post at any particular time is listed first as a featured post.

Within the posts themselves, I have taken away the idea of having categories that then link to all the related posts. These generally just confuse the reader, irritate the search engines and reduce the ability of both to get around your site effectively. Instead, I use categories as an administration function to ‘stream’ the site into various areas: web design articles, posts about theology and posts about my very exciting life in Vienna.

Down the right hand side of each stream, I present a couple of other general posts related to the same category. For instance, at the moment you can only see posts related to the web design articles section of the website. If you were looking at a theology post, you would be seeing links to other theology articles. Repeat for each of the streams on the website.

The reasoning for this is simple: if a user arrives at the site via this post, for example, the chances are that they are most likely going to want to read articles that are similar. Therefore, I present them with this as the default choice rather than make them have to go and find out how to get to articles that are similar. Which makes sense, but it just means a bit of tweaking of WordPress from the default flow of information.

The way I do this in the theme is actually pretty simple. First of all, I determine the category of the current post and assign it to a variable called ‘identity’.

{code type=php}

<?php
global $post;
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
$identity = $category->category_nicename;
}
?>

{/code}

You will notice this is embedded in a foreach loop. This is because featured posts can be members of two categories (‘featured’ and then their normal topic category). However, the theme category will always be the second of the two, and so the variable will always take the last one of a list.

Then, it’s a fairly simple case of checking whether each menu block of the sidebar matches the theme currently used. For example, if we were checking to see whether this was a post about Austria, we would use the following check:

{code type=php}

<?php if($identity == “austria”) {
// menu code goes here
}

{/code}

The menu code is really quite simple – it just takes the last few posts from the category and puts them into an array which I then output into an ordered list.

{code type=php}

<ul>
<?php
query_posts(‘category_name=austria&showposts=5′);
while (have_posts()) :
the_post();
?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php
endwhile;
?>
</ul>
{/code}

That’s pretty much it. I do have a small check on the home page which resets and shows the users all of them (so they can find a topic that is interesting to them in a subject of their choice). That is pretty easy to figure out from the code above however.

I have found that modifications like this greatly improve the usability of the website and mean that more people find the information they are looking for easily.

Love it or loathe it (and most of the time, I personally loathe it), social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter are here to stay and have become a dominant way of communicating on the net. With these platforms, a whole variety of online conversations are taking place with a level of connectivity that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.

All these developments mean that we as churches have to start thinking about how we respond to the presence of the new kid on the block and connect with these tools in a way that is life-giving and useful in mission.

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An interesting post came up on the Baptist Union E-News sweep this morning about Mark Driscoll’s recent tour of the UK, where during a Q&A session in Belfast he answered a question on congregational governance in churches. In the course of the answer, he made the statement that “it is almost impossible to be missional and congregational”.

Firstly some background. Driscoll is the Lead Pastor of the Mars Hill megachurch in Seattle (confusingly, Rob Bell’s church in Grand Rapids is also known as Mars Hill. Obviously there was a bit of a name fad going on in the early years of this last decade – kind of the same way there are loads of people my age called Rebecca!).

Mars Hill Church stretches across multiple campuses and beams their sermons to each campus via satellite. They have about 10,000 people in their congregation and saw 1,000 people join their congregation in the last year alone. Driscoll is known for being passionately neo-Reformed, against women in any form of leadership, against influences such as the emerging church and arguing for a very strong form of male eldership governance. So his statement wasn’t really a surprise.

Driscoll’s argument

Mark Driscoll argued that it is impossible to be missional and keep in congregational governance because the system is inherently adversorial and is dependent upon compromise rather than clear leadership. He argues that churches are paralysed in the fact of difficult choices and end up watering down to the desire of the majority. Therefore, churches lack the ability to make the changes necessary for growth and it is ‘impossible to get a church of more than 200 with congregational governance’.

Congregational churches tend to last a long time but get through a lot of pastors, as ministers go off with stress or disillusionment. The system, he argues, is a way to preserve the past rather than looking to the future. He makes the analogy of his family: he has 5 children. If his family worked on congregational governance, they would be staying up until 4am and drinking red bull for breakfast. Therefore, leadership is necessary.

Finally, he argues that congregational churches that do have a church above 200 are in reality not functionally congregational but have a brave leader whom people trust.

Thoughts

Obviously, coming from the perspective of a committed Baptist, I am not going to agree with Driscoll’s argument. I am fully in favour of congregational governance and think that it is the most compelling form of church leadership.

I think that more than anything else, Driscoll’s arguments relies on generalisations and stereotypes of congregational governance rather than an awareness of what actually goes on in the UK Baptist scene (though in fairness to him, he did state that he spoke as an outsider).

I would argue that it is perfectly possible to be missional and yet remain congregational. Many churches in the UK are doing really exciting things and are seeing great growth, yet use a congregational form of governance. Places like Morningside Baptist Church in Edinburgh have a whole host of exciting initiatives they are doing. And that’s just one story. Think of other places such as the Gathering Place in Glasgow. Dereham Baptist Church in Norfolk, which has got congregations in two languages and recently had a trilingual anniversary service. So many exciting stories.

I think that, although congregational governance can very occasionally make some horrific decisions, it is overall a good thing – as long as we see the church meeting as a place of discernment rather than a place of power games. The key Baptist insight is that leadership is ultimately a matter for the Holy Spirit. Church meetings therefore are a time of listening to the Holy Spirit and seeking his direction (even if at times it can feel like listening for God on Mount Carmel).

As a Baptist, I think that good leadership embraces the church meeting as a place where God’s Spirit is encountered and heard. Therefore, I think the role of the leader is not to be the sole decision maker, but instead to be the prophetic voice who helps articulate vision, enables the church to own its vision and encourages church members to see themselves all as missional disciples, all valued by God and all equipped to discern and hear his voice.

Through listening to each other, we learn to begin to hear God.

Through listening to each other, we become aware of the quiet voices of wisdom that sometimes get missed out in the cacophony of getting on a doing things.

Through listening to each other, we learn to submit to ‘our shared vision’ rather than ‘my personal soapbox’.

Through listening to each other, we ideally free church members up to be whole life disciples who wholly own the vision of the church rather than feeling either just along for the ride or disenfranchised by the decisions of the leaders (especially in megachurch models where the leaders may seem very remote and distant. This is obviously less of an issue in smaller churches where leadership is much more relational).

Through listening to each other, we learn to that it’s not about us, but about God working through us.

Through listening to each other we remember that, important and good as church growth is, it is ultimately about discipleship and faithfulness than performance and results. Through listening to each other, we have the freedom to fail.

Maybe sometimes that will mean a slower decision making process. Maybe it will even sometimes mean going via place C in order to go from A to B. I think that’s OK – I think that if a vision is God’s, he will get the church there.

What are your thoughts on it all? Both agreeing and disagreeing voices are very welcome.

Obligatory footnote

Sometimes I wish things like this footnote didn’t have to be written. It would be great if we could just say our piece and leave it at that. Inevitably, however, people will read it and get the wrong idea. “Does this mean that you are attacking Q or having a go at person P”? No, of course not. The fact I strongly believe in congregational governance is obviously not to demonise every other form of church. I would love that this didn’t need to be said, but would rather be explicit than risk causing hurt through people’s assumptions of undertones that don’t really exist.

For various reasons, I ended up attending a Vineyard church in University, and feel very welcomed here (though I still covenant to my home church, which is Baptist). I think the pastors here model top-down leadership better than I have ever seen it modelled anywhere else: humble, receptive and honest. I have the uttermost respect and time for them.

Maybe that’s the final part of listening to each other, then: we learn to see, however much our home may be in church X (in my case, in the Baptist world with its congregational governance), there is so much good life and vitality in other traditions. Even if we don’t buy into something as a model or theology, it’s great to see the good in other traditions. I love spending time in this church.

‘The curtain was torn’. This is the comment made by Matthew in his depiction of the crucifixion (Matthew 27:51). It’s enigmatic and is followed by some strange remarks about the bodies of dead saints wondering around Jerusalem followed by a declaration by the centurion that ‘this was indeed the Son of God’.

Yet the whole meaning of Easter is contained in this one enigmatic line. In the Jewish temple system, the curtain was the dividing barrier between God and humanity. It sectioned off the rest of the temple from the Holy of Holies, the place where God dwelt in mystery and power. Only the High Priest was allowed to enter, once a year.

It was a symbol of both presence – a God who was involved in his people’s lives – and absence – a God who could only be reached indirectly, through the mediation of the Priest. Most of all, it was a symbol of the otherness of God, the God who was defined by power.

And then this God came as a human. This God, in his freedom and power, decides to make himself vulnerable and dependent. The creator of the Universe becomes a baby who cried and needed feeding and nappies changing.

And in living and growing up, he modelled to us what humanity really looks like. What it really looks like to be alive. What power really looks like. What service really looks like. And, most of all, he modelled what God really looks like.

This isn’t just a version or glimpse of God. It’s not like good-cop, bad-cop, where Jesus is showing us the nice face of God and, if that doesn’t work, we get the horrible God of justice or punishment or justice.

When we look at Jesus on the cross, stretching out his arms, we see God as he really is in eternity. We see a God whose entire identity is defined by opening up his arms in an embrace of the other. This God chooses to want and need the company of his creation. Chooses to share his divine life with it. With us. With me.

This is the scandalous mystery of grace that is at the core of Christianity. Easter is not a story about an innocent Jesus taking the punishment from an angry, wrathful God in some obscure tribal child abuse. It’s not the story of a good man dying to show people that we should be prepared to die for love.

It’s the story of God entering into the alienation and lostness of humanity, making it part of himself and then God experiencing the absence of God. He takes our alienation and sinfulness, and then redeems and transforms it.

And the temple curtain is torn in two.

This God is not going to be separated by anything from his Creation. Not the rules and politics of institutional religions. Not the boundaries of class, religious communities or ethnic groupings. Not the right form of ceremony or words or theology.

In dying on the cross, Jesus defeated all forms of power and organisation that keep humanity away from God and opened up his arms in an embrace to all who will receive. The temple curtain is torn and God’s glory, formerly kept just for the Holy of Holies (cf. Isaiah 6), fills the whole earth and charges it with new life and a renewed welcome.

This is the God we worship. This is the God who invites us to come again to the foot of the cross and be welcomed by him. This is the God whose love is for all and who knows no boundaries.

This is our God. ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’.

Amen

I am blogging my way through Matthew’s gospel during Lent this year, taking time out to think and reflect upon Jesus’ life. Come and join in the journey through reading and sharing the posts, and commenting back with your thoughts.

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