David Bunce

Not for the first time, thinking about Lent has made me reflect on how much of the beauty and art of the Christian life we miss out on as evangelicals in not celebrating the church calendar. It seems that, in running from tradition and perceived staidness, we end up missing out on many of the liturgical contrasts and seasonal dynamics that give the Christian year so much of its beauty and drama. In doing so, I can’t help thinking that we always risk turning out as staid and dry as that which we were trying to avoid, as one Sunday becomes as monotone in its message and feel as the next – we sing the same songs and often ignore the drama of Lent in our sermons and personal reflections. This has to be impoverishing us and resulting in us missing out on a large part of what it is to be human.

For me, the blessing and joy of lent is two fold. First, it is a chance to go with Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. This is a practice that we need to reclaim as evangelicals in every part of our life, not just during Lent: we are chronically bad at creating our own little subcultures and circles and activities and friendship circles (and how true this can be in University, when it is easily very possible to spend every evening doing something Christian Union or Church related), fearing that the dominant culture is evil and corrosive and therefore the best option is to remove ourselves from it, above all from the messy and hurting parts of it out of the fear that it will corrupt us and make us less ‘holy’. Instead, we hang around in Christian circles, go to Christian Bible studies, listen to Christian music, spend our summers going to Christian Bible or Church camps, go to Christian events and endless conferences, occasionally coming out and interacting with the world to evangelise them and persuade people of their need for a saviour for their sins.

I think such an approach fundamentally misses the Biblical concept of mission, however. The call of the church is not to be a group of gospel-believing people withdrawn from the world into our own subculture, occasionally pushing out for a series of events that would take the message of Jesus to the great unwashed masses. Instead, the God of the Bible is constantly presented as the God who is already in every situation. Mission is at the heart of it the action of God. Our job as church is to find out where God is moving and follow him there. It’s not to withdraw from the world in some sort of platonic thought it being totally corrupt and evil, but to live within the broken world, affirming what is good and beautiful about it and then pointing onwards to the source of this beauty (similar to Paul in Acts 17 in his speech to the Areopagus). As a broad generalisation, in fact, it seems that a lot of the time God moves in history, it is to put in good rather than try and eliminate the bad. The ultimate summary of this tendency is found in the incarnation – the coming of the Creator God into the created world to bring healing.

So if we work on the basis that the earth is already full of the glory of God (as Isaiah 6 seems to suggest it is) then, although it is cracked and hurting and full of pain and immeasurable acts of human evil – holocausts, murders, rapes, greed, climate change, injustice, poverty, famine, children dying from preventable diseases – we can go into the world and live without fear, knowing that God is already present in every situation. It means we can begin to imagine and explore what it looks like to follow through Jesus’ desire that we are salt and light in the world – travellers on a road who can help to bring healing and hope to other people who have fallen down along the wayside. It means that people can experience Jesus’ transforming love not through having to come and find him in church but by finding him in the faces and lives of the people who follow him.

Please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying the darkness can’t be very dark, or even that it can be fixed in a few weeks, months or even years. There’s so much pain in the world which seems to just defy healing. For so many people, Christians and non-Christians alike, every day represents a new battle with depression, eating disorders, loneliness or ill health. It represents a constant struggle for survival, walking 3km just to get a days drinking water. It involves being raped daily because they have been trafficked against their will for the gain of others. It involves constantly dodging the bullet or the bomb or the machette. Lent and following Jesus often do not change this – if anything, we often become more aware of the way in which so many forces, illnesses – and people – are involved in dehumanising others and our hearts hurt and cry all the more as we respond to our mission to stand where the world is most in pain. Sometimes, despair seems inevitable as the challenge of Lent, of God in the wilderness, crushes us more than we feel we can withstand.

Yet, Lent also holds promise. It holds the promise of Good Friday, as, out in the distance we spot another figure, also crushed by the weight of dehumanisation and evil. Sometimes, the image fades as the pressures and pain of the now become too strong. But the figure is always there, even if only blurred. It is the figure of the God-man, the creator of the Universe who chose to get involved in creation and allowed himself to be crushed by the evil of creation so that he might identify himself with those who are dehumanised and through whose stripes we can be healed.

Finally, Lent holds the promise that the pain and despair and dehumanisation of the world would not always be so but that after Good Friday would come Easter – the Resurrection. As people who follow the crushed man-God, we are also people who bring the promise of life into the dark places, who bring glimpses of New Creation and Hope into situations where the dominant, all-encompassing experience is of decay and despair. Such glimpses are not triumphalistic or brash – a healing here, an alcoholic who comes off drinks there . . . a marriage in break down that is able to turn the corner . . . a community torn apart by division and violence able to learn to talk to each other and find common causes for peace. Yet in such glimpses, the church bears witness to the fact that the new Kingdom is inaugurated, will come to consummation and is breaking through into the present.

What a much bigger view of a missionary God this is than one who simply requires us to persuade people of their sinfulness from the shelter of our sanctuaries. And what a priviledge – and responsibility – the get involved with this mission of God.

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One of the things that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is known for, is a passion (and considerable expertise) for Dostoevsky. The author was actually the subject of his sabattical studies, and his fascination with the Russian novelist drew an article from Andrew Brown at the Guardian. I was particularly taken by the following quote, given the current power struggles and pain in the Anglican synod (last week, for example, saw a rather dirty attempted power-grab attempt from the Evangelical grouping Reform over the issue of women bishops).

The Inquisitor upbraids Christ for refusing all three of the temptations that Satan (“The terrible and wise spirit”) offered him in the wilderness: the power to make bread from stones; the power to perform miracles at will; and simple, political power.

In this, it seems to me that Rowan Williams is genuinely a follower of Dostoevsky’s Christ. Christ does not, after all, abolish these powers merely because he refuses them for themselves. They remain in the world. Science, as Dostoevsky says explicitly, performs the miracles. The powers that Christ refused are exercised by everyone today by modern science, by political bodies, and by most Christian bodies. Just like the Grand Inquisitor, they all think Jesus was wrong to refuse the devil’s offer.

The Anglican Communion contains a majority of primates who take a Grand Inquisitor’s view of politics; and some who would be happy to hand over heretics or at least homosexuals to the secular arm for punishment; some who encourage the belief that they can perform miracles, more or less, when their people need it; and plenty who use or threaten to use the power of money and modern science to expand their client base.

Rowan Williams, like Christ, renounces these powers; but when an Archbishop renounces powers he does not abolish them, he hands them to his enemies. Like Christ in the parable, Rowan’s response to the Grand Inquisitors of the world is to kiss them on their bloodless lips and then slip out into darkness and obscurity through the door they have held open for him. When Christ kisses him, the inquisitor is touched in his heart but his beliefs and his actions do not change. Fresh heretics will burn when morning comes.

I think, amongst many other of his excellent characteristics, it is this knowledge of the nature and dangers of power that makes the Archbishop such an excellent leader for the current crisis.

In his famous anti-war novel, ‘Slaughterhouse 5’, Kurt Vonnegut in talking about the fire-bombing of Dresden makes the observation that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”.  It’s an understandable sentiment, and one that deeply resonates with me. It’s as if, in putting words and descriptions to events like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the killing fields in Cambodia or the Gulag, we are somehow taking away from the raw power of the evil that was done. It almost seems to do an injustice to the victims of this evil when we try to rationalise it, carrying the connotations that what happened was merely an unfortunate set of circumstances, a curious by-product of history that had deeply tragic consequences. Therefore, silence is often the preferred option.

Yet at the same time, there is also the danger that, in remaining respectfully silent, we are unable to guard against a repeat of such an event in other circumstances (and a cursory knowledge of history will instantly tell us that such acts of inhumanity are repeated time and time again) and, most worryingly of all, we are unable to identify the same dehumanising and destructive trends and tendencies in our own lives. Even when writing this, I’m reminded by an RSS feed from a blog I read that officially in Turkey the Armenian Holocaust in the early half of the twentieth century is not officially acknowledged; in this area, as in so many others, the path to truth and reconciliation, already so painful, is made more impossible yet by denial and cover-up. Likewise, we would be foolish to think that such appalling acts of violence are not being perpetrated even now – whether it be in Darfur, or in the treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza strip.

In Rwanda, in Germany, in the Balkans, one of the main trends behind the massacre of millions of people was the loss of a sense of humanity. The story of massacre is the story of the triumph of nationalistic, ethnic or tribal identity over a deeper sense of shared humanity and a shared ethic of human dignity and human worth.

As a Christian, this recognition poses deep problems and fundamental questions for my faith – questions which became even more poignant last summer when I visited Dachau Concentration Camp and for the first time really became aware of the true extent of the Holocaust.

Theology after the Holocaust is something which is, quite rightly, very tricky. What is there to say to such an appalling act of inhumanity and evil, especially coming as I do from an evangelical perspective, when so often we only focus on the personal sin and atonement, the substitution of Jesus on the cross for our own personal sins? What is there to say to whole nations, whole peoples torn apart by hate, by division, by inhumanity? What hope does the cross of Christ hold out to such a massacre?

Indeed, it’s possible to say that it’s this focus on the personal, the private, a legacy from Martin Luther’s theology of two Kingdoms, that led many Christians in Germany and elsewhere to separate their beliefs from the wider political scene, to internalise faith and confine religious conscience to the private sphere.

Perhaps one of the few theologians who has begun to satisfactorily sketch the faintest shadows of an answer is the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. In his book “The Crucified God,” he reflects upon what the gospel of Mark reports as being Jesus’ dying words, the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In this cry, Moltmann argues, we can begin to get a picture of the scope of the cross – the suffering God, not removed from the pain of the world, but suffering alongside it – and suffers alongside us and all those who are oppressed, persecuted and denied their humanity –  entering into the world in compassion and thereby protesting against it in an act of self giving. It is a challenge to me as a Christian to not think of God solely as God of sin management, allowing me to sit in an ivory tower and be removed from a hurting and broken world, but a God who goes into the deepest, darkest places of humanity and calls me to follow, to be the hands and feet of the crucified God, whether it be in advocacy for the victims of dehumanisation in all its forms, whether it be working in local communities for increased understanding and peace and a decrease in hate and fear – whatever area of life, I believe the call to follow Jesus is a call to follow the crucified God and to come and die in order to bring life.

I’d like to finish with a quote I saw when visiting Dachau Concentration Camp. “Signs of conquest are presented only unobtrusively. No euphemism, no playing down. Only here and there an indication that there are such things as liberation, reconciliation, redemption. Perhaps you may cast a glance at the cross protruding from the wall. You recognise a figure being crushed by the surrounding load. But you may detect a different motion as well: A figure bursting open this load. Resistance and resignation, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.”

Maybe there is hope for us all yet! Thanks to Thomas for showing me this

“I don’t really have a ‘take on the state of Christianity.’ But when I read your question, this answer came to mind: As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.”

Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, has made some interesting points on worship in his book “Freedom and Framework, Spirit and Truth: Recovering Biblical Worship“

Christian worship is dramatic, performative, setting out and celebrating God’s story with the world; to tamper with it on a whim is a form of arrogant vandalism. The biblical story from Genesis to Revelation is a great drama, a great saga, a play written by the living God and staged in his wonderful creation; and in liturgy, whether sacramental or not, we become for a moment not only spectators of this play but also willing participants in it. It is not our play; it is God’s play, and we are not free to rewrite the script. We cannot read the whole Bible in each worship service, but the selections we choose, whether through a lectionary or not, should reflect the larger story and remind us of its full sweep and flow.

what we wear, where we stand, how we move (vesture, posture, and gesture) all matter, not because we are ritualists but because this is God’s drama and we can easily get in the way. When those leading worship stand to one side, this makes the point dramatically; when worship-leaders, including musicians, assemble directly in front of a congregation like a rock group at a concert, this can make exactly the wrong point. There is, no doubt, a sense among many modern worship-leaders that this does not matter; but, precisely because worship is about human integration, it matters very much indeed. What you do with your body says something about what you are doing with the rest of you. Of course kneeling down, raising your hands in worship, crossing yourself, taking up particular positions, can all become rituals and turn into magic. But to insist on sitting down to pray — the one posture the Bible never mentions in connection with prayer—because kneeling is “ritualistic” is cutting off your nose to spite your face. To insist on a free-flowing succession of worship songs at the whim of one leader is not to strike a blow against ritualism, but to put that leader precisely in the place where the Reformers saw the mediaeval priest, coming between the worshipers and God. Good liturgy preserves us from personality cults whether Catholic or Protestant.

I’d be interested to know what you think on this subject.

And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
even as he said to our fathers.”

When you get past the slightly Lord of the Rings feeling of a perfectly sane character suddenly bursting into song, Mary’s Magnificat is an amazing poem of worship to Yahweh, recognising his covenent faithfullness and his commitment to step into history and begin the work of putting the world to rights again, a promise that is celebrated by the song’s inclusion in Vespers in the Western Church and in the Morning Office in the Eastern Church. It is the song of a God who, rather than coming to earth as perhaps the all-too popular superman Jesus, come from no-where, doing the cross thing and disappearing again, chooses to come instead in vulnerability and brokenness and fragility. A God who comes not through a safe, Kingly inheritence but instead through the willing partnership of a frightened teenaged girl. Not in safety and security but in risk and danger. It is the song of a God who does not work at the expense of humans to put the world back together, but instead works together in partnership with humans, encouraging us to see the powerful and world changing at work in the most humble and broken of our society and our communities.

In the Magnificat, there is the weaving together of various streams of Hebrew consciousness from the Old Testament  – the close parallels to the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2), the various times in the Old Testament where Yahweh has stepped into history and brought about something new. At the same time, the poem also considers the contemporary plight of the Jewish people and speaks of the way in which the faithfulness of Yahweh in Old Testament history has continued down into the present and is now good news to the lowly and the hungry in 1st Century Palestine – and for us in 21st Century Scotland/England. The song is therefore an exegesis of God’s role in salvation history and a prophetic speaking of into the present context with hopes for a future which is characteristed by justice and mercy that is seen not only in an expression of faith and righteousness in remembering the promises made to Abraham, but is also seen in a transformation and renewal of the world and the way in which the world is ordered.

Therefore, as well as being a great hymn of worship to the faithfulness of God in history, it is also a profound call to mission and to action. As we see in the Magnificat a God who is committed to transforming the world around him and bringing in the societal changes and peace so long expected in so many prophecies in the Old Testament, in brings the missional call to join in with the living and active God and to live out lives that bring about God’s change in the places and situations where he is already working.

Ok, so after chaos has descended and passed, there is the calm after the storm. This is what this moment is. St Andrews Unwrapped, which two weeks ago today was still only the gem of an idea, took place on Friday night. We had four amazing bands, so much cakes and burgers you would not believe – and a great atmosphere. Perhaps best of all, we raised £193 for Oxfam Unwrapped.

A huge thank you to all who took part, in whatever capacity. You are the best

In other news, one of the highlights of my semester was John Bell’s visit to St Salvator’s chapel today – he was typically John Bell-ish (I don’t think many other preachers talk about Prince Charming smoking a spliff from the pulpit) and made some really good points about John the Baptist. As ever, he was very challenging and reflective, and I hope he comes back sometime in the near future.

Less than a week to go now!

Time is short in the busyness of life. As I write this, there are several other things I probably should be doing: learning Russian vocabulary, doing some more on the seemingly endless list of preparations for St Andrews Unwrapped, getting to grips with German grammar. And above all, I definitely should be sleeping. It doesn’t make sense for me to be sitting writing a blog. Yet perhaps that is partly what Advent is about. It doesn’t seem to make sense. In the middle of a chaotic and busy time leading up to Christmas, we have this time set apart to be still and reflect. To imagine and explore. An invitation to step outside the busyness and routine of ‘what is’ – and to instead see what could be. It’s a time to take the still, deep breaths of dangerous contemplation and learn to see the world anew – not as it seems to us but as God sees it: pregnant with hope and expectation and possibility.

We seem to have a general recognition that the world is not how it could or should be. Maybe this recognition has grown slightly over the last few years with the rise of mass terrorism, with the fears about economic or climatic turmoil and with a growing uncertainty about the future. Far from being a simple mental categorisation, evil seems to be something we can put pictures to – the genocide in Darfur. The subjugation and dehumanising treatement of one people group by another in so many parts of the world. The fractions and frictions that are in our smaller communities and relationships. The way we live out of balance with the world around us, exploiting its resources and failing to care for what we have been given. All these things seem to point to a feeling that the world – including, if we’re honest, our own lives much of the time – are not as they should be. It’s an awareness of the brokenness of the world.

Yet at the same time, there are also glimpses of hope – in the community that refuses to be split along ethnic lines. In the enemies who refuse to continue fighting along the same old lines but begin to seek some form of peace and reconciliation. In the ever growing number of communities who choose consciously to try and live a sustainable and ethical lifestyle.

Such things seem to resonate with us not just because they are miracles by themselves, but because they seem to point beyond themselves towards something bigger. Better. It’s as if in the pain, the brokenness of the world does not always have the last say.

This seems to be a good context in which to begin to approach the gospel. Far from being the safe, sanitised guide to getting individually saved that we so often seem to make it, the gospel seems to be something which steps into the awareness of the duality of the brokenness and the beauty of the world, offering a dangerous, subversive hope that it will be beauty that wins in the end.

Paul in his letter to the Romans talks the gospel as Jesus being Lord. Jesus himself talks about the Kingdom of God being very near. There is this sense that in Jesus, the Creator God is stepping into a fragile and broken world to do something new. Something beautiful. Maybe that’s what we all feel stir deep inside when we are captivated by something kind or beautiful or just. It’s the taste of Creation being healed.

The wonder and the senselessness of Advent is found in taking time to stop and see this happening here and now. One of the most poignant Advent Bible passages for me comes from one of the Psalms, Psalm 85, where the Psalmist pictures salvation as being a project involving both heaven and earth, with the earth responding to what God has already done. The poet paints a picture where “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other”.

Perhaps this is what we see each time everyone someone refuses to accept the injustice and brokenness of the status quo.

Each time someone becomes frustrated with shallow relationships but instead tries to live in a way that invites depth and vulnerability and sacrifice.

Each time some refuses to accept the charicature of a people group but choses the fragileness and unpredictability of love.

Each time someone in a conflict situation refuses to believe that it has to always be this way – but instead has the hope that a new and different future is possible.

In these situations and countless more besides, we see the glimpses not only of a future beauty and a healed creation but of the topsy turvy nature of God’s Kingdom here and now. A Kingdom that Jesus talks about in the Beatitudes, where all the loosers, the nobodies, the not-good-enoughs are welcome and valued and accepted. A kingdom which seems to welcome everyone – those working hard for peace and justice. Those who are facing hard times, for who every new day is a struggle. Those who feel amazing one day – and totally rubbish the next. Those who go from day to day bearing the strain of the pain of a loved one.

All these people Jesus puts in God’s Kingdom

Accepted. Love. Valued.

Not because of any merit of popularity or wealth or attractiveness but because of God stepping into the world in a self-giving, totally sacrificial way in order to allow the healing and possibility of what could be to flow into the present, to subvert it, to heal it and to spread the hope of final and complete healing because of the mystery of the Cross.

God’s Kingdom. The gospel. Good News. That is what seems to be at the heart of the Advent story.

I’m very excited as I can now take the lid off the next big event that I am involved in planning: “St Andrews Unwrapped”. Basically, the format is an evening of entertainment and fun in one of the function rooms. We then charge an entrance fee for this event (and have as many opportunities as possible to get more money from people through donations), the proceeds of which then go to Oxfam Unwrapped. At the end of the evening, we have a vote where people get to choose which projects they want to sponsor and where we announce the grand total.

There is a lot of organisation to be done and I am slightly scared and stressed by it – but I have an amazing group of people who are all working incredibly hard, so I have every confidence the event will be a success and raise loads of money.

So there we have it!