Sunday 4 October 2020

Salvation?

 A devout Christian was caught in a flood and had to retreat upstairs to escape the rising water. A fire crew in an inflatable boat pulled up to his window and told him to climb in. "No" he replied "God will keep me safe". So the fire crew left him and concentrated on rescuing the other villagers.

The water continued to rise and the man had to climb onto the roof of his house to escape the flood. An inshore lifeboat crew pulled up to the eaves of the roof and told him to climb into the boat. Once again the man replied "No, the good Lord will look after me."

The water rose further and the man had to cling to the chimney stack to avoid drowning. A coastguard helicopter appeared and hovered overhead and the crew told him they will lower a man down to lift him to safety. The man shouts back "No! The Lord God will save me".

The water continued to rise and the man was drowned. Arriving at the gates of heaven he berated St Peter, saying "I placed my trust in the Lord, but he let me down in my hour of need!". St Peter shook his head and replied, "He sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want!".

 

It's an old joke. It's kind of funny, and kind of pointed if you've been in church a long time. ESPECIALLY if, like me in times gone by, you were expecting some divine act of rescue instead of something very ordinary and human-driven.

I'm still trying to get an understanding of "what's going on" with this God/Jesus business.

A couple of random thoughts:

I understand the problem in the story. Our rejecter of rescue wanted to see bible stuff happen, but instead 'god' (yes, it's just a story) sends boats and helicopters instead of letting him walk on water. 

The current equivalent that eats me is why, when there's all the stuff in the NT about miraculous healings, do Christians HAVE to be cured by the miracle of modern medicine. 

Or not cured, and die regardless.

Why are churches centres of spreading coronavirus instead of the place people go to get healed from sickness.

Etc. in a similar vein.

 

I've mentioned before, the occasion someone I once respected told me, when I'd mentioned to him that I'd once prayed for resurrection from the dead and it didn't work "it would have done if you'd been in Africa". As I said at the time, my situation could not have been more desperate in any country. If it had been down to my level of faith, well, then it's not about God's power. 

 

If I look at the bible and suspend the 'eyes of faith' a little, I see an enormous amount of humanity, with tiny bursts of something else just occasionally. I get that stuff is written 'that you may believe' but I want cold, hard facts, not someone else's ideas of how they thought things should have been. No, I don't do poetry either. 

My friend Marc recently put this post up about being ecumenical. There was certainly a time when I was pretty sure the way I understood was The Right Way, and that approach to theology has a long and chequered past in the church (I've had some interesting talks with my mother about Bretheren and Baptish churches in the UK over the century). So when I read church history and start to compare it with the experiences I've had over the last nearly 60 years, and particularly the last 30, I start to see the hand of man very much at work in the church. Make me wonder, how much do we build out of ourselves, and how much really is God at work.

So I just don't get it. I'm not walking away, but I really can't accept the suspension of intelligence (God-given?) and integrity required to square the circle right now. For you younger than me who've already been through your crises of faith like this, I'm just a little slow, OK.  ;-)


4 comments:

  1. Wheat and weeds (Mt 13) comes to mind. There's a temptation to cast yourself as a farm worker or even as the farmer but I fear those attempts will end in ... tares. Pun out of the way, I think there is an application to the ideas and actions of church life. Not all will become part of the harvest but, at the present, both are allowed to co-exist and that is outworking of God's mercy and not an example of his impotence.

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  2. Hi Wulf - thanks for the comment. Guess I'd expected the wheat/tares analogy was applied to the world, but it seems that perhaps it applies to the church too.

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  3. I'm asking the same "Why" here as well.
    I've spent a lot of time with churches that are messed up and most of the times that brokenness comes from systemic failures. While I try to address the failed systems my priority has been working with the people. If God can change them, there there is hope for the body, the church. But if the people are not willing to address their hearts, any system will continue to fail.

    I've never spent a lot of energy or time building up a church organisation or a denomination. I could really care less about those things. Its the people I love and have hope for. If they can be more wheat than tares, then I have hope, whatever the structure may be.

    As with most things if we do it in our own strength for our own glory, I think we get more tares.
    But maybe thats one thing this season will do for the church. Get her to see that the Sunday morning systems aren't church.etc. etc.
    We have invests an awful lot in systems, buildings, budgets and constitutions.

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  4. "I've spent a lot of time with churches that are messed up and most of the times that brokenness comes from systemic failures. While I try to address the failed systems my priority has been working with the people. If God can change them, there there is hope for the body, the church. But if the people are not willing to address their hearts, any system will continue to fail."

    This is one of the things that I struggle with. I can put on 'right behaviour' like a cloak, and can see why it's better to behave like that, but all the stuff we learned and taught about 'building the forms & God will make them real' doesn't seem true for me. I can take the cloak off again, which says that I haven't changed, and instead am consciously following a learned pattern of behaviour.

    Perhaps this is all part of the freewill thing, and I'm expecting too much interference from God - He WON'T change my heart or nature, but instead requires I conform outwardly while fighting myself inside? That looks an awful lot like living under law.

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