Walking with Jesus this week

I started to write this on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and the most dramatic week in the Christian calendar. That morning we went to St Nic’s with Dave’s family who were visiting and heard David Day speak about walking with Jesus to Golgotha. Due to the church’s commitment to preach the gospel of Matthew and be able to preach on the passage about the resurrection next sunday, instead of the usual Palm Sunday jubilation, our focus was shifted Matthew 27 and to the mockery of those who viewed Jesus on the cross.  David spoke of two angers that compelled people to shout out against Christ then and today. It was eyeopening to see the anger in the characters of the bible transposed to modern culture and modern people. As church seems become more prominent in the media, the bile heaped upon it by secular society increases and as David outlined, there are reasons for the anger. 

The first type of anger or revile for Christ he touched upon comes from a fear of what Jesus might do. People instinctively seem to know Jesus has the power to change lives; when we first meet with him, he asks us to give up our old life and many are filled with the worry of how awful new life with him might be. (Some of their fears are not unfounded seeing the way that we Christians can behave!) In Jerusalem, at the time of the Crucifixion, there were the natives of the occupied land who fought for freedom from the Roman oppressors and natives who rather enjoyed the prestige and relative comfort the association with Rome afforded them. In comparison to today,we live in a society that does not have God’s kingdom or it’s purposes at heart and there are those amongst us who want to change the world by faith and others who prefer to let things continue as they are and be content with the status quo. Jesus challenges the comfortable, those who are too close bedfellows with the ‘occupiers’. When Christ offers the opportunity to recieve a new life it can mean relinquishing some of what this world holds dear and what has become to us comforting habit - he calls us to give up the excess, riches, that which causes us to sin so might grow in righteousness and holiness. When we commit to that acrifice, we allow God to come closer to us than perhaps we’d like and that is what angers people – they feel threatened by the Omnipotent God. David spoke of the Alpha course and the residential weekend away that happens towards the end of the course where the Holy Spirit is discussed. Nicky Gumbel apparently says many people ’storm out’ of the session because of the intense discomfort they experience as the Holy Spirit draws near to them and they encounter the living God. I can totally relate to that experience – my first encounter with  the Holy Spirit was a battle with wanting to run away and stay put, with all the things I would have to sacrifice if I pursued this faith running through my mind. It was one of those life-altering moments that if I had run away from it, I would have always been haunted by the memory. People deride Jesus because they fear what true life might entail.

The second anger that causes mockery is the deep disappointment that people, whether believer or not, feel with God. Be it an unanswered prayers, despair as the world around seems to be decaying or deep suffering, God is not all humans want him to be. The mockery stems from real anger with God and people can rage against him. We think of major disasters that have occurred in the past 10 years even ; the Twin Towers, the Tsunami, Darfur, the war in Iraq – so many people ask if God is a loving god, why does He let this happen? God is there but he doesn’t do what we’d imagined he might do, we cannot comprehend his ways and it is just too hard to trust Him. Even Christians who have some experience and understanding of God cannot comprehend his great mystery. And so we too join in the mocking, the scorn….

“If he really is the Christ, why doesn’t he save himself?”

Today is Good Friday and we come to the foot of the cross to observe in silence what Christ experiences. We hear the anger, we see the suffering, we even experience our own human weakness as we are tempted to disown him.

It is Friday but Sunday is coming. Thank God!

The fabric of life

This week has been about trying to make sacred space in my routine. Space for stillness, silence, repose so I might tune in to the signal of the Creator. My spiritual director suggested an Ignatian exercise of reviewing the day, looking for a moment when I felt most alive and noticed God at work in my life. Then last Thursday at the spouses group, Wendy led us in a Labyrinth style meditation. With thoughtful reflections and proactive instruction, the purpose was for us to journey into the Labyrinth, shedding the stresses of the day and heading towards a meeting with the Holy One. From that encounter, we returned outwards to share what we had experienced with others. At the end of the mediation, the stillness of the air, the quietness of the room meant that sacred space had been found and experienced. I still need to cultivate this practice into my routine, especially at work. With the constant demands on us for our attention, the white noise, the visual bombardment, the constant murmuring of traffic, computers, voices, stopping still isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. I find it so hard to see God at work in my day to day life. Yet I have seen in the Bible, God mysteriously moving throughout the backdrop of history, knitting together his purpose and so I know he must be present at work in my life. I love the analogy of textiles, God the weaver and life the fabric. I occasionally knit and the thing I find most satisfying is the thought of what I could create – me mirroring the delight of my creator, perhaps? I found this poem that speaks of the precious golden thread that God weaves through our lives; I don’t know who wrote it.

“My life is but a weaving, between my God and me,
I do not choose the colours, He worketh steadily,
Oftimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper, and I the underside.
Not till the loom is silent, and shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why,
The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver’s hand,
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.”

Food we throw away…

Have been reading this really great article at Delicious magazine on how much food we waste and how we can prevent this by better storage and using up odds and ends. I find shopping and cooking for just one or two often means that a load of food is wasted because you can’t always buy smaller quantities as the supermarkets sell everything packaged up. It may also be that I am so scatterbrained that I can’t organise myself and discipline what I buy and cook! Anyway this article inspired me and gave me ideas to prevent waste. Last night I put it in to practice, using up tomatoes and salad leaves with this Linguine with prawns, garlic and tomatoes recipe and I cheated too (all the rage now Delia’s relaunched it and Nigella has ‘express’-ed it)! Instead of roasting the tomatoes before making the pasta dish, the night before I used Nigella Lawson’s Moonblush Tomatoes trick – I got her latest cookbook for my birthday. Putting the oven on to heat up to it’s highest temperature, I then chopped some leftover Pomodorino tomatoes and put them in a small baking tin with a sprinkling of rock salt, sugar and dried thyme. I drizzled olive oil over the tomatoes, popped the dish in the oven, turned it off and went to bed. Voila! the next day when I came to make the prawn pasta, the tomatoes were perfectly cooked and ready to stir in to the steaming pasta.  And as I fryed the prawns in a little oil and garlic, I added the tomatoes and some leftover rocket, watercress and spinach salad that wilted nicely in to the sauce. It’s a pretty low fat tasty dinner too.

 In her book, Nigella then uses these tomatoes to make a goats cheese and mint salad which looks fabulous. I’ll be giving that a try soon!   

Choice

I am returning to the blog after a couple of months absence. Looking back through the posts, I’m taken by how much I’ve written and the journey mapped out thus far. It is a pleasure to write if at times, I hold myself in sharp focus and don’t like what I’ve written!

I have plenty of recipes to blog and plenty of news to recount but for now I want to tell you about a new book I’ve started reading: “Utopian Dreams: A Search for a Better Life” by Tobias Jones and in a paragraph he talks about handling the myriad choices we have today and here’s a quote that reaally struck me.

“The trouble is we are in a conundrum. In the stark words of Peter Berger, we’re presented with ‘an unattractive choice between thugs [fundamentalists] and wimps [relativists].’ Obviously anyone who doesn’t want to make a choice is automatically in the second camp. We seem to come to a dead end in which most of us want to be neither thug nor wimp but can’t see the alternative.”

It struck me because it reminded me of Christian faith and some of the contentious issues facing the modern church. How do we stay true to faith but live alongside and reach out to our society, to our culture? We cannot be black and white with answers to such issues as God is multi-hued. Yet to be vague or undecided is deeply unsatisfying for those questions and does not meet the need of a people hungry for God. We cannot be content with either. We need to hold our opinions and our responses in tension. We live with crumbs of the little we know now and the great expansive mystery of God. It is so frustrating to be human! One day it will all be explained, why we wrestle with our faith, our culture and ourselves.  We live in the world where God’s kingdom has come and that is still to come.

 1 Corinthians 13 verse 12 ”For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”