Prebaptist

This evening I sat in a Methodist Church listening to sacred music for Easter. The choir sang the ancient version of the Lord's Prayer as in this video and it has nothing directly to do with Easter Week.  Yet it reminded me - perhaps it is the beautiful simplicity of the unaccompanied music and the familiar words - that Easter is a time when I feel much more Christian than Baptist. And in a Methodist church, as somewhat a fan of Evangelical Revival - Whitfield and Wesley and all that has issued into Victorian and contemporary evangelicalism and pentecostalism - I am still a Christian first and every Easter I know that afresh.

When these words were sung in Elizabethan England there were no Baptists anywhere and no Evangelical revival called by that name.  Despite my denomination's current self-examination (because it has a financial deficit) my faith is rooted not in it but in the Lord of Easter who taught us to pray saying  . . .

Fabrice

When a 23-year-old Premiership footballer collapses in front of tens of thousands of people, a game is abandoned and teammates call for prayer for him following a technical death from cardiac arrest the worlds of ministry and sports chaplaincy feel very close together.

Fabrice Muanga's life, we all agree, is more important than his footballing life.  Football, even at its highest level, is nowhere near as important as life and death.  This one man's trouble has stopped thousands in their tracks and brought an encouraging humanity into the business whirl of top-level football.

But.

The beauty of what has happened in response to Fabrice's heart attack is a reason to think harder about humanity than we first imagine.  In this connection it has been passingly commented that Muanga's father came to Britain as a refugee from Congo.  From this upheaval Fabrice grew into a fine student as well as an excellent footballer.  And if he'd stayed in Congo?

Over ten years of the internal strife in that land it is estimated over five million people have died and hundreds of thousands have been raped.  Under the floodlights one man's hurt was shared by thousands but in the Congolese rainforests thousands' hurt has, too often, not been observed or shared by anyone.

This is not a fair world, though sometimes (as here) gems of kindness gleam within it.  We are about to relive the God-Man's journey to a hill where a crowd watched, a Saviour died, but more truly he was the one who was watching them - "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing".  Never a truer, kinder, or more heartfelt observation by one man. 

By one man watching a dying crowd.

Rowan

Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams announced his resignation from that role as of the close of this year.

An atheist of Jewish heritage said, "He has done a very, very difficult job and seen the church through difficult times in a very skillful way. But most of all has shown himself to be someone of the deepest conviction and the deepest values and all my good wishes go with him."

A fellow Anglican Archbishop wrote, 'Rowan Williams took over the leadership of the Anglican Communion in 2002 when it was a happy family. Unfortunately, he is leaving behind a Communion in tatters: highly polarized, bitterly factionalized . . .'

Rowan Williams is a very reflective and prayerful man with a great mind.  But I doubt he can make any sense of those reactions on the public record.

Let us ask with Paul (Romans 14)

Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.”  So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer,

As a Football Chaplain it is amazing to see how football can publicly unite in support of its own, but the Church cannot.  Amazing, and frankly embarrassing to its Saviour and Head.

Literally AVD

Great regret has been expressed regarding Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, who said in a keynote speech last weekend,

It makes people so incredibly angry when you are getting up early in the morning, working really hard to try and do the right thing for your family and for your community, you are paying your taxes and then you see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.

If these people are literally in a different galaxy they are not, of course, liable for UK tax of any sort. Literally none. This is the kind of linguistic torture that many a public speaker (Guilty, m'Lud) inflicts on words.  Someone colourfully described it as AVD - Adjectival Vomiting Disease! 

Literally, for Nick, meant nothing of the sort.  In fact it means the opposite - metaphorically in a different galaxy, perhaps.

For all who claim to be Bible believers the word 'literally' is a heavily significant one.  The problem is that it is a word that serves us less well than we think.  For example,

"Do you believe there was a literal Good Samaritan?" is a fairly irrelevant question, though sometimes asked, compared to the more sobering, "Do you literally do what Jesus taught his hearer to do?"

Huge controversy surrounds the question, "Are the days in Genesis chapter 1 literal 24 hour days?" yet this is hardly a question at all.  Richard Dawkins, for example, believes that they are.  It's just that he inconveniently thinks that they are wrong.  Literal interpretation is not the same thing as faith.  Others believe that they are literal days in a piece of poetry.  Others believe they are not literal 24 hour days but believe they describe literal eras of creating.  Others believe that there were indeed seven 24 hour days but then have to wrestle with how the Word that spoke life to the dead in a moment took a whole 24 literal hours to create (or how the other 23+ hours did not constitute literal rest (which belongs to day seven)).  All of which is to say that literally is literally one of the more difficult words and concepts.

There are places where it is THE word however;

¹ Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain ³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.' [1 Corinthians 15] 

The Apostle is not vomiting adjectives; he is listing evidences.  It would reveal so much less if he had written that Jesus was literally risen from the dead.  Instead he shows how this must have happened, how we can know it happened, why it happened and why it matters.  Without a risen Saviour everything else about being human is ultimately useless.  Literally.