WAITING FOR A MIRACLE
IN THIS EDITION:
New Writing: Waiting for a Miracle
From the Archive: Trust, Receive, Tell
Poem of the Week: This Silent Night
News: Oxford Theology Day
Yesterday in our worship gathering in Caen we lit the first of four advent candles. We read from the prophet Isaiah – the hope of the one who would come to bring God’s shalom peace to an aching world. The wolf lying down with the lamb; the leopard with the goat (Isaiah 11:1-9). The day we all stop eating each other.
Isaiah’s powerful poetry hovered over the Hebrew people for centuries, resourcing their dreams; lending shape and substance to the miracle they longed for. Nobody was actually waiting for the local wolf to cosy up with a his new lamb companion, but the words were vehicle for a feeling – an aching desire for things to be different in the world. For light to dawn in dark places. For hope to arise in the face of desperation. For enemies to come to peace and the oppressed find freedom. The more recent poetry of Christmas songs often carries the same intent.
“Chains he shall break, for the slave in my brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease.”
Mary, in her song of praise and wonder (Luke 1:46-55) catches on the wind the same, strong message.
“He has brought down princes from their thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away with empty hands.”
At the heart of this hope, for Mary as for Isaiah, are the anawim, the humble poor of Hebrew tradition. These are people who have not landed on the winning side of life, but who have not lost faith in the possibility of change. Those who hunger but have not given up hope; who are bruised but still believe. Those who, according to Jesus, will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5, citing Psalm 37:11). In contemporary therapeutic language, we might say “those who know their need.” Meekness; humility; modesty; lowliness – the anawim are those who, like participants in a 12-Step programme, know that only,
“a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”
The hope of advent carries not only the recognition that I need an intervention from outside of myself to change my situation, but with it the assurance that such a power exists, and is coming. The faith of Abraham, bedrock of the Hebrew worldview, was at its heart a belief that the maker of all things; the creator of the heavens and the earth; is good and can be trusted. Our deliverer will come (Isaiah 59:20, Romans 11:26).
This is why I am so moved by the season of advent. The month of December functions like a life-wide reset. It restores me to the default settings given to me at my birth – to the stripped-back, foundational belief that I am the beloved of my maker; that for all the signs and signals to the contrary, he will come through for me. Waiting, it turns out, is the very essence of faith. Advent is fuelled by a longing for change. A need for salvation. On dark winter nights we enter into the hope of the Hebrew people: a people plunged into the darkness of occupation and oppression and faced with the silence of God. Day upon day the dark seems heavier, not lighter. Days grow shorter, nights longer. The God who seems distant from us appears to be receding, not approaching. We wonder if our liberation will ever arrive. But it does. It comes. He comes. The great power of advent lies in its capacity to identify the Christian story with those whose primary experience is of waiting, of longing. Slaves in their chains; paupers in their dereliction; the sick; the tired; the lonely; the lost – all these can find comfort in the Isaiah’s declaration that
“those who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).
Advent is not about empty promises and easy victories. It is about waiting for real deliverance.
Advent gives me the opportunity to recognise the anawim in me. In what regions of my soul I am the humble poor? Where am I waiting for a miracle? The Apostle John describes a particular group of believers in these words:
“You say, ‘I am rich. I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realise that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.” (Rev 3:17 NLT)
John is not being judgemental. This is not condemnation – it is hope! Why? Because it is where we are poor, and wretched; where we acknowledge our nakedness, that God can get at us to help us. It’s the hiding that keeps us from his healing. Might advent be just the time to let my poverty come to the surface; to admit that for all my strengths, it is here, in this precise place, that I am anawim?
While Isaiah uses images of wild animals calmed and tamed to carry the sense of this promise, Luke, in his Gospel narrative, uses shepherds. The wage-slave workers of their day, these herdsmen are the very image of the anawim: uneducated men, working for minimum wage, as far you can get from the circles of power and privilege. It is to these, the humble poor, that the good news of Christ’s birth is announced, and it is these who say,
“Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened!” (Luke 2:15 NLT)
This is the invitation of advent. Come and see what God has done. Come in your poverty; your rags. Bring with you your inability to change your own life for the better. Bring your dead-end situations; your unresolved issues; your unhealed wounds. Come and kneel before the humblest of Gods; the poorest of deities; the almighty stripped of privilege, and recognise the birth of hope. God’s intervention. The gift of heaven. Healing, for every place in you that lingers still in darkness.
IMAGE: https://unsplash.com/@waldemarbrandt67w
Gerard Kelly. The Seven Stories that Shape Your Life (pp. 86-92). Lion Hudson
In Acts 1:6–11 Jesus gathers his followers to explain what life will be like for them after his ascension. His life, death, and resurrection are now part of their history. Everything he came to do has been done and the baton is about to pass to them with the pouring out of God’s gift, the Holy Spirit. The age of the Spirit will be the age of the church, when the purposes of God will rest not on the one man, Jesus, but on the many – men and women who have surrendered their lives to God’s purposes and are living in the power and presence of his Spirit. This will not merely be an event to shake Jerusalem; it will be a movement that changes the world.
Jesus tells his friends – at this stage still a small group – that they will be the agents of this movement; that something will begin in them that will reach to the very edges of the world. In the course of telling them this, though, he includes another, unexpected, instruction. He tells them not to go anywhere. They are to wait for the outpouring of the Spirit, after which nothing stands between them and the very ends of the earth. They are to go nowhere until the Spirit comes, and then to go everywhere. Don’t start until God fills you, but when he’s filled you, don’t stop! Surely the words to his friends at this moment qualify, if anything does, as the core commissioning of the church to its life and mission. This is how the conversation plays out:
…when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?” He replied, “The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere – in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
(Acts 1:6-8)
These are the last words Jesus speaks before ascending to heaven. If he hadn’t already died and come back, you might call them his Last Will and Testament. It is on the basis of these words that the entire project of the church is built. The age of the Spirit – the age we have lived in since Jesus ascended and will live in until his return – is shaped by this commission: and the commission is Trinitarian to its core. Jesus asks his followers to do three distinct things: to leave it to the Father to decide when and how the kingdom will reach its final consummation; to be open to the empowerment of the Holy Spirit; and to tell everyone, everywhere his story – that is, the story of Jesus. You might summarize this Trinitarian framework for mission as:
• Trust the Father
• Receive the Spirit
• Tell the story of the Son.
And if you did, you would have a missional theology that could carry you to every sphere of culture, through every season of your life, and to every sector of the world: a story sufficient to sustain you to the very ends of the earth. The importance of this framework is the recognition that our mission is Trinitarian. The Father, Son, and Spirit are involved, each with a particular role or perspective to bring.
We trust the Father, because there will always be aspects of our life and mission that are too big for us to grasp. We do not see the whole picture, and we must learn to trust the voice that shows us our part in it. Our engagement with God’s mission must be anchored in this father-love that predates our existence by an unimaginable margin and is too broad and deep and long and high to be shaken or dented by our troubles, no matter how intense they are. Without this knowledge of a parent beyond and outside our existential experience, we will fluctuate with the wind. Only by throwing our anchor into the heart of the Father whose life is established beyond the very boundaries of time and space can we be fully secure. Writing to his friends in the church of Ephesus, the apostle Paul prays that they will,
“have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is”
(Ephesians 3:18 NLT).
This is the Father from whom all parenthood is derived,111 the God who can do more for us than we can even imagine (Ephesians 3:15). Only by being anchored in this ocean beyond ourselves can we hope that we will,
“no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.”
(Ephesians 4:14,15 NLT)
The picture is of stability that is derived not from our inner sense of control but from its opposite. By relinquishing control to the higher power of our loving maker, we find ourselves anchored in a rock that cannot be moved. We tend to move towards being in control, but only by losing control can we find life – and the opposite of control is trust. Can we trust our Father to look after the big picture while we faithfully pursue the small part of it he has revealed to us?
We receive the Spirit, because it is only by God’s dwelling in us by his Spirit that we can embrace the tasks and purposes he calls us to. If the Father is the one by whom we know, from the deepest past to the furthest future, that we are secure, the Spirit is the one by whom we know right now what it is to do the will of God. The Holy Spirit is God the present tense, our maker present in our present circumstance. To speak of trusting the Father, or of worshipping Jesus, without the existential reality of his Spirit with us is to tell only a small part of the story. Without the presence of the Spirit, the first disciples couldn’t even get out of the room they were meeting in. They prayed behind closed doors, locked behind the tight walls of their human limitations. They weren’t growing in any way and they weren’t going anywhere, even though they had been witnesses of the resurrection. Only when the Spirit came did their horizons widen. By the Spirit they broke out of their small room; they stirred the whole of Jerusalem; they received gifts beyond their expectations – and within weeks they began to see that this church would indeed go to the ends of the earth. There are only two sets of walls that can contain you: your own, which are narrow and tight and confine you to the tiniest corner of your God-given potential, or God’s, which are wider than the universe. Once the Holy Spirit has broken you out of your small selfdom, there is no limit to where he might take you. This act of receiving, of being open to God’s presence in your present, is deeply connected to your first act of trusting the Father. Because you trust the Father, Jesus says, wait for his gift. Don’t jump into your own plans; let him shape you in his. The Holy Spirit is the one by whom the purposes of God are actualised within you. There is nothing God wants to do in you or through you that will not be done through his Spirit. As often as you pray “Your will be done on earth as in heaven” you are praying, by implication, “Come, Holy Spirit”.
We tell the story of the Son, because it is the story of Jesus – the specific and particular account of the incarnation – that unlocks the purposes of God in every life. It is highly instructive that, having given such honour to the Father and the Spirit, Jesus says “You will be my witnesses.” Not “our”. The framework is triune but the story is singular: it is that of Jesus. Why? Because the story of our maker taking on flesh and becoming one of us and one with us is the unique, game-changing reality at the heart of all mission.
“Of our flesh and of our bone,” the hymn-writer Charles Wesley wrote, “Jesus is our brother now, and God is all our own”
(Charles Wesley , Glory be to God on high, And peace on earth descend)
The biography of God is Trinitarian, and there are truths we need to learn about Father, Son, and Spirit, but our way into that biography, the on-ramp that will take us to those truths, is the story of Jesus. This is true for a number of reasons, but two stand out at this point in history. The first is that the truth of the incarnation cannot be arrived at by a process of logic or intuition: we perceive it by revelation and its counterpart, confession. There is so much about God that makes sense. He is our maker; the power at the heart of the universe. All those sunsets and mountaintops must point us to something. But the confession that Jesus is both God and man is an irreducible minimum that we arrive at by faith and confess in trust. It takes us somewhere our reason will never carry us. The second reason this matters so much now is that post-modern sensitivities struggle intensely with this level of particularity. We are ready to say that God might exist and can speak and could even be a lot like the God the Bible describes; but to say that God has spoken, and that he has done so definitively in the historic, human life of the man Jesus, requires a different level of commitment. It shatters the misty numinousness of our wandering imaginations and asks us to give assent to a concrete, non-negotiable truth. It is this assertion that allows us to attach the adjective Christian to our faith and experience. This is not an easy step to take in our age, but it is the very challenge of taking it that makes it worthwhile. For the record, it wasn’t all that easy the first time round. The notion of an incarnation, particularly an incarnation that submitted to death, was scandalous to a Jewish audience and foolishness to the Greeks. Our struggle to believe is not all that new after all.
…Whoever we are, wherever we go, and whatever God asks us to do, it will be framed by this threefold challenge.
You who come
In the freshness of night
To huddle under breath clouds
At this stable
Harbouring hunger
Numbed by an unnamed need
Shivering in the threadbare cloths
Of thin humanity
You who know in these moments
When knowing matters and is possible
How deep a hope it is
We lack and long for
Who tremble at the tremors of the earth
And hear the quiet keening of creation
Who recognise that though your eyes are dry
Other eyes than yours
Make lakes of tears
You who seek peace
In the presence of the Christ child
In the light of love revealed
In the knowledge of salvation set in motion
Frozen in this silence
Still in a turning world
May you hear the hope of heaven
And be healed
Source: Gerard Kelly, I SEE A NEW CITY, Chamine Press, 2020
It was a privilege to be involved in the Gather Movement’s Oxford Theology Day in November. We met to explore the biblical vision of city transformation. The end-goal is to resource and inspire practitioners who are seeking through unity movements to being redemption to their towns and cities across the UK. Piet Brinksma gave an excellent account of lessons learned in 30 years of ministry in the city of Amsterdam. Steve Jones, Pastor of Oxford Community Church, reflected on similar learning in Oxford’s very different context, while Becky Ingamells from Tearfund unpacked their valuable learning resource the Light Wheel Toolkit. We also heard from Steve Sutton on exciting developments on Teesside, and from Osoba Otaigbe on the multi-cultural implications of city-wide unity. A running theme of the day is the need for God’s wisdom in our lives and work: defined as God’s truth applied and practiced in real-world situations. Each of the speakers I have mentioned here has given their lives to doing just that, and it is thrilling to hear their stories.
Image: Rachel Ho
A highlight of the Theology Day was a presentation and workshop by ceramicist Rachel Ho. Inspired by the ancient art of Kintsugi, Rachel works with ‘scarred pots’ to enable individuals to recognise, value and process the scars in their own lives. Originally developed for one close friend fighting cancer, the concept has now spread through the ‘Gift to The City’ project, in which scarred pots are left at random locations around the city to be discovered, considered and in most cases kept by members of the public. A flood of diverse and moving letters has shown how powerful the response has been. On a day that was for the most part given to words and ideas, this practical, non-verbal demonstration of compassion and hope was both refreshing and inspiring.
