St Paul, sex, betrayal and faithfulness...

I realised that in ten years of preaching I don't think I've ever preached anything about sex.  Maybe it's because I get fed up with the way people assume that all Christians ever want to do is tell everyone that they shouldn't be doing 'it', apart from under rather proscribed circumstances.  But when this week's reading came out, with the big word FORNICATION in the middle I thought, 'hmm, maybe I ought to say something about this for a change.'  This was rather complicated by realising that I didn't actually know what fornicate actually means.  So I thought I'd better do a little homework.  This is what came out...

Bible Reading
Colossians 3:1-11
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

Betrayal and Faithfulness
My friends have occasionally poked fun at me when I’ve slipped up, muttered something under my breath or sworn at another driver, with the phrase, ‘And you... A vicar....’  If you're religious, it wouldn’t surprise me if you have had similar experiences where people have judged you perhaps because you call yourself a Christian (or some other path - but I'm going to focus on Christianity here) but then often don’t live up to their standard of what being a Christian should entail.  In other words their understanding of being a Christian is entirely based around ethics.  It’s not what you believe but how you live that counts in their eyes, and I suspect often in our eyes too.  I have sometimes heard people say, ‘I try to be a Christian’.  I don’t try to be a Christian.  I am one.  It’s a bit like saying I try to be a man.  Genetically I have no choice in the matter.  Every cell in my body has x and y chromosomes.  I might try to be a good man, but I can’t help being a man.  But people in general don’t view Christianity like that.  They think trying to be a Christian means trying to be 'good', assuming that Christianity means you have high ethical values and always do the right thing, usually feeling morally superior for doing so.  That’s one of the reasons why people call us hypocrites because they tell us we say one thing and then do another.

Actually, if we’re wise, we don’t tell other people how they should live.  But perhaps we ought to think sometimes about how we are supposed to live as Christians.  I don't often preach about morals because it's such a cultural minefield (and I really don't want to be accused of hypocrisy myself because I'm not a particularly 'good' person).  And then every so often I read a passage and it’s simply focusing on ethics.  That’s what we find in the Colossians reading where it’s not so much about what we believe, but how we live as a result of what we believe.

This last bit, the ‘as a result of’ bit is really important. 

This, and I’d like to underline what I’m saying here, is not about Christians telling other people how to live.  This is not about us moralising to the world in general.  Instead what we find in this passage is a series of prohibitions that I think are all linked by one common theme, the choice between faithfulness or betrayal. This is not so much about rules, but about the ethics that flow from what we believe, and why those ethics should flow.  It is therefore not our place to tell other people how they should live.  That is up to them and to their beliefs, but for those of us who call ourselves Christians, St. Paul is trying to tell us some important truths about how he thinks we should be living.  What I want to do with this is ask, 'Why?'  Why should we live like this?

So let’s have a think about the context of the letter as a whole and then see what is being said to us as Christians.  Now the funny thing about this book is that the backdrop to it seems to be just what I’ve described, that the Colossian church had become rather caught up in moralism as opposed to spirituality.  They were metaphorically putting the cart before the horse.  Morals should flow from spirituality, but they were beginning with the moralising.    If you were to read the previous chapter you can see St. Paul saying that they must not be taken captive to people telling them strict rules about how they had to live and about self-abasement, rules, self-imposed piety and severe treatment of the body.  His main argument is that Christ died literally to these things, and in him we should also be dead to them because he is living within us.  Rules on simply appearing pure by living according to strict religious piety are not in St. Paul’s book.

Or so it seems...

But then when we read this passage what we get is what looks like a whole series of rules.  But appearances can be deceptive.  What St. Paul is saying, what his essential message is, is that as Christians our minds should be turned towards the things of God and away from being held captive to cultural standards.  In other words our ethics should flow naturally out from what we believe and how it liberates us to be free, and faithfulness or betrayal feels like the choice we are offered.  To my mind everything in this list is about betrayal.

So we get the list, that from our spirituality should flow a desire to turn our backs on fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).  I think all of these need some unpacking.  After all, what is fornication?  If you are conservative in your beliefs you’ll probably have a very wide understanding of the word, so that it refers to pretty much every sexual possibility other than what takes place between a husband and wife that could lead to conception!  The reality is that actually this is one of those words which is really difficult to get the correct interpretation.  It seems most likely that people will say what they want it to mean in order to provoke feelings of guilt in those who don’t behave the way their leader thinks they should.  So in order to try and help those who feel eternally guilty because of normal human drives, let me say that fornication appears to mean one of three things, it is first and foremost tied linguistically to mean visiting a prostitute because the root meaning of the word fornication comes from the Latin word, fornix, which means an arch which was a euphemism for a brothel. The other two meanings are either adultery or incest.

Let me see if I can make it fairly clear then.  Fornication is basically the sexual betrayal of the one to whom you are committed, usually through what was then an illegal act, and for Christians it shouldn’t happen because our spirituality should be moving us towards faithfulness in all our dealings.

The betrayal theme continues with the prohibition against impurity.  Again, what does he mean by impurity?  Sometimes this is translated as uncleanliness but remember that Jesus and his disciples violated a number of Jewish purity laws.  So St. Paul probably means something different from that and perhaps the closest we can get to it is sexual indecency, because the word he used, akatharsia, was normally used by St. Paul in a sexual context.  Whereas fornication referred to illegal sexual acts in that culture you could probably say that uncleanliness referred to immoral or questionable sexual acts in that culture.  Now this one is much more difficult to define but I think that again you need to ask the question, is the action you’re contemplating going in some way to betray the person to whom you are committed?  If the answer is yes, then that falls into the category of uncleanliness.

How about passion then?  How on earth does that get into a list of improper behaviour for a Christian?  After all, shouldn’t I feel passion for my wife, and don’t we talk about the Passion of Christ?  Well once again we’re in the realm of sex and this time it is not the proper appropriate desire for our beloved, but unrestrained passion.  Once again it is the betrayal of the person closest to us by directing the passion that is properly theirs towards another. 

How about evil desire?  Well at last we get away from sex, (at least a little).  Desire in itself is morally neutral.  In a good relationship the couple naturally desire each other, but St. Paul clearly gives it a moral compass by referring specifically to evil desire.  What makes it evil?  When you desire something that is not yours to have.  It is basically about not being content. 

And once again we have a sense of betrayal. 

Now it is about betraying God by being discontent with what God has provided.  There is a subtle tension here with right and proper ambition which is to make the best use of your gifts and abilities, which can sometimes involve striving and working hard, as opposed to the desire to have more and more...

...which leads naturally to greed which is more of the same but rather more intense, being an insatiable desire to have more; more power, more money, more sex.  Why is this idolatry?  Simply because of what I have already said, that it is not being content with what God has provided and choosing to try and get more.  By doing so one is saying to God, ‘You are not enough for me.’

Now there is a second list here, of anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth, but to be honest I think I would be repeating the same message.  In the first list the failure is one of betrayal, either of your spouse or partner, or of betraying God.  The same could be said about the second list except that now they are very clearly tied to outward and mainly verbal expressions, but the same thing applies - each one is a betrayal.

So what then can we say about this passage?  I think its key message is this.  If you are a Christian then you are someone who recognises the love of God and God’s faithfulness to us by coming to demonstrate his nature in the person of Christ.  St. Paul is saying that since God is faithful to us we should naturally reciprocate by being faithful to him and to each other. 

If the Holy Spirit is living within us, then God’s natural actions should begin to flow through us.  So if God is faithful to us then we should be becoming faithful to God and to each other.  This then is basically a passage about how being a Christian means that we should be faithful to God in exactly the same way as God is faithful to us.  This is about reciprocal behaviour.

Of course it’s not easy.  Everyone of us, at some point in our lives, and perhaps at many points, will be confronted with the temptation to be unfaithful by our words or our actions to those who love us, either our family, our friends, our beloved, fellow Christians, or our God.  More or less what St. Paul is saying here is, God lives in you.  God is faithful.  So do likewise and let God’s likeness live out through you.

Or more simply - God is faithful to us.  We should therefore be faithful to God and each other. 

I was thinking about the Lord's prayer this week, and it got me thinking that it's not the world's most advanced kind of prayer.  And maybe that's the whole point....


Luke 11:1-13

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’
Perseverance in Prayer

And he said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

‘So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’


Prayer and Painting...
My grandmother was an artist.  You could provide her with a photograph of anything and she would return with a wonderfully artistic rendition in oils of the subject.  But as a small boy I wasn’t particularly interested in idyllic waterfalls and landscapes.  For me it was all about dinosaurs, which inevitably led to the request, ‘Gran, can you paint me a dinosaur?’  No photos were available for this task.  Yet still she set to, and on my birthday I was presented with a lovely painting, which I still have, of a Stegosaurus.  You can imagine my pride as a small boy.  I could tell my friends that my Gran painted me a dinosaur.  Eventually, though, it wasn’t enough.  My Gran had painted me a dinosaur, and now I wanted to paint one.  So I sat down with my Gran and said, ‘Teach me how to paint this afternoon.’  Bless her, she laughed, knowing that I had assumed that in one fell swoop I would emerge from my lesson as a fully fledged artist.  She had first to correct my assumption that I would become an expert in painting in one afternoon before she had a hope of teaching me how to paint.

And that, I believe, is what we find in the passage here.  Jesus is asked by his disciples about how to pray, and first he needed to correct some of their assumptions.  So what, I wonder, did they assume?  Well firstly we can see from the way the passage opens that they had seen Jesus at prayer, and clearly there was something about that which they wanted to do because he always prayed before doing something special.  And it’s also no surprise that we find this particular story in Luke’s Gospel because Luke has more about Jesus and prayer than any other Gospel.

When Jesus was himself baptised it is Luke who recalls that the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus after his baptism when he was praying.  Mark and Matthew miss that detail out.  When it comes to the choosing of the twelve apostles it is only Luke who says that Jesus spent the entire night in prayer on a mountain on his own before choosing them.

When Jesus asks his disciples who other people say he is, once again it is Luke who recalls the detail that before asking the question Jesus was on his own praying.  And the list goes on.  Luke clearly has a thing about Jesus and prayer and so at key critical moments in his ministry he records that Jesus was deep in prayer beforehand.

Prayer was an indispensable part of his life, and the disciples saw that about him, and so they asked him to teach them how to pray, and I find myself wondering whether they had the same impression about prayer as I had about painting, that all you need is an afternoon with someone and you will come out as a master.  So they say to him, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’  Now I find it quite interesting the prayer he teaches them, which in its lengthened form came to be known as the Lord’s prayer.  As I look at this I find myself thinking that this is probably a beginner’s prayer.  This is not the kind of prayer that Jesus would have stayed up for an entire night on a mountainside praying.

Think of it like this.  I say to my Gran, ‘Teach me how to paint a dinosaur Gran’.  So she says to me, ‘First you need to start with a cat.  You draw an egg shape for its body, then add a circle on the top where you’re going to sketch out its head, then two triangles for the ears, then...’  Meanwhile I’m saying, ‘Yes Gran, but what about a dinosaur’, to which she says, ‘Firstly you have to get the basics right...’

And that’s what’s going on here.  This is a really basic prayer, but it’s still challenging.  All it has about it is a series of, ‘God, please do this for me.’  In other words this prayer is simply about teaching us to whom it is that we turn for everything.  This prayer is about learning to become God-centred rather than self-centred. And then, as if to underline this we get a story about persistence.  Now let me hark back to my dinosaur painting art skills, you see the sad news is that I have none.  My ability to look at something with my eyes and transfer that to the movement of a pencil or paintbrush are lamentable.  Why?  Because I was not persistent.  I wanted to draw dinosaurs, not simple cats.  So when my Gran gave me a simple exercise; the artistic equivalent of the Lord’s prayer, I got bored and gave up.  But had I stuck at it, I might have learned the skills at just the right time for my young brain to integrate them.  I didn’t and consequently I have never been any good at it.

And I think that’s where this story of persistent prayer is coming from.  Now it is really important that we don’t think of this as an allegory.  God is not like a grumpy neighbour who will only respond to us if we keep nagging him.  The real point of this story is that in the middle eastern culture it would be unthinkable for a neighbour to refuse to help someone in need.  It simply didn’t happen.  The idea in this story is that the neighbour finally responds because of his fear of what other people would say about him, not because someone is at the door nagging him.  Jesus is essentially saying, ‘Look you would not ever contemplate refusing to listen to a neighbour in need, so how much more do you think God your Father listens to you?’

What Jesus is encouraging here is persistence because it is only by persisting in prayer that we will begin to be any good at it.  So let me underline something.  Prayer is an indispensable part of being a Christian. 

So how then do you pray?  Well the Lord’s prayer is indeed a good place to start, but remember it really is a beginner’s prayer.  You won’t spend a whole night praying on a mountainside to the words of ‘Our Father’.  But it does demonstrate how we naturally all begin with prayer.  ‘Lord, please can I have...’  Everyone knows how to ask God to do something but few of us have put in the persistence to learn how to listen when God asks us to do something, but listening is just as important as speaking.  Imagine a married couple where they sit down together and both just start speaking at each other..  Prayer needs to be like a rhythm, and a rhythm is constructed of a beat and spaces between the beat.  With no spaces it’s just noise.

So how can you learn to pray?  I'd say look for the silent spaces and inhabit them, listening.  You may wish to wait on God outside, as Jesus often did.  I find, as you can probably guess, that this works especially well for me.  In the non-technological sound of nature I am learning to discern the voice of God.  Or you may wish to use a prayer book.  I recommend Tess Ward’s ‘The Celtic Wheel of the Year’, if you want a book more centred on God’s revelation through the natural world.

Prayer is meant to develop into a place where it is less about asking for something and more about putting yourself in a place where God can interact with you, or as James Allison describes it, prayer is about ‘undergoing God’.  That can be extraordinarily comforting or deeply unsettling, and at its best, prayer should be both of those.

What each of us desperately needs is to make time for prayer, at the very least every other day, and practice.  It is only by doing it often and regularly that we begin to learn how to do it.  It is only by being persistent that we start to hear the sound of the voice of God.  It is only in the silence that we can begin to hear the Still Small Voice of God.

Now I am aware that there are all sorts of things I haven’t dealt with here, like what happens when we ask for something and God doesn’t answer.  We all know how that feels but it’s a subject for another time.  What I really want to hammer home today is that prayer is an indispensable part of being a Christian, and the Lord’s prayer is just a starter prayer.

So you can either aim to learn to pray by persistent practice, or you can be stuck drawing the spiritual equivalents of cats made of ovals and circles because you didn’t put the time in to build the discipline.  Prayer is an indispensable part of being a Christian.  It’s for all of us, and I promise you this, it’s life changing.

Looking in the mirror, self image, and Mary Magdalene (my favourite saint!)

Readings
2 Corinthians 5:14-17
For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.  From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

Luke 8:1-3
Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

The Mirror
What do you see when you look in the mirror?  I suspect that the answer you give will depend on your perspective.  So let’s go back one stage and ask, if you are standing next to a friend, in front of a mirror, what do you see when you look at them instead of at yourself?  That answer is relatively easy.  What you see is a mirror image of that person, with left and right reversed from how you normally see them in real life, and with their three dimensionality reduced to just two dimensions, the flatness of the mirror.  So with your friend what you see is simply your friend, the person that you know and like.

But now cast your eyes back across to yourself and what do you see?  Now everything changes because your self-image impinges hugely on the image standing before you.  People who have suffered from anorexia and are very thin will usually see someone fat and unlovable, often to the great frustration of those who love them.  People who have been mistreated by others will often see someone who is ugly and unworthy of love.  And for some who have been through severe mistreatment they may even go so far as to take down all the mirrors in the house, or refuse to ever look at themselves in the mirror. 

To a scientist a mirror image is a straightforward reflection but to a person their image in the mirror is anything but straightforward.  It is complex and complicated, shaped almost entirely based on their self-image which is itself shaped on the interactions that we have had with other people. 

And of course the self-image might be mistaken in a different way.  A person can preen in front of a mirror, believing themselves to be entirely beautiful and lovable because their inherent narcissism has blinded them to their true image.  This is the kind of lying-to-self that can be found behind an old man thinking himself somehow to be still uber-attractive to a twenty year old woman.  It is the same kind of self-deception as someone who see themselves as worthless and therefore ugly when they look in the mirror, only now it’s reversed.  But the same thing is still going on, that the narcissist somehow believes they are attractive to everyone and is just as unable to see their true self, and just as unable to accept who they really are, as the person who believes themselves to be unlovable.

All of this, believe it or not, leads us to my favourite saint, Mary Magdalene.  We actually know very little about her, but we can infer a great deal from that information.  In the above reading she is introduced as the woman from whom seven demons had been cast out by Jesus, and near the end of John’s Gospel she is the first person that Jesus reveals himself to after his resurrection.  Those two incidents cover a myriad of possibilities. She also shows up in other ancient writings suggesting that she developed a deep friendship with Jesus and went on to be a leader in the early church.  It has also been suggested that she may even have been a contemporary of Jesus’s mother.  From all of this we can infer that when she had first met Jesus she had been a very troubled woman.  She seems to have been subject to some kind of spiritual oppression although what the meaning of the ‘seven demons’ is can be difficult to fathom.  Whichever way we look at it, it seems likely to me that Mary would have been someone who would have been, if she looked in the mirror, deeply unhappy at what she saw.

So what, then, did Jesus see when he looked at her?  I believe he saw a world of possibilities.  I believe he saw who Mary could become, not who Mary currently was.  Jesus sees people differently.  He sees potential. He can see past the difficulties, the mistakes and the blind alleys, and can see the true self that’s hidden there.  And then he acts, and he goes on acting, in order to bring out the possibilities that he sees. What happens next is up to the person he is looking at.  Mary Magdalene she responded positively.  She allowed herself to be made spiritually clean.  She allowed herself to begin to become the person that Jesus could see.  That went to the extent that by the time of his resurrection Jesus felt that he could trust her as being the person to whom he would reveal himself first, believing that she was now ready to be able to go to the remaining disciples with the message, ‘I have seen the Lord.’

This seems to me to be what St. Paul is referring to when he says in his second letter to the Corinthian church that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation.  The old has gone and everything has been made new.  That’s how it was for Mary.  The old person who was deeply troubled, perhaps unsure of herself, and probably someone who wouldn’t want to look in a mirror, allowed herself to be seen by Jesus and dared to hope that she could be the person that he saw rather than the one that she saw in the mirror, and so the transformation began.

And that’s what happens when a new creation looks in the mirror.  Slowly and gradually they begin to see not themselves, but to see what Jesus sees.  It can be a long process, and sometimes we have to accept that seeing ourselves as Jesus sees us can be a humbling experience because it might just be that we’re not as desirable a person as we think we are.

But nevertheless we can still be seen by him; we can still be transformed, and we can still be made new.  That’s what happened to Mary Magdalene.

So the questions this leaves us with are, who do you see when you look in the mirror, and what do you think Christ sees when he looks at you?  Because if you wish to be transformed into a new creation, then the first step is praying that we can see ourselves as he sees us, and seeing the vision for what we can become. 

Thinking about Science and Faith - with apologies (or gratitude!) to Kant.

When I was working in science I had a colleague who was an atheist.  We would debate long and hard but usually in a friendly manner.  We had little common ground and never reached any kind of agreement, but it was quite fun.  However, over the last decade we have watched the rise of a more militant atheism, a sort of scientific super-rationalism, which believes religion to be completely irrational and as something that should be abolished.  Now it comes with a certain degree of relief that recently we have begun to see a slightly less hard-edged debate taking place as Dawkins et al have become marginalised by their own camp and are becoming more widely recognised as having little understanding of religion and spirituality, preferring instead to point at a Christian ‘Aunt-Sally’ that few genuine believers would recognise as anything more than a crude caricature of their faith.  Nevertheless many of us, from time to time, will find ourselves sat over the dinner table from someone who may be quite aggressive in their atheism.  It’s very difficult to know how to respond to someone who won’t listen to reasoned debate, but maybe it’s worth pointing out a few home truths about the limits of science and atheism.

The most fundamental point about science is this: Science cannot ever prove something to be correct.  I have had long arguments with people about this, but having trained and worked as a scientist this is one area where I think I do know what I’m talking about, so let me repeat it since modern media commentators often seem oblivious of this.  Science cannot ever prove something to be correct. Science can only ever prove that a theory is wrong, it can never prove that it is right.  The best science can do is to say that the results of a particular experiment are consistent with the theory which is being tested.  When commenting on results in the laboratory we would always respond with, ‘The results are consistent with...’  It therefore follows that if anyone tells you that science has proven that religion is nonsense or that God does not exist, that person has shown themselves to have a poor understanding of what science can actually do.  You can ask them to tell you of one thing that science has actually proven.  In fact in the real world it’s surprisingly hard to prove the reality of anything.  Why?  Let me see if I can explain...

Your understanding of the world around you is based entirely on the senses that you have.  We have the main five senses, sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste, and somewhere between four and sixteen other senses, depending on who you talk to.  All of them are geared up to providing you with information about the physical world around you that evolution selected for humanity in order to survive.  So your picture is based entirely on the world according to your senses.  But what if the world has other things within it that evolution didn’t select a detection mechanism for because interactions are less predictable?  Then we would be largely oblivious to them.  You might remember the old VW advert with angels sitting on all the cars.  Whilst I’m not suggesting that’s the truth, if the presence of angels, for example, falls outside our sensing detection mechanisms then none of us have any way whatsoever of knowing they are there.  We simply cannot prove their existence or non-existence.  So what, then, about science and scientific instruments?  Well the same arguments apply.  We have the most incredibly sensitive instrumentation now, with telescopes like the sadly now defunct Kepler able to determine the slightest wobble in a star’s position or the tiniest dip in its light, therefore enabling the detection of planets on stars that would take us many thousands of years to reach because of their distance.  But the flaw is that all of our scientific instruments are geared up to detect things that we are already aware of through our senses.  We’re using light to detect planets around distant stars, but our instruments are just extensions of our eyes.  However, we wouldn’t know how to design a machine capable of detecting something whose existence falls beyond human perception because we would have no idea what to look for.  Even within science there is a growing awareness of this.  For example we now believe that the greater proportion of the universe is made up of Dark Matter and Dark Energy with the visible world accounting for just 5% of all that exists.  The only reason we believe in Dark Matter is because our galaxy couldn’t exist without flying apart if it wasn’t there because of the extra gravitation pull it imparts.  So we can infer its reality from what our human senses enhanced by technology tell us.  But we don’t know what it’s made of and have very little idea how to detect it or measure it.  Science is struggling with this one.  I expect eventually we’ll figure it out, but it gives us pause for thought: If science is having a hard time measuring something that we can’t see and know is different from normal matter and can only infer its existence because of the way normal matter moves, how on earth can science be so arrogant as to say, ‘If we can’t see it or measure it then it isn’t real.’  Science only works with that which can be measured.  Everything beyond that is theory.

So the next time someone tells you that science has shown that God doesn’t exist, ask them to prove it.  You could even ask them to prove that you exist, which again is not as easy as you might imagine because our senses can be easily fooled.  Ultimately atheism is a position of faith, just like Christianity.  For me, speaking using scientific language, I would have to say that my spiritual experiences are consistent with the existence of a loving God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that’s why I believe.  I cannot prove God’s existence, but I also know that it also cannot be proven otherwise.

Actions and consequences - blurring the lines between good and bad.

Sometimes I find that when I look back on my actions I find that something good has come out of an unwise choice.  Did that make it a 'wise' choice in actuality?  I don't think so.  But our actions have consequences we cannot foresee...
Reading
Acts 16:16-34
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And it came out that very hour.  But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, ‘These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.’ The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.’ The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They answered, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

Actions and Consequences
There is so much good news to reflect on here, but I feel that there is another story going on as well, the one which Luke tells us almost inadvertently about how badly things can go wrong when we let loose with a bad temper, particularly if we are engaged in something spiritual.  So let me begin with a story. Many years ago, when Ali and I were first married our musical tastes were somewhat more narrow than what they are now and we played in a heavy rock band. Unusually we were a four piece made up of two men and two women. Ali and I were joined by a brilliantly creative guitarist who I had known since college. Our four piece was completed by a young woman on bass guitar and backing vocals who Ali had been at youth group with. So we had a lot of history together and worked well as a team. We were all on faith journeys and were haltingly and unsteadily growing as Christians as well as musicians.

It was exciting for us because we were just beginning to get noticed, and then our bass guitarist dropped what seemed at that time like a bit of bombshell. She had decided to go back to university and would we mind not gigging very much while she finished her degree. My response was, let’s say, not altogether charitable.  There followed an exchange of letters in which I responded out of what I wanted and what I felt the band should be doing rather than out of compassion for her needs. In the ensuing split our friendship was shattered and she was deeply hurt. I had reacted out of anger because of what I wanted rather than out of compassion for what she needed. I’ll come back to this story later.

So let’s turn to that reading from Acts, and you may recall that in my last post I mentioned St. Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the speculations surrounding it. Some church people, fairly typically, have assumed that St. Paul was struggling with some kind of sexual issue. Others have suggested that it may be that his eyesight was not as healed as he suggested after his blinding encounter with Christ on the Damascus road.  But I still feel the evidence suggests that the thorn in his flesh that he was referring to was a problem with anger. Now it is interesting to note that God was able to use that anger to bring something good out of it, i.e. the salvation of the jailer and his family, but there is an innocent party in all this who simply disappears, never to be heard of again.

I am, of course, thinking of the slave girl.

Now we need to be quite clear in our terminology here as to how we describe her. Although she is often referred to by commentators as a demon-possessed woman, that is not what Luke calls her. Remember that Luke is always quite clear about what he means, but translators and commentators sometimes muddy the waters.  So translations tend to say either that she had a spirit of divination or a spirit by which she told the future but what Luke actually says in the Greek is that she had a spirit of a python, and whilst that sounds odd to us it is actually very specific when we look at what it actually means. It refers to the Greek deity, Apollo whose symbol at his Temple at Mount Parnassus was a snake.  There were there the Delphic oracle readers who were usually young women. When in a trance state they could be asked questions and would give what would be thought of as answers from Apollo.

Now we should in no way interpret this poor slave girl as being remotely on a par with an Oracle at Parnassus, but she was thought of by Luke as being possessed by the same Python spirit and it was through this that she told fortunes. Two things stand out for me in this. Firstly St. Luke makes no comment about the nature of this spirit. He doesn’t call it an unclean spirit. Nor does he call it a demon.  Given his usual attention to detail we should be cautious not to jump to any conclusion there either. Luke was of his culture. This woman had the spirit of a python and through it she told the future. That’s all there was to it.
I think that actually it’s more important for us that we acknowledge her social status. Basically she had none. She was a slave so she had no rights of her own. She ‘belonged’ to someone else and they made money out of her. She was used.  If you remember from the last post I wrote about Lydia who was a rich independent woman trader in expensive purple cloths. The slave girl is at totally the opposite end of the social spectrum. She has nothing and Luke gives her no name. So what happens next?

She latches on to Paul and Silas and follows them around. From not too far away she bears witness to them saying, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way fo salvation.’ She is bearing testimony to their testimony. It is interesting that she uses the phrase, ‘Most High God.’ This is more-or-less a catch-all interfaith phrase.  For the Greek they would think it meant Zeus. For the Jew it referred to Yahweh. Either way people would know what she meant. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that this title goes back a long way and followers of both religions would have recognised and owned it.

So she follows them for some time, calling out who they were and what they were doing. We have no idea what the girl’s owners were doing at this time. Maybe Paul and Silas were drawing a crowd through their words and she was aligning herself to them so that they were able to make money by offering her fortune telling abilities. Maybe she was under a compulsion because of the spirit. We just have no idea.  I don’t know that was what was on Luke’s mind as he told this tale. But for whatever reason, Paul, being very much annoyed by this woman, and without asking her, casts the spirit out in the name of Jesus. It matters not whether we think of the spirit as an evil spirit, an animal spirit or the spirit of a dead person. It was given no choice but Christ’s name and the intent behind it meant the spirit had to leave.

But this is what disturbs me:
Paul acts out of anger.
Paul asks the girl nothing about her own opinion.
Paul treats her with nothing like the respect that he treated the well-off Lydia, and Paul’s actions, however we want to judge them, make her worthless to her owners. She is no longer of any value to them.

And so she simply disappears.

Paul reacted out of anger, not out of compassion and when we react emotionally rather than spiritually then people can get hurt. We have no idea what became of this young woman but I suspect that if she went on to become a believer then Luke would have told us, given his eye for detail. Instead we are left with the sad open-ended fear that the slave-girl’s future would have been pretty bleak. 

Now of course many people would want to point at what happens next. Paul and Silas are arrested on totally trumped up charges, they get beaten into a bloody mess yet still praise God in jail through their bruises. A miraculous earthquake and Paul’s quick thinking mean that the jailer becomes a Christian and another believer and his household is added to the fledgling church at Philippi.  But I want to suggest that this is the grace of God working with the consequences of Paul’s actions rather than the will of God from the outset. It seems unthinkable to me that given all the evidence from prophecies in scripture and from the lips of Jesus about how God was on the side of the poor, that he would have caused the downfall of the slave-girl in order to save the jailer who was probably a fairly well-off retired Roman soldier.  Instead this seems to me about how God works in the midst of our worst impulses to bring about the best outcome.

Let me return to the story I began with about the band. After a little while we recruited a new bass guitarist, and following a change of direction we recruited a fiddle player. Shortly after that we were offered a record deal with a small independent label.  The new bass guitarist and new fiddle player fell in love, married and had two children, and we still play together and the band continues as we work on a new album. In other words, out from the ashes of my angry response God was able to bring something quite beautiful.

But nevertheless I am still left with a sense of hollowness, a wondering of what ever happened to our original bass guitarist.  Did she ever return to her spiritual journey? Was God able to bring something good out of that mess for her?

So for me this story is a reminder of the need for our actions to be rooted in a deep and calm spirituality; of being people who respond first and foremost with love and compassion rather than anger. We can be truly grateful that God is able, in God’s grace and love, to bring something good out of the difficulties we weave.   But we should never forget that our actions have consequences, and a sharp retort out of anger can change someone’s life forever. Our tongues have a lot of power. May we learn to use them wisely.

Steamrollers and listeners.

Sorry, two readings to go with these ideas, but if you only have time for one, read the first one.
Acts 16:9-15
They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.  We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshipper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.’ And she prevailed upon us.

John 14:23-29
Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.  I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.

Steamrollers and Listeners
It can be difficult to know what we should do about communicating our faith. Many of us have experienced the person with the steam-roller faith, that is they seem compelled to mention Christ in every conversation and appear determined to tell you what you should do in any given situation, regardless of whether you believe what they believe.  For people like this they present as operating under some kind of compulsion to speak about their faith. The reasons for that can range widely. There are those who speak from a sense of guilt that Jesus called them to be witnesses and so they feel they must speak about him all the time or they’re letting the side down.

At the other end there are those who just seem completely unaware that they may actually being doing damage simply because they are determined to show everyone that what they believe is right, but are often speaking at the wrong time. But for many of us who don’t talk about our faith all that often, we are left with a feeling of guilt because we see these men and women of faith and think we ought to be like that, yet we feel too timid to say anything.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is the third way, the mature way of listening and speaking wisely into a situation because we have sensed somehow that we are being prompted to speak because to do so would help. So this is about listening.

Who remembers the infamous Poll Tax I wonder? It was around the time Alison and I were getting married, in the late 1980's, and it was one of the defining moments in the decline of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and a clear example of a government that had lost touch with the country it was meant to be governing.  To the Cabinet it seemed fair that everyone who resided in a constituency should pay the same community charge for the services they were receiving. But when one spoke to the people of this country it became steadily more clear that they disagreed, and that payment should be according to ability to pay.

But the government refused to listen.

The Poll Tax riots ensued and general opposition steadily grew. Yet still the government refused to listen. By the time of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation she was defending a policy that only 12% of the population wanted according to a survey in the Times in April 1990. Her successor, John Major, in his very first parliamentary speech, announced that the community charge was to be abandoned in favour of the council tax which took account of the value of a property. Now there were many reasons why Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister came to an end, but it is widely felt that her unwillingness to listen to others, as exemplified by her refusal to change course on the poll tax, was a key reason for the withdrawal of support from her by her own party.  As such she shows us a pretty good example of how badly wrong things can go when we don’t listen, and how it is possible to weave for ourselves a web of self-deception. I wonder what leads to this? For some people is it perhaps pride? In his book, ‘Mere Christianity’ C.S. Lewis said

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and...as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."

With that in mind let’s take a look at the reading from Acts where we have this curious story of how St. Paul and his co-workers found themselves in Macedonia. St. Luke tells of how Paul and his team were not permitted by the Holy Spirit to go into Asia to preach. Luke doesn’t give us any background to this, he just simply says that they were forbidden.  As they continued on their journey they attempted to enter Bithynia, but were again thwarted, this time, he says, by the Spirit of Jesus. Again we don’t know exactly what that means, but clearly the Lord wanted them elsewhere. So they continued on their missionary journey, arriving in Troas and it was there that Paul had a vision. You may remember that last week we heard about Peter having a vision leading him to the Gentiles. Now it is Paul’s turn, and so he is convinced by this vision of a man from Macedonia pleading to come and help them that this is where they are being called to go.

Notice the huge contrast between Paul’s actions with respect to listening to God and those of Margaret Thatcher with respect to listening to the people. Paul remained in touch with God. His prayer life had led him to the point where his spirituality was deeply in tune with what the Holy Spirit was calling him to do and I am convinced that this was at least in part because of his humility.  If I am honest I do not believe humility to have been easy for him. In his second letter to the Corinthian church St. Paul writes of the thorn in his flesh sent to test him. He writes of how he prayed that God would take it away from him, and God refused saying that his grace was sufficient. We don’t know what his thorn in the flesh was but I would speculate that it was anger and a bad temper.  There are, after all, numerous occasions in the New Testament stories, both in Acts and in his own letters, where it becomes apparent that Paul was an angry man, and sometimes it got the better of him. But God said he should live with it. Why? I suspect it’s because it kept him honest and humble.  St. Paul had to accept that there was a part of his nature that he seemed incapable of being in total control of. And because of that fault he was always reminded of his imperfection, and so he continued to listen. One way in which he describes his relationship with Christ, in his second letter to Timothy, is as being under a commanding officer. And so Paul, with all his faults and foibles, looked up to Christ and listened.

This, I believe, is what Jesus was referring to in the Gospel reading, that those who love God will listen to God and that God will take up residence within them, referring to the Holy Spirit as the Advocate that he would send.

Look at the difference it made in St. Paul’s life. He listened humbly to the voice of God within, the Holy Spirit who was willing to lead him, and he was willing to be told not to go to the place he wanted to go and to listen to where else he should go instead.

Now we might wish to speculate why Paul and his team were disallowed from going either into Asia or Bithynia, but I think we may be missing the point in doing so. I don’t think that this was so much about being told where not to go, but more a case of the Holy Spirit making it slowly clear where he was to go. If Paul had carried on regardless then it’s likely that he would never have reached Philippi. Why was it so important that he should go there? Well it seems to me that the Holy Spirit’s intention was to take him where She had already been at work, preparing hearts and minds to receive the message Paul had to bring.  And this is a key thing for us to understand, and it is also another way of undoing our pride. The work that we do as a church is not about us. It’s not about the survival of an institution. It’s all about following the Holy Spirit into places where She has already gone ahead of us.

This, I believe, is what we see in the next part of the story. Paul and his team, having received their instructions, are now left to use their own good sense, and so they went to where they thought would be a place of prayer, down by the river outside the city, and it there that they met Lydia.  We don’t know a great deal about Lydia except that she was probably not actually a Jew. Had she been then Luke would have probably called her as such, but instead she is referred to as a worshipper of God, so perhaps she was drawn to Judaism but hadn’t actually taken the steps to become a Jew.  It seems likely that she was of quite high social status since she was in control of her own household, able to invite men to come and stay, and she had her own business.

But it is the fact that she was already a spiritual searcher that leaps out to me.

This was someone who was already, of her own will, engaging with the Holy Spirit. Though not a Jew she was already convinced that there was one God. In essence she was ready to listen.  The result of Paul’s obedience, of his listening to God, of his willingness to do as he was asked, was that Lydia became the very first European to embrace Christianity. Such was her commitment that after Paul and Silas had been arrested, on being freed she welcomed them back into her own house.

So what does this have to say to us?

Well simply it poses the question, how willing are we to listen to what God is asking of us? Are we humble enough to look up to God and to be prepared to go where we are called rather than rushing in to every situation? Do we speak too quickly, or maybe not at all?  My belief is that the Holy Spirit is working in people’s hearts and She calls us to speak about the good news that we carry within us, but, and this is important, we need to be listening closely so that we go to the people who wish to listen.

All of us have at some point experienced someone who has steam-rollered their faith over us. I expect that at some point in time many of us have even been the steam rollers. Sadly I know I have. Sometimes in our enthusiasm about what we believe we feel compelled to say something at a time and a place where we may not actually be called to speak.  It is hard for us to understand sometimes that we are not to speak the Good News, but it is very clear in this story that on two separate occasions God made it absolutely clear to Paul that he was not to go where he thought he should and was not to speak until he was in the place where he was called to speak.  If someone is not ready to listen, or more specifically, if their spirit has not already searched for or communed with God’s Holy Spirit, then our insistence in telling them what we believe may damage a possibility of them meeting with God when they are more ready.

Knowing how to communicate our faith to others depends on us being good listeners, and ultimately that is what this passage challenges us about. We have God living within us. Are we going to be humble enough to listen? Or are we going to go our own sweet way?  We are, every one of us, meant to be willing to share our faith, but it should be under the prompting of the Holy Spirit. For those who feel compelled always to speak, they should put aside the sense that we are in the right and must therefore speak truth to people whether they want to listen or not. For those who don’t ever speak, they should learn to be ready to.

We believe that the way of Christ is the right way, otherwise we wouldn’t be walking it, but there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence. If we are too timid to ever speak then we should ask for courage, but  if we feel under compulsion to speak, then we should ask for wisdom. We are supposed to live out what we believe first and foremost. But when the Holy Spirit prompts us, we should speak. But first we must learn how to listen.  Remember, the first commandment is to love God. The second is to love our neighbour.

If our words and actions are not rooted in those, then we should keep silent.

Theology, dogma, doctrine, what we believe, should all be shaped by spiritual experience. No really...

Reading
Acts 11:1-18
Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ‘I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But I replied, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” But a second time the voice answered from heaven, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, “Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.” And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’ When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’

The vitality of spiritual experience
The story before us in the book of Acts today is one of THE most important things to happen in the early church. It’s implications for us are really quite far-reaching, but it does take a little unpacking so let’s see if I can put some flesh on the bones for us.

The context is that this took place very early on in the life of the church, in the very first few years. At this point in time pretty much all of the believers would have been Jewish and there was a sense that Jesus had come to save the Jews. This story tells of how God had much bigger plans than the limitations that the Jewish believers had placed on him.

So for a Christian believer who was a Jew it was simply taken as read that as well as being a follower of Jesus they would also keep the Jewish law, the Torah, and that meant that all the men would have been circumcised. But then news comes to the leaders of the church in Jerusalem that Peter has been spending time with Gentiles, who are people like us, basically non-Jews.   They therefore summon Peter to Jerusalem to question him and to criticize him. More or less they are saying to him, ‘Peter what were you thinking? These were unclean Gentiles. What on earth were you, a Jew, doing spending time with them and sharing the news about Jesus with them?’

You can sense what is almost a spiritual arrogance in this, that the early believers felt that Jesus was only for Jews. And so Peter explains to them what had happened. He was praying and had entered a trance state. In that state he had a vision of a large sheet being set down in front of him and being told to eat. ‘Well so what?’ we might say. Big deal.

But that’s because we’re not Jews and don't understand the importance of this. Jews, like the people of many religions, have some pretty strict rules about what food they are and are not allowed to eat, and some of the food in that sheet was definitely on their list of unclean foods. In other words these were animals about whom God had said in the Old Testament that they must not eat, such as reptiles and other meat-eating animals.

Yet now God was saying something different.

It is key for us that we understand God is speaking to Peter in a metaphorical image. If we read the chapter before it tells us some more details about this incident and it is clear that before the vision Peter had gone on the roof to pray and was hungry. So God spoke to him through what was on his mind - food. It was a great use of imagery by the Holy Spirit, picking up on what was on Peter’s mind and using that to say something to him while he was in the trance.  Peter has no problem with the interpretation of his vision because of what happens next. Three men who were not Jews arrive at the house he’s staying at and it immediately becomes clear to him that the so-called unclean food that God has told him it is now alright to eat is a way of explaining to him that God was telling him to stop rejecting Gentiles as being unclean.

If food cannot be classed as unclean anymore then neither can people.

The Holy Spirit basically said, ‘You must not treat them any differently from yourselves. You must go with them.’ So Peter went with the three men, taking with him six fellow believers who he refers to as brothers.

So who were these three strangers?

Again there is more detail in the previous chapter, but basically they were members of the household of a man called Cornelius. What is significant about Cornelius is not only was he not a Jew, but he was actually a Roman Centurion, a soldier who led a hundred men. He was also a devout God-fearing man who prayed constantly.  His prayers were answered when an angel appeared to him, causing him to just stand there and stare in terror. That says something about the magnificence and power of an angel, that a Roman Centurion who would have seen a lot of action should be terrified by what he saw. The angel tells him that God has heard his prayers and that he must now send men to Joppa, to the house of Simon the tanner where a man called Simon Peter was staying.  So Cornelius sent two slaves and a devout soldier to go and fetch Peter and hear what he had to say. Now we can begin to understand why Peter took other men with him, after all it was Roman soldiers who had crucified Jesus, so you can understand his apprehension.

Yet what took place when he reached Cornelius’s house changed the church forever.

As Peter began to explain the Good News of Jesus, so the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and all the relatives and close friends he had gathered together to listen to Peter. To Peter it was all exactly the same as it had happened to the first apostles on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell upon them all. When Peter finishes telling his tale to the sceptical circumcised Jewish Christians about how the Holy Spirit had come down on people who were not Jews but Gentiles he completes his story with a question:

‘Who was I that I could hinder God?’

And then silence descends on the room.

It is the silence that comes when all your old beliefs get swept away by experiencing God. The Jewish Christians, though sceptical, know and trust Peter, but they are now faced with a choice. God has acted and done something that they would never have expected. Lesser people would have remained sceptical of Peter. They might even have ousted him.  But after the silence they begin to praise God as for the very first time the penny begins to drop that Jesus is not just for Jews, he’s for everyone. Now it’s important for us to realise that this is just the very first step in a long journey that the early church took with this. It was a very long time indeed before there was a complete and full acceptance that Gentiles could be Christians without first becoming Jews, but it was a long journey that led to people like us.

We are here today because the early church listened to God and they changed their mind about what they believed. The experience of God challenged their theology and so they altered their theology.

God has a habit of doing this.

But the question for us is, how does this apply to us today?

I think it says something to us about the spirituality of being a Christian and how vitally important it is to our decision making and our beliefs that we learn to listen to God. Think about it for a moment. Until the Holy Spirit gave them this new truth all that they had to go on was dogma and doctrine; basically what they knew from reading the commandments in the Old Testament.

How often do we try and make decisions based simply on the rules of our religion and what people have taught us?

In our most difficult and trying situations, do we listen to what the Holy Spirit may actually be trying to reveal to us?

In the midst of some of the most challenging times for the church today, does it not spend rather too much time endlessly debating the minutiae of texts when actually we should simply be listening?

If our religion is just about what we are told to believe, but without any actual experience of the spirituality of being a Christian with whom God communicates, in what ways is that actually Good News? All that is is a system of ethics on how to behave and you don’t need any religion to give you good ethics, although of course I would say that ethics which are informed by a belief in God are going to offer more.

Instead what we see here are people who are willing to be spoken to by God and changed by God. These are people who pray, who enter trance states in their communication with God, who see visions and have dreams and are open to the possibility that God speaks to his people.

So here, I think, is the challenge. God is saying to us:

‘If you ask, I will speak to you. But you must be willing to be changed by the experience.’

I don’t think God is in the business of giving us spiritual experiences for the sake of it. How we experience God should impact on how we live and the decisions that we make.  Christianity is not meant to be all about warm fuzzy spiritual feelings, but it is meant to include a spirituality that speaks into the very heart of who we are by the words spoken by the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. So let us set aside time to learn silence.