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A new look to the church office

03/03/2019

Decorating isn’t something I normally get excited about, but I’m going to make an exception for last week’s decorating work in the Church Office in Upton Parish Church. 

Ever since Upton Parish Church opened in 1879, people have been wondering whether the dull pink plaster that makes the interior so gloomy was really what the architect intended. Other churches by the same architect were painted, often in white, but not Upton Parish Church.

Last year to accommodate our Benefice Administrator Helen, we began transforming the office space established back in 2013. First we replaced the drab carpet, bought some new furniture, and added secondary glazing to the windows. Then we installed an electric radiator, and to help us get the most out of the heating, we fitted a suspended ceiling with new LED lighting.

However, the walls continued to make the room drab. So earlier this year we asked the Diocesan Advisory Committee if we could paint them, and with permission given and a special paint bought, a decorator arrived last week to transform the office. And we think the results are quite remarkable!

 

 

Big thanks then to Church Wardens Tim Toman and Roger Davies for helping write the faculty application , as well as handling the arrangements for the decorating process!

If you’d like to see the new, brighter, church office, do call in and see Helen during office hours (9:30am-1pm, Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri).

Next, the PCC wants to begin to transform the side (or “Lady”) chapel. Once again they’ll paint the walls a shade of white, as well as replacing the carpet, lighting, heating and furniture, with the ultimate aim of creating a small contemporary, comfortable and user-friendly worship and meeting space that can accommodate choir rehearsals, prayer meetings, small services and could even be hired out to external groups.

 

Barry Unwin
3 March 2019

Losing Jesus.

03/03/2019

First published in the Bridge Magazine, February 2019

 

What have I got in common with David Cameron and Jesus’ mother Mary? Answer: we’ve all suffered the embarrassment of losing a child in a public place.

Back in 2012, the Camerons and their three children stopped off at a country pub. After a swift pint, the Prime Minister jumped into a car with his security team, and his wife Samantha followed with two of their children. Each assumed the other had eight-year-old Nancy, who was actually in the pub toilet. A panicked telephone call confirmed Nancy was okay, and her embarrassed Mum returned fifteen minutes later to collect her.

They have my sympathy because I did something similar in an Edinburgh pub back in 2009. A game of hide and seek, combined with a failure to do our normal headcount when it was time to leave, meant that it was only as I reversed out of the car park that my wife noticed the lost child’s bemused face staring at us through the pub door.

But when it comes to losing a child, Mary takes the biscuit. She lost the 12-year old Jesus for three whole days in Jerusalem. It was only at the end of the first day of the long journey back to Nazareth that she realised Jesus wasn’t off playing with the other children.  Three frantic days of searching later, mother and son were reunited. Perhaps predictably Jesus was debating the scholars in the temple courts,

Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

He says to his Mum, before she presumably grounded him for a month.

I wonder if you have ever lost Jesus? Not physically like Mary did, of course, but spiritually. Christmas was a great time to reconnect with him. It’s relatively easy to find Jesus in a carol service or other special Christmas events. But then the hustle and bustle of January means we get distracted and take our eyes off him. Rather than depend on the one who is in charge, we get busy trying to organise and plan every detail of our lives. And ever so slowly, the truly important business of enjoying the presence of God in our lives as we read the scriptures and pray gets squeezed out. That’s what I mean by losing Jesus.

It’s a bit late for New Year’s Resolutions, but it’s never too late to find Jesus again. So why not set aside five minutes of every day, to meet with God in prayer? Talk to him about your worries, your hopes and dreams. A lot of people find a verse from the Bible can help with this: a website called verseoftheday.com will even email you a daily Bible meditation to help you focus your thoughts on Jesus. And as you do that, something remarkable will happen: God will come and meets with you, as what was lost, becomes found.

Why do we baptise babies?

03/03/2019

Why do we baptise babies?

David Beckham once said,

I definitely want [my son] Brooklyn to be christened, but I don’t know into what religion yet.”[1]

It isn’t just David Beckham who gets confused about baptism. I’ve met atheists who believe having their child baptised will guarantee a place in Heaven. Others think it’s about a guaranteeing a place in a church school. Some parents think it gives their child the right to be married in a particular church building. For others, baptism is an excuse for a big party, a glitzy naming ceremony.

And then there are the churches who won’t baptise babies. For Baptists, baptism is such an important expression of faith in Jesus that it could never be offered to a baby – after all, how can a baby express faith?

So why do we baptise babies?

Let’s start by asking “Why baptise anyone at all?” This one’s easy to answer:  Jesus tells us to! He told his followers to go

and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19-20).

St Paul explains why baptism matters: he tells us it’s the way a Christian is united with Jesus in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4). In other words, it’s the route to eternal life beyond the grave. But its not the water used in baptism that does this, it’s the faith in Jesus that the person being baptised has. Baptism is an expression of that faith. The Book of Common Prayer puts it like this,

They that receive baptism rightly are grafted into the church.”

That word “rightly” tells us that baptism is all about confirming the faith already present in a person.

Does that mean if you don’t have faith in Jesus you shouldn’t be baptised? Yes! Baptism only has integrity if you have faith in Jesus: a faith which should affect how you live, including regular church attendance and a willingness to engage in Christian community. If you don’t want to do that, why bother with baptism?

So what about baptising babies? Clearly, they can’t display faith in the way an adult can, but from the earliest days of the church, believing parents brought their children for baptism because they wanted them to be included in the promises of Jesus. Infant baptism is the Christian fulfilment of the Jewish covenant of circumcision – which was how infant Jews became part of God’s family even before they could express faith themselves.

St Peter brings this mix of family and faith together in Acts 2,

Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children”.

The first infant baptisms followed soon after, as whole families were being baptised into the name of Jesus.

So what does all this mean today?

  1. That for baptism to have integrity, it must arise out of a real desire to journey in faith with Jesus, a journey that involves your lifestyle, and a commitment to being part of a church.
  2. Parents who bring their child for baptism need to be living out these values. To help them with this, we offer baptism preparation for parents seeking baptism.
  3. Children eventually need to take up the promises for themselves. In the Anglican tradition, we call this “confirmation.”
  4. Some parents should not have their child baptised! A better option might be to ask for a ceremony of thanksgiving. This is a way to give thanks to God for the safe arrival of a baby, and to name them publicly, but without all the promises and commitment that come with baptism.

Finally, a word on schools and weddings. All of our local Church of England primary schools base their selection on location, not religion, so being baptised offers no special privileges. Baptism does, however, give you a qualifying connection for marriage to a particular Church of England church.

If you’d like to know more about baptism visit the baptism page on our website.

 

 

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1479657/Beckhams-sons-christened-in-back-garden-chapel.html

 

First published in the Bridge Magazine, Feb 2019

When was Jesus really born?

03/03/2019

When was Jesus really born?

Combine all that fuss about Christmas, with our Anno Domini calendar system, and you might imagine that Jesus was born in 1AD on December 25th. The problem is, there’s nothing in the Bible to point us to December 25th, and lots of evidence in the Bible to suggest Jesus was born several years earlier!

This lack of clarity over when Jesus was born has led some sceptics to be very critical of Christian claims about the birth of Jesus. In his God Delusion, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins dismisses the evidence for Jesus’ birth as a load of historical nonsense[i]. But is he right? What can we know for sure about when Jesus was born?

First, let’s deal with the obvious: in Jesus day there was no system for registering births with the state, so we don’t have the sort of details about Jesus’ birth that would be a matter of public record about any birth today. The exact time and date of his birth, and what he weighed, are a mystery, though it’s reasonable to assume that Mum and baby were in a stable condition.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t make a plausible estimate about when he was born. The gospel writers Luke and Matthew tell us that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod (who most historians reckon died in 4BC[ii]). Luke later tells us that Jesus was “about thirty” years old in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (28AD). So if Jesus was born no later than 4BC, and was still “about 30” in 28AD, then he had to have been born in 6-4BC.

Which would all be fine if the Gospel of Luke didn’t also tell us that Jesus was born after Joseph and Mary travelled to Bethlehem to register for a census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. This is a problem because Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6AD, ten years after Herod died. So it looks like Luke made a mistake, and there’s an error in the Bible! Perhaps Dawkins is right after all?

Or perhaps not. As you can imagine, the historians have been poring over this question for many years, and have offered a number of possible explanations.

It could be that Quirinius was governor of Syria more than once: not only in 6-12AD but also during the period 4BC-1BC when we don’t know who was governor[iii]. If he’d begun a census in this earlier period, then there’s no problem with what Luke says. Sadly there’s no conclusive evidence to prove this, though there are some interesting hints it might have been the case. An archaeological find known as the Antioch Stones dated somewhere between 11-1BC, places Quirinius in Syria at this time, and the Roman historian Tacitus also seems to place him in the area in 4-3BC[iv]. Another archaeological find known as the Lapis Tiburtinus, refers to an un-named person going to Asia to take on a senior role for the second time. This could be Quirinius, but without a name, we can never know for certain.[v]

Another possible explanation is that Luke is referring to a census that began before Jesus’ birth, but which wasn’t completed until Quirinius was governor in 6AD (some Roman censuses took as long as 40 years to complete). This is a plausible theory, but until evidence of such a census is found, it is only just a theory.

Perhaps more likely is that many of our modern Bibles mistranslate the rather ambiguous language that Luke uses about the census. The New International Version which we use in many of our services, states:

This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

However Greek word orders are very different to English, and the word translated as “first” can also be translated as “before”. The Greek scholar and historian NT Wright suggests a better translation would be,

This was the first registration, before the one when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”[vi]

This actually makes a lot of sense grammatically and historically, because the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria in 6AD was notorious: it lead to revolution and the imposition of direct Roman rule on Israel.

Sadly, until more historical evidence emerges, we can’t know which explanation is right, but as things stand, no archaeological discovery has proven Luke wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, which does rather undermine Dawkins’ “historical nonsense” argument.

What then can we conclude from all this? That the checkable facts in Luke and Matthew’s accounts, suggest that Jesus was born no later than 4BC and possibly as early as 6BC.

Which is all of course rather embarrassing for the inventor of the Anno Domini system, a 6th century monk called Dionysius Exiguus. Either he hadn’t read his Bible very accurately, or more likely, he made a mistake when translating the Roman calendar system into his new format. And once his flawed Anno Domini system was popularised by a 7th century monk called Bede, based in my home town of Sunderland (and former parish of Jarrow) it was more than anyone’s job was worth to correct the error!

 

[i] Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, p93-95

[ii] For details of Herod’s death, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herod_the_Great

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_governors_of_Syria

[iv] Tacitus, Annales, iii. 48

[v] For a sceptical view of the evidence about Quirinius see https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html

[vi] For more information on how Luke 2:2 can be translated, see http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2004/12/luke-census-and-quirinius-matter-of.html

First published in the Bridge Magazine, December 2018

Is God a woman?

03/03/2019

Is God a she?

My daughter started studying at Durham University last week scene of the latest round of our culture’s gender war.

Not content with forcing the sacking of the assistant editor of Critique, the university’s philosophy journal for the transphobic hate crime of sharing an article[i] from the Spectator Magazine that said women don’t have penises,[ii] the Students Union have issued “pronoun badges” to all new students bearing the slogan, “My pronouns are:”[iii]. Then there’s a space for the student to fill in their preferred option: whether something traditional like she/her or he/him; or something more gender fluid like: they/them, e/em, per/per, ve/ver, xe/xem.

Lest you think this just affects a bunch of loony students, the same pressures are coming to our schools, where organisations like Stonewall are using equality legislation and anti-bullying campaigns to shift our understanding of gender away from traditional or “binary” religious or chromosome based definitions of male and female towards something “non-binary”, where gender can be as simple as what you declare yourself to be.

And as you’ve probably noticed, with this new thinking, comes new language. The new pronouns used by non-binary people, words like: zie, sie, ey, ve, tey and e will be brilliant for Scrabble, but we shouldn’t be blind to what these new words mean for us. As Big Brother put it in 1984, once

…you control the language, you control the argument”.

Someone else trying to control the language so that she can control the argument is Rachel Treweek, the Bishop of Gloucester. Back in September, she told the Sunday Telegraph she didn’t

…want young girls or young boys to hear us constantly refer to God as he”[iv].

Previously she has challenged the Church of England to stop referring to God as he, and to also use female pronouns[v]. But is she right to do this?  What does the Bible actually say about God’s gender? Is God a she?

Let’s start with the obvious. The God of the Bible is not a human being, but Spirit (Numbers 23:19, John 4:24). Therefore God doesn’t have chromosomes or any physical body at all. As Article One of the Church of England’s doctrinal basis (as found in the Book of Common Prayer) puts it, God is

without body, parts, passions.”

But despite this, God must have both a “maleness” and a “femaleness” to Him because the Bible speaks of humankind (both male and female) being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

So what is God’s gender? Well, the overwhelming majority of the pronouns and descriptions of God in the Bible are masculine. Paul’s letters refer to God as Father over forty times and use masculine pronouns throughout. Jesus, who knew a thing or two about God, speaks of God as Father sixty-five times in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and over one hundred times in the gospel of John. Most famously, Jesus said this is how you should pray:

Father, hallowed be your name…”

Father, here, doesn’t mean God is our biological father, instead, it’s a relationship term, an invitation into the eternal relationship of God the Father to God the Son; through the Father’s promise of adoption into his family, by trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But despite all the male pronouns and descriptions, there are also a number of female images of God in the Bible. Whilst at no point is God described as “she” or “her”, He is described as being like a woman in labour (Isaiah 42:14); a considerate, comforting mother (Isaiah 49:15, 66:13); a mother eagle (Deuteronomy 32:11-12), and a mother hen (Matthew 23:37). God’s wisdom is personified as a woman in the book of Proverbs, though we are later told that the male Jesus is the Wisdom of God (1Cor.1:24).

I haven’t added up the numbers but I’d be surprised if these female images of God amounted to more than 0.5% of the total gender-based references to God in the Bible, and so on weight of numbers alone, it’s pretty obvious that God presents himself as male in the Bible, albeit with some significant female characteristics.

However, a critic might reasonably ask to what extent the maleness of God is a consequence of the Bible being written by men in a male-dominated society? Perhaps men have obscured the truth about God by remaking Him in their own image? That question is of course as impossible to answer, as the equal but opposite charge: that when feminist theologians call God she, they are remaking God in their own image and therefore obscuring the truth about Him!

When it comes down to it, we each have to decide whether we’ll trust what the Bible reveals about God, or try to rewrite it to suit our own agenda. The 4th-century theologian Hilary of Poitiers put it like this,

For he is the best student who does not read his thoughts into the [Bible], but lets it reveal its own; who draws from it its sense, and does not import his own into it, nor force upon its words a meaning which he had determined was the right one before he opened its pages. Since then we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of himself, and bow with humble reverence to his words. For he whom we can only know through his own utterances is the fitting witness concerning himself.”[vi]

Or to put it another way, if God were a student at Durham University, then the Bible is his pronoun badge, and he’s written “He” “His” and “Father” all over it, and who are we to tell Him He’s wrong?

 

First published in the Bridge Magazine November 2018

 

 

[i] https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/is-it-a-crime-to-say-women-dont-have-penises/

[ii] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6192453/Student-editor-tweeted-women-dont-penises-fired-university.html

[iii] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/university-hands-out-pronoun-badges-13362943

[iv] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/16/church-england-should-avoid-calling-god-bishop-says/

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/24/bishop-rachel-treweek-gods-not-a-he-or-a-she

[vi] De Trinitate (1.18)

What is the purpose of my life?

03/03/2019

Is there a purpose to my life?

I was a teenager when I first thought about whether my life had a purpose. I blame the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life for that. It promised so much in its opening song:

Why are we here? What’s life all about? Is God really real, or is there some doubt? Well, tonight, we’re going to sort it all out, For, tonight, it’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.”[i]

Yet an hour and a half of sketches later, all it delivered was,

Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and then. Get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

Really? Is that all there is to it?

I had a similar feeling about The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy, in which the ultimate super-computer Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years trying to answer the question of life the universe and everything, before concluding that the answer is “42.” The problem it seems is we hadn’t properly understood the question.

So is there a purpose for our lives? Well if there is, it would be enormously helpful to know what it is, because, as the Ancient Roman senator Seneca put it,

When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind”.

So let’s think about if there is a purpose to life, and how we might know. Certainly, experience leads many people to think they have a purpose in life. Self-help books are full of techniques to discover your purpose or “true north” as the Americans like to call it. Interestingly some of those techniques tell you that you can choose for yourself what your true purpose is. Author Justin Gesso claims this is “hugely empowering”, an “awesome revelation.”[ii]

Yet it also begs the question: if I can choose my life purpose then I can also change it, and keep changing it: so which life purpose is the right one (if there is indeed a right one)? This is especially frustrating when you then go and talk to someone who claims that rather than choosing their purpose in life, their purpose in life seems to have chosen them!

Then at the same time, the newspapers are full of tragic stories about people who have lost all hope in life, who feel like they have no purpose. So what’s going on? How do we make sense of this? Well, it might seem like I’m arguing semantics here but it seems to me that some people are calling a purpose in life what would be better called a cause or a passion.

  • A PASSION as an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. So for example, (and please forgive the gender stereotyping) Samantha is passionate about netball. John is passionate about hiking. Passions like this are internal; they’re things we can choose because we can choose the causes we invest our time in.
  • A PURPOSE, in contrast, is The Reason for which something exists, and is by definition “external”. So a purpose can never be something we choose, instead, it’s something that some agent outside of us has chosen for us, and shaped us for. So for example, the purpose of Upton Bridge[iii] is to connect two banks of the River Severn. The bridge didn’t choose this purpose, instead, it was chosen for it by the people who created it. In the same way, we would never say that the purpose of Samantha is netball or the purpose of John is hiking. That’s just something they’ve chosen to do; it’s their cause, their passion, their reason to get out of bed in the morning.

What all this means is that once we define purpose as the reason something exists, then any attempt to talk about the purpose of our lives is, whether we realise it or not, a god claim. We’re implicitly stating that something bigger than us (god, fate, the universe, whatever) has a plan for our lives!

This, of course, means an atheist can never really claim their life has a purpose. They may well have passions and causes that motivate them to do extraordinary things, but to claim that an external force they don’t believe in, has a purpose for them, is bad atheism!

So where does this leave us?

First, it means that for all the same reasons you can’t prove the existence or otherwise of god using empirical means, you can’t prove you have a purpose in life.

Second, it means that if we are comfortable with the idea of god, we should also be comfortable with the idea of a purpose for our lives. At which point the question becomes which god, which purpose, and how we can know. More on that another time.

Finally, it leaves us with the problem of experience. Even though many people deny the existence of a god, they still feel a deep sense that they have a purpose in life. It gets labelled in various ways: fate, karma, destiny, providence, kismet, but I’d argue it’s something more. St Paul says,

we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10).

If that’s true, then our yearning for a purpose is really God’s way of getting us to re-examine our presumption that he doesn’t exist! Our longing for meaning implies that there is a giver of meaning, and should cause us to seek him out!

First published in the Bridge Magazine October 2018

 

[i] Cited from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Meaning_of_Life/intro.htm

[ii] Cited from https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/7-ways-create-your-life-purpose.html

[iii] I’ve intentionally chosen an inanimate object here, as it’s a lot easier to be certain about it’s purpose. Had I chosen a human example, I could not have spoken with any certainty about his/her purpose as I’m not their creator!

Is God the Author of Evil?

03/03/2019

Did God Create Evil?

At our newly launched youth group (“The Deep End” – for young people in the yr5 to yr10 age range), one of the young people asked me a great question, “Did God create evil?”

Some people would answer the question “Yes.” After all:

  1. The Bible says God created the whole universe
  2. There is clearly good and evil in the universe
  3. So logically God created both good and evil.

That’s actually a pretty handy thing to be able to claim, because if God is the inventor of evil then he’s responsible for all my failings, and “I was born this way” becomes the perfect excuse for everything from burping in public to mass murder!

The thing is, the Bible says loads more about the problem of evil than just pinning everything on the creator. For starters, it tells us that God is good and that all his works are perfect and just. He is:

“a faithful God who does no wrong” (Deuteronomy 32:4).

So he can’t have created evil.

It also tells us that God’s original creation was completely good (that is, there was no evil in it):

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31

And into that very good creation, God placed the first people, giving them the freedom of a beautiful garden with everything they needed for life, joy and family. But with that freedom came two responsibilities – one was to take care of creation (Genesis 2:15). The other was to obey God’s very simple rule about the garden – they could eat food from all the trees but one. Eat of that one, and they would surely die (Genesis 2:17).

And that second responsibility is the key to understanding the whole question of whether God created evil. By creating a rule that could be disobeyed, God created the possibility of rule-breaking, evil, or sin, as the Bible calls it. Understood this way, evil isn’t a supernatural force like it is in the horror movies and some religious traditions – which tend to portray evil as a ying-yang style balancing force to good. Instead in the Bible, evil is at heart, disobedience to God’s moral law. And tragically the people God placed in that wonderful garden broke his moral law (Genesis 3), and people have carried on in much the same vein ever since.

So God didn’t create evil. But there’s another question we need to ask: Did God do a proper risk assessment on the Garden of Eden? After all, if you create a world in which evil is possible, and put people who are capable of evil into it, don’t you have some responsibility for what happens? Does God have a duty of care?

I’m writing this on the first afternoon of the World Cup, and so I hope you’ll indulge me a footballing analogy…Back in October 1863, the Football Association pulled together the various strands of football to create a unified set of rules for Association Football. I mention this because 47 seconds into the first World Cup game, Russian winger Aleksandr Samedov was hacked to the ground by Saudi defender Omar Hawsawi. So who is responsible for what happened? Was it the Saudi footballer, or the Football Association? Like the referee, I hope you choose to blame the footballer! And it’s just the same with God and creation. Although he created a world where it is possible for us to do evil, God holds us responsible for what we do in that world. One day we can be sure that judgement will come.

But God does still have a duty of care. That’s why the main story arc of the Bible is all about how he responds to the mess we’ve made of his world. He makes a series of promises to put the world to rights and then comes in the person of Jesus to do it, by dying on the Cross to deal with the sins of the world.

But benefitting from God’s duty of care isn’t automatic. As we saw earlier, he created us to be morally responsible choosers, and his rescue plan involves a choice too: a choice to admit our part in the world’s mess and ask for the good gifts of forgiveness and life that Jesus offers through his death and resurrection. And if we’ll do that, something amazing happens: God takes responsibility for the evil we have done, and we’re set free.

So did God create evil? Did he create all the mess in the world? No, we did.

But through the Cross God ends up paying the price to fix it! And as any parent will tell you, that’s what you’ll do for your kids if you really love them!

First published in the Bridge Magazine July 2018

If it bleeds it leads

01/12/2018

First published in the Bridge Magazine, October 2018

I was chatting with someone recently and we got onto politics and elections, and his real fear that if an election came suddenly, he wouldn’t know who to vote for.

Conservative? But the Prime Minister is incompetent – just look at the mess with Brexit. Labour – Corbyn just wants to take the country back to the 1970s. And the other parties are no better.”

Then we switched to the broader political scene – and

that idiot Trump, and Putin – he’s a monster.”

We live in a frightening world. Or do we? Is it really as bad as it seems in the newspapers? When the Queen had her 90th birthday back in 2016, Guardian Columnist Simon Jenkins reflected on why a good news story was getting so much coverage when newspapers generally only give us bad news. And the simple answer is that bad news sells: or in newspaper speak:

If it bleeds, it leads.”

He recalled how an edict once came down from a newspaper owner saying he was fed up with so much bad news, so his staff prepared a spoof front page. ‘It reported:

No crashes at Heathrow”; “Government doing well”;

and in gossip column,

All celebrities slept in their own beds last night”.

Would you buy a newspaper that read like that?

And that’s part of the problem. We live in a frightening world because most of our information about our frightening world comes from newspapers who know that we won’t buy them if they don’t give us a reason to! The Pew Research Centre in the USA studied people’s news preferences over a 20-year period, starting in the late 1980s. What they found is that

people’s interest in the news is much more intense when there’s a perceived treat to their way of life.”

Fear sells! There’s money in crisis. Click here to find all about something horrible and how to avoid it.

The psychologists have probed the consequences of all this. Apparently, the more we’re exposed to news media, the more likely we are to feel our communities are unsafe; that the crime rate is rising (it isn’t!); and that the world is a dangerous place. Most strikingly of all, it makes us completely overestimate the odds of becoming a victim.

So how do we handle fear? Well we could read less news, but that too has its dangers. But what if we could find a place to read from that offers absolute security? Psalm 46 is an ancient prayer written by an unknown Bible author to teach his people how to pray in response to fear:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging…

…The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress….

…He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46: 1-3, 7, 10)

We love good news, and it’s a helpful buffer to fear. But what we really need in this life is the safety the Lord provides. When we place ourselves in his fortress we can choose not to fear, because we’ll know the absolute security offered by the one who, one day, will call all the nations to be still, and to give an account of their actions before him.

So next time you find yourself afraid because of a news story, why not turn to Psalm 46 and read it through and use it to pray away the fear?

The Power of Forgiveness

01/12/2018

First published in the Bridge Magazine, November 2018 edition.

On March 28 2010, 19-year old Conor McBride shot his fiancée Ann Grosmaire, after a horrible row that had lasted for two days. An hour later he voluntarily handed himself into the police.

Ann was so badly wounded she had no hope of recovery. As he sat at her hospital bedside, her father Andy longed for her to speak. And as he listened he became utterly convinced he could hear her say, “Forgive him.” But how could he forgive this?

After four days Ann’s parents decided to switch off her ventilator. As he prayed next to her bed, Andy felt God speaking to him, that it was not just Ann asking him to forgive Conor, but Jesus Christ. Andy shared this with his wife Kate, who next day visited Conor in jail.

It was an emotional meeting. Conor wept as he said how very sorry he was. And then battling tears of her own, Kate explained that she and Andy wanted to forgive Conor for what he’d done. Then murderer, and the mother of the victim, sat and cried together for fifteen minutes. When the visit was over, Kate returned to the hospital, where she and Andy turned off Ann’s life support. Conor later received a twenty year sentence for her murder.

Forgiveness is not easy, but it is better than bitterness. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats us up from the inside out, destroying our relationships with others, splitting churches and villages, hindering our prayers and blocking the flow of God’s blessing in our lives. The only cure for the cancer of bitterness is the chemotherapy of love and forgiveness. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount,

love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”

and

if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Kate and Andy’s decision to forgive Conor set them free. Kate says,

Everything I feel [now], I can feel because we forgave Conor… Because we could forgive, people can say her name [around us]… I think that when people can’t forgive, they’re stuck. All they can feel is the emotion surrounding that moment. I can be sad, but I don’t have to stay stuck in that moment where this awful thing happened. Because if I do, I may never come out of it. Forgiveness for me was self-preservation.”

So how do you forgive? One simple way is to get a blank sheet of paper, and write down who needs to be forgiven and for what. Write honestly about how the wrong made you feel, and how you want to let go of those feelings. Then try to imagine the benefits of forgiving and write those down too: for example, how you long for sadness to become joy. Then at the bottom write “I forgive X” where X is the person who has wronged you. Then when you’ve written it all down, turn it into a prayer, seeking God’s help to forgive, saying sorry for how hard you find forgiveness, and asking him to help you change how you feel about that person. Finally, share the news with someone. If it’s the person you’re angry with, so much the better!

And as you do that, you’ll discover something wonderful: freedom. As counsellor Lewis B. Smedes puts it,

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

 

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You can read the full story of Conor and Ann’s families here.

 

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