Jesus Course

Just heard on the T.V. that in a survey of favourite carols for a couple of UK radio stations “O holy night” came out top. This was a bit of a surprise but my own guess is that people were voting on the tune rather than anything else.

I love a good Christmas carol myself and think they are an ideal way to celebrate the Christmas season. Carols are: uplifting, fun and they tell you something about the real Christmas story.

Personally, I’m not sure that “O holy night” qualifies as a carol (more of a Christmas song I would have thought).

Just in case you are interested, here is the top 5

1. O holy night

2. Silent Night

3. In the bleak mid-winter (to Darke’s tune).

4. Hark the herald!

5. In the bleak mid-winter (to Holst’s tune).

What is your favourite?

Thoughts Christmas

The latest place for Jesus to appear is on a naan bread at an Indian Restaurant in Southampton.

Here is the story about the Naan Jesus …

Jesus in funny places Jesus

My youngest son just loves his torch. He has a quite a fancy torch that changes into something different with each click. The first click shows a red laser kind of light, the second click has an ultra-violet light, and the third is more like an ordinary church. About every 18 months or so I have to buy him a new one because he manages to break a wire or something. Of course the problem with a child and a torch with three different clicks – fourth turns it off – is that he is always leaving it switched on. So we have to ration the batteries.

Now the point of me telling you all this is that in the sermon on the mount, that we have been looking at lately, Jesus says that we should be light to the world.

If you let your batteries go flat then your light won’t shine.

I’m sure Jesus wasn’t thinking about batteries when he was talking about letting your light shine for others to see, but I think there is an important point to made here about following Jesus. Our light only shines because we follow Jesus. It has nothing to do with how clever we are or which church we go to or how important we may feel we are.  So a relationship with Jesus is what makes a light shine. Jesus is the battery that makes our torch work – if you’ll forgive the analogy. So to keep shining we need to work on building our relationship with Jesus.

A single light only shines bright when its really dark

If you turn on a light in a bright city then nobody will notice it. If you’ve been in a big city during the night you will have noticed that one thing you don’t lack is light – of course there are dark places but mostly there are lights. To get any idea of what Jesus was talking about when he described us as being lights we have to imagine ourselves away from cities or towns or villages and out into the dark countryside. If you have even been out in the hills when its dark and there is not even a moon to see by you will know what darkness is really like. Then if in that darkness you light one single, even weak, light you will see it. In fact you can see one small light for miles and miles if its really dark.

When its really dark even a small light burns brightly.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden

So Jesus says, and he is right. I like to walk in wilderness areas on in England there is one place that I really love, called Dartmoor. I’ve been on a few night walks on the moors and they can be pretty dark but when you get in view of a village or even a farm with its lights on it looks amazing. You can’t miss it because it is so bright.

Jesus compares Christians to such a light.

Light is supposed to help us see things by

Jesus wants Christians to be such a light to the world. Christians are supposed to make life easier to navigate. Of course this isn’t always the way things work and you might get the impression that some Christians are determined to make the world a very dark place. Light brings illumination. The light that Jesus brings is supposed to lead us out of ignorance and into truth and understanding, it’s supposed to lead us from the dark ages to light ages. Light is supposed to help us navigate through life.

Jesus offers such light and those who follow Jesus are supposed to bring that light with them.

So do you bring light to the world or darkness?

Thoughts light

The latest place for the image of Jesus to appear is on a car window. It’s a pretty good likeness too – at least in a hollywood kind of way.

Take a look here

Jesus in funny places

Few people can escape from the problem of stress. We have always suffered with it but recently it seems to have been reaching pandemic proportions. Of course this may be just down to people being more willing to report it but I suspect we are at least discovering the real problem that it is.

To earn a crust I am a stress management consultant. I don’t force my faith on those battling with stress because I don’t think that is the thing to do. However I do mention faith in my talks as being an important part of stress therapy.

Research shows that people who go to church are far less likely to be stressed and far more likely to cope with stress than those who don’t.

I think there are lots of reasons for why this is so:

• Belief in a loving and supportive God
• Good relationships with others
• Positive attitude
• Times of meditation
• Singing

But for me the biggest reason for me is that Christians have Jesus. Being a follower of Jesus not only gives you a good view of life but it also gives you a good relationship with the creator. God can help even in the worst of circumstances – not always taking the problem away but sometimes just offering the strength to carry on.

Yes, Jesus does help reduce stress.

Thoughts stress

In this day and age of high blood pressure and stress the medical advice is for us all to eat less salt. This is good advice although sometimes I miss my food being as tasty as it once was – I’ve almost given up on crisps these days  – probably a good thing for my health anyway.

So when Jesus talks about how we are to be the salt of the earth has he gone mad? Does Jesus mean that we should be putting the pressure on so everyone dies of a heart attack? Does Jesus mean that we should make sure we are doing our bit to make everyone in the world as unhealthy as we can? Of course not.

We need first of all to understand what salt meant back when Jesus said we should be like salt.

Salt in the ancient world was most certainly considered to be a very good thing. It was used for all kinds of things – not least as a flavouring for food. It was also used to preserve meat, for money, to aid healing, as an offering to God, and in customs performed for newborn babies (Ezekiel tells us that newborn babies were rubbed in salt – Ezek. 16:4). Sounds a little crazy to me but I guess it was probably something to do with it’s antiseptic qualities. Salt was a pretty important commodity. In fact in a society where food was not always plentiful and labour tended to be hot and hard salt was an essential of every day life.

Let me just make a small point here about how we use the bible. It seems to me that it is pretty obvious that when Jesus says we should be like salt he wasn’t saying we should turn ourselves into little heaps of white powder. It hardly needs saying that Jesus is using a metaphor here and he didn’t intend us to believe that we are quite literally salt and should pop ourselves into the cooking pot. This may seem obvious but it is an important point to remember. Christians sometimes gets confused by biblical metaphors and those antagonistic to Christians will sometimes quote things from the bible that are obviously metaphors but they try to make us sound weird for having such metaphors in the bible.

Anyway back to my point.

Salt is important because it improves things. This is pretty much what Jesus was saying. Christians should improve things, make the world seem a better place. Sadly this isn’t always true of Christians but it should be. So we Christians need to be asking ourselves: are we making the world a better place or a worse place.

Jesus had an answer for those who made the world a worse place – he described them as those who have lost their taste. They are no use and will be thrown out and trampled on. Again this is a metaphor.  He doesn’t mean that anyone who loses their saltiness should be thrown out in the street and used as a pavement (side walk, etc). He simply means that if we lose our saltiness we will find ourselves outside of God’s kingdom.

So are you going to be someone who makes the world a better place, or someone who makes it worse?

Christian living salt of the earth

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if people really lived liked Jesus said we should live? We see some of the effects when Christians live as they should – sadly this doesn’t always happen – we might know some of the names of well known Christians who we can admire, names like Mother Theresa and Desmond Tutu come to mind. If everyone followed the teachings of Jesus then people like these people would be common place. You may be surprised to hear that I have met many such people in churches I have been to but they don’t get noticed by the public as they live out their Christian lives.

Today we are going to think a little about the beatitudes.  The beatitudes come at the beginning of the sermon on the mount in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew chapter 5).

The beatitudes tell us about some things that will happen in God’s kingdom. These statements tell us nothing about the kind of people that Christian’s should be – save that the qualities listed have a place in God’s kingdom. Sadly some Christians have mistaken the beatitudes for a list of Christian attitudes and have tried to copy the attitudes that the beatitudes talk about.

Of course qualities like meekness and desiring righteousness are good qualities for some but God did not intend us to try and live up to the beatitudes.

What Jesus is saying is that in God’s kingdom:

• the poor in spirit will find job in the kingdom of heaven – and not when they die but now!
• those who mourn will be comforted
• the meek will inherit the earth.
• those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied
• etc

Jesus is telling us what the kingdom of God will be like. This is reassurance that although you might feel that being merciful doesn’t count for anything – God notices and is happy that people are following him. It is comfort to know that people who mourn will be comforted by God in his kingdom. I could go on.

The beatitudes then are not rules for us to try and follow but statements about how wonderful God’s kingdom is.  I’m sure Jesus could have gone on for a very long time explaining other injustices that will be put right in God’s kingdom. And whilst God’s kingdom might need some time before it is complete we can get some of this reward in the hear and now.

Christian living beatitudes, Jesus

The sermon on the mount is a set of teachings from Jesus that have been grouped together in a section of Matthews gospel (chapters 5-7). The teachings are also in the other gospels (in various forms). Scholars like to get all hot under to collar debating whether Jesus sat down or stood up to preach and how many actually listened. The gospel writers all arrange their material to make points so it becomes impossible to say whether this sermon was written down as presented or whether Matthew gathered together several sermons into one place.

There is historical interest to finding answers to these questions but realistically we aren’t going to answer them in a way that makes everyone happy unless someone invents a time machine to go back and find out.

Sadly too many Christians gets caught up in this kind of detail and then fail to get the point of what Jesus was trying to teach us anyway. What methods Jesus used for preaching are not the point of the sermon.

The sermon offers guidance for the follower of Jesus to understand what life in the kingdom of God is supposed to be like.

Jesus makes it very clear that he is not intending to offer a new set of rules that simply replace the ones found in the ten commandments but that through the following of his guidance we can learn to love, forgive and enjoy life.

One of the complications with Christianity is that we believe that the way to get a good relationship with God is to rely on the loving and forgiving nature of God and not worry about trying to prove ourselves through the following of certain rules (what we might call being saved by grace).

However once we have gained that good relationship with God through our faith in God we then need to commit ourselves to living life with God in charge. We commit ourselves to letting God be our monarch and living a life in God’s kingdom.

We could take the line of saying that all we have to do is to love God and forget about the rest (as St. Augustine once did) but this doesn’t answer all of our questions. We are people who have to live in a practical world and so we need some practical guidance.

Because Jesus understood this he gave us guidance about what kingdom living is all about – guidance which we find in the sermon on the mount.

So if you ever wonder what a Christian should live like then you should turn to the sermon on the mount. Like all things you read in the bible you should also understand it bearing everything else you have read in the bible in mind but it does give a pretty full account of how we are supposed to live.

Does this teaching apply to people who are not Christians? The easy answer is yes because this is how God intends us all to live but the less easy answer is that each person must choose whether to live like a member of God’s kingdom or not. Christians cannot force people to live this way they can only hope that others will want to live this way when they see the difference it can make in the Christians life.

Christian living christian teaching, sermon on the mount

Although I haven’t watched the program (I’m in the UK and don’t follow the series anyway – perhaps my loss) I’ve had my Internet news feeds about Jesus dominated by the story of Larry David ‘urinating’ on Jesus painting in a ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ episode.

From what I’ve read the event seems to have involved some splashed urine on a painting of Jesus that was then mistaken for tears. I think in some ways the idea was a clever one, although perhaps the idea could have been softened to avoid offense with someone washing their hands (perhaps there is something funny about urine that escapes me somewhat).

This is the kind of issue that constantly comes up in the UK with religion and religious characters (although Jesus and Christianity seems to be the main source for the fun) being the object of ridicule and innuendo on many TV comedy shows ).

So then we have the dilema. Do we laugh at it to show we are just the same as everyone else and can take a joke or do we make a stand to say actually this is really quite offensive?

Not just Christians, of course, see Jesus as a great religious figure and this is likely to be offensive to quite a large percentage of the worlds population.

There is always a fine line between using something for a joke and trying to squeeze some humour out of an offensive situation. There are certainly people who find any offensive remarks to be a great source of humour.

Personally I feel that with so many other things to laugh about (and I personally enjoy a good laugh) any humour that degrades other people is not right.

We already have some restrictions on free speech (and rightly so) where people are not free to say what they like about people of different races or genders. We don’t accept that it is ok to say anything you like about anybody (we don’t accept verbal bullying as being acceptable for instance). So at some point we want to draw the line. Personally I think we need to make sure we don’t draw the line so close that people are not free to express opinions – whatever they may be – as long as those opinions are not expressed in a way that is going to cause a riot. This is about the way opinions are expressed and not the opinion themselves.

So we come back to humour. Humour is not just about expressing opinion it is about the way it is done. People must be free to say Christians are wrong but not to piss on them (sorry for the language!).

I think this is a case of things going too far and perhaps we let too many comedians get away with too much – in the interests of free speech and being afraid we are going to be labeled as humourless killjoy spoilsports.

Perhaps comedians are sometimes themselves guilty of bullying others – how far is it from a good joke to bullying someone (those who have been bullied at school will tell you have most bullies use tactics to make others laugh at them).

Of course humour has been used in the past to make us laugh at: black people for being black, homosexuals for being homosexual, Jewish people for being Jewish, etc. And at the time we all collude with the claim that it’s just humour and people should loosen up and learn to laugh at themselves. I hope by now that we have come to see that humour can play a part in the way people view others. Of course it isn’t the cause of the problem but it certainly can contribute to making some pretty terrible things to happen. I hope by now that even those who hate Political Correctness would understand that some things are just too far.

I didn’t see the episode and we get worse in the UK but I want to make a plea for people not to degrade others (or their beliefs) whether in the name of a good joke – or otherwise.

Thoughts humour, jesus christ

It sometimes makes me sad when I read stuff that makes me think that someone is getting angry at Jesus. What makes me really sad is that too often the people getting angry at Jesus are Christians. To hear some Christians write about Jesus or the church you would think that they were the worst of enemies. I was reading something today on a blog by a Christian that at first I assumed was an anti Jesus blog but it turned out to be written by a Christian.

Why does this happen?

• I guess it could just be bad writing and the writer meant to say something else, but this seems unlikely to me.
• It could have been someone who was caught at the wrong moment and they were letting off steam – maybe but then why write it in a blog?
• Perhaps it was someone just struggling with their faith – this could be true because I know that every Christian faces this from time to time.
• Or perhaps they just thought they were being funny – quite possible, there is an awful lot of anti church stuff written by Christians who think its funny – not my taste though.

Now look. I’ve had my fair share (perhaps more than my fair share) of rough treatment by the church. I’ve felt that sometimes God was keeping his distance and letting things happen to me that in my view he shouldn’t (always seems to turn out best for me in the end though). I’ve also had times when I’ve cried out to God in desparation but don’t seem to have got an answer (although later I found out I had). I’ve been there, felt it, and done it.

I’m sure that deep down the person in question does love God and wants to be a good servant but there is something that has hurt them that makes them want to get angry at God. I understand this. But never forget that despite all the anger God still loves you.

Jesus is pretty used to people being angry at him. If there is someone who can take the angry accusations its Jesus. But do you angry Christians realise that others find fuel for their own anger in yours?

So please don’t burden those who are looking for God with your own anger. Let the anger go and let the rest of us be free to find Jesus.

Thoughts