September 2012 - Dwelling Spaces

Saturday 29 September 2012

Meditating on control (or: God is not pants)

Sales of control pants over the last few years have rocketed in the UK both for men and women.  Is this a sign of our desire to control things that are not quite the way we want them to be?  Control pants (made famous by Bridget Jones) do the job of hiding the evidence of excess without you having to make the effort to change your diet or to exercise.  They give the quick fix that our culture always seems to be looking for.

So, this got me thinking about the nature of control.

Rowan Williams talks about us all chasing an illusion which is that we are in control of our lives.  He says that the act of baptism addresses this because it is the immersion of ourselves back into the chaos of the waters from which only God can bring order. God is the one enthroned over the flood (Ps 29:10), who hovers over the chaos (Gen 1:2) and brings it under control (see the rest of Gen 1).



I just re-read Romans 6.  Paul is pretty explicit that baptism is joining Jesus in His death so that sin has no control over us any longer.

Jesus at the moment of His death was the least in control He could possibly be.  Crucified, immobile, subject to the control of so many human desires imposed upon him; we should not be surprised that the light went out in the cosmos and that chaos and darkness reigned until the moment Jesus said: It is finished. Control is broken. Light returns. A new creation is made.

We become our most free - most in control perhaps? - when we give up all control to God (Jesus said whoever loses his life for my sake will find it - Matt 10:39).  It is an extraordinary thing that as we say 'not my will but yours be done', as we turn to Jesus and at the cross give him all our sin and lies, pretense and self-justification; we find forgiveness and truth, reality and newness of life. The expanse of his mercy knows no bounds; thinking about this kind of makes me want to kneel in humility and dance with praise at the same time!

So this is my prayer at the moment, for the illusion of control to be destroyed in my life and to become a new creation again and again trusting in God above all things.

Friday 14 September 2012

Called to be....

I have been pondering the nature of 'calling' lately, and thinking about Mary as an example. More than anyone else in the history of the world she had the calling to the most high profile role - Mother of God. But it struck me that God’s calling to Mary to become the mother of Jesus was not the primary calling on her life. The calling on her life was exactly the same as the one on each of our lives as Christians, it is to hear the word of God and obey it.

Mary was living her normal life, one shaped by her genes, culture, family, experiences etc, but was living her life in a way that must have resonated with an obedience to God, and with a character that reflected His character. That meant that when Gabriel appeared to her, what happened wasn’t a new and sudden calling on her life, it was a moment that sparked into life the fruit of her primary calling. 

When I read Luke 11:27-28 it helped to clarify my thoughts about this. Jesus is teaching to a growing crowd, and Luke writes:
As he said these things a woman in the crowd spoke out to him, "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts at which you nursed!" But he replied, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!"
 
 
 
I love the way that Jesus underlines Mary's primary calling - to hear the word of God and obey it - without dismissing the reality of what this meant for Mary. She became Jesus' mother precisely because she was obedient in response to God what God asked of her, and being Jesus' mother was an important thing; just not the most important thing. Jesus words help us to understand what our priorities should be.
 
The act of calling into being is one of creation. When God creates us, He calls us. The very fact that we are alive, means we are called by God, and He is more interested in who we are becoming, how our character is developing than in what we do. Of course what we do is still important, but how we are doing it is more so. Perhaps then as we seek to grow as disciples walking alongside one another, one of the best questions we can be asking each other is "What is God saying to you at the moment? And how are you responding to that?" As we do this we can help each other grow in our primary calling of hearing and obeying God, because we all need help to do this.