Monastery Method

Much to today's church scene, especially the emerging church, seems to me to be an exercise in making the gospel accessible, whether through music, words or art. My church, for instance, is starting a new contemporary service aimed at reaching the a new audience.

I have just watched a remarkable few minutes of television. The Monastery showed a period of silence lasting perhaps a minute, which felt like many hours. God was present in that moment. The scandal of the programme is that a group of middle aged white men who live together in a community, who pray together five times daily using ancient formula, who are celibate and have little contact with the modern world have had such an effect on a group of modern men.

The contemporary world is so self-referential and self-obsessed that to buy into that robs the gospel of its intrinsic otherness, its scandal and its mystery. We risk losing preaching culture not Christ. Why are we Christians, who have a heritage stetching back two millenia to Christ and then several more to Abraham, so afriad to explore our ancient practices? Is it because we are ignorant or because the spirit of our age has robbed us of our self-confidence.

Whatever the case let us commit to once again knowing and preach nothing but Christ and him crucified, foolishness to the Greeks and a scandal the Jews.

Across the whitewash

In urban fields of dreams,
flashes of green mingle with pebbled grey
and young men prove their worth.

across the whitewashed borders,
lives are lived and deaths are died,
dead men walking

time ceases to drone and comes alive,
space crinkles and bursts into freedom
of genuis and brutal glory.

on these modern fields of light and dark,
we love you still and hope for those moments
when we know ecstasy once more.

Far Fetchedness

I had a conversation about the merits of Nestorianism today. Not a topic that comes up much in daily discourse. I tried to tell the guy that Nestorius was a heretic and why so. I'm afraid that I couldn't have done such a good job. The conversation came to an end with the guy saying words to the effect that the idea of God becoming man and dying to save individuals is somewhat 'far-fetched'.

My first reaction was to agree. On the surface it does seem a little incredible. but then i got thinking and wondered if we have become so disconnected from the biblical stories that our only reaction is to doubt. to be sure our world, which teaches us to analyse and imitate, can't reduce the incarnation - or anything about jesus really - into a package. at least not one that still remains jesus. endlessly beguiling he remains. like a bar of soap, he give us the slip most of the time.

But i can't imagine Paul saying that Jesus was 'far-fetched'. He seems to have lived and breathed the world of Israel that it is obvious that Jesus would have to come and die for us and be raised on the third day. Still that was after a good 15 years thinking in the desert, so maybe we are let off with a bit of 'far-fetchedness' for a while.

Its been some time...

So its been a while.

When camera's flash and bulbs enslave,
when lives are lived on screens with mung beans,
when the chosen ones are spirited away,
then we know that somethings have changed

when we talk and shout at the flickering screen
and sit silently every morning in a sea of hearts, and minds and
when there is nothing more than the world of noise

but when we lose that moment of magic,
when eyes meet and greet and say more than could ever be written,
and when we move too quickly
to even notice the crease of the eye and
the sprite on the lip.

this is the world we live in

the world that we are called to bring together into something bright.