by John Mason | Sep 12, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Seventeen years ago yesterday (September 11, 2001), Judith and I were living in Downtown Manhattan in close proximity to the Twin Towers. The second of the terrorist planes flew above us at a high-pitched scream before a mighty explosion as it crashed into the South Tower.
In spring and early summer that year I had started a mid-week interactive Bible program on Wall Street, Downtown and in Midtown – what we called ‘More to Life: Wall Street Ministry’. On 9/11 I was to speak on the subject, ‘God, why don’t you clean up the mess?’ Needless to say, I did not give that talk that day.
In the course of teaching and pastoral ministry that followed that day, I observed that our culture has made a habit of setting aside the wisdom of the past and especially the wisdom of the Bible. I noted how interesting it is that in the midst of catastrophe, in times when we are confronted with the harsh realities of life, the words and wisdom of the Bible reveal a unique power. The Psalms, for example, provide comfort for the broken-hearted and hope for the bereaved. Indeed, the President on the night of 9/11 quoted from Psalm 23.
Psalm 46. In my ministry I drew attention to Psalm 46: 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 God of the Bible knows about the devastating events and suffering. Encouragingly, Psalm 46 tells us that God’s presence is neither interrupted by nor dislocated from such events. Rather, the Psalm reveals God as being in the midst of them. He is not the cause of wickedness, but neither is he removed from it.
The good news is, as the Psalm goes on to assure us, God has not left us to our own devices. He has committed himself to be involved. He will hear us and sustain us, despite the awfulness of our experiences. We read: There is a river, whose streams make glad the city of God…. God is with her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.
Justice. Bubbling through Psalm 46 is the implication that God will comfort by bringing about his justice. Indeed, all of us have within us a sense of right and wrong that cries out for justice, especially when great wickedness has been perpetrated.
It’s important to think about this. If we lived in a world that had come into existence simply by the process of spontaneous change, we would be nothing but particles, bumping around in some sort of meaningful connection. Our conscious state would be nothing more than electrical discharges in the human brain.
If this is how we view life, we can hardly be morally indignant about behavior that results from quarks smashing together. The issues of wickedness and suffering, and our cry for justice, lose their relevance.
Rather, the sense of justice we have within us is in line with the Bible’s teaching that condemns violence and the taking of innocent life.
Psalm 46 is one of a number of Psalms that point us to the New Testament and its teaching that wickedness will not triumph, that God will vindicate the innocent and glorify his own name. His judgment may be slow as we count time, but it is very sure.
We can be sure of this because of the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross of Jesus comes between the good creation of God, ruined by human sin with which the Bible begins, and the promise of a restored creation with which the Bible ends – where God will wipe away every tear … there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away (Rev 21:4).
It is on the cross where a godless world put to death the sinless Son of God, that Jesus took the consequences of the wickedness of the world into himself. From that day, God has promised to forgive all who truly turn to him – something we all need to do, for none of us is righteous in God’s eyes. It is the cross of Christ that gives us confidence that God has our good in mind no matter what wickedness is perpetrated.
The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:38f – For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is the kind of faith that answers fear and assures us that God truly is our refuge and strength.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Sep 5, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
One of the striking features of Thomas Cranmer’s, Book of Common Prayer is the use of the Bible, and in particular the Songs of the Bible. At the heart of the orders of service for Morning and Evening Prayer is not just a pattern for the reading through the whole of the Bible in a year, but the reading aloud of the Psalms – and not just one Psalm.
So important did he consider the reading of the Psalms to be, that he designed a reading plan, a Table as it was called, for the reading of the whole of the Book of Psalms every thirty days. His plan set out the way the extra day in January and March would offset the twenty-eight days of February; he also made provision for the remaining longer months throughout the year. And, yes, he also had provision for the calendar leap year.
But Morning and Evening Prayer not only included the reading of the Psalms each month. Some psalms were used every week – Psalm 95 as a ‘call to worship’ at Morning Prayer, for example. He also brought in other songs of the Bible together with very early Christian hymns, such as the Te Deum Laudamus (We praise you O, God…) at Morning Prayer and the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the highest) at Communion. What is more, the Psalms and the songs of the Bible were to be read aloud or sung.
The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church help us understand something of Cranmer’s thinking: Article VI states : Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.
Writing during the reign of Elizabeth I, Richard Hooker, writes in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V: The end of the Word of God is to save, and therefore we term it the word of life. The way for all men and women to be saved is by the knowledge of that truth which the word hath taught . . . . To this end the word of God no otherwise serveth than only in the nature of a doctrinal instrument. It saveth because it maketh “wise to salvation”.
Given that by the early 16th century most people were ignorant of the Scriptures, and given Cranmer’s desire to bring the Scriptures not just back into the life of the clergy, but into the church as a whole, we can understand his extensive use of Bible – to be read in English – in the daily services. But why read all one hundred and fifty Psalms each month?
Dr. Andrew Shead, who heads up the Old Testament Department at Moore Theological College in Sydney, comments that ‘the Psalms are poetry – and for good reason. Poetry is designed to do many things …: first of all, poetry slows us down. You can’t skim poetry; it’s about reading and rereading… Secondly, poetry brings sounds and images into conversation with the words, and makes the words say more than they can say by themselves’ (The Psalms in the Christian Life).
The Psalms don’t just speak to our minds, but to our very being, including our emotions – our hearts and souls. We see this more clearly when we consider the variety in the Five Books of the Psalms.
In Books 1 and 2 we find psalms expressing suffering and distress, weakness and yet trust in God. Book 3 takes us to the low ebb of the psalms with the cries of a people in distress where in Psalm 89 we are left with the question, ‘How long O Lord?’ Book 4 takes us back to the time of Moses and sounds a note of extended praise. Psalm 96 says: ‘Sing to the Lord a new song…’ Book 5 takes us to God’s answer to the prayers of the nation and the restoration of his people. Significantly five psalms of praise – which each begin and end with the word, ‘Alleluia’ conclude the Book of Psalms.
The Psalms speak to our whole being. Significantly, in recent years, Dr. Ashley Null, one of the world’s leading authorities on Thomas Cranmer, sums up Cranmer’s anthropology this way: ‘What the heart desires, the will chooses, and the mind justifies’.
Here we have a clue for Cranmer’s keen interest in the Psalms. He understood that the Psalms, in speaking to our whole being and our life’s experiences, are used by God to play an important part in changing us.
Surely our churches, and we ourselves, need to give greater attention to reading the Psalms each day – aloud.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Aug 29, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Earlier this month I drew attention to Dr. Greg Sheridan’s observation in his new book, God is Good for You (Allen&Unwin:2018), namely that ‘Liberalism (today) remains in furious rebellion against Christianity, its parent and its source. A certain panic at the existential emptiness of liberal atheism impels liberalism to a new authoritarianism. Everyone must genuflect to the same secular pieties’ (p.31).
Furthermore, as his book develops, he writes, ‘It is evidence of how Christianity has been marginalized in the popular culture in the West that there are very few Christian celebrities, or rather celebrities whose primary fame is due to their Christianity, their Christian works or writings,…’ (p.66).
‘The new atheist polemicists are really the bishops of the new atheist religion, fortifying their followers in their beliefs by reference to their own sacred texts and authorized teachings. But they are false prophets of a false religion.’
‘Christians,’ he says, ‘have a right to be worried about what is happening to their beliefs in the West. The primary challenge is not intellectual but cultural…’ (p.66).
How then do we respond? The Bible’s starting point – and ending point – is prayer. How important it is then that we consider, not just the importance and the power of prayer, but rather the One to whom we are praying.
Let’s look again at Ephesians 3:20-21: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Now to him who… is able to accomplish abundantly far more…
Handley Moule (Ephesian Studies, p.133), quotes Adolphe Monod who wrote of these words: “After the grandest promises which human language can express, the Holy Ghost here closes by declaring that all which can be expressed is infinitely below the reality which is in God. In vain we mount, even in the track of an Apostle; we can only contemplate, after all, ‘parts of the ways of God’ (Job 26:14), and we must always conclude with ‘groanings that cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26). Yes, and nothing other can suffice us than this avowal of insufficiency; nothing less could respond to the vague and vast need of heart. All that the mind comes to see distinctly, and the mouth to enunciate with precision is incapable of satisfying us. This conclusion accordingly, astonishing and unexpected, is just what we required…” (Moule, p.133).
Too often, in our minds, God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.
We need to pause and meditate on Paul’s words: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish than all we can ask or imagine…
Handley Moule continues to quote Monod: “Nothing can restrain or bound the power of God towards us; nothing in him, nothing even is us; no limits set to his power, for it knows no limits; not even the weakness of our prayers, and the imperfection of our knowledge, for he is able to transcend all our demands and all our conceptions” (Moule, pp.133f).
Think of it: Paul the Apostle tells us we should be confident in praying for the limitless resources of God’s power to be at work within us.
Handley Moule comments, ‘The Doxology… seems to come less to close it (the prayer) than to waft it aloft into eternity. This is one of the great Scriptures, the Holy Spirit’s words of the first order. Let us recall it, let us ponder it, to be ourselves uplifted, and then abased, but only to be the better uplifted again in the power of God’ (HCG Moule, Ephesian Studies, pp.132f).
It may be that we have not reflected sufficiently on the awesome nature of our God. Or maybe God is saying to us, you do not have because you do not ask. You’re playing in the shallows. You’re not swimming in the deep crystal clear waters of God’s love.
Ask. And when we do, we will begin to understand just how much God does love us. Then we can know what it means for us to love the Lord our God, and to know his power at work within us as we live in today’s world.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: ‘Psalms: Ancient & Modern’
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Lunch with the Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms – and 9/11’.
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© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Aug 15, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Love. Back in the sixties Burt Bacharach sang: What the world need now is love sweet love … The Beatles were singing All You Need is Love. The problem was then and still remains today that it’s one thing to sing about love, but quite another to live it.
In his prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21, Paul prays that God’s people be rooted and grounded in Christ’s love and so have the power to grasp the love of Christ, how high and deep is the love of Christ and to know the love of Christ… (Ephesians 3:18f).
In speaking of our experience of Christ’s love Paul mixes two metaphors: one from agriculture— rooted, and the other from construction— grounded. On the one hand, our experience of Christ’s love makes us like well-rooted trees, able to withstand droughts. On the other, like well-built houses, we are enabled by Christ’s love to withstand the hurricanes of life.
We can have an intellectual understanding of God’s love, but Paul prays not only that we know but also that we experience Christ’s love deep in our hearts.
In 1 John 4:10 we read: In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When John says ‘God is love’, he is not referring to some quasi-erotic ecstasy, but to Jesus dying on the cross.
In speaking of ‘love’ John chooses a rarely used word in the original language, a word that speaks of a love that is committed to making sacrifices, no matter the cost, for the good of others.
Paul uses the same word here as he prays that God’s people may feel in their hearts the deep love of the Son of God for us. God’s Son was willing, not just ‘to share in our human suffering on the cross’, as Greg Sheridan says (God is Good for You, Allen&Unwin: 2018, p.84), but rather to die in our place the death that we deserve. Drawing from the depth of his love for us, the most godly man who has ever lived chose to die for us in our god-forsakeness.
Sometimes it takes a sickness, a crisis, or a tragedy to awaken us to the reality of Christ’s love. Sometimes it’s not until we see houses, cars and the luxuries of the world for what they are – trinkets whose splendor is uncertain and fading – that we experience the heart of God’s love.
The power of God’s love. Paul knows that it is only when God’s power is at work in our lives that we really see what it meant for him to get into our skin and enter our world; what it cost for him to suffer and die in our place. And it is for this that he prays.
Early in the 19th century, Napoleon’s army opened prisons used in the Spanish Inquisition. They came across the remains of a prisoner in a dungeon deep underground. Bones hung limply from chains around the wrists and ankles. The prisoner had suffered a grim death, but he had left a witness. On the wall he had sketched a cross and written words at each corner. Written in Spanish they read at the top of the cross, ‘height’, at the bottom ‘depth’, on one side ‘length’, on the other side ‘breadth’. Even in his suffering this man had felt the impact of God’s love.
I want you to experience, Paul says, the power of the love of God, to feel in your hearts the reality of that love.
Significantly, he adds a caveat: That with all the saints you may have the power to grasp… God’s love.
Change. A personal experience of Christ’s love doesn’t tend come to lone ranger Christians. Rather, when we consider the kinds of people God saves by his grace, whose lives are transformed by Christ – the egocentric materialists and party-loving hedonists, the powerless and the impoverished, you and me – do we fall to our knees in humility, thankfulness and joy.
Sometimes we wonder how God can love some of these people because we ourselves find it hard to love them. And then it hits us that wonder of all wonders, God loves me.
Can this power change us? Can this power change our relationships with people around us? Can this power help us cope with the disappointments and frustrations of life?
Paul’s answer is very much ‘Yes’. God’s power can change us, direct us, enable us to say sorry, to say, ‘I forgive.’ This power of God, like the dynamite it is, can and does change this fallen, fragile life of ours.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: Psalms: Ancient & Modern
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Lunch with the Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms, and 9/11.
by John Mason | Aug 8, 2018 | Uncategorized
In the Introduction to his new book, God is Good for You, released last week, Greg Sheridan, an Australian op-ed writer and author, observes that ‘the hostility to religion’ in the West ‘is unfalsifiable’. He comments that liberal atheism which is committed to ousting Christianity from the market-square, ‘is driven insane by contradictory impulses it can no longer control or balance. One is an anti-social self-absorption. The development of the metaphysical understanding of human identity has ended in a dry gulch’, he says.
Christianity, he points out, brought hope even for ‘the excluded and marginalized of the ancient world – they all had souls. But the soul… gave way to the self as the therapeutic age replaced the age of belief. Now, in our post-modern times, the world of social media and the universal quest for celebrity, even self has been supplanted by the brand… From soul to self to brand is a steep decline in what it means to be human’.
Springing out of the ‘brand’, Sheridan continues, liberalism, against the universalism of Christianity, is creating ‘a new series of tribal identities. Nothing is more powerful now in Western politics, or more dangerous, than identity politics. It sells itself as a way to help disadvantaged and marginalized communities. But eventually everyone wants a slice of identity politics and it sets all against all’.
How do we live in such a world? Paul’s significant prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21 goes to the heart of what we need.
In Ephesians 3:14 through 3:17a we read: For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,… that… he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;…
Paul links the power of God to the strengthening work of God’s Spirit in our lives – not in order to make us externally powerful people, but rather that our inner lives will be open to Christ, the Spirit of Christ, fully taking up residence within us.
Paul understands that while we may truly turn to Christ in repentance and faith, we tend to fear him being Lord of every aspect of our life. We might be seen as ‘fanatics’. We shrink from the idea that Christ is interested in changing those things within us which conflict with his expectations. We resist the idea that he may want to re-tune the desires of our heart.
While we might be truly Christ’s, we may not be fully Christ’s. This is not about a second blessing. Rather, it is the recognition that Christ’s presence within us is, as with all relationships, a process.
So Paul prays that the Spirit will use his supernatural power to open our hearts to the beauty and love that flows from Christ – so that when we see his overwhelming love for us, we will not fear putting our lives fully in his hands.
Further, Paul continues: So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;…
Dwell here is key. It means, ‘take up residence’ and ‘settle down’. There are many things in all of us with which Jesus Christ will not be at all comfortable. As we come to know him better we realize the need for cleaning up and even renovation. And, as anyone who has been involved in renovation knows, it takes longer and costs much more than originally expected.
Paul knows this and that’s why he prays for God’s power to be working in us through his Spirit. He knows that God’s intention is to make our lives a fit home for his Son.
Paul often uses the imagery of putting off the old and bringing in the new. Colossians 3 gives us an example of the kinds of practical things Jesus wants to see happen in our lives. So in 3:5, we read: Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:… Toss out of your life what doesn’t fit this new life with Christ. Is it sex outside of marriage? Is it pornography? Is it evil or greed? Is it anger or rage, or malice or slander, or perhaps cursing? Do you always tell the truth? These things belong to the old self.
Put on the new self which is being renewed after the image of its creator. So, Put on then,… compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
The key to living as God’s people in our rapidly changing world, is to have Christ, who has saved us, now living at the very center of our life.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: Psalms: Ancient & Modern
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ Lunch – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms, and 9/11.
– – –
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
