Aweikinin 19/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-5

           

H,

The constant question is about intimacy with God. How do we get into that? It is hard to comprehend something that is not physical in terms of love. We have been effectively socialized into seeing and touching love that we do not even know what it will feels like to not have love in that way. This is the challenge that confronts us; to make an unknowable quantity into the measure of a knowing God and to see the quality of intimacy with this invisible being as a new reality every day.

I do not know how this is achieved. I know the obvious answers but they all spell religious duty and though they are all good and fine in their place, they do not take us closer. I am talking about a living presence of love in our lives that paints through, not over, everything else. Like that sense a person gets that they cannot be anything less than friend/lover/father/sibling and any dereliction from that duty is wrong and must be amended. Well, that is a small part of it. I am trying to talk about a sense of being in love and in intimacy, the kind where your whole life is summarized in that other person’s pleasure and light. Where there is no holding back and no fear and no hesitation, just an endless tessellation of one soul to another, in shapes and forms where the only boundary is devotion.

I think I am explaining this all badly but you know how it went for me. I had a series of knocks on the head and heart and then I fell headlong into the brush. I could hear Him but not in words. More like in urges. The urge to do this or that and the older I got and the real nature of things showed up as wretched in my cynical mind, the closer I got to this idea of a white-place. I have sought the pure intimacy all my life. This place where I can be myself not as indulgence but as safety and wholeness spiraling up into meaning.

It has not been enough for me, the Sunday service or midweek fair. I am tired of neat boxes and easy answers and the soul clenching myth of routines. I desire a living, breathing connection to all things real. I want truth at its utmost or else this pale and terrible world is all there is. If this is so and I have been high on my supply all this time then like Cadmus I have to call this all absurd, living and dying and being afraid. I do not think it is something anyone can create. I do not think there is anything special or deep in feeling this hunger of the soul. I think the human core is like that. I think we all try to define the something more. Some of us go back to source and try to work it out from there. We fail but that is just how we start to kneel and look up. We give up some of this solid ground to walk on water. We look up and go for walks and talk to the clouds until we see that old face looking back at us. It is an inverse thing. We seek the other universe only hinted at in dreams and miracles and notions and insinuations. We seek love-divine and the opportunity to go missing during walks with the sublime. Perhaps one day this ‘some’ will be all. I hope so. My idea of heaven has always been a place where everyone is.

Aweikinin 18/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-4

H,

It is the old question of faith or works? Is it what we do that matters or what we intend to do? In the past you know how strongly I defended the intention over the deed. I used the famous bible line: “God judges the intention.” It was all fine and dandy and probably true but I forgot that other line, or ignored it because of how I had seen it misused, “faith without works is dead.” Obviously faith is in actions as well as in deeds. We are to worship with our entire mind, all of our heart and all of our body.

It is often automatic. The faith will lead you to the acts. I cannot think of any single person of faith who did not find something they were compelled to do. They might do it quite badly at first, and this is where the intention is vital, but they will often grow into doing it well, and if they do not get haughty or start playing to an audience it will continue to be worship. Intention ties the act back to God. Or good, as it tells us we are in sync with the higher perspective of the things we are doing. So often we fill our lives with the things that bring instant praise or prize. Too often we are upset or feel put down because we either expect we ought to be respected or our intentions should be clear to the human eye. How many fights are based on the simple premise “you do not understand me.” perhaps no one is meant to. It is possible that the lonely walk of living for God is a lesson in necessary isolation and you will get the same shtick that Noah got (“a boat on dry land, you fool”). That is what living in faith always is; a boat on dry land.  We cannot see and so we follow. Always, vision over visibility

The thing is to keep our eyes above. To remember why we do the things we do. To not get tired of doing good when we can and to not do good only so we can say or think or feel we did good. To give to the poor is to lend to God. True religion is to tend to the orphan, the widow, the needy and the brokenhearted. The unsexiest of tasks are the ones that have the omniscient attention of God. I suspect that the best people on earth are the ones doing the little tasks of making individual lives better in the darkest places on our planet. There will be no Nobel Prize for them. They do not care. They have their eyes set on the irresistible glory to come.

Aweikinin 17/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-3

H,

It is hard to follow through on the truth you now believe. It is hard to not to begin to think it is all a trick of the mind and nothing is out there but space. The vastness and majesty of the universe has now been sort of explained by science. We have come nearer and nearer to replicating the conditions for  creating life. And aside from that whole cosmological argument there is still the drudgery here. The things we really seek and believe and care about are hidden in the heart. We do not need science to tell us our hearts are not well.

I ate dinner in tears yesterday as I read one hundred and thirty four people, mostly children, were killed in Pakistan. I thought of the girls not yet rescued over here and the many children killed in this whole senseless conflict over belief.  That it has been this way for a while and that throughout history the weak and innocent have borne the brunt of war does not put it in context, tragedy is tragedy. It has come to the point where I cannot read the news without caution. This world has lost its glory for me.

Yet, I cannot leave like that. Inertia from terror and sorrow is not a solution to anything. I have to look back and realise that this is not the final destiny of the earth. The foundations of the earth are not made of temporal stuff. I see clearer these days why that date with God is vital because it is the final cure for the human problem. We seek money and glory and some sort of truth and protection from evil but none of these things go past the seventy or less years we will spend on earth. None of these things can change the crimes in the north east of Nigeria or that tragedy in the middles east and environs or the poverty of the world or the horrors of child slavery. This is a world that has a veneer of progress just above a cesspool of the human heart’s regress. We can laugh and play and get lost in distractions, but we are just a step away from sliding into the abyss we do not yet know.

Sorry for the gloom. Children keep dying. I have no answers. I am crying again. I do not know what to do. I light a candle, I pray, I ask for something to do, I want to give all my blood and all my life to a better way of being. There has to be a God. There has to be reckoning and a reason for all this. My new resolution is to not shut off from the pain or the joy of life. Perhaps in there I will see what He says. I am not losing hope or faith. His understanding of the world and men is what I see play out in the world today. His prophecy is right altogether. He formed the world from an abyss once before. He is on the road to doing it again. I cannot explain how I know, I just know. I have my marching orders. I know my place in this end army. I can live in the flow of His grace that helps me see a better everything to come. He formed the world form an abyss before. I know He will do so again.

Aweikinin 16/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-2

H,

What was I on about again? Yes, the place to come over the scourge of the now. We are always prisoners of our now. There is always some nagging voice inside telling us that it is all in the now and things will never get better. We cannot outgrow our childish bouts of sin and succor. We cannot escape our past misdeeds. It says: if you have started you might as well finish. It tells us there are fine men and women walking around the surface of the earth and we might as well just lay ourselves in the dust and die because we will never be that eloquent in living. What can we do but be products of the now?

A lie, damn lies and statistics, is what that voice is. We must move on to what the poet calls: “vision over visibility.” We must have a stronger grasp of the thing we are involved in. We cannot believe in all the grandeur and poetry of an invisible deity and one that He has all the power in the universe but still think our stuff is too large for Him. He cannot be cosmically larger than everything but intimately small. He has to loom large in all. He has to be able to change minds, hearts as well as form galaxies.

I am thinking we have to let Him in more. Faith is the giving over of our whole lives to God. It is that divine marriage where all the sacred and mundane aspects of everyday life are brought into the light of His will. We have to care what He thinks and go about with the thought in our heads that the way He suggests is the way we should take. I have found it is not prison to do this. The freest people are the ones who are made boundless by minds free of gravity. The gospel merely states the heart can be free too. It tells us all our hungers have some shape and all our longing has a home. It unbundles the myth that all we have is now and all we will ever be is the now. It says we are not merely the sum of past deeds but the destiny of a divine sacrifice and we can be made whole in that new reality. It says to us, who doubt all things and suffer all things and want whole lives where body, mind, heart, Soul dwell in peace, that such a synergy of self is possible. It says, have vision over visibility and all good things will be yours.

Aweikinin 15/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1

H,

I am trying to remember what it felt like to have a feeling for God. You know what I mean, to feel it not just know it. Those golden times when He was spring in step and voice in laughter and the real joy in everything. Of course memory plays a trick on the mind called reverie. We remember in struggles only the good spots of a supposed easier past. It is quite possible that it has always been this hard. It is also quite possible that a sort of inverse Eden is upon us and so we are not learning the knowledge of that tree again but growing into the knowledge of God so the world now seems naked and flimsy and cruel. Our longing for Him is growing but our darn flesh will not keep up.

Do you remember that old Pentecostal dating epigram? It went something like “do not fall in love but stand in love”? I always thought it was a little much about a turn of phrase but I am quite sure now that in terms of loving God we never stand. It is a steep fall from the heights of trying to make our way to the true floor of knowing that we cannot do it this way. A consciousness for Him seems to contain this new dislike for the pale grey of this present world and to miss the rainbow extravaganza that is to be the promised return of the King of Kings; that government of no end where lions lay down with lambs and there is no one hurting on the holy mountain. We try to fix problems now and spread a light and well we should but we still long for the completion of all things and the final manifestation of all the best attributes of the Sons of God. We want a better world but only an unwise look at things can produce anything but despair as a whole for the evil across the planet. We may be a little above the fray of constant sorrows but we are just one slip away from being in the moss. If we care for the state of the world then we know even if we never have great evils happen to us it is still absurd that they happen at all. The long night seems too long this time and we struggle to look up when down here there is all this darkness.

Am I too doom and gloom? Well, I am misleading you because I am not down at all. I get down and all (being ‘poigny’ and all) but in all this a light is growing out of the blind side of my despair. It may take a few days for me to explain this but let me start by saying this: I am starting to see that I have to look through other eyes to see the kingdom as an eternal epoch again. In other words, I am not just hearing rumours of another world built on truth, justice and righteousness; I am starting to believe them.

Aweikinin 12/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-5

H,

Waking up to the sound of your own life is never easy. I am on a early morning bent now and with the material future so up in the air, I usually wake up to the dawning dark of worry. It is the sort of worry that leads to the escapism of stupid acts. They are the sort of stifling worries that solve no problems nor create any value to the look or feel or taste of life. It is the kind that tells you that I have mixed things up and planted solitude where there should be fellowship. I forget “I am with you always, even until the end of time.”

The thing is that our mistakes loom larger than God. I would like to say it is some godly sorrow because we know we have gone astray but I suspect it is some ego driven inability to rely on the higher things and to stop digging our own holes of despair. We do not want to admit that this is a way too far and a sea too deep. And even before all that, we do not want to admit that we are called to a spiritual existence in a material world not to a material existence with spiritual help. As that writer so brilliantly put it “we are divine (spiritual) beings having a human experience not humans having a divine (spiritual) experience.”   I paraphrase, but you get the point. The entire material world up in our face and we can fail to see that it is only a figment of time. Nothing we chase down daily is of eternal relevance or reality.

We only have to look at the things He has asked us to do to realize what a divine joke it is outside of Him. It is so against our human nature that we mostly do what we can, get self righteous about our petty progress, treat the ones too hard as suggestions or just our plain ‘weakness’ and go on with life like we have no core. I imagine God, saints save me from blasphemy, writing out the Ten Commandments and giggling to Him-self: “let me see them try and do all this without me.”

That is our core. I sound like a broken record this week but the truth is set in holy stone: we depend on Him. How did that bald eagle put it: “for when I am weak then I am strong.” All of the Christian life is giving up the idea that you are okay with the crumbs of half and half and almost there. To finally say we are ready for the Full Bread and Full Wine of God. We are taking in His life. Remember those thirty three years of glory? A carpenter, a virgin, a manger, a star, three wise men, years of silence, baptism, temptation, ministry, prophecy fulfilled, conspiracy, arrest and death. Then, life forever. He tells us to: Go and do likewise. No material look at that life as a whole makes it attractive. When we give up the hold and worship of flesh perhaps we can begin to be illuminated about all the real sense this apparent madness makes. Perhaps, when we see Him we shall be seen whole and become that wholeness and holiness that our hearts know and long for but our present bodies cannot achieve. I know, on that path, we will become His forever man, woman, being, like Him, sons, daughters, Him.

Aweikinin 11/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-4

H,

The bumpy road of doing the right thing gets even more unstable the older we get. First, we have to clarify why we seek to be right. In terms of faith or belief we are not moralists or puritans. Well, all the evidence suggests that we are not. We do not seek to be better than others or sit in judgement over anyone. For a Christian doing right is what the name itself denotes: becoming more like Christ.

When the question is asked, what pleases God? The answer is Christ. That is the name and the nature that resounds in all of time as being the Son of God. When He was baptized on earth and the heavens opened and that symbol of peace and reconciliation with God (or the subtext in a John Woo film), the dove, appeared, the main thing said or announced was “I am well pleased.” He is the sun of righteousness. He is right, itself. All the character of living up to God is in him, tied together. All law, all covenants, all prophecy and the whole truth personified in the second Adam. We do not seek to be moral examples but to be Christ like. The difference? We often seek to be moral examples so we can seem good as well as be good. We want to be the centre of the thing. Here, we are disciples, following and failing, living in the shadow of the sun. The former is easy to fake but impossible to accomplish. The latter is impossible to fake but easy by humility and obedience, daily and daily again, to become.

The other part is the rejection of everything else. We have reached the summit so all other vantage points pale in comparison. We have seen the truth so we can now work out what is in it and what is a lie. We do not have to follow men. We may seem independent, loose cannon(ish) or arrogant but if you look closely we are merely dependent on something deeper than the falsehood of this present world. We rely on God to take us Home.

Aweikinin 10/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-3

H,

I guess it is instructive that a large part of getting it right with the will of God is not hurting other people. Before we seek to help them we must be sure we are not in the habit, already, of hindering them. A large part of what we are taught about all this is the need to get involved as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible in the lives of others. No. This could only work if we had the eyes to see right into them and the heft to diagnose rightly what the maladies of their souls really are. Honestly, we are yet to fully understand our own issues. It is the log and speck thing all over again.

Now, I am not saying that we should be detached from the human experience or be so careful not to make the wrong sort of gesture that we become stuck in inertia. What I really mean is that we learn to do the simple things well. The small acts of love and the kindness of love that always go further than our self righteous attempts to summarize lives into sound bites and epigrams. Like all things, we need the humility of not letting our bloated image of self get in the way.

Of course, the main thing about grace is the constant failure it stands against. If we set out to list our flaws and failings in this matter, it will know no end. This is the part that makes us give up. We are arrogant enough to think that if we know something then we should immediately be good at it or we are failures. We have to be prepared to fail a little more. This light emerging from our dark is who we will forever be. We have to give it time to become a full shine.  

Aweikinin 9/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-2

H,

It is easy to approach anything in God as an endless list of do’s and don’ts. It saves us the time to think about the scale of the thing we are involved in. It will always be easier to follow the line in front of you and the formal rules of the road than to think of things in an informal way and to have a personal, rather than impersonal, relationship with God.

To be personal with Him takes us far from that cold way that does not include listening and learning and being connected. We can coast by on the easy platitudes of the day. We can have a pastor and a building to go to. We can function as ghosts while our vicarious preacher does all the heavy lifting. We can have busy lives and sit in safe pews on Sundays and Wednesdays and get executive summaries of the things that matter but have been choked out of us by the things that do not. And above all we can finally stifle that awful feeling we get that we will be called out to live the full depth of our belief even to the point of daily death and daily resurrection.

The temptation to put God in a box is huge. Yet we give up more when we refuse to accept the limits of our way of seeing things. We get a tin god and a tame god and one who is frequently unable to make us into anything useful or anyone true in the forever to come. The narrow way is or seems hard but it is drawing us closer to the source of all right doing. The danger of the dark makes intimacy with the light a necessity on the long walk home.

Aweikinin 8/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1

H,

It is the question of questions: how do we get on God’s good side? I think I have put that badly. I do not mean to make it sound like we can manipulate our way into His favours. That will be silly since we believe Him to be omniscient. He would know we were faking it. The question should be: How do we please Him? What can we do to live in right standing with Him?

This question has haunted me all my life. I had a strong sense of theism before I even had any idea of the riches of Christ and the depth of that call to Him. And, well, once you know all the rules it is often the case that you start breaking them. There are snakes in you that the light you choose has begun to show you. Things you know will not please Him. So, what does please Him? We often think we know. We try to keep the straight and narrow and our heads up and our hearts right. We struggle to share grace and be polite and to not condemn so we are not condemned. We know the dance and we do it well but is there something missing in our steps?

When we read through the 15^th Psalm of that 6^th chapter in Micah and align those heavy thoughts with the gospels and what Christ said and what the apostles explained in their letters we get a picture that it has a lot to do with how we act. It seems to say that salvation is all well and good but it has to change us. It has to produce new fruit and a new character. This might lead us back to the error of thinking that this is a high stakes morality play and we should all get in shape or ship out. This reduces grace and truth and love and hope and faith to a behavior control experiment and us to tame rabbits without passion, docile and obedient but lacking the full heft of personality.

I think it all ties into that sermon we heard years ago. It is a radical way of looking at the word but the preacher sums it up as: all these things tell us how far we are from the full stature of Christ and through failure we learn our only hope is constant dependence on God. Daily, daily we fall and we are never complete. Daily, daily we are carried up in Omnipotent arms and made complete. Till kingdom come

Aweikinin 5/12/2014

From John 15:1-27

H,

It is incredibly hard, as you say, to fathom what is right from what is wrong in this present stretch of life and living. Well, it is hard, if we do not take heed of the infilling of truth we are promised at the onset. Yes, I am talking of that Holy Spirit thing. The strange and wonderful idea that God comes to live within our metaphorical hearts and dwells there to tell us right from wrong as we navigate the murky waters of being alive.

It is not so strange when you think about it with a sense of mystery and eschew the dogma and ‘doctrine’ that turns truth into denominations. If He dwells without as conscience and within as companion then He engineers this great call to live out for truth in the most diverse ways. Perhaps He helps us engage our minds in deciding what the right road to follow is, our hearts to “will and to do” the service of worship and follow through and the body or actions to do it in the overt way that witness demands for the spread of the good news about who God really is.

I know this sounds incredibly unlikely with sinners like you and I. Well, that is the point; whoever is forgiven much, loves more. He was known, on earth, to hang out with shady characters, broken people, ready to change faulted ones. The people like us. He is trying to teach, preach, sing a song and make a life about the fault in all of our stars seen as raw material for the great realignment of earth with the heavenly will.

A pair of perpetual mess ups (language cleaned up here) are just the right candidates for a life of grace made out of unruly grass and turned into the stuff of eternity.

Aweikinin 4/12/2014

From John 15:1-25

H,

It all falls back with the thing about ‘enmity with the world’. Once we have taken up the drinking of thirst-quenching water nothing is ever quite the same. You cannot go back safely to drinking the other stuff. You are cured from contentment on this earth. The deeper you go, the less milk you consume, the more other forms of fulfillment seem less and less. You are in fulfillment, Himself. What can mortal anything do to you? Immortality is in your heart and is infecting your whole being, slowly.

Of course, it is not as simple as stated. Nothing is ever as simple as before you have to live it out. All the sermons, notes, talk, words in the universe do not compare to living out the dreams of God. Word becomes flesh to make that point.

We will often feel like we do not belong. It will feel like we are being left behind in an improving world and these ideals we hold, that are much more than ideals, seem obsolete in the ‘fast pace’ of our brand new century. We may fall into the danger of trying to keep up. We may think we have to stay relevant and with or ahead of the curve. We may begin to act like we have a point to prove. This is wrong. These standards the world has set have only temporal relevance. They do not transcend this present version of life on earth. They may not even last pass the next great leap in thought and action. There is no such thing as a trendy truth. We are in the thing that lasts forever. It will not change or bend or become more ‘reasonable’ over time. This is not an experiment. This is utter reality.

So, I guess, my point, dear friend, is that you take the ‘slings and arrows’ as part of discipleship. Perhaps, you will never be understood and appreciated in that way. We are called to witness and not to impress. The world system may be evil and opaque but the people of the earth are like us: lost souls in need of a finding God. And, hey, even if they are the enemy, are we not told to love those as well?

Aweikinin 3/12/2014

From John 15:1-15

H,

It is apt that we are called to love, isn’t it? We are told this is how we make our home in God: the commandment is to love the disciple (fellow Christian) next to us for proximity and extend it to the furthest cover of that holy love. If anyone doubts that this thing of ours in character extends to strangers and unbelievers then the story of the Good Samaritan speaks to that. We are told, further on, to love our enemies and to conquer evil with good loving. It is flower power with the mark of the divine.

We keep talking about eternal character but it starts in this temporal space, with this sandy plain and with the faulted stars of others. It is not a romantic view that justifies holding people in hand when the way to love them best is to stop being an influence. Nor is it an intellectual excursion into the right words or actions. It is, rather, our life long journey into passionate concern for others and how they end up. It is not charity in the sense of pity or the petty puppy love a ’superior’ suggests toward his/her ‘inferiors’.  It is not a pseudo-spiritual way of talking or praying or the gift of ‘advice’ that really means judging with a foul mouth. It is a heart toward the truth and always that.

To love is to make our home in God. To receive His love is the start but to spread it out in His character is the end game. We are not just “hearers” but “doers”. It is better to give than to receive. These words tell us that though there is all the room to bask in the majesty and glory and grace and love of God the better step, the friendship stage with God, is to let that light shine through us so the whole world might be a little clearer. Till kingdom come

Aweikinin 2/12/2014

From John 15:1-8

H,

Still on the theme of birthdays and wishes, I keep asking myself if it is really possible to ask anything of God as Christ encourages us to do. It is all tied up to character, is it not? If we are “in character” everything we ask will be valid. We will ask according to character and that holy being cannot be resisted.

To put this in another way, if we are actors on a stage and we know the right lines then it will all work together for good. The universe of the play will be coherent and sensible. If we ad lib here or there or freestyle it but keep the themes and major ideas going the story would still move along. But, if we have no idea of the message, do not get the theme or setting or what it all means, we begin to act at a disadvantage and no one watching the play will make much sense of our production.

At some point, every analogy breaks down but you get the larger point. We learn the lines first to get in character but after a while we may become one with the famous method and not need to stay in character but will be that character. It is in the now, the great dress rehearsal for eternity, that we need the props of miracles and rescues and prayers and study. We are nowhere near the heart of His thing. We are struggling. Life is closing in. We fall and we make mistakes but we are in it. The vital thing now is to stay in it. To not give in and walk away from love.

We are fruitful in some areas and fruitless in many. He is pruning. He is taking out the bad bits. We are stepping into the most thrilling character of all: Christ. We must stay there. The desire to be good and godly will be sorely tested by our need to do evil. Our blind spots will make us think we are walking forward even when we are way back. Our eyes opening will fill us with a supreme hunger for change. We will see what we really need is character above charisma, truth above consolation and everlasting bread over the sweet barren feed of material safety. Then, it will come slowly; we will see our great need to be like Him. To live as He lived and lives. On our knees we will cry out for this new heart, new body and new mind. On His throne He will grant every individual request.