My God is not contained within the pages of a book, no matter how big or comprehensive. Even if you took every word ever said or written about God from whatever time or whatever background or faith this would not even come close to describing all that God is. My God teaches me through a life lived fully in God's presence, a life aware and moving and changing.
My God is visible! My God can be seen in the face of my children and the blossom on a tree at the beginning of Spring. My God can be seen in the hands of the people reaching out to those in the midst of disaster, in the eye of a storm or the brightness of a summer day. The God that I know can be seen in the face of another person, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or someone with no faith at all. My God is visible.
My God is not silent! My God can be heard in laughter and tears, In the hurting, angry words coming from someone's mouth or from the words of joy and praise of another. My God is not only to be heard and understood in the words of certain people. My God is not silent.
My God is tangible! My God can be felt in the arms of those around me, in the tugging of a little hand in mine. My God is there in the midst of hardships and happiness, my God is in hands and lips and all that I can feel. My God is tangible.
My God tastes wonderful! My God makes food through the talents of others and shares it. My God is in the raising of a glass or the eating of egg on toast. My God tastes wonderful.
MY GOD, I cannot prove to you that my God exists, and nor would I choose to try, but My God is visible, can be heard and touched and tasted and cannot be contained! My God.
What about yours?
Stay Blessed
Rev Ruth xx
Wednesday, 22 April 2015
Friday, 10 April 2015
The God of our Emmaus Road
As many of you who read my blog posts know, I do not take the Bible literally. I don't know for sure what is historically accurate, what parts are accurately quoted or indeed what is actually poetic licence. I suspect that a lot more of the Bible than we would like to think is actually not very similar to what actually happened. However, that doesn't mean that I do not believe that there is truth to be found in the pages of that book. In fact, especially in the life and teachings of Jesus, I find a message of truth about God which speaks directly into my life and my ongoing relationship with God. That truth, for me, may be different from the truth that you or anyone else may find in it's pages but it is nevertheless truth as I understand it. So when I speak of the Bible and what it says to me, I am not telling you what to think or feel, but instead I am inviting you to hear what it is that I feel God is saying to me through the words on the page of a book written so many years ago.
So today I have been looking again at the stories following Jesus' resurrection: How he met with so many people who at first had no idea who he was until he did or said something. I love how Jesus, unrecognised in the garden by Mary herself, a woman who had been by his side, followed him, listening to him. After his death she washed his broken body, anointed him with oil and wrapped him lovingly to be put in the tomb. Anyone who has been through grief knows how this feels; doing everything through the haze of tears that seemingly fall uninvited. And still in this state she just sees a man in the garden. Who knows whether she even raised her head, or whether she simply looked at him but could not tell who he was? Either way she did not recognise him. She pleads with him, and yet one word stops her in her tracks, "Mary". For me this is one of the most tender, loving and intimate moments of the Jesus narratives. I can feel the joy that wells up within her and overflows as she realises that the man standing before her is indeed the man she loves so deeply.
And these wonderful moments of recognition happen over and over again throughout the stories in the Gospels. Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room; again they do not know him, do not recognise him. I don't blame Thomas for not believing them when they told him what he missed: the disciples evidently had not believed the witnesses at the tomb either until they saw it with their own eyes. There are other accounts of people 'seeing' the Risen Lord outside of the Gospels but I am only looking at some of the Gospel accounts.
However, there is one more main encounter that I really like and that is the meeting on the road to Emmaus. Two men are walking down the road, only one is actually named, the other is assumed to be a part of his household. Suddenly a stranger joins them from out of nowhere and starts to walk with them. They walk and talk together on the road and when the men arrive at their house they invite the stranger in to eat with them. Just like Mary in the garden, it isn't until Jesus does something that they recognise that they realise who it was that was with them, and then the moment is brief and Jesus is gone. Now to the point of this blog....
I do not know for sure what really happened at the time that Jesus lived. I do not know whether or not everything that is accounted in the Gospels is 100% accurate or not. What I do know is that, in the midst of these stories I find a truth about God. One that has born out again and again throughout my long and varied faith journey. And that is this: I do not know how and when I will see God; I do not know what God looks like but I know that God is revealed to me in the most unexpected of places and ways, and almost never where I expect God to show up. Like Mary who was not expecting to see Jesus in the garden until she heard her name, like Thomas who doubted until he touched the wounds, like the people on the Emmaus road who did not expect the encounter they had: God shows up for me in the most unexpected of places and in the most unusual ways. But more and more I am finding that in order to really encounter God I must stop looking where I think God should be and instead allow God to surprise me again. I must stop restricting God and thinking, "Oh God could not possibly be found there, or in that person" and instead simply be open to The Divine, allowing God to once again jump into my life and show up where I least expect it. Remain open to God and hopefully we too will encounter the God of the Emmaus Road.
Stay Blessed
Rev R xx
So today I have been looking again at the stories following Jesus' resurrection: How he met with so many people who at first had no idea who he was until he did or said something. I love how Jesus, unrecognised in the garden by Mary herself, a woman who had been by his side, followed him, listening to him. After his death she washed his broken body, anointed him with oil and wrapped him lovingly to be put in the tomb. Anyone who has been through grief knows how this feels; doing everything through the haze of tears that seemingly fall uninvited. And still in this state she just sees a man in the garden. Who knows whether she even raised her head, or whether she simply looked at him but could not tell who he was? Either way she did not recognise him. She pleads with him, and yet one word stops her in her tracks, "Mary". For me this is one of the most tender, loving and intimate moments of the Jesus narratives. I can feel the joy that wells up within her and overflows as she realises that the man standing before her is indeed the man she loves so deeply.
And these wonderful moments of recognition happen over and over again throughout the stories in the Gospels. Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room; again they do not know him, do not recognise him. I don't blame Thomas for not believing them when they told him what he missed: the disciples evidently had not believed the witnesses at the tomb either until they saw it with their own eyes. There are other accounts of people 'seeing' the Risen Lord outside of the Gospels but I am only looking at some of the Gospel accounts.
However, there is one more main encounter that I really like and that is the meeting on the road to Emmaus. Two men are walking down the road, only one is actually named, the other is assumed to be a part of his household. Suddenly a stranger joins them from out of nowhere and starts to walk with them. They walk and talk together on the road and when the men arrive at their house they invite the stranger in to eat with them. Just like Mary in the garden, it isn't until Jesus does something that they recognise that they realise who it was that was with them, and then the moment is brief and Jesus is gone. Now to the point of this blog....
I do not know for sure what really happened at the time that Jesus lived. I do not know whether or not everything that is accounted in the Gospels is 100% accurate or not. What I do know is that, in the midst of these stories I find a truth about God. One that has born out again and again throughout my long and varied faith journey. And that is this: I do not know how and when I will see God; I do not know what God looks like but I know that God is revealed to me in the most unexpected of places and ways, and almost never where I expect God to show up. Like Mary who was not expecting to see Jesus in the garden until she heard her name, like Thomas who doubted until he touched the wounds, like the people on the Emmaus road who did not expect the encounter they had: God shows up for me in the most unexpected of places and in the most unusual ways. But more and more I am finding that in order to really encounter God I must stop looking where I think God should be and instead allow God to surprise me again. I must stop restricting God and thinking, "Oh God could not possibly be found there, or in that person" and instead simply be open to The Divine, allowing God to once again jump into my life and show up where I least expect it. Remain open to God and hopefully we too will encounter the God of the Emmaus Road.
Stay Blessed
Rev R xx
Thursday, 9 April 2015
Did Jesus need to suffer so much?
I confuse a lot of people because I tell them I do not watch films that are rated 15 or above. 12A is my limit with Harry Potter probably being the most violent film I have watched in many years; I will choose a Disney film over a thriller any day of the week, and yet I love watching Criminal Minds, CSI, NCIS and all kinds of murder and crime related television viewing. I read Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwall, both writers of violent crimes and the Tony Hill series by Val McDermid which centres around a criminal psychologist who looks into the most depraved serial killers. Criminal Minds is currently in its ?? series and the original CSI is in its 17th, I have watched most of the episodes from both series. As technology has progressed and filming techniques improve, I have noticed that sets and murders became more graphic and realistic, the story lines have, over time, become more involved and have had to go to some extreme lengths in order to keep the viewer ratings. No longer are we simply satisfied with seeing a knife being plunged into someone who is out of shot and then seeing the body, now we are captivated as we watch an actor or actress portray the horror of the realisation that they are about to die and the life draining from their body. In order to keep us entertained the violence is graphic, detailed, realistic and depraved.
Each Good Friday I heard the same account of the death of Jesus on the cross. As I got older the leaders of our youth group felt we could handle the 'reality' of a death by crucifixion. So we were taken vividly, step by step through the horrible, gory details of the death of Jesus Christ, from arrest and beating, to the hill, the nails and the slow suffocation brought mercifully to an end by a spear in the side. And why the need to do this? To make me more grateful for what Jesus did for me? To make the sacrifice he made more significant? The price greater for the reward to be appropriate? Perhaps all of those things. What would we have thought if Jesus had come claiming to be the Messiah and had died of a heart attack? Or cancer? Things that we count as 'just one of those things', 'Not the person's fault'? Was it the way he died or the fact that he rose again that matters?
I don't think it would have meant enough if Christ had not suffered when he died. I don't believe that anyone today would take seriously any lesser sacrifice. But the question remains: Could God have achieved the same ends for our salvation had Jesus simply keeled over from a heart attack? Well the obvious answer is yes. If God is truly God then God can really do anything, including the salvation of all people through a simple, relatively painless sacrifice. So the real question is, is the problem with God or with us? Why do we need the violence and the pain to be so horrific that it feels like it rivals some of the most horrifically depicted violence that our technology mixed (with some of the ideas inspired by some of the most heinous of crimes that our world) can conceive? Why do we feel the need to, generation after generation, pull apart in tiny detail the suffering of Jesus?
When I was at university we studied a book by Elie Wiesel called Night. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and had seen the worst of the depravity of humankind, in the process losing his whole family. Some of the scenes in that book were awful, I went through one chapter with a box of tissues; the same when I watched the videos; went to museums which told me story after story like that. Why? Because I do not want to forget what we are capable of, I do not want my children or my children's children to forget what can happen when one person decides that the answer is violence on such a scale to anyone 'other' than their view of perfection. People like us killed Jesus. People like us thought that public execution and torture were acceptable. People like us denied and betrayed Jesus. People like us mourned him and grieved his loss. People like us touched his risen body, heard his words of love, promise and hope.
These are the things that are important to me. Not the level to which Jesus suffered, but the fact that he lived at all, that he brought a radically new way of understanding God and having a relationship with God. He taught a whole new way to love, to include, to touch and to heal. Yes it is important that we never forget what we were, what we were once capable of, because that is important in healing and growing and never repeating the same mistakes. But we must also remember that we are all a product of love. We were created by and for love, to love ourselves and others. Jesus may have died violently and in pain, but we proclaim a risen Christ: not just for Easter day but now, today and for eternity. Let the Jesus who lives and not the Jesus who died, be your guide and your reason for love.
Each Good Friday I heard the same account of the death of Jesus on the cross. As I got older the leaders of our youth group felt we could handle the 'reality' of a death by crucifixion. So we were taken vividly, step by step through the horrible, gory details of the death of Jesus Christ, from arrest and beating, to the hill, the nails and the slow suffocation brought mercifully to an end by a spear in the side. And why the need to do this? To make me more grateful for what Jesus did for me? To make the sacrifice he made more significant? The price greater for the reward to be appropriate? Perhaps all of those things. What would we have thought if Jesus had come claiming to be the Messiah and had died of a heart attack? Or cancer? Things that we count as 'just one of those things', 'Not the person's fault'? Was it the way he died or the fact that he rose again that matters?
I don't think it would have meant enough if Christ had not suffered when he died. I don't believe that anyone today would take seriously any lesser sacrifice. But the question remains: Could God have achieved the same ends for our salvation had Jesus simply keeled over from a heart attack? Well the obvious answer is yes. If God is truly God then God can really do anything, including the salvation of all people through a simple, relatively painless sacrifice. So the real question is, is the problem with God or with us? Why do we need the violence and the pain to be so horrific that it feels like it rivals some of the most horrifically depicted violence that our technology mixed (with some of the ideas inspired by some of the most heinous of crimes that our world) can conceive? Why do we feel the need to, generation after generation, pull apart in tiny detail the suffering of Jesus?
When I was at university we studied a book by Elie Wiesel called Night. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and had seen the worst of the depravity of humankind, in the process losing his whole family. Some of the scenes in that book were awful, I went through one chapter with a box of tissues; the same when I watched the videos; went to museums which told me story after story like that. Why? Because I do not want to forget what we are capable of, I do not want my children or my children's children to forget what can happen when one person decides that the answer is violence on such a scale to anyone 'other' than their view of perfection. People like us killed Jesus. People like us thought that public execution and torture were acceptable. People like us denied and betrayed Jesus. People like us mourned him and grieved his loss. People like us touched his risen body, heard his words of love, promise and hope.
These are the things that are important to me. Not the level to which Jesus suffered, but the fact that he lived at all, that he brought a radically new way of understanding God and having a relationship with God. He taught a whole new way to love, to include, to touch and to heal. Yes it is important that we never forget what we were, what we were once capable of, because that is important in healing and growing and never repeating the same mistakes. But we must also remember that we are all a product of love. We were created by and for love, to love ourselves and others. Jesus may have died violently and in pain, but we proclaim a risen Christ: not just for Easter day but now, today and for eternity. Let the Jesus who lives and not the Jesus who died, be your guide and your reason for love.
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