The Body-Positive God

At the centre of the Christian faith is the belief that by coming to earth as one of us, Christ could die for our sins, rise to new life, bring us into fellowship with him, and begin the process of putting right all that is gone wrong. But at the centre of that centre, tucked away where we don't always see it, is the idea that to become one of us, Jesus had to become flesh. To become a human person, he needed to become a human body. In John 1: 14 we read The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
 
He didn’t just pop a body on for a season like Canberrans don puffer jackets for winter. Theoretically he could have done that, I suppose – just appeared one day as a 30-year-old male prepared to immediately gather his disciples, teach about God's Kingdom, and head to the cross. But to truly become human, Jesus needed to become an embryo, a foetus, a baby a the breast, a toddler who grazed his knees and cried for his mum and a teenager whose voice broke and had hair sprout up across his body. He needed to become a man. It wasn't enough to have a body. He needed to truly be one.
 
This was all too much, incidentally for many of the first hearers of the news about Jesus. In Ancient Greek thought the body was gross. In Plato’s teaching it was a prison you wanted to escape from so you could exist as pure soul.
 
So, when Paul, the great missionary of the New Testament, was in Athens preaching about Jesus and many of the philosophers of that city were so confused by the idea that they thought Paul was teaching about two gods, one named Jesus and the other called Resurrection (Acts 17).
 
In the first few centuries after Jesus was raised, a number of alternate explanations were produced to explain away the body problem for Jesus. They were grossed out by the humanness of Jesus and so they tried to smooth it over.  
 
Perhaps Jesus only appeared to be human, or perhaps he was a divine mind in a human body.
 
The Christian pastors of the time were having none of it. Tertullian, who was a pastor from Carthage in modern day Tunisia, wrote this book called On The Flesh of Christ written about 205AD.
 
Tertullian spends a whole chapter laying out the physicality of Jesus. He wrote of the womb of Mary and the physical details of her pregnancy, with all of the accompanying bodily functions and fluids. He wrote about Mary - how she was expanding daily, heavy, hot in stuffy rooms, uneasy even in sleep, and my favourite description of the experience of pregnancy:
 
“... torn between the impulses of fastidious distaste, and those of excessive hunger”
 
Tertullian describes the normalcy of Jesus birth: He writes Mary's son was brought into the world together with the afterbirth. It’s not that he didn’t have more polite ways of describing the placenta but he was choosing to to be gritty and vivid in his writing. Talking about the goopiness associated with the birth of Jesus may sound coarse, inappropriate, or maybe even irreverent. Why would an early church pastor speak so crassly about Jesus?

Tertullian was convinced however, that if we distance ourselves from the earthiness of Jesus birth, then we also distance ourselves from his concrete humanity and therefore diminish the good news of Yahweh's coming in the son. Tertullian dwells on the messiness of Jesus birth to say to the gospel forgers, “why should we be embarrassed about the material world if Jesus wasn't?”

Sam Allberry in his excellent little book What God has to say about our Bodies notes:  
 
Jesus incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid. God not only thought our bodies up and enjoyed putting many billions of them together; he made one for himself. His body was for life. And for far more than that. After his death he was raised bodily. And after his resurrection he returned to his father in heaven, also bodily. When he ascended into heaven he didn't ditch his humanity like a space shuttle teaches its booster rockets. Becoming human at Christmas was not meant to be reversible. It was permanent.
 
There is now a human body made of the atoms of this universe at the right hand of God the father at the very centre of heaven.
 
Bodies matter. Jesus couldn't become a real human person without one. And we can't hope to enjoy authentic life without one either. That his body matters is proof that mine and yours do too. He became what he valued enough to redeem. He couldn't come for people without coming for their flesh and without coming as flesh.

grace and peace,

Steve

The Helmet that saved Renew

This week I attended the funeral of Joe Mullins. Joe died old and full of years (103 of them). He and his wife Edith (who died in 2009) had six children, and what seems to me like a bajillion grand-children and great grand-children.
 
Joe had come to the Lord as a teenager through the boys’ holiday camp ministry of Eric “Bash” Nash through Scripture Union in the UK. Bash was a master evangelist and through his ministry many of the most influential men of 20th century British evangelicalism were formed. People like John Stott, Nicky Gumble, Dick Lucas and even the present Archbishop of Canterbury all went on Bash's camps.
 
When WW2 rolled around Joe signed up, but the military is a difficult place to cultivate one’s faith and Joe would have said at the time that he was a backslidden Christian. Then, while in Burma in the final weeks of the war a Japanese sniper lined him up and hit three times. The first hit broke through the top of the then 25-year-old's steel helmet before apparently falling out the back. A second entered above one ear and dropped out the other side of the helmet. The third ricocheted off the side. I’ve put my fingers in the holes. 

It's hard to imagine a louder wake-up call. Joe felt the Lord was saying to him “Your life doesn’t belong to you” and after the war he became a clergyman in the Church of England. Joe became a powerful preacher and a bold personal evangelist.
 
After a circuitous route that involved meeting and marrying Edith while pastoring in India, Joe ended up in the brand-new suburbs of Weston Creek, where he and Edith planted St Peters Anglican Church in 1974.

•  St Peters begat St Matthews Anglican Church in Wanniassa

• St Matthews begat Lanyon Valley Anglican Church

• And Lanyon begat Renew

At different moments in the funeral all the descendants stood up and we could see his lineage stretching on. It was hard not to think of how that helmet saved each of their lives.
 
But even better was to be able to imagine the thousands of people who had been blessed by the ministry of those four churches over these last 50 years. 50 years of people exploring and finding faith in Jesus, being encouraged to stay firm in him through each season of life. Had those bullets hit at a slightly different angle, we might not be gathering this Sunday. In the Lord’s providence, that helmet saved us too.
grace and peace,

Steve

Celebrity Converts

You might have heard or seen on socials that the renowned Muslim-turned atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has announced that she’s now a lapsed atheist and has become a Christian. This is a big deal. She has been a prominent public atheist for decades, often sharing a stage with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
 
In a piece titled ‘Why I am now a Christian’ on the website Unherd she details how she read the book by Tom Holland Dominion (one of my favourites from the last few years) and came to the conclusion that the things she values: the nation state and the rule of law, the institutions of science, health and learning, free and fair markets, freedom of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.
 
The news of her conversion lit up my socials – but the intensity of celebration made me nervous. Not about her conversion – I’m glad it’s happened; I’ll join with the angels in heaven in rejoicing for her. What I’m concerned about is we’ve been here before.
 
Ever since I was little, I’ve heard people say “ohh if only [insert celebrity here] became a believer then…” and the sentence kind of trailed off after that.
 
A few years ago, another prominent atheist announced, to great fanfare, that he too had become a Christian – Kanye West. At the time, the Christian world was falling over itself to celebrate. His music was being played in churches and he was leading worship in the megachurches of the world.
 
But like seed growing in the third soil, his conversion seems to have metastasised into something quite dark. I listened yesterday to his new single, Vultures, which seems to be about him justifying his new-found antisemitism.
 
Paul warns in 1 Timothy 3 not to elevate people to leadership within churches who are recent converts, and the reason he offered for this is the danger of conceit. That conceit is not only a problem lurking in the heart of the individual, it’s actively fed up by us.
 
Part of the challenge for famous people when they become Christian is our expectations of them. We’re used to being led by celebrities. We expect celebrities to be immediately adept at articulating the things of faith, because we expect them to be adept at articulating everything else.
 
Kanye needed time to sit in church, experiencing the indignity of bumping on every misplayed note by the non-professional musicians up the front and being humbled by the experience. He needed time to be re-formed by the King of the Jews.
 
I hope Ayaan Hirsi Ali can take a bit of time now to sit in church, get immersed in a Christian community, and get to know her new Lord. My hope for her is that through the nourishment of meditation on the words of God in the scruptures, she’d be like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
 

grace and Peace,

Steve

Diwali

This Sunday is Diwali and my Indian neighbours across the street will be hosting a party. Last year we got an invite, much to the delight of sugar-seeking-missile-children. The sub-continental community is growing rapidly in Canberra – with 12 000 Indian and 5 000 Nepali migrants moving here between our last two censuses, many of these people identify with Hinduism, Jainism or Sikhism. How should Christians approach a holiday like Diwali?

Before we answer that, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about. Diwali is a Hindu celebration and part of the 5-day festival of lights. Hindus follow a lunar calendar, like the ancient Hebrews, and so the date changes each year, much like Easter. Diwali derives from a Sanskrit word that means “row of lights.”

Diwali enacts a set of mythic stories – celebrating the day the god Rama returned to his kingdom in Ayodhya with his wife Sita after defeating the demon-king Ravana. It is also widely associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and Ganesha, the god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles. These stories come to symbolise spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.

All this talk of gods might make you think this one is best avoided, but it’s worth noticing too that Diwali marks the beginning of the Hindu New Year, it’s a public holiday in India and plenty of Indians celebrate Diwali without much consideration of the spiritual aspects of the day – much the same as Christians in Victoria this week might’ve been glad to take Tuesday off while also saying, “Nup to the Cup” and ignoring the whole horsie thing.

I take my queues on this one from Paul in Athens in Acts 17. Paul was internally distressed by the Athenian idolatry. I can imagine him walking around, penning Romans 1 in his mind as he read the plaques on the city’s monuments. But he processed that distress into engaged persuasion. He looked for points of resonance between the gospel and the worship around him and showed how the longings of the Athenian heart are satisfied in the person of Jesus.    

So how do we do that for Diwali? If you’re invited to a party this weekend, be winsomely curious. Ask heaps of questions about what this celebration means to them. If triumph of good over evil and light over darkness comes up, ask what that means about how we face darkness and evil now.

And should you get the chance, you can share your story of light overcoming darkness and good overcoming evil too. On the first Easter day John tells us that the women arrived at the tomb “while it was still dark” (John 20:1). The sun did rise the day before, but the time between Jesus’ death and that morning were perpetual gloom for Jesus’ followers. Discovering the open tomb, Mary Magdalene even assumes that some unnamed “they” had taken Jesus away. Darkness and evil looked for all money like the victors. Light had been extinguished.

But then the gardener calls her by name, and the glow of recognition flashes into Mary’s heart and the light that overcomes the darkness embraces her, and with her the whole world.

Jesus is God from God, Light from Light. He is the true and better Diwali and welcomes us out of ignorance, evil and darkness and into light and goodness and true knowledge and delight in God.

grace and Peace,

Steve

Now and Then

A new Beatles track dropped this morning Australia time. Quite a feat for a band that broke up 49 years ago, has two deceased members, and the two remaining members are both Octogenarians.
 
With a little help from filmmaker Peter Jackson and his Machine Audio Learning software, they were able to isolate out the John Lennon vocals from a previously unreleased demo record he made called For Paul. They then layered in guitar recordings from George Harrison from the 90s, and add a fresh baseline, drumming and vocals from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.  

The song is both beautiful, and desperately sad. For those of us who grew up with the Beatles in the background – this song is yet another triumph of jaw dropping AI technology. The demo recording was discovered and is project had been considered back in the 90s while George was still alive, but it was impossible with the tech of the time to isolate John’s vocals from the piano parts, so the whole thing fizzled out. But with these new tools in place suddenly possible. The song is clearly a Beatles song – and listening to it feels like finding $20 in your coat pocket from the winter before.

But it’s also so desperately sad. Because listening to it reminds you of what we’ve lost. The song’s newness can’t help but make one reflect on the band’s demise following interpersonal conflict, the shooting death of John Lennon, the cancer death of George Harrison and the slow march of age on Paul and Ringo. While the song feels like a collaboration, it’s, at best, an homage, like having a deep conversation with ChatGPT.

Even the words direct your thoughts that way:

Now and then
I miss you
Oh, now and then
I want you to be there for me
Always to return to me

It's an unmet desire.

All this has got me thinking about the experience of music as a Christian. One day we’ll be gathered around the great throne. All of us in Christ. Billions upon billions. People separated by death will reunited in diatonic harmony. No more will our collaborations be spoilt by avoidable conflict, violence, sickness or distance. On that day we’ll be returned, never to experience the pangs of missing one another ever again, never having to worry that our best moments won’t last, or are behind us.

grace and Peace,

Steve