How do we find peace in traumatic times? - Nat Charles

Luke 12 v22-34

Part three of a three part mini series ‘Hope for a troubled world’ by Nat Charles.

This week: How can we find peace in traumatic times?

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday Zoom service. Everyone is welcome to join us, see details on our home page.

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Transcript

One of the features of life over the past few months has been a heightened sense of anxiety. At first we were anxious about what we were dealing with. A virus that puzzled both the scientific and the medical communities, and no-one seemed to know how to respond. And in those early days, as the lockdown started, all of our familiar bearings were lost. The rhythms and routines that give shape to our lives and get us through each day and each week were gone in an instant and we struggled to know how to respond.

It shouldn’t have been surprising that retailers reported a spike in sales in March and April not just of toilet roll, but of alcohol and chocolate. Everyone needed a sense of reassurance in the midst of deeply concerning, traumatic times.

But for many of us, that sense of anxiety hasn’t disappeared as time has gone on. More recently, we’ve been anxious about how we ought to re-engage with the ‘new normal’. How safe is public transport? Should we wear a face mask? How socially distanced will the office really be, especially if there is a lot of hot desking going on. Should we go to see elderly relatives and parents? Should we go to cafes and bars?

On one level, it was fairly easy to go into lockdown. You just stayed at home. But coming out of it is much more complex, and still causes a great deal of anxiety.

As we’ve been going through all of that, what help does Christianity have to offer?

In the passage that we had read from Luke’s gospel a moment ago, Jesus Christ outlines two radically different perspectives on anxiety and worry. He claims that his followers have all of the resources that they need to approach this issue very differently to anyone else, and begins to sketch out what that will mean in practice.

I want to us explore what he says through two instructions that he gives to his disciples. Do not worry, and do seek.

DON’T WORRY

First, do not worry.

You can’t miss the heart of Jesus’ teaching in these Vs. Right at the start, in Vs 22, he says ‘do not worry’.

It might be tempting for us to imagine that because Jesus was around a long time ago, and life was so much simpler, that there would be much less to worry about, so it was easy for him to say these words.

But a moment’s reflection ought to make us see that can’t be the case. Jesus’ contemporaries lived in an agrarian society that was entirely dependent on the weather. Imagine being in a position that a wet, gloomy summer doesn’t just mean that we can’t get out to the park as much as we would like, but that there might not be enough food for the winter. My guess is that Jesus lived in a society and a culture where life was much more precarious than ours is today – and yet he still says ‘do not worry’.

Jesus roots his instruction in the reality of who God is. There’s a reminder that as creator, God cares for every individual life, every life matters to him. Because human beings are made in his image, we are much more valuable to God than the created order.

But we’re not made in the image of a distant, unknowable deity. The God who made us is the God that Christians call ‘Father’. God is relational, and he knows what we need.

And for evidence of that, Jesus says, look to the natural world. Look to the birds. They don’t spend their lives saving up, putting a bit by every month in case of a rainy day. Yet God feeds them. 

And what about the flowers? Yesterday I had the joy of taking a wedding. Perhaps because of the unusual circumstances, there were only 20 people there and it was socially distanced and all the rest of it, it felt even more joyful than usual. The bride looked truly beautiful, but what really lifted the occasion was seeing a building full of flowers. They were glorious. Even though they last just for a moment, their radiance couldn’t be matched by Solomon in all his splendour.

Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater. How much more valuable are you, made by God in his image, a child of a heavenly father, then the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Much more. And your Father knows what you need. So do not worry.

All of that is not to say that hard times won’t come to us. Jesus isn’t saying here that his followers will automatically be protected from the hardships of life. Illness or bereavement, suffering or pain. If you’ll excuse the double negative, we don’t not worry because there is nothing to worry about. But we know that when hard times comes, our Father has us. He knows what’s good for us and he knows what we need.

Neither is Jesus saying these words to condemn us, or to make us feel bad if we do worry. Some of us here will experience anxiety not just as a low level, occasional feeling, but as an illness that requires medical help and attention. If that is you, please don’t hear these words as Jesus just trying to get at you that makes you feel even worse. He is speaking to reassure you, and if you do need medical help for your anxiety, please go and find it.

DO SEEK

But there isn’t only an instruction here about what not to do, Jesus also offers a positive.

Don’t worry, but do seek.

Now maybe you’ve been thinking so far, all sounds a little like a romantic, slightly hippy like idealised version of life. Look at the birds and flowers and don’t worry.

But there’s something much more subtle going on here. Jesus offers a significant insight into human nature and what drives us. He draws a contrast towards the end of the passage, between what he calls the pagan world, and the his own followers.

But the contrast isn’t what we might think. He says that the pagan world is characterised by anxiety. Vs 29, don’t set your heart on what you will eat or drink… for the pagan world runs after such things. Doing some reading this week around this passage, I came across a really helpful insight in one commentary on this passage around anxiety. ‘Anxiety is driven by a very simple insight… the insight that we are limited creatures. If you know that you can’t manage the future, yet you try to manage the future, there can only be one result: anxiety.’

And it’s anxiety that keeps the world going round. Anxiety is the governing principle of the world. Anxiety keeps shops open 24/7. Anxiety means we are rushing to get back to work as soon as humanly possible. It’s anxiety that keeps the construction industry open even through a Pandemic. Anxiety, you could say, builds skyscrapers.

So what’s the contrast? Here’s the interesting thing. Jesus doesn’t say that being his disciples means getting out of the rat race. His followers are also people who seek something. Vs 31, they seek his kingdom. His kingdom is the place where, to put it simply, God is king.

But here’s the difference. In the very next vs Jesus says, you have been given the kingdom. In other words, Jesus followers seek what they already have rather than seeking what they do not have.

According to Jesus, everyone is seeking something. Looking to achieve something. Living from and for a particular vision of the future, living towards and in hope. But Christians seek differently, because the future is already secure. So our striving isn’t driven by what we don’t have, but what we do have. And what do we have? In Jesus, we have the Kingdom. It’s been given to us already.

What might all of this look like? This week I read an interview with the comedian and actor and writer Sally Philips. You’d know her from shows like Miranda and Smack the Pony. In recent years she’s had more profile as she’s worked through issues around Down’s Syndrome, as her eldest son has Down’s himself. In the interview that I read she was asked whether her Christian faith has helped her in the difficult times, and she that because of her son, ‘I think I’m being particularly blessed by God in this family unit… ‘I’ve been given a Narnia cupboard through which I can look through and see things God’s way.’

There hasn’t been miraculous healing for her son. There have been plenty of tough moments as a parent of a Down’s Syndrome child. Although his life will look hugely different from what many would consider successful, nothing has been lost.

Don’t worry, seek God’s Kingdom. The kingdom that you have been given as his children.

SILENCEPRAY

MUSIC – The Lord’s my shepherd.

Is the world broken beyond repair? - Nat Charles

Mark 2: 1-12

Part two of a three part mini series ‘Hope for a troubled world’ by Nat Charles.

This week: Is the world getting better or worse?

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday Zoom service. Everyone is welcome to join us, see details on our home page.

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Transcript

Is the world getting better or worse? That question was asked in a lecture hall full of undergraduates when I was at university soon after 9.11. The answer was… mixed. Some of my fellow students were adamant we were making progress, pointing to the gradual eradication of global poverty, increased equality between men and women, black people and white. Others were less sure.

In recent months, the picture seems much more mixed. Back in March, as a novel Coronavirus spread around the globe I remember readings newspaper headlines like ‘Is this a warning from the universe?’ There was a deep sense of angst and tension in the country because we just didn’t know how scared we ought to be.

That was compounded by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the worldwide protests about racial injustice that followed. 

Christian thinkers often talk about the problem of pain and suffering in two ways. They talk about natural evil that causes unintentional suffering – when people die in an earthquake or tsunami. And they also talk about moral evil – when suffering is caused by the evil actions of other humans.

In the past few months we’ve been confronted with both. In a way that we just cannot escape or deny. The world that we live in is deeply broken.

And what we’re all looking for is hope. Is the world broken beyond repair, or is there hope?

We’re going to take a few minutes in this familiar story in Mark’s gospel. Jesus of Nazareth is caught up in a scene that appears to lean in to some of these issues – innocent suffering, natural and moral evil. And yet his perception of the problem goes much deeper than anyone expected. But like a good doctor, he doesn’t only recognise the issue, but offers hope of a cure.

Let’s see that worked out in this narrative.

AN UNEXPECTED DIAGNOSIS

First, notice that Jesus wastes no time in identifying the real issue.

The great shock of the story for us comes at the end of Vs 5. Huge crowds have been following Jesus, a young Rabbi with a big reputation. And a group of men have gone to great lengths to bring a paralysed man to Jesus. They carried him to the house where Jesus was, and because they couldn’t go through the door as there were so many people in the house, they made a hole in the roof and lowered the man through the hole to Jesus’ feet.

And can you imagine what those men might have felt when they heard Jesus say ‘Son, your sins are forgiven?’ They had come in the hope of a miraculous healing, and instead Jesus offered forgiveness.

But note the implication of Jesus’ words. In his view, what this man needed even more than healing, was forgiveness. As far as Jesus is concerned, the root cause of the brokenness of the world is sin.

That’s not to say that the paralysed man is more sinful than anyone else in the room, or that sin has caused his physical condition. That’s what many people in Jesus’ world believed, but it’s a view that Jesus contradicts a number of times in the gospels. We’re not supposed to think that the paralysed man was any more sinful than anyone else in the room.

That’s one of the great levelling realities at the heart of the Christian faith. Every human shares the same condition. The belief that we are all sinners tells us even at our best we are deeply flawed and have all sorts of imperfections. That each of us have lived in God’s world without any recognition of who he is.

This belief was expressed in the words of one of Shakespeare’s characters in ‘All’s well that ends well’. Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of one of his characters, ‘the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’.

But here’s the real issue. Jesus saying these words to a paralysed man offers a parallel of our own situation. Just as this man was powerless to change his physical condition, so we are powerless to do anything about our spiritual condition. He couldn’t just make himself stand up and walk through will power or ingenuity. We can’t just fix ourselves through trying to do better.

Yet we try to, don’t we? A recent example is the debate that’s happening around cancel culture at the moment. As you probably know a letter was written to Harper’s Magazine last week, signed by authors and academics and political activists, warning that free speech is being stifled by cancel culture. In response, Philippa Soo, who stars in the screen version of Hamilton tweeted that ‘If you are cancelled and don’t wish to be, you must work to earn back people’s respect…’ Yet how will you know if you’ve ever done enough.

If that’s true on the widest scale, so it’s true on the personal too. And Jesus’s words front us up to that.

AN UNEXPECTED HOPE

But as hard hitting as they are, so they offer hope. Because as he gets the diagnosis right, so he can offer the cure.

I said a moment ago that we are powerless to help ourselves as we are confronted with the reality of who we are. That’s the message of the Christian scriptures – from beginning to end they tell us that the predicament of humanity is so serious, grave and unfixable from within that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.

But the good news is that God has acted. When Jesus says ‘your sins are forgiven’ he really means it. And to demonstrate to the watching crowd that he can forgive sins, he does the seemingly harder thing of miraculously healing the man. You see the point that he’s making in Vs 9? It’s easy to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ because that claim can’t be tested. It’s much harder to say ‘be healed’ because that can be tested immediately.

So he does the thing that seems harder as a demonstration that he can do what appears easier.

Here’s the point – Jesus really can forgive us. He really can offer the forgiveness that we so desperately need.

If you’re with us this afternoon, and you have never known or received that forgiveness, can I invite you to come to Jesus and find it. Or maybe you are here and even though you would have called yourself a Christian for a long time, you know that a sin of some kind is clinging on to you really tightly, or maybe you are holding it. And you haven’t yet come to Jesus to find forgiveness. Can I invite you too to come to Jesus and find forgiveness?

It might be that you are thinking, why does Jesus have the authority to forgive sins? That’s a fair question. It’s asked by some of the people who are in the room with him that day in Capernaum. And the answer is that even at this early stage of Mark’s gospel, there are already hints of how the story will end.

We’re told in the next Chapter that the Pharisees, and the teachers of the law in Vs 6, were looking for a way to kill Jesus because of what he claimed about himself.

Yet in Mark’s narrative, it’s when Jesus dies, that his full authority to forgive is revealed. Because in his death, he pays the penalty for all of our sin against God, so that we might know his forgiveness. On the cross, he experienced the full consequences of sin, and because he did, he has the authority to offer forgiveness to everyone who turns to him.

One of my favourite Christian thinkers and speakers is an American woman who is now in her 80s. She spent many years in the Anglican church in the US but now in her retirement continues to travel and speak and write and I find much of her work very stimulating. This is how she describes the solution that Jesus offers through the cross, ‘In order for God truly to overcome the very worst, the Son underwent the very worst.’ 

Friends, our world is more broken than we know. We are more broken than we know. Yet the hope that Jesus offers is deeper and richer than we can possibly imagine. There is forgiveness in him that will right every wrong. There is hope in him.

SILENCE

PRAY/SING

Where is God in a global pandemic? - Nat Charles

Luke 7: 11-17

Part one of a three part mini series ‘Hope for a troubled world’ by Nat Charles.

This week: Where is God in a global pandemic?

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday Zoom service. Everyone is welcome at our services and you can find out how to join online on our home page. Due to a blip at the time of recording the recording begins about a minute in.

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Transcript

As we reflect on our own experience of the past months, I suspect that all of us are asking a similar question, even if we might articulate it differently. Where is God in all of this? 

It might be that as you have faced a particular experience of the Pandemic, illness, increased stress at home or at work, uncertainty over your job or just missing loved ones that you can’t see in person, you are wondering where God is. Or maybe the grim reality of life in a pandemic – 10.6 million Covid cases around the world, over 500,000 deaths – have left you feeling like it’s simply impossible to believe in God at a time like this.

The question about God and suffering is not a new one. It’s been around since ancient Greek and Roman thinkers grappled with the problem. Yet we probably know the problem as it was stated by the enlightenment philosopher David Hume in the 18thC. Hume wrote ‘Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he incapable. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?’

To put the problem most straightforwardly, isn’t the presence of suffering in the world, like Covid-19, evidence that God just isn’t there? How could a good, powerful being, just sit back when we’re going through all of this? Where is God?

I’d like to take a few moments to explore this story in Luke chapter 7. As far as we know, the gospel writer Luke didn’t meet Jesus of Nazareth personally, but he did compile his narrative, his gospel, on the basis of eyewitness testimony. And this short episode offers at least three perspectives on the question about where God is and what he’s doing in the presence of suffering and evil.

JESUS IS OFFENDED BY SUFFERING, vs 13

First, notice how Jesus is moved by the suffering he encounters.

The scene that Luke describes is tragic in all sorts of ways. Not only has this woman in the story lost a son, and has to deal with her grief. but she’s also lost everything that a son represents. As a woman, her economic and social status in the culture of the ANE would have been entirely bound up with the male figures in her household. Her husband and her son. So she isn’t just dealing with her grief, but with huge insecurity and uncertainty about her future and status.

We’re told in Vs 13 that when Jesus encounters the woman, his heart goes out her. In fact, the phrase that Luke uses could be translated even more strongly. It literally means ‘his guts/intestines were twisted up’.

Jesus is affronted by the presence of suffering as he encounters it. It moves and grieves him.

That’s really significant. Because while we all know that suffering is wrong, many of the explanations offered for suffering can’t actually explain why it’s wrong.

Contrast Jesus with other religious and philosophical approaches to the issue of suffering. Some religions are fatalistic about suffering – it’s simply God’s will. Or suffering is thought to be an intrinsic part of the world, and the way to leave it behind is to find a way out of the world.

Likewise, although atheism might look like it solves the problem, it just creates new ones. Famously, Richard Dawkins, in a book published some years ago described our universe as pitilessly indifferent. No design, no purpose, no evil, no good, just indifference. 

But if that’s true, if there is no God, why should anyone call our experience of the last three months wrong, or bad? There’s no warrant to do so, it’s simply all there is.

Contrast Jesus. No fatalism, no platitudes. Instead, outrage. And as we see him affronted by the presence of suffering in this world, we see that we’re not wrong to have a problem with suffering and evil.

Jesus validates our own sense that suffering is wrong. It’s not just how life is. Not just part of the natural order. It’s not just the way things are. You are not wrong if you feel that suffering of any kind, your own or anyone else’s is deeply wrong. It’s not the way that things are supposed to be in God’s world.

So Christianity invites us to reframe the question. John Lennox, a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University puts it this way. We ought to ask not ‘why doesn’t God do things this way or that way, but is there a God we can trust with our lives and our selves in a world like this?’

JESUS EXPERIENCED SUFFERING, vs 14

And this story goes on to offer an answer to that question.

Because second, Jesus isn’t only affronted by suffering, and so validates our own suffering, he knows what it is to suffer.

There’s a small detail in this story that is really striking. In Vs 14, Jesus approaches the bier that the dead child is lying on. And he reaches out his hand, and touches it.

Now why is that so striking? As a vicar, when I lead a funeral service, I will often place my hand on the coffin for the final prayer in the service,. It’s known as the commendation. And that’s not so unusual. What’s different about Jesus?

The answer is that in Ancient Israel, in a devoutly religious culture, death was considered unclean. Ritually and ceremonially unclean. And to touch something that had died, whether another person or an animal was to also become unclean. Various practices that involved cleansing had to be undertaken before you could re-enter society, before you could worship at the temple.

So as Jesus touches the bier of this dead child, he enters into the suffering of this widow. And it’s also a glimpse of his own suffering. The central act of the Christian faith is the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, and his rising to new life.

So hear this, the Christian God isn’t just offended by suffering. He knows what it is to suffer.

It might be that we’ve become a little desensitised to that idea. We all know the story of Jesus dying on a cross. But in the ancient world, it was an incendiary, scandalising notion.

I’ve recently been reading a book by the historian Tom Holland, who sets out to investigate why Christianity has so profoundly shaped the people of the West, and why we think as we do. Early on in the book he writes about the horror of crucifixion, not just it was physically, but what it said about the victim. ‘Divinity, then, was for the greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings… That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a God could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.’

And yet, that is precisely the God that Christians worship. The only God, as one writer puts it, with scars.

And because he is, because he knows what it is to suffer, he can draw alongside us in our own suffering.

JESUS WILL END SUFFERING, vs 15

Jesus validates our suffering, he knows our suffering. One last perspective. He will end our suffering.

This scene in the town of Nain is remarkable in one other respect. 

Over the past three months, we have become very conscious of the risk of infection through touch. Do you remember the early days of March, and the constant reminders to wash your hands. To avoid touching your face. Videos appeared on the BBC news website about why we feel the need to touch our face and how to stop doing so.

That’s what you’d expect Jesus to think and feel. He wouldn’t want to be infected as it were by any contact with a dead body. Yet the touch, rather than infecting him, brings life. Vs 15, the young man gets up, and is restored to life again.

And again, in this very small action, we’re pointed towards the cross. How so?

I mentioned a moment ago that the people of Israel were taught in the OT that death was unclean. The reason that death is awful in the Bible is because it’s the evidence of God’s judgement against sin. Humanity’s defiant attempt to live as gods in God’s world. As far as the Bible is concerned, we have all turned away from the source of life looking for life everywhere and anywhere else, but finding only death and darkness.

But in his death, Jesus himself, the giver of life, is touched by death. Jesus faces the judgement of God at Calvary, so that those who are under a sentence of death might know and share in his life. Jesus suffers to bring his healing to us all.

And the joy of the widow of Nain, as her son is restored to her, is a small picture of what our joy will be when the risen Jesus restores all things. When everything and everyone that we have lost will be restored. Tolkien famously has one of his characters say at the end of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ that everything sad is coming untrue. The promise of Christianity is that all things will be restored to us in and through Jesus.

Jesus gladly enters our suffering so that he might bring it to an end. So that he might be our hope that will sustain us through even the worst that a global pandemic can do.