Be still and know that I am God

I am not writing a blog this week. Standing back and pondering the above, seeking guidance about the future.

Psalm 46:10 NIV

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

The poor

The Lord hears the cry of the poor;blessed be the Lord! Psalm

Looking at his disciples, he said:  “Blessed are you who are poor,     for yours is the kingdom of God.
Luke 6:20 NIV

The second quote is from Jesus and part of a longer passage.

Here was a man whose words were like fire.

Even now Jesus words can penetrate our comfortable world and challenge us so that we can dare to be different.

Here is a man who presents to us an altered perception of what it means to be living the human life. Here is a man whose words can make us question our existing value system and drag us out of our introspection.

Jesus trades in paradox. We start to listen to him and when we hear him say "BLESSED", "POOR", "KINGDOM OF GOD" in the same sentence we begin to question what he could possibly mean.

The Good News translation even says "Happy" instead of "Blessed "How can poor people be happy? How can the hungry be satisfied? In a way the beatitudes are one of the most frightening passages that Jesus teaches. Because what he says invades our life. We spend most of our lives working hard to feed our family, clothe them, pay a mortgage, buy a car (and of course be a success in the process) and yet Jesus comes close to us in today's gospel and says "alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now."

It is not something that we should explain away or dilute. Jesus words are addressed to us all at an individual level. To each one who listens they are a challenge. They are a challenge to our hearts and directly to our interior lives. Jesus is prompting us in a very direct way to change the orientation of our lives, so that we put the God who Is Love first and everything else second. He is inviting us to have spiritual integrity and part of having this is to be able to detach from material possessions so that they no longer own us.

You could also say that Jesus words are addressed to us so that we change our hearts from stone to compassionate hearts of flesh. This invitation is from a Jesus who wants to usher in the new reign of God. A lot of the teaching in the gospel of Luke is about the "Kingdom of God" and how to bring it into our lives. Jesus expects his followers to be "yeast" in society, to have integrity. Changing society by their very presence. If our hearts are in the right place then this starts to happen. Christians are not called to be passive. If our faith does anything for us at all it should stir us into a more pure kind of love which isn't at all selfish.

...and yes then the beatitudes start to come true. We are happy (or happier) when we change and live by the gospel.

Of course we are only human and will struggle with temptation and even fall back at times. But what we need to watch is that the direction of our lives is going the right way. That is towards God and towards each other and not the other way... We need to set our rudder straight. Set our love straight. Set our integrity straight and head for the goal. Then rich or poor becomes irrelevant. I remember a good friend reminding me that we pray daily for our food in the Lord's prayer "give us this day our daily bread"

Dear Jesus, I have so much help me to know this and to live fully as an heir to the kingdom. Amen

Avoiding the dragnet of evil

Put at its starkest level sometimes Christianity is about the struggle between good and evil. The struggle between love and hate. And the choice between what helps us and that which harms us.

What has provoked those thoughts in me is rather randomly last Thursday I put my toe in the water of the book of Habakkuk. The same day I started to read Christine Caine's book Undaunted. Both books gripped me and started me thinking along the same lines.

To be a follower of Christ rather than just a believer means that we are called to an active opposition of evil. You could term it spiritual opposition but it can also be said that we are called to a direct opposition of evil where it is manifest in our world. Bear with me please and follow me to where I go with this.

First Habakkuk. I put my toe in the book thinking I was just going to read a passage but had to read the whole of the short book in order to try and understand it. I found myself thinking about a description that the prophet uses, "dragnet of evil, " he warns us that we are like fishes in the sea and that we can be unwittingly caught up in that dragnet of evil. Sucked into evil without at first being aware of what is happening. The dragnet can plunge towards us and before we know it we can be deep in the net with our tail flicking in panic.

I have come to realise that the main times that this happens is when we come into contact with the off-shoots of organised crime or institutional and corporate sin.

We have to allow the scales to fall off our eyes and to be aware that these "dragnets" reach our local communities. Our first response should be to say "no" to their products ourselves and teach our children to. That's a definite no to soft drugs, money lending, counterfeit goods, heroin, pimps, pornography. If they can't sell their products they lose the incentive to be in your neighbourhood. All these products are produced through coercion in some way and to deliver the product a human has suffered. Even if the first fix was free.

The link to Christine Caine's book Undaunted is that she brings, as her witness to us, a meeting that she had with some young women who had escaped human trafficking. The account is very moving and should be of concern to us. She explains why she started the A21 campaign in 2007.

For reflection

• Does the dragnet of evil come near to me or someone I care about?
• Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?  You have made people like the fish in the sea, like the sea creatures that have no ruler.  The wicked foe pulls all of them up with hooks, he catches them in his net, he gathers them up in his dragnet; and so he rejoices and is glad.  Therefore he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his dragnet, for by his net he lives in luxury and enjoys the choicest food.  Is he to keep on emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy? Habakkuk 1:13-17 NIV
• Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,  yet I will rejoice in the Lord , I will be joyful in God my Savior.  The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights. Habakkuk 3:17-19 NIV
• Be under obligation to no one—the only obligation you have is to love one another. Whoever does this has obeyed the Law.  The commandments, "Do not commit adultery; do not commit murder; do not steal; do not desire what belongs to someone else"—all these, and any others besides, are summed up in the one command, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law. Romans 13:8-10 GNT

Dear Lord, open my eyes. Purify my heart and my intentions, free me from pressure to do things I don't want to do. I want to freely dedicate myself to seeking your peace and your love for my life. Amen