Will You See God??

Last night I preached (prought??) at a church on Matthew 5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

I had soooo much fun; there was laughing, I pretended to be a sneaky Jesus, and there was even reference to the Trinity doing a Jewish dance with one of them held up on a chair. Nearly heretical but not quite and that makes all the difference :p

Anyways, here is the transcript. Have a ready if you would like :)

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Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

I know you have been looking at the beatitudes for the last few weeks, which I think is great! I love the beatitudes, they make me feel pretty good when I am in pretty bad places. Like knowing that I am blessed when I mourn, when I am persecuted, when I am struggling to make ends meet with money. It makes me feel good, makes me happy to know that God has an eye out for the weak and suffering.

Like I have this friend Albert who is a homeless guy. He lives in the city and use to sit outside where I would work. I got to know him pretty well as I would sit and share my lunch with him and it made me feel good that God had his eye on this young man whose life had been so hard. I would walk away each day knowing I left him in the best hands possible – God’s.

But this one, this verse, I find harder to talk about, harder to feel good about.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Being poor or mourning or persecuted are easy to see, easy to feel that those people deserve their blessing.

But who of us are pure in heart??

I mean really? Can any of you say that during an average day you don’t have naughty thoughts? That you don’t think of that guy or girl in a way that you would be embarrassed to share about? That you don’t think nasty thoughts about teachers or people who pick on you? Can you honestly say that those thoughts don’t sneak up on you in a ninja attack in such a way that you hope no one can read your mind?

Being pure in heart is a really big ask, and how can anyone actually be pure or even know that they are? 

Does that mean none of us will see God?

Maybe looking closer at what Jesus was saying will help us. Maybe if we step into 1^st century Israel there will be a loop hole or something.

So let’s go back in time a little.

We are standing on a hill by the sea. The air is warm with the multitude of bodies that surround us and press into us. Everything is dusty, dust hangs in the air and clings to our clothes. The smell of salt and body odour fills your nostrils and all around you is the noise of people murmuring and being shushed, bodies shifting their weight from foot to foot, children crying, and above it all, the sound of a lone male voice calling out that those that are pure in their hearts will see God.

His statement shocks you. You look around and see your own shock on the faces of those around you. You have been a good Jew for years, gone to the temple to atone for your sins, prayed and given tithes. And you know with certainty that no one at the temple or synagogue preaches like this. The holy men that you get out of the way for in the street are pure because they keep the hundreds of purity rituals. But you can’t do that, you have to work, you have to get your hands dirty and sometimes you break the rules a bit even though you try not to. You know you aren’t pure.

And this claim that people like you could see God is laughable!!! Not even the priests get to see God, because seeing the face of God, as every good Jew knows, means death. It is because no one is pure that God cannot be seen. So what this preacher man is saying doesn’t make sense. He makes it sound like that there are people who are pure in heart and, even more astoundingly, that people can see God!

What Jesus said that day in front of the crowd wasn’t just nice sayings that made people feel good. They were radical statements about the nature of humanity and the person of God. He effectively was turning the religious teaching of the day on its head. He couldn’t have been more radical!

But since then we have had 2000 years of people explaining Jesus’ words to us so the impact has worn off a little bit. Now his words seem like nice, feel good sayings to remind us that everyone is valuable.

But what if it meant something much much more? What if this simple saying could changes lives?

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Many of the things I read around this passage went something like this: “Live life seeking purity, living well and holy, and you will end up seeing God when you die.” Nice sentiment, but I think this is really off the mark.

For example, has anyone thought about how totally ironic Jesus is being here?! Think about it. There he stands, God incarnate, telling people who are sinners, who are broken, that the pure in heart will see God. Yet he is God! The very people who are impure are looking at God! What seems impossible is happening that very day!

How is this possible? The thousands that came to hear him are not all pure in heart! And yet there they stand looking at the face of God.

There must be something that they, that we, are missing, some vital link that Jesus forgot to explain.

Jesus, as he often does, is drawing on a story that is much bigger than the time and place which he finds himself in at that moment. Underlying all his words is the great story of God and his people. We can see that throughout the Bible story people try to see God.

They build a tower at Babel and get scattered over the earth.

The wrestle with a man from heaven and are given a lifelong limp.

They ask to see God’s face and are given only a glimpse of God’s back.

They try to be pure through their actions, their laws, their words when the temple is rebuilt.

 And they fail over and over and over again.

They are like us.

We try hard to do our “Sunday best”.

We try not to swear, to think badly about others.

We try to forgive and to love.

And yet we fail, repeatedly and often in a spectacular fashion! No one has managed to get it right, to live pure.

We are so good at trying to make rules and laws about how we should live in order to be pure that we miss the bigger picture. We forget that no matter how hard we try we will fall down. We forget that to love is much more important than to follow social conventions. We forget that it is not about keeping up appearances before each other.

We forget Jesus.

God took the initiative in something that he knew we would never accomplish. God stepped down into our history as a man that told people that it wasn’t about their actions, it was never about the actions, it is about their hearts.

And because we will never get our hearts right, Jesus sorted that out to. It is through him that we are made pure. It his through his life, death and resurrection that our broken sinful nature is made clean. Paul tells us that we are now holy, yet still being made holy. We have been proclaimed pure, and yet still striving for purity.

It is the miraculous and wondrousness of God that through his Son he sees us as sinless though we are still sinful!

Wow! That sounds totally complicated and ridiculous. At best it sounds like I am talking in circles, at worst that I am a crazy person!

I spent ages trying to figure out how to explain this better, and really I can’t do it by telling you all the theological who-ha, but more through examples.

The Message Bible states this verse like this: “You are blessed when you get your inside world – your mind and heart – put right. Then you can see God in your outside world.”

There is the story of Princess Catherine of Hungary who took pity on those who were poor and dying and so gave up her life of luxurious wealth to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and wash the dead in preparation of burial. She believed in Jesus as the Christ and his message changed her heart. And through that change she started to see God in the faces of the poor and starving that lived in her country.

Then there is the story of the black woman in South Africa whose son was killed during the years of apartheid by a young white man. At the trial later she asked not for retribution but rather that the young white man would come live with her and receive the love that she would have given her son. She said that the message of Christ changed her heart towards the young man.

See, she had let God s message of love and forgiveness change her heart and as a result she saw God in the face of the man who killed her child. Forgiveness for the senseless act that ripped her family apart meant that her heart and her mind weren’t filled with hate and anger. She had forgiven those who had hurt her and, though the hurt was still there, saw that everyone, even the man who had hurt her the most, was a child of God, someone whom she could love and who could learn to receive that love.

She saw reconciliation where others saw retribution.

She saw God where most people would see despair and death.

She saw love where others saw hate.

Or even my own story, one that has been filled with anger and hate to the point where I was at the point of drinking myself to death. And then I decided to give Jesus a go to see what he could make of me. I am no longer angry, no longer hate filled, and I have learnt to love those that I meet and see around me.

When the message of Jesus and the Spirit enter your life change just happens. When you let go of the need to be in control and let a man who loved and who forgives get inside your head with his ideas then your heart starts to change; towards God, towards others and towards yourself.  When you begin to accept the idea that God has proclaimed you pure, your actions begin to reflect that purity.

Although it is impossible for us to have a pure heart in and of ourselves, we can have a pure heart by the grace of God. What is impossible for man is possible for God. A pure heart is a gift from God, and it comes by a new birth, by a new creation, and by the Spirit living in us. We will never be perfect. But the message that Jesus gives us isn’t that we have to live to a strict set of rules to makes us perfect.

The greatest blessing and the noblest goal of the Christian life is to know God, to experience His presence in our daily life, and to live for His glory. Paul made this the goal for his life, as he said:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him … I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Philippians 3:7-10).

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are you, for Christ died to make you pure, and through him, you can see God.

Blessed are you for accepting Christ, for it will change the way you view your world.

Blessed are you for acting out of the faith in your heart and seeing the image of God on the faces of others.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Let’s pray

May God help us to strive for a purity of heart that transcends the division between interior and exterior that we so readily construct in order to guard our true selves from others and to appear different than we really are.  May God help us to live honestly and transparently before others.  Most of all, may God help us to acknowledge and depend upon him as the only one who is truly pure, the one in whom we place our trust and in whom our hope is found.

Act of Murder

I just walked out of a movie.

I don't do this often, as I usually am interested in what a movie has to say, even if I don't agree with it.

The one I walked out of however made me so angry that I couldn't stand to watch it anymore.

The movie is called "Act of Valor" and is about real life situations that the Navy Seals have found themselves in. Though I respect the fact that the Seals are the elite of the elite and they have fine tuned their craft until it is an artwork, the fact that their artwork is that of death is something that I find hard to swallow.

In the movie one of the situations is an extraction of a CIA agent that has been captured and is being tortured. The agent is a young woman and will no doubt be tortured until death. The Seals have to infiltrate and extract the woman.

They efficiently get the woman out but in doing so kill many of the workers on the other side. Do I agree with the fact that they were torturing a woman? No at all! But do I think that somehow the Seals are justified in killing people for one of their own people? No!

I find war, or violence between countries, the height of hypocrisy. We tell someone that they are not right in hurting our people so we spy on them. They say we have no right to spy on them so they capture the spy. We say they have no right to capture our spy so we kill untold numbers of their people to get our spy back. They retaliate to the killing of their people...and so it goes on.

Martin Luther King Jnr said once that you cannot murder murder, you cannot stop violence with violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness, only light can do that. 

Too often the ideas of 'an eye for an eye' are taken to the extreme on a world stage to the point where even Christians think that it is noble and right to fight and kill others for the sake of the ones they love and protect?

What about the family of the person you are killing? What about the fear/anger/passion they are fighting with/for? How can you justify their death if it means saving your own?

Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies. If we take that from not just in our own lives but to a global stage, then forgiveness and love cannot lead to violence! They cannot co-exist! How can you shoot someone whom you love and whom you have forgiven? Even if it means the death of those you love? Even if it means your own life?

No one life is better than another, even if that life has been used to hurt and manipulate and destroy. Even if that person's actions are evil, who are we to judge whether or not they should die? Is that not for God to decide? Is it not good enough to live out of Jesus' words to love and to forgive?

As I watched the movie I was struck by the amount of money and effort that is put into making machines that sole purpose is to seek and kill people. It made me think about how that money could be used to support countries where most terrorists are made. If there was nutrition, schooling, safety then maybe less children would grow up with so much hate that they needed to kill. Maybe their parents would teach them to hate others but to love those that helped them.

I see no justification for money and people to be used to kill others. I see no justification for war of any kind. I see no correlation between the story of the Bible and violence. I would give my life to stop others being hurt, but I would never take another's or kid myself that by doing so somehow I would achieve peace through violence.

God has left the Temple

When I was a young girl, maybe around ten, I started what can only be called an obsession. I don't know what triggered it but I can say that every time from that age on when I saw articles or pictures about this topic I would collect them. My mother worried about my fascination, thinking it wasn't healthy for a young girl to be so interested in something so complex, and at times dark, but I kept going. To this day I follow what I can. My obsession is with

The Israel/Palestine Conflict.

I know, not really a usual interest for a young child but something about the fact that no one could agree on what was happening or who was right capture my mind and I have found it only more interesting as I have aged (though I am now aware of the fact that propaganda plays a major part).

The thing that I never really understood was the rest of the world getting so involved in the issues of this small country. America was the mediator (many times) between the two states and tried to help them come to peace. I always have thought, what business is it of theirs?? It isn't their land so why do they butt in an expected the two warring countries to listen.

The thing is, this conflict is so much bigger than just the war within it's boundaries. It has everything to do with Zionism, or the belief that Israel is still the Holy Land, Jerusalem is still the Holy City, and as good Christian countries (so the thinking goes in America) we need to protect the land of God from the heathen Arabs, or at least stop it imploding. There is also a direct correlation for Zionists between the return of Israel to the Jews and the return of Christ. To speed up one is to speed up the other.

I have simplified this somewhat as Zionism is far bigger than just this issue, but I am surprised at how many people I met who don't even realise that they are Zionists! There are so many Christians that seem to just accept as fact that the Israelites are in the right and the Palestinians are evil and deserved to be corralled in concentration camps on the Gaza strip.

There are also many who have sympathy for the Israelites after what they went through in WWII. Granted, the making of a Jewish state on the same soil that their religion comes from seemed to make sense after the senseless slaughter of millions of innocents. The world was trying to do the right thing by a people who had been left to die by the very same people. The problem was, in their guilt, the West didn't ask permission from the people who were living there happily; namely the Palestinians. As a result of their land being taken over and the borders continuously shifting against their favour, the Palestinians fought back.

Were they right to? I don't know. I don't agree with war in any case but if someone came into your home and told you you had to clear out because people who hadn't lived there for centuries were coming back to take over, I might be a little put out too.

But putting aside the rightness or not of fighting back, I want to look at the reasons as to why the West generally supports Israel and vilifies the Palestinians.

The idea that the return of Jerusalem to the Jews and the return of Christ are linked is from Revelation. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone since Revelation was written that truly understands what it is talking about in full. Jerusalem can look like a heavenly city, the renewed earth, and at times a bride (!!), and so taking what it says literally without any proper understanding of the text is dangerous.

The Jews themselves tried to hurry along the Messiah. After their temple was destroyed and they were taken to Babylon in exile (at the end of the OT before the NT), they were allowed to return to Israel and rebuild their temple. This they did but the Messiah did not come. So they tried to be ultra Holy and keep all the Sabbath's because somehow that would get the Messiah to show up. When Jesus finally did come (400 years later) he proceeded to tell off those people that had helped evil doers by thinking that their actions made them holy while they did not love or care for people. I look at Palestine now and ask, is the West trying to bring back Christ through their actions in Israel but by doing so are not loving or caring for the Palestinians and letting evil happen??

I believe that the promises that God made to the Jews are true and still stand. But I believe that they are fulfilled in Christ and have also gone out to the ends of the earth. At the death of Christ, the temple curtain that separated God from the people was ripped. This signified that God left the Temple to dwell in them. This in affect means that Jerusalem, while holy from a historical and biblical view, is as holy today as any piece of land where believers stand. The city itself will always be significant to believers but it is not somehow more Godly than anywhere else.

I am sickened by what happened to the Jews in WWII. Nothing will rectify how most of the world stood back and let that happen. But building walls around slums to keep the Palestinians and Jews separate, or putting fences up and making Palestinians walk through check points, or putting them in massive camps where disease spreads, is not justifiable just because this happened to them. Two wrongs do not make the past ok.

I had a friend go to Israel last year and when they came back they told me that they saw "no holiness in the holy land." There was only fear and hatred, pain and anger.

Bombing people who you believe have done you wrong isn't going to stop their actions. It is going to breed a new generation of children who grow up in fear and who are taught to hate. As they grow older they are going to want answers, revenge, meaning to their lives. And they will take it out on the people who they see to have caused the suffering.

People, if you are Christian or not, there is no justification for anything that is happening over there. There is no one who is acting well, there are none that can claim that they are acting more holy. As people who love others, Christians should be the last to try and justify or support a war where the victims are children and innocents.

God has left the Temple, let's all stop fighting for an empty house.

Meet Thomas

For those of you who don't know Thomas let me quickly introduce him. He is one of Jesus' followers who gets a bit of stick because he has the audacity to say that he won't believe Jesus has risen until he sees it for himself. Ever since he uttered those words, anyone for the last 2000 years who has voiced their doubts has run the risk of being called a "Doubting Thomas".

Talk about a name sticking like mud!

It seems to be a bad thing to be a Doubting Thomas and yet I think I, and many others, would react exactly the same way.

Imagine if you had just been told that someone you knew and loved had got up and walked out of their grave after you had witnessed their brutal torture and murder. Are you gonna start hollering and praising God or are you gonna say "really guys? That seems a bit far fetched, I may have to see it to believe it"?

The thing I love about Jesus in this story is that he shows up to do exactly what Thomas said he needed. While all the other disciples where standing round telling Tom he needed more faith, or he should just believe, or that doubt is from the devil (come on, we've all been told these things!), Jesus walks in and says "hey bro, heard you needed some proof".

Love it!

I think Tommy boy gets a bad name.

Because we all doubt.

We all have moments when we ask ourselves if our faith is really what we make it out to be or if it is simply a really good hoax.

We all question why we are living as Christians, or why we are living at all!

We all ask for proof, for something that would undeniably prove to us once and for all that this is everything it promises it is.

We doubt God, we doubt our faith, we doubt ourselves.

We are all Thomas.

Except in the fact that Thomas doubted one massive thing, whereas I for one everything.

I am always seconded guessing myself and wondering if I made the right decision. I am constantly worried that I am gonna make a wrong turn and ruin my life. Maybe it comes from being divorced so young. But I have another theory.

My sister calls it 'procrastinating perfectionism'.

Being a perfectionist means that you have to do everything perfectly, you want it to be right first time. By procrastinating though you usually don't end up with enough time to do that. Put these two together and you have someone who fears getting it wrong so you put it off til the last minute to when you are bound to not be able to get it right and then you don't disappoint yourself.

Yeah, I am messed up.

See disappointing people is where my biggest fear lies. I am worried that, if I take the wrong path, I will disappoint my friends, family and, worst of all, God.

I know that this isn't right. I know that God is with me in all things and that nothing I can do is going to drive God away  but somehow that doesn't translate into how I feel.

And so I become afraid, and then stressed, and then I begin to doubt.

It's a vicious cycle.

It is moments when I am beginning to fear that I remember a bible verse that I memorised as a child in Sunday school:

"God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of power, love and soundness of mind" (2 Tim 1:7)

See, God doesn't operate by wielding fear over our heads. In fact fear is the opposite of love, and God is love, so there is no fear when you live in the love of God.

So those moments when I am afraid, I tell myself that if I just step over that line, cross that bridge, jump that hurdle, then I will have defeated the fear of the thing itself.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Because faith is about the unknown. It is about hearing a life giving word and, despite the doubt, despite the fear, deciding that you can't live without it. And then, equipped with that faith, you then face all of lives other challenges, still with fear and trepidation, but with strength and determination.

And then when you face death, the biggest fear of all, it can be with peace, knowing that to die is the biggest step of faith there is (idea stolen from Sam Burrows) as it is in death that we find out if what we lived for is really true or not.

For it is when we die that we will see Jesus, just as Thomas did, smiling and saying "Now, about those doubts you had...."

Bread and Circuses

Anyone who has ever been in a class with me knows that I like to ask questions. Lots of questions.

I have tried, honestly I have, to just shut up and not put my hand up and not ask questions that I know will make half the class groan because I am taking up time. I try not to put my hand up with the answer every time the teacher asks a questions. I try really hard!! But something happens to me when I try and restrain myself. My insides get all fluttery, my hands can shake, I start to get nervous for the teacher standing up the front in silence because no one is answering, I feel physically ill. So, without fail, I will put my hand up.

It's an illness.

What surprises me every time are the number of people for whom this is not the case! For so many people they put their heads down, try and appear invisible, pray that their name won't be called, and sigh with relief when it is all over.

My brain doesn't compute this.

Because I see it as inherently important to be brave enough to ask questions. I see it as a fundamental part of life to challenge those that have the power/knowledge, to learn from them as much as possible, and to share when I think I have knowledge that someone may need. It may be annoying as all heck when you are in the class with me, but later on in life I think the fear of putting one's hand up can becoming crippling to society.

The Romans use to have a saying that goes like this:

Panem et Circenses

In English that translates to "Bread and Circuses".

It was a saying used to indicate that a society of people with full bellies and enough entertainment will give up any responsibility they have in politics and therefore their power. It is a saying full of cynicism and, scarily, not just a little truth. My take on it today would be "Meals and Movies".

This giving up of the power to speak into society and change things didn't end when the Roman Empire fell. Today, in the United States, the voting for the person who will be the most powerful man (or woman) in the world is taking place. And a lot of people won't vote. They won't vote for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones among the 20 year old's will be that they can't be bothered because how does it relate to them?

During the election on Parliament in New Zealand in the last couple of years there was a decrease, yet again, of people in certain age groups who didn't vote. Talking to my friends who didn't choose to vote, one of the common lines was that neither of the main political parties will change much about "my" life so why bother?

We don't vote because we don't care. We are happy, with full tummies and enough money to entertain ourselves, why does it matter who is in charge. We have given up our power by ignoring our political responsibilities.

It goes further though.

This giving up of the power to speak out is rampant throughout our communities.

You go into schools and children are too afraid of bullying to act too smart or speak up in class with something intelligent. 

In churches people are more concerned about the quality of the coffee and chat afterwards than really paying attention to the sermon, challenging or questioning the pastor on their points, or even calling out answers if a speaker asks a question.

You go into work places and people are asked to lie to their bosses or make up figures, or they see work place bullying or sexual harassment and they are too embarrassed to put their neck out and draw attention to something that may result in them being fired.

We have become complacent, happy with what we have to the point that rocking the boat would be disastrous and costly and uncomfortable.

I believe this is true especially for Christians who don't want to appear 'Bible bashy' so they avoid talking to their mates or colleagues about their faith, about their doubts, or about their religion.  

We are afraid to speak out, believing that our actions will suffice. That if we act as a good Christian then words are unnecessary as surely our example will compel others to not only recognise Jesus in us but also to then accept him as Lord and Saviour.

All I ask is how?

How is someone suppose to know what they have not heard?

Our God is a talkative God. 

The universe was spoken into existence.

Moses was compelled to march up to Pharaoh by nothing more than a spoken promise. 

Abraham left his homeland on the back of a spoken promise too. 

Prophets left, right and centre were called with words and then went with words.

Jesus was tortured and killed for doing nothing more than preaching words.

The first thing that happened at Pentecost was the preaching of words.

The gospel spread through the passing on of words.

And now we are called into that conversation.

And it requires a lot of balls-iness to speak within the conversation.

It will mean people won't like what you have to say.

It will mean some people may not read my blog again.

It may mean you lose friends.

It may mean you shrink your church.

It may mean that people think you're a tad nuts.

But how will they hear if there is no one to speak?

Everyone of us is being called by God into a conversation that brings death and life. Death of the old and life in the new. And the words that are spoken to us should be so challenging, so changing, that we are compelled to share them in our broken and halting speech.

Don't be afraid of being responsible for speaking in God's power and changing the political, sociological, and societal landscapes of our world.

Throw away the bread, pack up the circuses, and be moved by the power that is the Word.