The really good news gospel

If you are a watcher of the blog of Martyn Atkins, President of the Methodist Conference, I apologise for repeating what you have already seen.
But for the sake of a wider audience....

The really good news gospel - Easter message from the President

Donald English used to say that death and resurrection is not simply what happened to Jesus but is the deep movement God implants in all creation. The Christian God is a God of death and resurrection.

Like many I have been challenged by poignant examples of death - its reality and hard consequences - and blessed by wonderful examples of resurrection - and the hope and joy it brings. I will never forget a conversation with a Sierra Leonian man, bearing the scars of the rebel war in the 1990’s so powerfully depicted in the recent film Blood Diamond. He thanked me fervently for bringing the gospel to his land - he talked to me as if I was one of those first Methodist missionaries to West Africa! He explained with deep emotion how he had received Christ quite recently, in the war years, and this coming to faith had enabled him to begin to forgive those who mutilated him - and, as I learned a little later, killed his wife. I was moved to tears. In all his pain and lasting disability he knew that Jesus was alive, and there was hope in his life. He knew in a deep way that the gospel of Christ truly is good news.

More recently, when in Uganda with MRDF, I met Christian folk who have so little, who live with the reality and proximity of death and suffering in a way I do not, yet who remind me more than most of the life and hope of Christian faith. Death and resurrection belong together.

Or I think of some friends who have died in recent times. They knew their prognosis. They lived with the stark consequences of their impending death, for themselves and especially their loved ones. And at just the time when hope might be most lacking in these dear people and those who love them, they talk of the nearness of Christ, the wonderful love and forgiveness of God, the comfort of their faith, their trust in Jesus, the salvation he freely gave and their hope of heaven. In the most traumatic situations of life, it is often those going through them who embody and make clear that the Christian gospel truly is good news.

Death and resurrection is also evident in the life of our churches. I was at Walworth Methodist Church some weeks ago. A church with a venerable past, ‘Clubland’ had a great ministry among local youths and others in that London neighbourhood. But there came a time when almost all signs of life disappeared, and a long three days of darkness ensued. But resurrection has come and new life bursts out everywhere. Methodist Christians, young and old, many (originally) from various parts of West Africa and beyond, share life and worship that exudes the good news gospel. “Our world lives with death and resurrection in many ways and in many places. An ‘average’ news broadcast gives cause to both weep and rejoice. In places of death and darkness we must continue to weep with those who weep and ‘look for the morning’ as people of resurrection faith and hope. With those who rejoice in life and hope we must celebrate and point to God, the giver of it all.

Our Easter faith is not death or resurrection, it is death and resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is not a reversal of death. It is much more than that. The risen Jesus is known by the scars of crucifixion. He is the Living One Who Died. But now he is alive forever. And, marvellously, he stands today with this needy world in the reality of death and the promise of new life. This ministry he shares with us, his Easter People Church, a people bearing the marks of both death and new life. A people who know and live out the profound truth that death and resurrection life both lie deep in the purposes of God, in whom all things will be well.
Alleluia!

blog of President and Vice-President:
http://www.methodist-presandvp.blogspot.com/

He is not here. He is risen

ON 16 FEBRUARY 1977, Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda had a meeting with President Idi Amin, whose murderous regime he had opposed outspokenly. After the meeting, the Archbishop was driven away, along with two government ministers. Uganda Radio announced that the three of them had been arrested, and the following morning it was stated that they had died in a car accident.
In fact, they had been shot on the orders of Amin. A funeral service planned for the following Sunday was forbidden by the government, and the Archbishop's body was not released. Nevertheless, thousands gathered at the cathedral on Namirembe Hill, and the service went ahead around an open grave.

Standing over the empty grave, Luwum's successor, Archbishop Wani, repeated the message of the angel that we hear at Easter: "He is not here. He is risen!"

"He is not here. He is risen!"

And, according to Matthew, the angel adds: "He is going ahead of you to Galilee."
To seek the risen Christ is about moving on; "to go ahead to Galilee".
to live
in hope..
"Christian hope", Jürgen Moltmann writes, "sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands." "Those who hope in Christ", he continues, "can no longer put up with reality as it is. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present."

Janani Luwum understood that belief in the risen Christ entails a commitment to a better world, to"the Kingdom of God". Such a commitment will mean from time to time challenging the powers that be....resulting in our unpopularity, damage to our reputations, desertion by our friends, and worse. For Janani Luwum, it meant martyrdom.

As they gathered round the empty grave of their Archbishop, murdered and risen, they sang of another world, better than this one at its best. That world, too, is promised, and Moltmann will forgive us for sometimes pining for it. But - one world at a time - it is in this one, this Easter, that we must seek the risen Christ.

thanks to John Pridmore. I have edited and added to his article at http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=53492

The Crunch and The Cross

When America sneezes, the infection quickly spreads through the global financial system. As a result of her recent 'credit crunch', lenders and debt junkies alike worldwide are being crushed by the weight of defaults. Greed has suddenly given way to fear, destroying the market value of major banks that have looked at their reserves and found they have none. Slashed interest rates confront us with the truth that money is not as valuable as we thought.
Writing off - or, if you prefer, forgiving - bad debt is painful, and our global interdependence means we all share the pain. It has become personal for me. No longer is it a distant problem of troubled banks; now it's a friend of mine out of a job. Now it's people I know who can't get a mortgage. My own savings are at risk and shrinking in value.
A fund manager said that the Western financial system needed 'a clean-out of Augean-stable proportions' but added that 'we have no Hercules.'

If only the current crisis were all a legend that a suitably legendary hero could put to right. The problem is that the crisis and the pain it brings are real. And so it's a real hero we need.
That's where God comes in. The greed, deception, fear, denial, guilt and collapse of trust that lie at the heart of the current credit crunch are symptomatic of the crisis at the heart of humankind. This is an all too public and corporate demonstration of a normally private and personal reality. It was to deal with this reality - the reality of sin - that Jesus went to Calvary.
In stark contrast to our desperate attempts to escape liability, on the first Good Friday he willingly embraced the cross, experiencing all the terror and pain of the cosmic 'crunch point'. There, the global bad debt of sin was paid, with the only currency that never devalues:
For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. (1 Peter 1:19)

Have a blessed Easter!

PS. Don't miss 'ThePassion' ..http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thepassion/

Thanks to Paul Valler (LICC)

avoiding EASTER Saturday

The teacher and writer Alan Lewis used to talk of workshops that he’d led on the theme of Easter. The trouble was, he said, that groups were happy to talk about Good Friday but then they wanted to jump forward to Easter Day as quickly as possible. That long hiatus of Easter Saturday, when Jesus lies alone in a borrowed tomb, was to be avoided.

Was that, Alan wondered, because we simply don’t like talking about death?

And yet, he said, if we believe that God lived in and through Jesus Christ then it’s important for us to think not only about what was happening to Jesus, dead and buried, but what was happening to God… also dead and buried. It’s a tough idea to get your head round – that God, too, experiences death on the cross and “knows how to die”.

Alan came to understand that the God’s aloneness and despair on Easter Saturday is precisely that part of the Easter story that most closely mirrors so much of our own human experience. Three events of the last century, he suggests, bring into focus the sense of despair we so often feel about our world:

Auschwitz....... Hiroshima........ Chernobyl

Three events that represent the possibility of soulless inhumanity, a nuclear winter and, at Chernobyl, “the terrible possibility of planetary death… the ultimate eco-catastrophe”.

“Who and where is God if God’s power and love can sustain such losses and accede to such defeats?” Alan asks. Is God uninterested, absent or dead?

OR

Does such bleakness as we often experience in the world around us, such inhumanity that screams daily from our newspapers, such injustice that we seem powerless to prevent, offer another possibility?

For Alan, despair and pessimism, “the collapse of confidence” and “the abolition of optimism” creates the possibility of a different way of looking at tomorrow. A way not of fragile, shattered optimism but of strong un-killable hope.

“For hope, finding space to flourish in the very absence of optimism, is the courage not to be swallowed by despair but, in frank acknowledgement of rampant evil and negation, to trust in the possibility for life and creativity amid and beyond that malign [super-power], though assuredly not in its denial or avoidance. The very realities which banish confidence and legitimise despair also invite a hopeful embrace of love’s living power to prevail in history.”

Alan liked to say that the only truly authentic Easter hymn was one that begins “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain”. It speaks of hope (not optimism) present in all our Easter Saturdays of death and despair, ready to push through and grow once more in the shape of God’s love.

The question is: if the aloneness and despair of Easter Saturday is precisely that part of the Easter story which most closely mirrors so much of our own human experience why, then, is it the part of the story that Christians most usually skip over?

More Information
Quotations taken from Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday by Alan E. Lewis (published by Wm B Eerdmans Pub Co.)

thanks to the Methodist Church website for this article

Gethsemane

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What was the agony of Gethsemane?
The Son of God sweating blood.
What was the pain he felt deep within
Which tore at every fibre of his being?
Men and women face death each day,
Afraid of the transitory suffering
of the journey to the unknown.
But he knew his destination and purpose.
The joy set before him,
The sure hope which he would cling to
...through the blackness and torture
and the last enemy’s last stand...
contained in the lonely cry
‘Your will, not mine…’

DEFINING and DOING PRAYER

Thanks to Pete Atkins for this Devotional on prayer...Pete is a founder of what is now the nationwide Mission Shaped Ministry Course...I'm on the course, and enjoyed being on the receiving end of this inspired word last night. Don't just read it once...take time with it and let God speak to you as you reflect:

To pray is to breathe
Relationship with our Father in Heaven is what brings us life

both on earth and for eternity;

prayer is one of the gifts from God for expressing and deepening relationship with Him

– without it we die inside,

we are cut off from our source of life

and our souls start to shrivel.

This gift is permission and means to communicate and commune

with the creator of all things,

the redeemer of our souls,

the lover of all mankind,

the King of Heaven.

In prayer we speak and listen,

ask and receive,

are quiet or shout,

pray in words or in silence,

focus on the needs of others

or our own situation,

use what is written

or respond in our own words,

use our mother tongue

or the "tongues of men and angels".

We can sing or say our prayer,

pray wordlessly

or in groans too deep for words.

We can dance out our prayer,

draw it,

paint it,

write it down,

write it in the sand

or encapsulate it in the flame of a candle.

In prayer

we approach the God who loves us

and who draws us nearer;

we acknowledge our dependence upon Him,

our desire to hear Him,

to give thanks to Him,

to pray our confession when we mess up

and to receive again the joy of forgiveness.

Prayer can be …
…a season of devotion

...or a 3 second request for help,

it can be impregnated with intense feeling

or be a cerebral and passionless event.

Prayer can be on our own

or with others.

Prayer can be inspired by nature or beauty

..or by desperation and suffering.

Prayer can be inspired by our own joys, needs or sorrows

..or the difficulties and heartaches of others.

Prayer, like worship, is a way of life

..not an occasional foray into a spiritual realm.

Seeking to see vision fulfilled without prayer

is like going to war with

no strategy,

no map,

no armour,

no weapons

and no communication with headquarters.

But of more importance

is that seeking to see vision fulfilled without prayer

is to seek effect above relationship.

Closeness to Him is what He desires of us most
…it’s what Jesus came and died to restore.

Seek His face before His hand.

Seek the giver before the gift.

In our love for Him and His for us

lies the source of the power

of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom is within us

and only to the extent it has come in us

will the Kingdom come through us.

The Kingdom of God in us is measured by

our submission to the King,

our love for the King,

our likeness to our King,

our relationship with the King,

our communication with the King,

our life of prayer.

In prayer we align ourselves

to the will of heaven

and pull away from the gravity

of our own desires,

our self centeredness,

and our perspective.

In prayer God invites us

to sit beside Him in heavenly realms

and gain His perspective,

share His heart

and commit ourselves

to the accomplishment of His will.

In prayer we can ask

or groan,

or plead

or wrestle,

or agree

for His will to be established,

for His Kingdom to come on the earth

– including in our hearts,

our territory,

our realm of responsibility,

our lives,

our families

and our Churches.

We pray on our own and we pray with those who share our life
We pray

as one of the two or three gathered together in His name

and we pray

as one of the thousand

gathered together to worship the King,

to cry to heaven,

to plead for the nation

or for the future of our children.

To pray is to live
…and to breathe,

and to allow Him

to be our all in all.

Then as we obey in prayer,

we see our dreams unfold,

His love made known,

His Kingdom established,

the captives set free,

addictions broken,

light come in the darkness

and the lost found.
…and as we pray, Heaven comes upon the earth