Some reflections on believing in God today (after the EU referendum)

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

My Dad loves this sentence and he always says, 'Why will they get called children of God? Because it's the family likeness. God makes peace, so when we make peace, it's obvious that he's our Dad.'

The referendum campaign has been a brutal and divisive and there are a lot of wounds just from that. Every poll explaining the way a particular demographic voted (old/young, more educated/less educated etc.) just offers us all another way to define the ‘Other’ who we can take our stand divided from as an enemy.

More than that though there are painful wounds for everyone who has come here from Europe or elsewhere and made it their home, for whom this vote feels like a vote against them. Of course it’s especially scary for people who actually don't know what will happen to them long term, but also just those who feel like this vote has declared them unwelcome.

And on top of that I'm particularly worried about the way this result inevitably makes things much more complicated again in Northern Ireland, and I am praying that it won't start a series of events that pulls apart the incredibly hard won peace there.

Basically what I’m saying is, there’s a lot of un-peace going around right now. A lot of anger and division and fear. The sense that the Other is a threat to us, rather than a gift to us. Whether that Other be Europeans living in the UK or Leave voters. So it seems like an important time to remember that God is a peacemaker, and he makes his children peacemakers too.

The whole peace-making thing starts with God himself. He has made an offer to us of peace and reconciliation with him. In a weird, very metaphorical sort of way, the very worst elements of the Leave campaign (and I am not at all saying this is at all what all of my friends who voted Leave were thinking, it definitely wasn’t, and I have no way of knowing how significant this kind of thing was numerically) were actually echoes of what the Bible says about the fundamental problem between each one of us and God. God created us, and he is infinitely wiser and more loving than we are, so he is totally worthy of our complete obedience and allegiance. If we really saw who God is and who we are, ecstatically joyful submission to him as our King and our Father would be the only sane response. But we’re not actually famed for sanity as a species. And right down deep somewhere at the bottom of us we have a kind of resentment of being the smaller one, the creature and not the Creator. We don’t want to be told what we were made to be, we don’t want to orbit around the sun, we long to be the centre of our own solar system. And we are always tempted to be selfish – to look out for our best interests even at the expense of others. So we reject God as our King and our Dad and establish our own little solar systems where we’re the heaviest thing around and everyone else is supposed to revolve around us – or in our nobler moments around our family or our group or our nation, ‘people like us’. We splinter our rightful relationship to our God at such a fundamental level we don’t even know we’re doing it, and it shatters and twists our relationships to one another – the others that were created as gifts to us become threats to our Absolute Sovereignty over our own petty empires. Of course we create profound, loving, intimate alliances as well as purely business ones, but we always feel the tug, when push comes to shove, when we can’t feel the benefits, the tug back to looking out for our own interests, to ‘independence’.

And all of this has a cost. It deeply hurts our Father God and ultimately it mortally wounds us. But God’s response is not simply to give us what we deserve, to leave us to the consequences of our actions - to let us declare ourselves enemies and return rejection for rejection. Of course that would be entirely fair, and if we refuse all offers of reconciliation he will have no other choice. But he does make an incredible offer. He comes to us himself in Jesus, and utterly subverts the logic of selfishness and enmity – he dies, freely, the death we have earned for ourselves. He pours out his blood, his life, as an offer of peace precisely to those who have rejected him as the ultimate Other, the ultimate Threat. He dies freely with “Forgive them” on his lips. And then he makes a mockery of the whole system of zero-sum-game, warring, self-interest economics – even of death itself – by literally, genuinely, historically in time and space with an actual glorified body and holes in his hands and feet, coming back from the dead. He died to pay our debt but death couldn’t hold him. He bore the weight of hatred and evil but the love that would go that far was indestructible. This is Aslan rising in the light of dawn, this is Simba returning to Pride Rock as the rains begin to fall again, this is the tears in the eyes of every father and mother and lover and child who has ever lost hope and then had it gloriously given back. This is bigger than every moment of defeat, every political struggle, every black cloud of pessimism and apathy – this is Hope-beyond-despair, Life-beyond-death, Love-beyond-hatred, this is God himself, bearing every single one of our burdens, shattering them to pieces and then holding out his hand to us and saying, “Peace be with you.” God offers us peace.

I may have got slightly carried away there, but it is actually all totally relevant to today and the referendum, because God offers us peace even in the middle of all kinds of uncertainties and turmoil. All morning my brother has been reminding himself (and me by proxy) of the bit in one of the Psalms in the bible where it says, 

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” 

As in, the strongest thing we can find to trust without God is whatever is most powerful in the world – whether that be chariots or the FTSE 100, or our citizenship in a powerful nation. But the strongest chariots can be overthrown and spit us out into the dirt. My brother was very confident last night that we would vote Remain, but he woke up today at 4:30 to discover that he was wrong. But he doesn’t trust in chariots or horses or the FTSE 100 and this is what he keeps reminding me of. He trusts in someone much more reliable, much more faithful, and much more powerful. He got a really cool text from one of his best mates today, that said something like, 
‘Me and Victoria [his wife] were just kind of looking at each other over breakfast, knowing that this has probably made a huge dent on the value of our house, and that realistically both of our jobs may well be at risk’ - they work in the city, if we actually leave the single-market a lot of that business will move away to stay in Europe – ‘but we were saying to each other that the real reason we’re here is to love and serve the people of Old Street and to share the good news of Jesus with them, and that hasn’t changed.’

That’s class. God is bigger, and he gives us a purpose and a peace that are indestructible by circumstances.

But also God calls us to peace with each other. I was thinking as I started to write this blog about this Sunday, and the fact that up and down the country people who love Jesus are going to gather in homes and halls and old stone churches and there will be people who voted Remain and people who voted Leave and we will look at one another and call each other brother, and sister, and mean it. We will actually love each other. Because – as the bible puts it in Ephesians – Jesus is creating a “new humanity” that cuts across every racial, national, political and gender division to make a new family, united because they are all united to Him, and in his own body he has “put to death their hostility”. This has been happening through this campaign and it is happening right now and it will happen face to face for thousands and thousands on Sunday. And when you see it in action, like we have done amazingly in recent years amidst ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe, it is really beautiful to behold.

And finally God makes us peacemakers, if we’ll let him. All of what I’ve talked about so far is an indestructibly glorious context out of which to be a channel of actual peace – a group of people who love relentlessly even people with whom they profoundly, painfully disagree, and who pray and act and sweat and bleed for peace in every fight and between every faction. So I’m praying that God will make the people who love him co-creators with him of peace between Leave-voters and Remain-voters, between migrants and all who feel threatened by them, and between the two sides in Northern Ireland. And I’m praying that as we do, it will become gloriously obvious that we are being re-made in the likeness of our Dad.

So this is my prayer:

God,

Patient, faithful, reconciling and redeeming God,
Thank you so much that you didn’t just leave us as your enemies. Thank you that you actually died to offer us peace, to break down the barriers of division and enmity between us and you, and even amongst ourselves. I still haven’t really got my head around it but I am grateful and I want to be more grateful. Please let more people realise that you are real and good, and accept your offer and be reconciled to you. 

Thank you that you have promised that if we come to Jesus you will transform us and make us like him. Please God, I want to be like him today, and tomorrow, and relentlessly love every kind of Other that I am tempted to see as a threat.

Please make us like him. Make us humble, make us gentle, make us patient, make us kind. And give us a genuine hunger for peace and for unity. By your epic power work through our little efforts to actually bring reconciliation and kindle hope. Make us people who build bridges and not barriers.

Please restrain evil and enmity and aggression in this world. Teach us to care about problems that are not our own – teach us to care about Syria and Iraq and your people there as well as here and in Northern Ireland. And in our own places, our own relationships, our own countries, use us to bring about a world that looks more like what you made it to be – and more like it will be when you restore it completely and wipe away the tears from every eye.

Thank you for the peace that comes from knowing it’s not all down to us. But we really do want to be like you, and we long to be part of the peacemaking that you are doing, and have been doing from the very beginning.
We love you and we trust you.

Amen.

My last blog as a Cambridge student. (About treasure.)

Last weekend I got invited to give a little talk at a treasure trail (that’s right, I said a treasure trail) that the Selwyn Christian Collective put on for the rest of college. We decided that we would stick with the treasure theme, and have a look at one of the tiniest parables Jesus ever told – it’s just one verse I think in Matthew’s biography – and I thought it would be fun to blog something along the lines of what I said! So here’s the mini-parable:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

So this guy is digging in someone else’s field for whatever reason (is he working? is he treasure hunting?) and his shovel hits something and he sees that it’s this immense thing of treasure! So then, cheekily, he covers it back up with dirt – and he runs home to sell everything he has! And then with only the shirt on his back left he takes his money and, grinning all the way, he goes to the guy who owns this field and offers to buy it from him. And then once it’s his he goes and digs up the treasure and it’s worth a thousand times what he sold to get it!

This is classic Jesus, because he is, as usual, making an outrageous claim about himself. Because the kingdom he’s talking about is what happens when he is the King – when people love him and follow him. So he’s basically saying: “I am so valuable, so precious – knowing me, loving me, following me is so glorious – that you would be right to drop everything else in your life to get me. With a massive grin on your face. I’m worth that much.” It’s times like this when it doesn’t seem so surprising that people had a tendency to throw rocks at him.

But he said this kind of thing all the time – somewhere else he puts it like this:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me, will save it.”

Hold onto your life for yourself and it’ll slip through your fingers. But lose everything for his sake, and then you’ll really start living. Then you’ll discover what you were really made for, you’ll find out what ‘life’ really feels like. Like he said another time, “I have come so that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

But there’s a problem for us when we hear this. I think we have a problem because there are loads of people making that claim these days. In this time and this place, we are in a literally global market of people selling us different things, all claiming that they are going to give us ‘real life’, fulfilment, peace, joy, security, meaning. Saying ‘buy this product’ or ‘take this job’ (OK, this one doesn’t actually happen to English students that much but my friends tell me it’s a thing) or ‘join this cause’ or ‘follow this pathway’ and it will make you feel really alive. A thousand different ideologies and religions: right wing or left wing, Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism, spiritual practices and pathways, meditation and mindfulness and a thousand other things: and all of them saying “this is where you’ll find real life”.

But how on earth are we supposed to know who to believe? How are we supposed to know who to trust?

As I thought about this it occurred to me that surely the most popular solution to this problem throughout history, by far, has been this:

Choose whatever is most normal.

Cast your mind back to 500 years ago in this country. The average person is a Christian, basically because it’s normal. It’s the worldview which is socially acceptable and widely held around them. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t thinking, “I only believe this because it’s normal”, not at all. But the normalness of it means that to them it just seems obvious, sensible, good – and when they encounter other belief systems they seem just quite implausible. Other moral systems might well seem downright outrageous, deeply wrong.

But just because Christianity was normal 500 years back didn’t make it automatically true. Those cultural inclinations to see other things as implausible or morally unacceptable are actually a really rubbish reason to believe in Christianity! You want to go back and shake them and say, ‘’Think about it!’

So then the pressing question for us is, what’s the ‘normal’ worldview right now, in early 21^st century Western Europe? And I think it’s a kind of agnostic atheism – something along the lines of ‘There might or might not be something out there, but we definitely don’t know anything much about it, so you should just be true to yourself, and respect everyone else and their beliefs.’ This is so normal that for most of us anything else seems quite implausible, or even immoral. But in the same way as with Christianity in the past, just because it’s normal doesn’t make it right. Just because it’s normal doesn’t make it real. Just because it’s the most natural way of thinking for us culturally doesn’t mean it’s the way we’ll actually find real life, real fulfilment.

And Jesus clearly seems to think that going for the most normal, most obvious, most convenient option isn’t the way to find real life. The man in the story is digging. The treasure was buried – it was hidden – it wasn’t obvious! We have to some digging – we have to investigate. In fact, imagine he bumps into a friend as he’s selling all of his possessions with a grin on his face. To everyone else this field just looks like any other field, just another patch of dirt – to them he must look absolutely crazy! It’s not normal at all. But Jesus is saying, ‘knowing me, loving me, following me – it’s not normal, it’s not convenient, but it’s worth it. Because it’s where you’ll find real life.’

So the question is then, if there are so many options, and Jesus is quite open about the fact that what he’s offering is neither obvious nor convenient, why would we listen to him at all?

There are a thousand reasons, but a big one I’d want to point out is that Jesus lived what he claimed. He actually lived it – he proved what he said with his life.

So for instance, there are plenty of people who’ll tell you that they care about you, or about people like you, but actually it’s all about their own fame or profit or power. (If you insist on an example, might I politely offer Boris Johnson.) But Jesus says ‘I love you’, ‘I care about you’ and then he actually goes and dies. He lets himself be arrested and killed for our sake – to make it possible for us to be reconciled with him. He lived it.

Or as I said, there are a thousand different things saying they can give you real life, life to the full. But only Jesus has actually defeated death. The historical evidence (and this is why I decided to be a Christian in the first place myself) points inescapably to the conclusion that he actually did die, and actually did come back from the dead and people saw him and spoke to him and touched him. And if this guy has punched a hole in death and come out the other side, surely he’s someone worth listening to about where we can find real life!

So please, do some digging. I think Jesus is worth literally everything – I don’t expect you to believe that yet – but I think it’s pretty clear that he is worth a second look. Read one of the biographies of his life. They are eyewitness accounts. Read Luke. It’ll literally take you 2 or 3 hours. Read about Jesus, see what he was like, see if you like him. See if he intrigues you. Or if you prefer people to books, please talk to me or another person you know who loves Jesus – we love to be asked about this stuff!

If you want to try and be fair and investigate other beliefs at the same time – fantastic, do it! I’m just asking you, whatever else you look at, look at this. I’m asking you to do that because I’m like the guy in the story: I’ve found following Jesus and it’s amazing. It is worth everything. To be loved relentlessly, to be forgiven and restored again and again, to be entrusted with work of genuinely eternal significance – it’s so good. I’ve dropped everything for it, and I’d do it again a thousand times.

So yeah, have a dig. At worst you’ve given a few hours of your life, but at best you might find that you discover a whole new level to what life really is. If you’re in Cambridge and you fancy a chat about it, I would several hundred percent love to buy you a flipping massive fancy coffee and a cake of some kind, and chat. Because this is worth all the cakes in the shop – and if you know me you’ll realise those are very serious words. And I’m leaving Cambridge in less than a week’s time! So message me. Or just read Luke or talk to someone else because ultimately it’s not about me in the slightest, it’s about someone unimaginably better.