Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 11

The God Thing

Where does one start with God? I’m not sure that arguing about God’s existence is a helpful use of energy. We may be influenced one way or another – especially during childhood and youth – by familial or other external factors, but ultimately the choice is ours: we either build our lives around faith or we don’t.

I choose to believe.

If one makes that choice, however, a critical question is what kind of God we’re talking about. In the name of Christianity alone, a lot of different models are peddled out there, and most I wouldn’t spend the time of day with. Today’s televangelists, prosperity preachers and religious hucksters give God a bad press. Whether exploiting people’s fears of divine wrath or commodifying God into a cross between a therapist and a stockbroker, their poor theology and ill-disguised greed are persuasive arguments for atheism. But the genuine article is worth another look.

I chose faith because of the beauty of the God I grew up with.

I suppose my first sense of the numinous was linked with churchgoing in the early 1940s. At Sunday School before church I got filled in on most of the better-known Bible stories but it was when sitting in the pews with the grown-ups that I felt it. They seemed to be engaging with an invisible presence among and around them. My childish curiosity needed to locate this presence and I decided that ‘he’ must reside behind the ornate organ pipes in the old Wesley Methodist Church in central Pretoria. They made loud noises and looked impressive enough to conceal whoever everyone called ‘God’. Much of the service was spent staring at the pipes, hoping for an appearance.

More meaningful, however, was the influence of our home life on my child-soul. A quiet acknowledgement of God permeated our home. It was understated in a typically English way, with little push and a minimum of outward ritual. In grace before our meals and prayers before we slept, God was honoured as our authority, provider and guide. It was comforting to feel that there was this ‘Somebody’ above and beyond us who watched over us. But the most powerful God-moment in my early childhood had to do with Dad. One day I blundered into his study and found him at prayer. I can still see him now, on one knee, an elbow on the old horse-hair armchair next to his desk, one hand supporting his bowed head. It stopped me dead. Dad was the ultimate strength and security in my young life, yet here he was, kneeling in submission to some authority beyond himself. He wasn’t angered by my interruption, neither did he show embarrassment. If there was any impression at all, it was that he had been in deep conversation with someone and wasn’t quite ready to come away – that I had broken in on a special friendship. It was a profound parable and the impact on me was enormous.

I began to listen much more carefully to his sermons, and was increasingly drawn to the God he spoke about with such intimacy. His sharing about God included the entire biblical saga of a desert people’s fortunes and sorrows through slavery and liberation, conquest and exile, but it was his focus on the life, teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth that captivated me most. This young Jew’s nobility of character and utter selflessness seemed to be the ultimate in human goodness, the Everest of what humanity could aspire to. More than that, it seemed that God was embodied – incarnated – in a unique way in his life, so that looking at him, one saw beyond the human and encountered the divine. Religious faith therefore, was not so much an attachment to dogma or ritual or creed as it was a friendship with Jesus. Religion was a relationship with him, and through him, with God. The heart of this relationship was discovering that one was loved, cherished, welcomed and embraced by a God whose essence was Love itself. Dad’s preaching was the beginning of my discovering that this was true for me too. More important than my knowing about God was that I was known. God knew my name.

Therefore the Sturm und Drang of hell-fire religion had no place in my upbringing. Anyway I was a stubborn little fellow and I doubt that the terror of hell would have been much of a motivator. Fear of betraying a great love was another matter. If you spend time in the company of Jesus and of people whose lives have begun to look like his, you don’t need legalistic threats of damnation to know that there are things in your life that need sorting. In the presence of real goodness my character blemishes showed up unbidden and my sense of alienation, of somehow falling short of the best I could be, was real. The most beaten up, abused word in the Bible is ‘sin’, which is sad, because the condition it refers to is real and should not be trivialised by religious legalists. Ever since humanity’s first stirrings of God-consciousness, we have had one or other form of soul-police obsessed with listing and codifying our ‘sins’, presumably to be able to tick all the boxes to their God’s satisfaction, but also to expose and exploit the guilt of others. This obsession with ‘sins’ is possibly the primary sin of religion itself. It was widespread in the time of Jesus and his refusal to buy into it was one of the things that got him into fatal trouble.

During my teenage days I had a brush with legalistic, fundamentalist Christianity. When we moved to Cape Town I sometimes attended a fellowship meeting in Rondebosch where a mix of peer pressure and loads of cream cakes brought some 30 or 40 of us schoolboys within preaching-range on Sunday afternoons. The recipe was simple and not much different from that used by televangelists today: first use every possible Bible text to convince us of our guilt before God, then offer Jesus as the Saviour sent by God to step in and take our punishment, thus rescuing us from eternal damnation. If we turned to Jesus and invited him into our hearts we would be ‘saved’. If not … well, we’d been warned. Woe betide us if a bus were to run over us when we left the meeting. This is not the place to engage this mechanistic dumbing down of the mystery of salvation but it is important to say that while parts of Scripture may appear to lend themselves to this narrative, there is a troubling disconnect between it and the kind of God Jesus reveals. What brutal Deity would plan that for a beloved son? What anthropomorphic God is so bound by human constructs of crime and punishment? And what puny God allows the work of salvation to be frustrated by a No 10 bus? This scenario reduces Jesus to a robotic pawn – a sacrificial offering sentenced beforehand to a violent death because of a pre-destined ‘salvation plan’.

The dissonances are deafening.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that at Calvary something was happening that changed the divine/human equation forever, but in a very different way. The point about sin is that it goes deeper than a dirty deed or a forgotten ritual. The word sin means ‘to miss the mark’, to be less than I am meant to be. If I am created supremely for relationship with God, then sin is much more than the breaking of some impersonal law; it is the breaking of a lover’s heart – God’s heart. It alienates me from the relationship that completes me as a truly human being. A whole raft of destructive actions may flow from this alienation, but the fundamental need remains the mending of the relationship.

I still remember my dad telling of the one-sentence sermon that Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa15 used to preach over and over again on street corners in his native Kobe: “God is love – love like Jesus.” It was as if no more need be said. God was, in the Apostle Paul’s words: “… in Christ, reconciling the world to Godself.”16 If this is so, then on Calvary Jesus, far from being a robotic substitute slaking an angry God’s need for retribution, was instead revealing God’s real heart to the world – a heart of vulnerable love. The Calvary event was God, present in Jesus, suffering in Jesus, forgiving in Jesus and loving to the end in Jesus. What happened in that place, at that time, is timeless: it exposes what we do to God everywhere and always; it also reveals how far God will go for us everywhere and always. If this is so, then once I truly comprehend what my – and all humankind’s – ‘missing the mark’ does to infinite love, and see God’s willingness to suffer rather than stop loving, I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude and wanting to respond. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”17

It was this kind of God who won me, a divine lover whose belief in me was infinitely more significant than my failing efforts at faith in (him), a God who would never give up on me or the world (he) so loved, a God who wooed rather than threatened, whose vulnerability was more winsome than (his) omnipotence, and who transformed me not through fear, but by the “expulsive power of a new affection.”18 And yes, this God came to me in the story of Jesus, who lived and died in exactly that way. His resurrection is a mystery I cannot fathom, but I do know that it was God saying a resounding “No!” to the power of death and an even more resounding “Yes!” to the Jesus kind of life. Nothing we humans are capable of can succeed in killing it off. It rises again and again and his Spirit continues to confront us with its ‘unutterable beauty’.19

It was the Methodist Church that nurtured me on this faith-journey. There is really no such thing as a ‘no name brand’ Christian. For better or worse, we find ourselves in communities with unique histories and traditions a little distinct from the others and emphasising slightly different dimensions of the faith. The Methodist Church has as many warts as any other, but I will always be grateful for certain of its emphases that were crucial in forming my faith priorities. It was born out of a spiritual renewal led by Reverend John Wesley and his brother Charles in the mid-eighteenth century. Loyal Church of England priests of considerable intellect and passion,20 they chafed under the dry hand of an institution in serious decline at the time. Too many clergy were lost in the shallow distractions of English classism and had lost touch with the poor masses. By contrast the Wesleys, with John as leader, were searching for a truly holy life and at Oxford University they joined a group of serious-minded seekers known as the ‘Holy Club’. Members held each other accountable for spiritual disciplines such as prayer, searching the Scriptures, regular attendance at worship and Holy Communion. However, the Holy Club differed from other such ‘pietist’ groups because of its equally rigorous practice of ‘works of mercy’. England’s poorest classes at the time lived in utter wretchedness and degradation and it was to these hurting people that Wesley and his comrades went, feeding the hungry, visiting debtors and condemned criminals in prison and aiding the sick and homeless. At Oxford their strict, methodical ways earned them the scornful nickname ‘Methodists’, and the name stuck. Methodism might have remained a fairly obscure movement had it not been for a powerful spiritual encounter which both John and Charles experienced within days of each other in May 1738. John’s famous phrase “I felt my heart strangely warmed within me” described an overwhelming sense of the grace and love of God flooding his life, accompanied by a deepened faith in Christ and a new attitude of forgiving love toward “those who had despitefully used me”.21 His experience in that London meeting house in Aldersgate Street set him free from the constraints of self-obsession and ignited a passionate concern to share this ‘awakening’ with others. His first attempts to do so in the comfortable confines of Oxford Christianity were underwhelming: he was accused of ‘enthusiasm’, something not to be tolerated by the cynical religious establishment of the day. He was marginalised by them but this rejection didn’t trouble him over much, because he was already becoming increasingly conscious of the call to focus on England’s poor.

He responded to that call with unparalleled passion. Within a year he was preaching in the open air and reaching great numbers of desperately poor people. We are able to follow the fortunes of the movement in detail because of his careful journaling. In the 53 years between the Aldersgate experience in 1738 and his death, Wesley preached an average of two or three times each day, the first being usually at 5 am. His travels on horseback through the British Isles totalled the equivalent of nine times around the world. He wrote 230 books and pamphlets and established hundreds of new ‘societies’ – groups of new Christians – and personally appointed some 10 000 ‘Class Leaders’ to watch over their growth. While remaining a renewal movement within the Church of England, the Methodists became a formidable spiritual force in the land. The break came around 1784 over the matter of ordaining preachers for the newly independent American colonies. Wesley had fine volunteers but couldn’t find a bishop willing to ordain them, so he did it himself and there was no going back. There are today some 70 million Methodists around the world.

They arrived in South Africa with a touch of civil disobedience. During the second British occupation of the Cape, some Methodist soldiers in the colonial garrison requested spiritual oversight and a Reverend Barnabas Shaw was sent from England in response. On his arrival in Cape Town in 1816 he was forbidden to preach by the British Governor but he went ahead anyway and the first Methodist or ‘Wesleyan’ chapels and churches began to be built. Large numbers of the 1820 Settlers were Methodists too, swelling the ranks of what was to ultimately become the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA). The remarkable mission work of its first 150 years made it the largest multi-racial church in Southern Africa, 80% of its members being black. Certain Wesleyan emphases were to be crucial in developing the MCSA’s role in the South African story.

First was the all-ness of God’s grace. In Wesley’s day various forms of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination were rampant, claiming that a sovereign God had pre-determined people’s station in this life and their fate in the next, and there was nothing to be done about it. Wesley fought this tenaciously, insisting that “prevenient grace” – a primal memory of God as our soul’s true home – operated in all people. All could freely respond to the offer of wholeness in Christ and none, no matter how degraded, was excluded. There were often emotional scenes as he declared this message in the fields and marketplaces of England. The poor of the land could scarcely believe that they, too, were embraced by God’s love. This powerful word ‘all’ also had significant political implications in a class-ridden English society that believed the brutish status of the poor was divinely ordained. The ruling classes sensed the threat and often paid drunken mobs to attack Wesley and break up his meetings, but he would not be deterred. In his La Democratie, the continental political writer Ostrogorski spoke of the humanising influence of the leaders of England’s Evangelical Revival: “They appeal always and everywhere from the miserable reality to the human conscience. They make one see the man in the criminal, the brother in the negro.” They had “introduced a new personage into the social and political world of aristocratic England – the fellow man.” That fellow man, Ostrogorski predicted, “never more will leave the stage.”22 Indeed, this new honouring of all men and women, valuing human dignity above position and property, would ultimately flower in both the trades union movement and the British Labour Party,23 and 200 years later Wesleyan convictions about an all-including God would have similar implications in an apartheid society shaped by Calvinist exclusionism.

A second consequence of Wesley’s relocation was the practical empowerment of the poor. The early Methodists started free schools and economic co-operatives, the first free dispensary and building societies. Wesley’s Benevolent Loan Fund was designed to “stimulate the expression of initiative and independence on the part of the underprivileged” and the Strangers’ Friend Society with branches in every major city in the country was unique in that it operated “wholly for the relief not of our society but of poor, sick, friendless strangers.” Each of the great humanising social reformers who followed: William Wilberforce, Robert Raikes, Florence Nightingale, the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Howard and Elizabeth Fry had their faith roots in the eighteenth century evangelical renewal. Thus the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire, the beginnings of popular education, the transformation of hospitals and nursing care, the ending of sweated labour in the factories and child labour in the mines, as well as prison reform – are all part of the legacy of Wesley’s prodigious compassionate efforts. With this heritage, and given the deeply degrading circumstances in which so many South Africans are still forced to live, I don’t believe any church congregation in our land can call itself Christian unless it is placing itself alongside the poor in practical, respectful, empowering ways.

Third, Wesley never consciously set out to be a social prophet, but like those we now call ‘liberation theologians’ he reflected on his theology in the light of his daily experience and what he found led him on a journey from piety, through charity, to justice. He found himself calling for social as well as personal transformation. Ever since the Holy Club days he had been committed to “works of mercy” among the poor, but now, in the process of regularly sharing their humble homes, their meagre crust, their heavy burdens and terrible degradations, he became increasingly aware of the systemic nature of economic deprivation. He scorned attempts by the rich to explain poverty away: “So wickedly false, so devilishly false, is the common objection: ‘they are poor only because they are idle’,” he declared.24 Thus, while his primary passion was preaching people into the Kingdom of God, he increasingly campaigned to bring English society into conformity with that kingdom, seeking the conversion of systems as well as individuals. He promoted campaigns for justice and protested infringements of it. He attacked slavery as “that execrable sum of all the villainies”, proclaiming liberty to be “the right of every human creature as soon as he breathes the vital air”.25 He protested the legal system and denounced war as the foulest curse he knew, “a horrid reproach to the Christian name”. The liquor traffic, political corruption, persecution of Catholics in Ireland – all received his attention. He used the press, the pulpit, the pamphlet and the private letter. He believed that if God could make individuals Christian, God could make a Christian England. One common thread ran through all of Wesley’s activism: he believed that every single person carried God’s holy image and mattered infinitely to God. Therefore any infringement of human dignity was a spiritual, not merely socio-political matter. This remains true: however complicated or fraught the social problems we wrestle with today, the fundamental Christian question we must ask in judging them and seeking solutions is simple: does this do honour or violence to the image of God in those whom it impacts? Any political policy – like apartheid – that does such violence is an affront to God. Therefore when the church engages such issues, far from “interfering in politics” it is declaring that there is no area of life beyond God’s moral authority.

Fourth, while he was convinced that no nation could be reformed without a spiritual awakening, Wesley was also persuaded that it would not happen without a radically different approach to wealth, property and poverty. At a personal level he saw money as a loan from God to be used for “first supplying thine own reasonable wants, together with those of your family; then restoring the remainder to God through the poor”.26 Wesley was seeking a “Gospel-shaped” economy rooted in compassion and equity and he was clear that those who strove to “corner” the fruits of the earth were “not only robbing God, but grinding the faces of the poor”. If we leap 250 years to today’s South Africa, who would deny that our nation stands in an uncannily similar place? Whatever we think of his belief that greater equity could come about through spiritual renewal, we cannot deny that achieving that equity for the South African nation is becoming literally the difference between its life or death.

I find that I can never read the story of my spiritual forbears without a sense of excitement. It leaves me with some idea of what being a Christian might look like. I have tried to put it into words thus …

One who grows from the discovery of being loved and accepted by God into a life of disciplined love for God and neighbour, expressed in acts of devotion and worship, compassion and justice, who is willing to be held accountable to this by one’s fellows, and has made an intentional option to stand with Jesus in solidarity with the poor and marginalised of society, against the powers that hold all such in bondage.27

I never ever had any singular ‘warmed heart’ experience, though there have been many moments of strong ‘presence’ or when some powerful spiritual truth has broken in on my consciousness. People speak of two kinds of ‘conversion’. One is as if someone comes into one’s darkened bedroom, flinging the curtains open, letting in the blinding light of day; the other is more like the slow awakening that dawn brings as it creeps gently through opened curtains into the room. Mine has been the second. I do speak in the next chapter about the day an ‘assurance’ about how I was meant to spend my life settled on my soul, but for the rest it has been a journey filled with small steps in the adventure of being a Jesus-follower.

One liberating truth for me has been that in following Jesus I am not asked to be superhuman. Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was … and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.” She goes on: “Committing myself to the task of becoming fully human is saving my life now.” She believes that there is more than one way to do this, but because she is a Christian she says, “I do it by imitating Christ.”28

I like that.

Another freeing discovery is that following Jesus is not about earning brownie points to ‘get to heaven’ – whatever that means. The whole point of his life was to remind us that this is God’s world, to stand in solidarity with this world, to offer fullness of life29 in this world, and to invite us into God’s dream for this world and all of creation. In the Sermon on the Mount30 he painted a picture of the kind of world our lover-God dreams for us, a world of love and justice, peace and joy. And in the words we call the Beatitudes31 he described the kind of truly-human beings who could make that world a reality. Such people, he said, will be the yeast in the loaf and lights on the hill.

Heaven is not our priority. It can wait.

A tougher discovery is that following Jesus always involves other people who we have no hand in choosing. If we do invite him into our lives, Jesus asks the uncomfortable question: “Can I bring my friends?” And we look at the motley crowd clustered round him and see people of different colours and cultures and habits we were taught not to like, the unwanted and unwashed … and we plead, “Do I really have to have them too?” And Jesus answers simply, “Love me, love my friends.” The prayer “Lord, I’ve tried loving my neighbour, now can I please have your next ridiculous suggestion?” comes to mind. Yet if we can’t make that leap, we miss everything because you can’t privatise Jesus. In Daniel Erlander’s Manna and Mercy32 there is a passage that simply describes what happened every day when Jesus was around. It challenges every prejudice we ever had, and bursts with glorious promise of a new world:

“Lepers, prostitutes, tax-collectors, sinners, poor people, discarded ones, blind people, debtors, outcasts, children, women, men, elderly people, sick people, Gentiles, Samaritans, Jews, demon-possessed people, outsiders, heretics, Pharisees, lawyers, and even rich people and big deals were …

Invited, included, affirmed, loved, touched, liberated, healed, cleansed, given dignity, fed, forgiven, made whole, called, reborn, given hope, received, honoured, freed …”

Now that is what church should look like: not meeting up with people who look and sound just like us, but working out how to practise the ‘ridiculous’ notion of loving people who are very different. The world is full of clubs where like-minded people gather, but church … church should be an exciting laboratory of human relations surprises. It should fly in the face of our addictive prejudices and be the place where we find clues to humankind’s most enduring dilemma – how to get on with each other. The Book of Acts is the story of how the first churches, led by the Spirit of Jesus, put up one barrier after another to try and stay safely in their religious, cultural, national and racial comfort zones, and how the Spirit knocked over their walls one by one. Simon Peter the Jewish chauvinist put it well when he cried out in amazement, “I now see how true it is that God has no favourites …”33

God is still in the business of knocking over walls and invites us to share in the task. At the place where I worship these days, we end the service by clasping each other’s hands and praying this prayer:

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that we may live from deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer with pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.

And …

May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done: to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

In God’s great grace, we say Amen – so be it.34

That prayer sends us out each week into a great unfinished adventure. It invites us realistically to live against the odds. I have never once regretted taking this path, although on myriad occasions I have had to confess failures in faithfulness. It remains the most exciting thing I can do with my life. I have also been asked what I would do if I was proved wrong – that the whole God thing was a nonsense. My slightly absurd answer would be that I think I would rather be wrong with Jesus than right with the rest of the world.