Wrestles with God

Someone said yesterday that they’d been speaking to an African Christian who pointed out that when we say things like “we’re so lucky” and “God has given us so much” that is an incredibly materialistic view of the world.

And this morning that set me thinking about how much God has given us spiritually: how nourished we are. And I thought: not a lot. I’m not necessarily trying to blame God here, although I’m not necessarily trying to absolve him completely either.

What is it like to starve? It’s a distasteful analogy I know, but think about it for a minute: how serious is our situation? Do we believe that we can’t live on bread alone? Someone who is starving is hardly able to move – they are paralysed, unbearably tired, dry and aching. How do you feel when you go to church?

I feel like we’re starving. Not metaphorically, but actually. I think we’re struggling on as if just going through all of the stuff will somehow give us our life back. But it doesn’t. We find a scrap here or there, and we hang on to it – we remember what it felt like to eat and drink from our creator, but it gets used up and we’re dry again, and the shades come down.

And I prayed this morning, and I’ll do it again now, that God will change this situation. Please God, feed us and cloth us, pick us up from the dust and let us feel your touch. We are weak, and the knowledge of your son is not enough – we need to feel him with us, healing us.

Although there are many ways we block you from us – and we renounce them now – I know we can’t fix this. Only you can, and we beg you to give us just a little of you.

Where are your promises? Where is the abundant life you promised?

Today I want to say not “O God thank you for giving me so much,” but “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I beg you, take pity on me, on us.

“Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One.”

“Blessed are those in the struggle, oppression is worse than the grave. It is better to live and die for a noble cause than to live and die as a slave.”

It was these lyrics to a track by Black Samurai that first inspired me to write an article.

It is the subject and objects in the quote that interests me the most. What is the noble cause, who are those in the struggle and from what are they avoiding slavery?

It is important to me to note that the struggle is not just against anything but against something which is, or perceived to be, oppressive. It is not struggle for struggle’s sake, more a reaction to an unwelcome intrusion into their life or way of life. Many questions arise from this. Are they struggling against a majority and fighting for their right to exist as they have done or how they want to? Perhaps they are the majority and feel threatened by the new trends and ideas arising around them similar to countless situations through history? The other possibility is the struggle with the unseen or unknown. Rumour, disinformation and uneducated assumptions creating an imaginary enemy…

I then realised I wanted to expand what I was writing from more than just this quote to Hip Hop as a whole. There are also many positive reinforcements of Christianity to be found in the lyrics, “…When every thing is going down, when everything starts to frown… You should do what’s right for you but remember that God’s got you too…”

While it is true that some Hip Hop, especially that quoted in the media and commonly known by the public, lyrically pictures violence, drugs and death (as well as copious amounts of money being spent in frivolous ways) it should be pointed out that the fundamental driving force behind Hip Hop is that of reflecting the life, times and culture surrounding it: surrounding the artists. The fact that music from the US has a strong foothold in the market in this country and that violence, gun crime and drugs are a way of life for far more people than is true of the UK means that it is the dominant message which comes through. I am perfectly prepared to admit that there are a lot of ‘studio gangsters’ rhyming about a life style that they have little or no experience of and, while this goes against the principles of pure Hip Hop, I have come to accept it is no different to an author writing about industrial espionage when they are, in fact, a school teacher.

Listening to a full spectrum of Hip Hop, noting its influences and especially its geography can highlight the wealth of different expression out there. I personally prefer UK Hip Hop. Not just because I feel I can relate to it more easily but also because it usually conveys a far less violent and gun-related culture. There are many positive messages to be found in Hip Hop.

Creps by Scor-Zay-Zee talks about how we are a slave to fashion, warring with each other over such trivial things as a brand. More powerful messages are delivered in this track and I have recently been moved by it on a very deep level.

Hold Strong by The 57th Dynasty has the line, “Dedicated to all those who relate to the struggle”. In this case the struggle is defined as poverty in areas of the UK. I will not quote the whole song here but I’m sure the lyrics are available on the web. I would also encourage you to listen to the track.

Infectious Organisms – 23rd Psalm follows on from my previous comment regarding positive Christian reinforcements while still talking about a struggle with multinationals.

An often-quoted example of Hip Hop’s negative messages is Eminem. A national hit with a wide spectrum of ages almost over night, I’m sure he is a name you have heard of. I imagine that you are now thinking about a pretty sounding song you once heard on the radio or horrendous lyrics involving rape, drugs and murder. Well, some of his lyrics are exactly that, but in the words of his track ‘When The Music Stops’, “…this is crazy, the way we act, when we confuse Hip Hop with real life when the music stops…”. What really riles me is that the same parents that denounce him as purely providing negative influence to their children are the same ones who BOUGHT his albums for them, having never listened to it or the messages he really passes on: probably after listening to a radio edit of ‘Stan’… An album, like anything else, needs to be listened to in its entirety so as not to be taken out of context. While it should be commended that artists such as Eminem and Dr. Dre release ‘clean’ versions of their albums because they recognise the mainstream appeal of their songs, the tracks often loose their meaning through doing this.

A track by Black Samurai called ‘Don’t Kill Jah Baby’ sees oppression as “…Negative educated roots reinforcing systems, oppressive systems, can we be the victims tricked in a state of mind ‘cause the system keeps insisting, inflicting pain upon the brain. Everyday I hear the same lame excuse, who’s to blame? It’s a shame we a turning POW! white like cocaine, getting fucked up, sucked up and slain…”. It talks about continued oppression through history and rising up to crush this oppression. Another track by Black Samurai called Blackapela tackles abortion and the historically perceived supremacy by whites.

So what am I trying to say and what have I concluded from this? I guess I’m trying to offer an alternate view of Hip Hop and I have come to believe everyone is in a struggle of their own and the important thing is that you fight your corner and not sit idly by. I think I have also reinforced my belief in Hip Hop as an education: teaching the views and feelings of people all over the world.

Darkly

I’ve been worrying about this a bit lately, and recently I’ve read several bits of the Bible that make me worry more: why is God so interested in us believing in him?

The usual way we are told you become a Christian is by believing, turning away from everything we do wrong, and giving our lives to God (with Baptism fitting in somewhere in that process).

Fine, but why is believing as important as the others? Surely we don’t have any control over what we believe?

Also, isn’t it true that what’s important about becoming a Christian is that we have a relationship with God, which we are able to do because we have accepted the forgivness he is able to offer us because of the sacrifice that Jesus made.

Now, a good old fashioned literalist evangelical would be able to tell us that it’s logically impossible to have a relationship with a god or ask him for forgiveness if we don’t believe in him, but I would say that experience often suggests this isn’t true – that people with varying degrees of belief in God actually form a relationship with him before they come into a full state of believing in him.

All of this wouldn’t be too disturbing if belief were just one of the elements needed to reconcile us with God. But in fact it’s more than this – both Jesus (I can’t find the reference now – grr) and Paul (Romans 4) appear to refer to the whole process of conversion in a shorthand way by simply calling it “faith” or “belief”. The implication is that belief is the most important part of the conversion process.

[Perhaps a counterbalance to these quotes is in Matthew 19 where Jesus tells the rich young man to sell all he has and follow him, rather than believe in him. This implies the relationship stuff I’m keen on.]

Of course, as James (and very often Jesus – see all of Matthew) points out, true faith will lead to putting this stuff into practice. But here again the faith comes first, before being proved by your actions.

This all leads me to ask: what’s so great about believing that God saves you because you do it?

And that of course leads me to realise the great mistake I’m making. I want God to be rewarding me (by saving me) for some great work I have done – accepting him into my life and turning away from all I do wrong. But that’s not what it’s like, is it – I don’t get it because I deserve it.

So do I have a point at all? It still makes me very uneasy.

One encouraging thing though: on this issue reading the Bible has genuinely changed my mind: I thought I was pretty sure that the really important thing was asking God’s forgiveness and turning to a life following him (and believing was basically a means to that end), but I am now definitely aware that I’ve got some flaws in my worldview there.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

I thought you might be interested in reading the following article:

Turn the other cheek, George.

It is also well worth trawling through all the responses – among the “Religion is stupid!”-like comments there are some really good embellishments and counter-arguments from both Christians and others.

Or to put it another way, why do we apply such double standards to Paul’s letters.

I have been recently reading through Paul’s letters [and suffering my traditional irritation as I think he is self-righteous and self-obsessed.]

I was unsurprisingly (yet again!) annoyed by his various diatribes on women. I think the gist of them are offensive to men and women of today’s society.

To take a case in point; see 1 Timothy 2:
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing–if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

My point however is not that Paul should just get over himself but rather that his various views on women do not seem to hold sway in today’s society and most interestingly in today’s Christian society.

Now I know the arguments why…Paul was a product of the time, you need to take the comments in context..bla,bla.

But this is where the double standards seem to come in. Many of Paul’s comments about women are followed by various qualifications of his right to make statements.

However women are not the only topic Paul makes pronouncements on to take an obvious example is his views on homosexuality. How come a large majority of Christians support Paul’s comments on some topics for example homosexuality but ignore the comments on women? Why are the other comments not contextualised to the point where they can also be side-stepped?

What is the rationale for taking such selective views of Paul’s letters?

I love horror movies. They are far and away my favourite film genre.

Just saying that has got me some very bad looks from Christians before now, but allow me to explain why …

There are lots of reasons to like horror movies: they tend to be very ironic and self-aware, which is always good, a lot of effort is put into the visual aspects of the film – something I personally like, they are aware of their own history and make lots of backward references, they produce a rush of adrenaline, they allow us to explore feelings about death and fear we might otherwise have to confront for the first time in real life.

(There are doubtless many more reasons, but let me stop there.)

Now, I could go into a discussion about whether films can corrupt us etc., and there a probably quite a few people reading this who have decided for example that they don’t want to watch 18-rated films, etc. However, I want to put that debate aside for another day. I don’t know whether it’s right to watch “evil”-seeming films or not. What I’m interested in is why I _want_ to watch them.

The reason (or maybe just a part of the reason) only struck me quite recently. I think it’s because they represent a world that I can recognise: one in which good and evil exist (in fact they are often explicitly set within a Christian worldview) but in which God is absent or only vaguely involved.

Let’s take some examples:

The Exorcist, probably my all-time favourite horror movie, and a serious attempt to scare containing little or no irony, is about two priests who attempt to exorcise a demon from a 12-year-old girl. The film is controversial because the actions of the little girl while acting possessed are extremely disturbing. More importantly for this discussion, the universe in which it is set is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: Christianity is true, but God is extremely inaccessible while the evil force of a demon is readily accessible and tangible. At the end the demon is not defeated but persuaded to move from the girl into one of the priests, killing him. Whether this condemned him to hell is unclear, but it is not a happy ending.

Another of my favourites, The Omen trilogy is again set in an explicitly Christian world. The film makers have tried faithfully to represent the words of the book of Revelation as they interpret them, in particular the parts about the antichrist. Several Christians throughout the series attempt to kill the antichrist, unsuccessfully, and finally at the end an impersonal bright light – God – appears and effortlessly kills the antichrist. This begs the question: why did God not intervene earlier?

But doesn’t our whole life beg that question?

Of course many horror films are not set within an explicit Christian context, and here the analogy is weaker, but they still represent a world in which evil is obvious and tangible while good is squeezed out of human hearts, possibly with grudging support from the creator. I think this is what attracts me to them.

I am a Christian. I do believe in God, and at the moment I don’t often worry about whether or not that is true (so I’m lucky given what I know some here are experiencing). I do believe that God is all-powerful, and that we are on the winning side. But, like Job, I just think that it doesn’t often feel that way. God seems distant.

I try to have a relationship with him, and I do love him in some way, but he just seems distant.

In a way it’s not a surprise – I can’t hug him or hear his voice – how could I expect to feel close to him? But we do expect to feel close to him, and he allows some of us to have that feeling at certain points in our lives. I’m sure I’ve had it, but at the moment I just try and pray, try and read the Bible and wait for him. (Isn’t there a Psalm about “I will wait for him”? Could someone look it up and post it?)

So horror films serve as a kind of therapy for me I think. They express my pent-up anger that God doesn’t intervene by portraying him how I feel he is in my angriest moments: uncaring and, fundamentally, distant.

If only life were so simple, I could just hate him and be done with it, but I know that he loves me and hates to see me feel like this, and that makes life very complicated.

Of course none of this really gives me an excuse for liking Buffy: I just think it’s cool.

I wrote this for the purpose of a daily reflection, a thought for the day. I am no English scholar but I would like to know others insights or reflections which they have had and so I offer one of mine.

You wake to the sound of your stereo as it forcefully throws out pressure waves which bounce of solid objects giving rise to the acoustics in your room. You listen to the music before opening your eyes as your mind slowly comes out of its sleepy slumber and begins to go through those first thoughts of the day unaware of how your inner ear translates the vibrations caused by three small bones in your middle ear into electrical impulses sent to the cerebrum of your brain.

You slowly get out of bed oblivious to your mind controlling your nervous system responding and reacting to every move you make. You walk across your room barely even comprehending how the mass of the earth is compelled to pull on your mass by constant force of attraction. You reach out to your stereo in order to change from the radio to a tape which is one of your old favourites. This simple action stops the information being received from electromagnetic radiation via modulation of a carrier wave at a specific frequency, to an induced electromagnetic force corresponding to the magnetic alignment of iron oxide particles.

As you open your door you hear the hinge creaking and almost asking you to give it some lubrication, which you instantly forget about as the light from the sun hits you with the full force of its luminescence. As your reflexes instantly force you to shield your eyes you ignore the fact that those rays of incandescence were formed by a thermonuclear reaction around 100 million miles away.

You enter the kitchen in order to make yourself your morning brew and turn on the kettle unconsciously accepting the generated electricity most probably by way of a turbine. You pour out the boiling water without a thought to the delicate irony of superheated steam producing a rotation in order to produce electricity so that you can create steam once again.

You stand for a while staring out of a fusion of lime, soda and silica window and watch a bird fly effortlessly outside. While you stare at its brilliance of control and wonder how can something so stupid know how to manipulate its body so gracefully using such complicated aerodynamics, you begin to wonder, how much do I really understand of this world ?

This is more of a ‘have you ever felt like this’ article rather than a BIG QUESTION I am struggling with though I do feel that it could start off some interesting stuff about how God affects our lives/influences us in a real way…

So, enough ‘prep’ and here is the real thing.

Has anyone ever found that God has sneakily changed your mind about stuff when you didn’t even want to change your mind?

I have

Especially about those really fun things that _good christians_ aren’t meant to do – like getting drunk, snogging random (inappropriate?) people, smoking… need I go on?

I have

Let me give you an example: at age 17 – very definitely a committed christian – I regularly went out and got really drunk with all my friends (one other of whom was a christian). The way I saw it was – I was ‘being real’ with them and being’one of them’ but really, I was just doing what I wanted to do and having lots of fun. (This did not stop me having a relationship with God where I was striving to do what He wanted etc) This may have led to lots of unfortunate things (or not) but this is not my point….

My point is that, at some point around 18/19ish, God managed to convince me that maybe this might be something I should at least look at. And the weird thing was – I didn’t resent him for making me think like this – I actually agreed.

What I’m getting at is – God somehow changed the way that I thought about the whole thing so convincingly that I actually believed him… I had always thought that if ‘God stopped me having fun’ I would put up with it, but not necessarily agree.

(Please note at this point that some of this particular change was also due to growing up a bit but let’s leave that as another aside…)

So – what do you think? Not about getting drunk etc but about how God influences us and how he moulds us to be more like him.

How do we know what is HIM and what is socialisation/growing up/suppressing ourselves/christian culture?????

A friend of mine has convinced me that people who do maths at university study truly wacky things. For instance, he claims that he once took an 18 lecture course to show that you can’t comb the hair down on a hairy sphere. Eh?

Imagine a circle with hair growing out of it. You can comb it down – just start with your comb at one point, and comb it down all the way round.

But when it comes to a hairy sphere – ah, now you’re in trouble. You can start combing the hair down, but you’ll always find that somewhere or other you’ll create partings or mohicans. It just won’t lie flat.

I feel something like the same way about my beliefs about God. I have various beliefs that I think are true – I’ve got these from a mixture of reading the Bible, listening to other Christians, thinking for myself (heaven forbid!)… and I feel as though I should be able to arrange them all neatly together, without any scrunches.

So far, it never quite works.

It *nearly* works – they do fit together and tie in together quite a lot. For instance, I remember feeling reallly satisfied when I realised I had an answer for the question ‘Why do we divide the Bible into two main sections, not three or fifteen?’ It’s a trivial example, but it’s pleasant when you realise that your beliefs fit together to make sense of unfamiliar questions.

But it doesn’t *totally* work. Fort instance, I can’t fully reconcile these things, all of which I believe: (a) God knows everything about the future; (b) God is totally capable of acting to bring about any outcome he wants; (c) we have real choices. How can all three be right? I’m not entirely sure. I’m not willing to abandon any of them, because they all make sense and seem important on their own; but together they seem to make a mohican.

And my point is?

Well it certainly isn’t ‘Give up’. I think we can make progress in making sense of what we believe – we can talk to each other, wrestle with the issues, read books, think hard, decide to be ready to change our minds, abandon some beliefs, correct others, be prepared to let the Bible disagree with us and change us – maybe some of the knots in our hair can be disentangled. The branch of theology that tries to lay out a set of beliefs in a well-ordered way, Systematic Theology, is really valuable, and none of us has investigated it enough, I’m sure. Life is too short.

But my main point is that, if you feel as though your beliefs are a bit provisional, messy, and contradictory, then you’re in good company. We all have to put up with this, while trying to seek out more understanding as time goes on. We aren’t God, and it would be a huge surprise if we could describe him and the world fully and without distortion.

I seem to remember that there was a happy sequel to the sad “can’t comb the hairy sphere down” story. Although I can’t imagine it at all, I seem to recall that if you have the 4-dimensional equivalent of a hairy sphere, you *can* comb it down. I wonder if our attempts at having no tensions in describing God are doomed to failure for now, because our descriptions are always going to be on too low a plane…?

This is a story that has come to mean a great deal to me. I used to think that what I lacked in my life was a direct challenge from God; that if like some first century martyr I was thrown into a place where the choices were simple, black and white and irrevocable, I would be OK. It was the endless uncertainty and struggling to have the faintest idea what God intended me for that was the problem.

However, increasingly I’ve been drawn to this story. Here’s a young man who gets exactly that. Jesus himself offers him a direct black and white choice – sell all you have and follow me, or don’t. And he doesn’t.

I have found myself looking increasingly hard at how I would have done in that situation. Not that Im a millionaire or anything; but I have a stable job, I can afford to live in a nice flat, by myself, in a nice area; I can go out a lot, to nice places, with my nice friends; as the prevalence of that hideous word ‘nice’ suggests, I’m very comfortable. And I like it; or to be more accurate, I strongly dislike the idea of losing it. Actually, to be more brutally honest, I am deeply afraid of losing it. Not in the sense of lying awake at night worrying about being made redundant – in some ways redundancy would be a relief, forcing a change of direction. But whenever I contemplate doing the bunjee jump; voluntarily throwing myself over the edge, abandoning my security and comfort; well, I get a serious case of cold feet.

I can’t help but wonder whether that was the case for the rich young man too. Was it really greed – or fear? There’s something very moving about the story; the young man knows there is something that he lacks, that what he has, what he is doing isn’t enough. He knows who can tell him what he should do, too. He even has the courage to ask. And Jesus looks on him, and loves him (God bless Mark for including that bit), and tells him what he needs to do. And he goes away sadly; that’s always struck me as tremendously significant. He isn’t angry or resentful; he isn’t challenging Jesus’ diagnosis. The sadness suggests he accepts it. Jesus has asked for something he lacks the courage to give.

That’s when I see myself; kneeling in Church, asking for God to show me how I can serve him, resolving to actually mean it when I say I dedicate my life to him. And I wonder whether I don’t hear anything because I have already shut my ears to protect myself from hearing anything I don’t want to hear; and I go away sadly, because I am very comfortable, and very uncourageous. Would it really make any difference if I had Jesus physically standing there and asking the question?

It’s not necessarily about money, either. I’m not the best person in the world at interacting with other human beings, and whenever I get the slightest sense that it might be my duty to get involved I go cold to my very heart with fear. I wonder if one of those men on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho passed by on the other side not from pride or contempt or disdain, but because he was afraid; afraid to go outside his own comfortable world and deal with the pain and hurt outside it, interacting with strangers, people whose reactions and behaviour he could not count on. God help me, I’ve done that. And I wonder if there will be a third category on the last day, the cattle, who will cry out “Lord, we saw you hungry and we knew you, and we did not feed you; we saw you thirsty and we knew you, and we did not give you a drink; we saw you homeless and naked and we knew you, and we did not take you in or clothe you; we saw you sick and in prison and we knew you and we did not visit you. For we were comfortable, and afraid.”

That’s why I choose to live in a nice area; it shelters me off from dealing with people in situations which will be uncomfortable. That’s why my friendship circle remains the same group of people from school and university; people I am comfortable with, people like me with similar thoughts and prejudices and ways of behaving. It’s why I seek out a church filled with people like me, and even there I try to hide away, at the back, not to interact. It’s so that as far as possible I can insulate myself from ever being uncomfortable.

If it’s not too heretical, a paraphrase:

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it is for the comfortable to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a comfortable man to enter the kingdom of God’

The disciples were even more amazed and said to each other, ‘Who then can be saved?’

Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’

A bit of hope there, perhaps. Perhaps that rich young man came back, one day, and managed it. I hope so.