John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Saving Christianity: how to love your enemies without submission or retaliation

... Jesus teaches us ways to love our enemies without being weak and feeble, without losing our integrity or our dignity. Jesus shows us ways to resist evil without becoming evil.

Of course these strategies carry risks: we might still get thumped or sued. But they also give us dignity and transfer strength to us. They show us how we can love our enemies without either rolling over and doing nothing, or falling back on retaliatory violence. And maybe they contain the seeds by which, in our time, Christianity can be saved. 

We are surrounded with reasons for hope. Again and again over recent decades and in place after place around the world, people have begun to put Jesus’ teachings into action - and to great effect. 

Courageous Christian leaders in South Africa put bodies and livelihoods on the line to resist and overcome an apartheid system which many churches had supported. Others in Nigeria supported Ken Saro-Wiwa in his non-violent struggle against Shell Oil’s brutal exploitation of the natural resources of Ogoniland. 

Martin Luther King once said, 

'I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.... But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.'

Fifty years ago in the United States, leaders of the civil rights movement, inspired by their Christian faith, dared to challenge the dominant view of a segregationist God who upheld white privilege. They faced not only the opposition of white religious and political institutions, but also the misgivings of many African Americans who feared they were pushing too hard and too fast. But now virtually all Christians agree, at least in theory, that Dr King’s dream was God’s dream, and that God was imaged more truly by the marchers being beaten on the Edmund Petrus Bridge in Selma than by those swinging the clubs in the name of tradition, law and order. 

In word and deed, with their words and with their feet, courageous demonstrators have literally embodied for us the way of a God who resists evil, without violence, but with imagination, and love.

- there's more to turning the other cheek than you might think. Saving Christianity: how to love your enemies without submission or retaliation, my talk today. With thanks to Walter Wink and Brian D. McLaren.

How the privileged talk about the unprivileged - and how the unprivileged speak of themselves

How the privileged talk about the unprivileged - and how the unprivileged speak of themselves. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector - my talk today. With a TED talk by Jessica Jackley.

 

On our relationship with Scripture

... The judge - what was his relationship with scripture? Well, he would have been steeped in a knowledge of scripture as it was the foundation-stone of the law which he arbitrated, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy - the founding legal and ethical religious texts of Judaism - the scriptures on which the law was based. And yet this judge is described by Luke as a man 'who neither feared God nor had respect for people', and that must make us wonder whether he was taking any sort of notice of the scriptures at all. 

Even a cursory glance at the Five Books of Moses should persuade any reader that the scriptures demand of everyone a fear of God and a respect for people. But the judge had neither, as his behaviour towards the widow shows. 

The widow - what was her relationship with scripture? It would appear that this woman, whose social position was among the poorest and most vulnerable in society, also knew her Torah, understood and believed what it said about protecting the likes of her from ruin. Time and time again the Books of the Law speak of protecting the widows and orphans in their need. She must have understood and believed this so much that she felt justified in persisting in asking the judge for justice against her opponent. 

...

Jesus didn't himself say anything about how we should 'read' this parable which he told. Luke wraps it up for us as a parable about persisting in prayer, but that makes God out to be like the unjust judge, which poses problems for us. 

Perhaps we should take Jesus's parable as a story which instructs us about our relationship with the scriptures. Are they merely collections of words which we know very well but choose to leave behind at the church porch? Or are they passages which carry power into our everyday lives because believing them gives us confidence in our faith? ...

- from my talk today, On our relationship with scripture. Discussing Luke 18.1-8.

The one who came back

When he realised that all he needed he had been given - Jesus had made him clean - the Samaritan experienced an inrush of the greatest power there is. The power of faith. His faith made him whole.  We don’t hear the rest of his story, but we know that from here on in this is a man empowered, enlivened, enriched, by his faith in Jesus - and surely that would trigger new possibilities, new opportunities, for him. Nothing else has the power to make you whole. Nothing that money can buy or laws provide, nothing that status can offer. Only faith. 

- The one who came back, my talk today.