Pilgrim Soldier

We hold on to what is comfortable and familiar to us.

This was a comment that I read recently elsewhere and it suggested that this should be seen as a positive thing so that we would be unique whilst other denominations/congregations kept copying each other, with little success. I also heard something similar today!

Now I know that change is uncomfortable and that many people might actually like the idea, but I couldn’t help thinking about it in the context of Jesus’ disciples! What would have happened in the early church had held onto ‘what is comfortable and familiar’ to them?

If nothing new is ever considered, if nothing ever changes, then where will we be in 20, 30, 50 years time? If everything must stay the same then how are we ever going to reach out to a rapidly changing world?

Now I’m not naive enough to expect everything to change, but what is sacrosanct and what is up for grabs? I’m coming to the conclusion that very little of what we actually get upset about when things change is what really matters, because in fact a lot of that is cultural. It is though a way of protecting ourselves from change in other areas. But then what does that say about our reliance on God? Surely it is the never-changing God who really protects us, not the never-changing ‘Army’!

So what am I holding onto that needs to change? Probably more than I’d like to admit, but please Lord don’t let me hold onto it just because it offers me comfort. Instead I want to throw off everything that hinders for the sake of God’s Kingdom!

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while will know that I have mentioned my concern over the attitude of Western Christian’s to what is being called Christianophobia. Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that this does exist, especially in places in the world that see Christians prevented from worshipping or being truly persecuted. I’m just not sure we can count things like “Jerry Springer – The Opera” and the fact that some aren’t allowed to wear crosses outside their uniforms as real persecution.

Two things have brought this subject back into the forefront of my mind. Firstly, an article by my former colleague, Jonathan Bartley, written just after Christmas. Picking up on the fact that there was the normal avalanche of stories in the lead up to Christmas about the downgrading of the season due to over political-correctness, he suggests that this was in reality achieved years, if not decades, ago. His conclusion is that:

Christmas is offensive, and for ever will be. It legitimates the undermining of those in authority. But it is also about looking after not just those who are “deserving” of our love, but those who may appear disreputable and unworthy.

The second was a piece by Nick Tomlinson in the September issue of Zoe’s Women Alive magazine which arrived from Latvia earlier this month. Tomlinson suggests that the typical suburban lifestyle is all about comfort. This striving for comfort is really the complete opposite to what real Christianity is about. One telling comment that leapt of the page as I read it is this:

…radical love and forgiveness become invincible weapons of evangelism when the Church is under fire. But when the Church is comfortable and safe, it becomes hard for its members to understand how to apply Christ’s commandments to daily life.

He goes on to suggest that maybe rather than responding by acting as if a slight on Christianity is a terribly offensive thing and insisting our status is protected from these slights, we should see an opportunity to publicly forgive and bless our ‘enemies’. Now that’s counter-cultural!

For the whole of December I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Maggi Dawn called Beginnings and Endings. A series of Advent readings that go from 1st December right though to Epiphany on 6th January, they have lit up the wonders of Advent in a way that hasn’t happened before. On 26 December she wrote the following when writing about the way Jesus was looked after after he was born; the way he was kept as safe as possible by being swaddled and kept in the cleanest available space.

“We expect Jesus to be where it’s clean, but he is born into the mess of human life. We think of Jesus as safe and calm and serence, but he grows up to be the kind of leader who has his sleeves rolled up, ready to face reality and connect the spiritual world to the material one. We try to restrain him and keep him clean, but he breaks out of those expectations. Our idea of ‘holy’ is to protect God from anything unpleasant and unmentionable, yet Jesus’ idea of ‘holy’ is to bring the fresh air of heaven into the dirtiest and messiest corners of our world. He will not remain restrained, swaddled, safe, warm and still for very long.”

I love that thought that idea of bringng “the fresh air of heaven into the dirtiest and messiest corners of our world.” This simple, yet profound statement, strikes to the heart of who we are as Christians. You see everything about our task as human beings is geared around trying to make our lives more comfortable.

Providing increased comforts has been one of the hidden driving forces of virtually every step forward in technology. This drive towards increased comfort has been either of the very practical sort, ie transport, or instead to provide increased wealth, which provides the money for us to buy the ‘home comforts’ so many measure success by.

However, comfort poses something of a problem to us. Jesus famously warns people that sought to follow him that whilst foxes have holes, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. This makes the pathway of discipleship seem far from a comfortable lifestyle choice. Comfort does not easily go hand in hand with a gospel that seeks to reach into the dirty and messy places of the world. It doesn’t even matter whether these places are the physically dirty and messy places or those of our hearts and minds, either is an uncomfortable place to find ourselves in.

Recently, Phil Wall wrote an article on theRubicon that shows how comfort is something to be wary of because of its inherent ‘unrisky’ nature. He also made the powerful claim that,

“Taking faith filled risks within our comfort-oriented lives is a powerful antidote to spiritual impotency. … It is most often within the crucible of risk-induced challenge and hardship that God does his greatest work within us.”

Following Jesus’ lead in this is an inherently risky business. If Jesus was about reaching into the dirty and messy places of our world with the “fresh air of heaven” then surely, as his followers, we should be opening doors into these same areas so that the same fresh air reach those places too!