Skip to content

1

My final entry for Radio 2's Pause for Thought competition:

Triumph Through Adversity

AUDIO

Three Australians in a pub compare their scar stories. One points to purple flesh on his calf: “Box jellyfish” he complains. The second says “You big girl’s blouse” – shows his left hand missing: “Shark Attack!” he says.  The third simply takes off his shirt revealing a massive scar from his throat straight down to his belly button. The other two say “Jeepers, what happened?” He replies “Post-mortem.”

We love a scar story.  Do you have one?  It’s a tale of triumph through adversity.

Think of the Paralympian on the podium winning gold. And you know that this gold has come through a furnace: a life-time of struggle, a car accident, a war wound, but through the furnace: Gold. We love triumph through adversity.

Recently Derren Brown was asked why his magic shows are so different.  He said “Magic tends to be about people clicking their fingers... and it happens.  Which is a God-like whim... What’s more interesting dramatically – he says – is a Hero-story... somebody who’s struggling with something and then goes through a journey but at some cost to himself.”

Derren Brown’s absolutely right.  We’re just not interested in the God-like figure – all triumph and no adversity.  We all respond to the Hero’s journey – struggle through adversity.

But what if the God story IS the Hero story?

At the end of John’s Gospel, Doubting Thomas is confronted by the Hero of the Bible.  The Risen Jesus shows him His scars – proof of a love that took Him to hell and back.  And Thomas blurts out “My Lord and My God!”  Thomas has seen God, because He has seen His scars.

We’ve all got scar stories. The Bible says even God’s got a scar story.  If that’s true then, in all our struggles, there really IS Triumph through adversity.

1

Here's my second round entry for Radio 2's Pause for Thought competition

Lost and Found

AUDIO

This week, universities up and down the country are holding Freshers’ Weeks. I’ve been at a couple this week and I’ve discovered two realities that are powerfully at play in Freshers’ Week.  The first is that EVERYONE is utterly LOST.  Folks are far from home, with a new environment, new people, new rules, new routines, and everyone’s LOST.

That’s one reality.  The other is that everyone’s trying to FIND themselves.  I still remember my mother’s parting words to me on the first day of uni.  I think she’s now embarrassed by them, I’m certainly embarassed by them, she said with tears (and I quote) “Glen, I want you to FLY... Just... fly.”  It’s the Bette Middler school of parenting I believe.  But we know what she meant!  In new environments we want to FIND the person that we want to be. We want to flourish and thrive and maybe even fly, I dunno.  We certainly want to stop feeling lost.

That’s Freshers’ Week – but it’s also life.  So often we feel lost and we want to find ourselves.  But let me tell you – If you are LOST, the last thing you need to FIND is YOURSELF.  Because you’re lost.  And finding a lost person is NOT that much help. Lost people who find themSELVES find that they are Lost.  Which is no great find.  When you’re lost, you need to find HOME.  And when you’re HOME then you can just BE yourself.

Jesus was always telling stories about how HE had come to find the lost.  He’s like a searching shepherd finding lost sheep.  He’s like a searching woman, finding a lost heirloom.  He’s like a searching father, finding a lost son.  Read more in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 15.  Jesus comes from HOME – that ultimate Family Home of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and He’s come to FIND the lost.

If you’re lost, you don’t need to find yourSELF.  You need to find home.  The good news Christians proclaim is that someone from Home has come to find you.

Recently I entered a Radio 2 competition to present Pause for Thought.  Unfortunately I didn't win, but what a consolation prize: meeting Vanessa Feltz at the final!

Here's my round one entry: We Are The Champions...

AUDIO

We Are The Champions

It’s official, the Olympomania Geiger counter has gone nuclear.  As an Australian who’s lived half his life in the UK I’ve undergone a bit of a conversion experience, I’ve been caught up in Team GB hysteria.  For the last fortnight I’ve been, in the words of Dylan Moran, ‘roaring advice at the best athletes in the world.’ And when you catch yourself screaming at the planet’s greatest sportsmen: “NOT LIKE THAT!” you realize you’ve been gripped by something bigger than yourself. There is a deep connection between us and the athletes – they are our champions.

Just this Friday, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, published a poem about the Olympics with the line: “We are Mo Farah lifting the 10 000m gold”.  And on one level that’s just ridiculous.  I’m not Mo Farah, I’m part-man, part-sofa. Brushing my teeth is about as aerobic as I like to get.  But there’s something deeper going on.  Our champions belong to us and their victory is our victory though we haven’t expended a calorie of effort.

And here is the very heart of Christian faith.  You see I’m probably like you – I’m an arm-chair critic when it comes to life.  I talk a good game, but my own performance is laughable by comparison.  Step forward our Champion, Jesus.  He comes at Christmas as our representative, wearing the colours of Team Earth.  He lives our life for us, He dies our death for us, faces off against our biggest enemy – the grave – and beats it hands down.  Now His victory is our victory – though we have not expended a calorie of effort.

Put it like this:  If Usain Bolt is my competitor, I have no chance.  If he’s my Champion, I can’t lose.

If you think God just sets you standards, then of course you’re going to fall short. But Christianity says there’s a Champion.  And if He’s your Champion, you can rejoice like an Olympomanic long after the Games have gone.  Because His victory is your victory.

 

 

3

Three prominent stories in the news reveal the same human condition.

Jimmy Savile's molestation of minors was even recorded in his autobiography.  It's not even disguised, it's right there on the page.  He remembers an incident in the early '60s when he managed a dance hall in Leeds. Police asked him to keep a lookout for an attractive 16 year old girl who was missing.  He told the female PC if he found her, he would keep her for one night as his reward.  She did indeed turn up at his club that night and, as he writes, it was ‘agreed that I hand her over if she could stay at the dance, come home with me, and that I would promise to see her when they let her out’.

This is precisely what happened and he 'handed her over' to the police at 11:30 the next morning.  Jimmy adds, she ‘was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well-known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me’.

Scores more stories like these are emerging a year after Savile's death.  People knew.  People were told.  Savile even told us.  But somehow we couldn't quite allow the truth to confront us in all its stark horror.

Today is the day Jeremy Forrest appears in Eastbourne Magistrate's Court.  The 30 year old maths teacher, who's been married for a year, ran off with a 15 year old student.  They ended up in France before the authorities caught up with them. Back in May he wrote a blog post entitled "You hit me just like heroin."  After speaking of the difficulty of an unnamed moral decisions he concludes: “At the end of the day I was satisfied that if you can look at yourself in the mirror and know that, under all the front, that you are a good person, that should have faith in your own judgment.”

As the relationship with his student grew, you can imagine the secrecy and the insanity ratcheting up in equal measure.  With no-one to break in from the outside and say "This is nuts!", they end up fleeing to France.  And then what!!?  That should have been one of a thousand questions bringing them up short.  But no.  He 'looked in the mirror', was content with what he saw and acted accordingly.

The third story is about Lance Armstrong.  The US Anti-Doping Agency has released "staggeringly voluminous supporting documents" for the decision to strip Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles.  ESPN journalist, Bonnie Ford, writes "After today, anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn't want to know."

But what's fascinating is the admission by Ford that there would indeed be many who don't want to know.  She concludes her article saying:

Armstrong will always find a place to race and people who want to race with him, or at least come to watch. He is stubborn enough to be capable of existing indefinitely in a sort of parallel universe where he is still who he purported to be -- a purveyor of hope on wheels. And there will always be people who loved those three-week travelogues every July and don't want to give up on their longtime protagonist, either.

Sunflowers and lavender and Alpine switchbacks are far more appealing images than syringes and blood bags and a cult of personality channeled into coercion. Armstrong's legacy lies now not only in the eye of the beholder but in the willingness of that beholder to take off the blinders and see.

Here's the common thread... no-one wants to take off the blinders and see.  With Savile, for Forrest and for Armstrong's fans, we just don't want to know.  As the saying goes, there's none so blind as those who will not see.

But that's all of us, according to the bible.  "All men are liars" said Paul in Romans 3.  Calvin said this should be the first principle of Christian philosophy!  And Thomas Cranmer's anthropology was well summarized thus:

"What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies." (Ashley Null)

Our minds are brilliant at justifying what we already love.  We don't see because we don't want to see.  This is part and parcel of our human condition.

When people pretend to a dispassionate appraisal of "the cold hard facts" and pledge to follow them "wherever they lead", we can admire them.  But we also have permission to smile and shake our heads.  It's just not how we tick.

So is there an answer to our universal flight towards fantasy?

Well Paul and Calvin and Cranmer would say Yes.  The answer comes in the Word.

We need to be confronted with Truth from beyond.  We need a Voice that contradicts us - that judges us and frees us.  If it only judges us, we'll flee it indefinitely.  But in Jesus, we have a verdict that condemns us as sinners, but then raises us as justified.  It tells us - Yes, Savile really could be this evil, but still there's a way to confront it and deal with it.  No, Forrest cannot look in the mirror and see a good person, but still there is a way back from this madness.  No, Armstrong is not a hero but we don't have to divide between truth-deniers and Armstrong-haters.   

This is a problem that besets us all.  We are all, continually, involved in justification.  Either justification of ourselves or justification of our heroes and principles.  Christ alone can free us.  He brings truth and grace.  Truth to judge our lies.  And grace to raise us again on His footing.  The only answer to self-justification is Christ's.

3

I remember the second half of Titanic being almost watchable.  That verdict would have been completely undone if they'd gone for this astonishing Telenovela ending.

What lies ahead includes some swearing, blasphemy and the most cringe-worthy dialogue ever conceived.  Even worse than Rose's earlier line "I'll never let go, Jack. I promise."  Uttered as she let's him sink into the Atlantic.

Anyway, you've been warned...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2tYHcXNwAk]

For 49 more alternate movie endings, go here

.

3

 

 

 

 

He might well have died 40 years ago.  Certainly the authorities were worried enough that this sobering speech was drafted for Richard Nixon...

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown...

Read the whole thing here.

Thankfully, they came back with stories to tell, and photos to capture our imagination.  To me, this picture is as captivating as any they took.  It's not simply the wonders of space, but wondering at space that should make us stop and think.

RIP Neil Armstrong.

 

3

Chris Addison chats to Derren Brown on Radio 4's Chain Reaction (UK listeners can get it for another few days).

From 19:30 Derren talks about his journey towards atheism.  But then at 25:36 he's back on magic and showmanship.  What he says here is very revealing - not only about the stories we respond to, but the god he rejected:

Magic tends to be about people clicking their fingers and saying "Oh, this will happen" and then it happens.  Which is a God-like whim and is therefore not dramatically very interesting.  What's more interesting dramatically is a Hero-story.  All drama that interests us is about somebody who's struggling with something and then goes through some journey but at some cost to himself, and so on.  And that's what we need more of in magic, people treating it as a Hero's journey rather than as a whimsical God-like figure who could make anything happen.

Whimsical, struggle-less, finger-clicking Gods do not win our love.  Struggling, suffering, journeying Heroes do.  Very true.

But what if the true God is the Suffering Hero?

And on that subject, isn't The Dark Knight Rises the most Christian film you've ever seen??  Astonishing!

1

Here is Bert le Clos, the proud father of South African swimmer Chad le Clos (best version here).  After Chad’s gold, Bert was interviewed and could not contain himself:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYa0r43Xn-8]

“Unbelievable!  Unbelievable!  Unbelievable!  Look at him, he's beautiful, I love you!”

Sounds just like the Father’s love for Jesus: “Behold my Servant whom I uphold, my Chosen One in whom is all my delight.” (Isaiah 42:1).

Eternity has been filled with the love of Father for Son.  That is the life of God, the life of heaven.  But then, something truly astonishing: heaven comes to earth in the Person of Jesus and as He prays in John 17 about His people, He says:

"Let the world know that you... have loved them even as you have loved me.  24 Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world... the love you have for me [will] be in themand... I myself [will] be in them.”  (John 17:23-26)

Believers in Jesus come in on this family affair – included in the glorious and overflowing love of the Father for His Son.  No wonder Bert le Clos said he felt like “he’d gone to heaven.”  He’s given us a snapshot of it – a heaven we enjoy now through Jesus.

Audio for a 6 minute talk given at a BBQ today

.

For the next two weeks billions of people will roar advice to the world’s greatest athletes.

Helpful tips like, “Run faster, swim harder, he’s gaining on you, and Not like that!!”

Why do we do it? Because we are involved – they are our Champions, they are competing for us.

For me the biggest moment of connection was the 2000 Games, 4 x 100m swimming relay.

The American, Gary Hall Jr said the USA would  “smash Australia like guitars.”  But our champions did it for us. And after smashing the world record, they played air guitars to the Americans!  The roof nearly came off!

We feel an immense connection to our champions - they do it for us and we celebrate.

That’s how Christians feel about Jesus.  John 1:14

We don’t do life right.  We're like the couch potato, full of bluster but no follow-through.

But lives the life we should live. As our Champion.  Then dies death we should die

Cross = Jesus representing us.  Taking on our much and enduring what it deserves

He rose up to defeat our biggest enemy – Death.  And He did it as Champion.

Enjoy the Olympics.  Enjoy the victories of others.  Don’t miss the ultimate Champion.  You don’t want to represent yourself before God. Allow Jesus and share in His victory.

6

Click for source

Have you ever heard this kind of claim from an atheist:

Unlike you theists, I am open to change.  All you need to do is show me the evidence and I'll confess on the spot that I was wrong.  If you can prove God I will switch sides.  You theists on the other hand obstinately cling on to the God hypothesis no matter what the evidence.  You call this irrationality "faith."

How to respond?

Do we say "No I'm very open to change, I just think the evidence is better on our side"?

That might sound tempting.  After all it has the air of intellectual credibility about it (if, ironically, you don't think about it too long).  And it's the least we could do seeing as the atheist has been so even-handed with "the evidence."  Besides, what hope is there for genuine dialogue if we're not open to change?

Well let's slow down a second.  What kind of openness is being claimed by the atheist?

Doesn't their claim amount to:

I, the neutral observer, will accept  the God hypothesis if and only if naturalistic evidence meets my criteria.  And of course such acceptance will be eternally tentative, since opposing evidence may arise to dis-prove the God hypothesis.

Let me ask some questions about those bolded phrases...

Are you really a neutral observer?  Is the scientific community, religious community or indeed the human race collectively a neutral observer?  How could you ever know?  What tests could you perform to figure out whether, when it comes to God, humanity suppresses the truth?

If you are assessing 'the God hypothesis', are your investigations being carried out in a way proper to the object of your study.  I.e. is God really a 'hypothesis' to be tested?  And if you think he is, the question must be asked, Which god are you talking about?  Because it doesn't sound like the God of the Bible.  If, on the other hand, God is a Self-Revealing Speaker, doesn't "scientific investigation" look very different?  i.e. Wouldn't a proper correspondence to this Object of enquiry entail listening to His Word?

Who gets to decide what is "evidence"?  Does the Bible count?  Does it count on its own terms, or only when filtered through other tests?  What about encountering Christ spiritually through Scripture or worship?  Wouldn't that be quite a  "knock-down" proof - for some even literally!  Is this evidence allowed at the bar?

Even if you are a neutral observer, even if God is a hypothesis that could be tested and even if the evidence you demand is the right kind of evidence - will you really 'become a believer' on the basis of this evidence?  Surely, to be consistent with your methods, you will merely line up with the God-hypothesis-camp until a better hypothesis comes along?  This is nothing like what Christians mean by "faith in God."

Therefore in what sense are you open to change?  Admittedly, you are open to reshaping certain of your views - and that is a very laudable thing. Few ever do it, so such openness is indeed commendable.  But the openness of which you speak is set within a tightly de-limited, pre-established epistemological system (i.e. system of gaining knowledge).

And if that's your definition of "open" then the Christian is at least as open.  If you show me convincing evidence about a pre-millennial return of Christ (to choose an intra-mural Christian dispute of secondary importance) then I hope I'm open enough to change.  I hope I am.  Obviously, people are biased, obstinate, self-justifying fools by nature (the Bible told us that long before science did), so it might be an uphill battle, but allow me to declare my willingness to change.

So there you are.  I'm open.

Of course, at this stage, the atheist says: "That's not openness to change!  That's just redecorating the exact same house."  To which I say, "Pretty much!  But then, a tentative assent to the God-hypothesis is also just re-decoration.  The foundations and structure of your beliefs would remain exactly the same."

You might rate yourself as a De-Facto Theist on Richard Dawkins' scale, but it's your commitments to a naturalistic method of knowledge that are really God for you.

To inflexibly hold pre-commitments about yourself, your object of enquiry, your method of enquiry and your criteria of judgement is to be "open" in only a very limited sense.   But here's the thing... pre-commitments about Me and God and the World and how I know things are absolutely inescapable!  I can't even begin to think without at least a shadow of an opinion on these things.

Which means none of us are very open.  There is no neutral space between the Christian position and the naturalistic position.  There is only conversion - i.e. a radical re-ordering of my view of self and God and the world.

Does this shut down all conversation?  Absolutely not!  This is the beginning of genuine conversation.  Now that we know where we all stand (and both Christians and atheists are regularly deluded about this), real interaction can happen.  How?  I say "Come on over to my house.  Let me show you around.  For a time, come in on my foundations, my vision of God and self and how to know things.  Experience the world from within these commitments.  See if life doesn't make more sense.  See if you don't confess that Jesus really is the deepest Truth"  And, by the same token, you can say to me "Come over to my house.  Allow me to show you the Magic of Reality as I see it.  Experience the world from within these commitments."

There's great hope for fruitful engagement (though this is a real statement of faith, I acknowledge!).  I believe that there is plenty to be said on the other side of an acknowledgement of our radical differences.  But let's be honest enough to state our differences.  It's not a case of simply assessing mutually agreed-upon evidence with the obvious tools for the job.  It's about show-casing different visions of reality.

This doesn't mean we cast stones at each other's "houses" or dig into our entrenched positions.  Instead it's a call to hospitality.  Let's love our neighbours.

Twitter widget by Rimon Habib - BuddyPress Expert Developer