2022 - Reflection 01 - the one where it's important to get the right balance

Happy New Year.

 

On Sunday we were thinking about how we can be prepared to grow in 2022 – not simply to survive another year of uncertainty, but to grow and see lives transformed. If you’ve not had a chance to listen yet you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/ZOuOj1qbEWY

I find this a challenging topic to talk about because it can be hard to get the right balance. It’s right that we think about our faith in terms of a relationship with Jesus. That’s why we started with Hebrews 12:1-2 – the importance of fixing our eyes on Jesus. We’re called to follow Jesus. That’s why we use the language of walking in our Vision. It’s also right that we talk about ‘being’ and not only about ‘doing’. Afterall the gospels are littered with people who on the outside did all the right things but didn’t have the heart attitude to match.

 

And so it’s not about finding the things that you need to do in order to grow in your faith. It’s about catching a fresh glimpse of how much God loves us and what Jesus has done for us on the cross and wanting to respond to that love. But how we respond is important.

 

It’s about recognising that when it comes to people who grew in their faith – there are common things that they did which helped them on that journey. It’s about not seeing these as things that I need to do in order to become more like Jesus, but that as I become more like Jesus these are things that I am going to increasingly do.

Another way of thinking about these things is that they are a bit like scaffolding. They are not the tower that is being built but they will help you as you build. They provide a framework for what is being built.

 

It’s also important to remember that healthy human relationships don’t just happen. Even healthy marriages don’t just happen. They take work and effort. When a relationship is new, spending time together is not really an issue – you put considerable effort into being together. But after some time you might find that you have to deliberately and intentionally make sure that certain things happen. 

If you want to go out for a meal with your partner you have to plan weeks ahead, arrange childcare, put it in the diary, write it on the calendar. You will discover that there will be times when you don’t want to put the bins out but you choose to do it because of love. You recognise that you need to put boundaries in place to protect your relationship. 

 

And so it is with our relationship with Jesus – it won’t just happen. Especially when you consider that we are in a spiritual battle and we have an enemy who wants to do everything in his power to derail our attempts to spend time with Jesus. Whether that be a distracting thought the moment we sit down to pray, or pointing out that we’ve already failed in our New Year resolution to read the Bible every day and it’s only the 5^th January so what’s the point…

Or else our enemy goes the other way and we get so absorbed in the box-ticking of our Bible in a Year reading plan that all the joy and time for devotion is sucked out of the experience. We churn through the chapters with no time to speak or listen to God. We read God’s word but we don’t allow it to change us.

 

Whatever it is that you need to put in place to grow closer to Jesus can I encourage you to do it today. Start small if you need to. Be encouraged by the thought that Jesus wants to spend time with you. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son he is on the lookout for the first signs that we are making a bit of space, and a bit of time to sit with him.

Reflection 15 - the one with lots of holes

 

On Sunday we looked at the story of the magi visiting Jesus. If you’ve not watched it yet you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/SAK3JIoqss4

 

This is quite an unusual choice of passage for a Sunday before Christmas, but I wanted to look at it because of the potential link with our Daniel series.

 

The Bible is full of holes – just as every written account of anything is full of holes. You simply can’t write down everything about an event and nor would you want to. If you wrote down everything, the important things would get lost in the detail. So, the bits that were written down are important.

But the holes naturally invite us to try and fill them in. That’s what we do when we imagine ourselves into a Bible scene. It’s what film makers such as the Lumo Project do when they create films of the gospel accounts.

And there are all sorts of holes that have been filled in regarding the Christmas story. So much so that very few of us even realise that the things we think we know about Jesus’ birth are actually holes that have been filled in for us by the Victorians and nativity plays.

 

On Sunday I attempted to fill in a massive hole by suggesting that the magi came to Jerusalem because of their links to Daniel – who was himself one of the magi of Babylon. They’d heard his stories and read his prophesies that put a 490-year marker on the date when the Messiah would come. And so they were waiting and watching.

 

Of course, we don’t know that they actually came from Babylon or that they’d ever heard of Daniel. But I think it is more than likely that they did and they had.

 

I don’t think it’s possible to read the Bible without trying to fill in the holes. That’s one of the ways that stories work. It’s why people have an issue when their favourite book is turned into a film – because someone else’s version of events (even if they don’t change the plot line) is different to the pictures they’d created in their head. 

 

So what things should we watch out for when we fill in the holes?

Our faith should be built on things that are actually there in the text and not on the holes. Nothing that I said on Sunday in terms of the impact the story has on our lives or what it shows us about Jesus was built on my speculation about the magi. The truths that Matthew wants to communicate remain true whether or not the magi had heard of Daniel. Our filling in of the holes should be consistent with the rest of the Bible.

The more we understand the Bible and the cultures within which it was written the better we will be at filling in the holes. If you’ve ever visited a museum or art gallery you’ve probably seen some massive paintings of scenes from the Bible by famous artists – where the characters look more like 17^th Century Europeans than 1^st Century Jews. In European art the magi are often portrayed as elaborately dressed formidable oriental kings. And maybe they were that. But as we saw on Sunday, for Matthew’s audience, they were also a bit of a joke and certainly a surprise. At one extreme they were a bunch of crooks who try and make up interpretations to dreams hoping that they’d come true eventually – and at the other they were a group of people in league with the forces of evil and opposed to God’s kingdom.

 

There’s lots more I could say, but one final encouragement. When we read the Bible and consciously (or subconsciously) fill in the holes we should read prayerfully, inviting God to speak to us through the Holy Spirit. Ask that the Holy Spirit will guide our imaginations as we visualise what we’re reading. Thank God that the Spirit who inspired Matthew to choose this story to be a part of his gospel is the same Spirit who speaks to us as we read about the magi two thousand years later.

Reflection 14 - the one about reading difficult passages

On Sunday, Mandy rounded off our series on Daniel, covering the final three chapters all in just over 25 minutes. If you’ve not yet had chance to listen you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/olicvR_7pRI  If you prefer to listen to podcasts then don’t forget to check out the Listen Again page here: https://www.c-b-c.org.uk/Index.asp?MainID=26240 You can subscribe so that our sermons will automatically arrive on your listening device of choice on a Monday - as if by magic!

Now that we’ve come to the end of Daniel – how did you find it? Is this the first time you’ve engaged with chapters 7-12? Have you learnt anything through the talks and home group questions? Are you going to miss the Old Testament just a little bit as we head back into the New Testament for the spring and summer terms? If you’ve ever wondered why Holiday Clubs only ever look at the first half of Daniel – now you know. 
 
On Sunday, Mandy started with two New Testament verses: 
 
Romans 15:4 – “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.” 
 
And 2 Timothy 3:16 – “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,”
 
Both of these verses flag up the importance of all of the Bible – not just the nice bits, the exciting bits or the bits that we agree with. That’s one of the reasons why we follow the cycle: Old Testament, Gospels, rest of the New Testament – during the autumn, spring and summer terms respectively here at CBC. The Bible is a big book and we could quite easily have avoided preaching on Daniel 7-12 altogether. 
 
Part of our vision here at CBC is about discipleship – about each us growing as disciples of Jesus, becoming more like him and seeing our lives transformed. Hopefully a part of that process means that we are less intimidated by passages of the Bible such as Daniel 7-12.
 
So, how do you react when you come across passages like these – whether here in Daniel, or in Revelation or maybe something from Ezekiel?

One of the problems we have is that modern life does not really equip us for reading the Bible properly. If you’re anything like me, life is lived far too fast and we’ve been trained, since school, to read as quickly as possible to extract the knowledge that we need in order to answer the question that has been set – in the minimum amount of time. And we fall into this trap with our Bible reading. We scan the verses looking for the nugget of truth that God wants us to know for today – and we may even use Bible notes because they’ll give us the answer without us having to think about it – and we can be done and dusted within 10 minutes. Tick the box. Move on. Repeat tomorrow.
 
Please don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Bible reading notes. They are incredibly helpful, and a resource that I often recommend people use. And of course, when used properly, 10 minutes is never enough.

Preaching, or offering to lead a Bible study at Home Group, is a great way to get to understand the Bible better. Something about the thought of having to talk about a passage or answer questions on it tends to focus the mind. And the process involves reading the passage through lots of times, writing down lots of questions as you read, praying for God’s guidance and wisdom, finding links to other parts of the Bible and writing down a few thoughts. Then, if you’ve got a study Bible or similar, you might want to read what other people have said. You never know – you might actually find the answers to some of the questions you wrote down at the beginning.

 
So, the next time you come across a passage that you don’t understand, put your Bible down, go and make a cup of coffee, and then settle down with your Bible for a bit longer than normal. Pray – asking to meet God in the passage. And then read it through slowly a few times. I’m not promising you’ll be any the wiser at the end of the process but why not try it and see what happens.

An app that gives the carbon footprint for a tin of beans - well almost

At the end of last week’s post I said that I would talk about an app that gives an indication of the carbon footprint for individual food items you buy in the supermarket. Given that I need to reduce my carbon emissions from about 6,000 kg to 2,500 kg of CO2 a year – a target we all need to hit by 2030 apparently – making better purchasing choices is clearly important. Eating is something that we all have to do and our eating habits have a big impact on CO2 emissions.

As I said last time, I love data. I’m also the sort of person who loves apps that track things. Whether it’s the number of steps taken in a day, the quality of my sleep at night or the calories consumed through eating too many chocolate biscuits - I love a good app. I appreciate that I might not be representative of the whole population in this regard.

Anyway – back to the app. This discovery came through the same Guardian article mentioned last time: ‘Sustainable gin and family-sized crisps! My week eating a climatarian diet’, which you can read here.

When I downloaded the app a few weeks ago it was called ‘Giki Badges’ but I see, through an update, that it has been rebranded as ‘Impact Score Shopping’. Their logo looks like this.

Using the app simply involves pointing it at the barcode on the food item you are interested in and then the app will tell you how many badges that product has been awarded. The maximum number of badges available (that I have seen) is seven but not all badges are necessarily available for all products. One product might be awarded 3 out of 5 badges, another 2 out of 3. The seven badges/categories I’ve seen are: free from additives, healthier option, better packaging, low carbon footprint, plant based, organic and animal welfare.

As mentioned before it is very difficult to work out the exact carbon footprint of the tin of beans that is sitting on the shelf in my kitchen. All tins with that same packaging will get the same score – but their actual carbon footprint will be impacted by things like the distance travelled from the factory to the depot, then transport to individual shops, then whether I walked to the shops, drove to the shops or had my groceries delivered.

The carbon footprint badge comes in low, medium and high categories. For me, the purpose of this whole exercise is to get informed, so that I have a little more to go on than the ‘eat local, in season and avoid cows’ generalisation. 

So whilst working out the exact impact of each individual product is near on impossible, it is possible to get an idea of products that are better or worse for the environment in terms of their carbon footprint.

Another thing the app allows you to do is to view alternative products – products that may be healthier for you, healthier for the planet or even both.

Obviously, for reasons already stated, it is not possible to know the impact of switching from one product to another in terms of kg of CO2 per year. Only a low, medium or high rating is given. But eating less high carbon footprint products and more low carbon footprint products is obviously going to be an improvement.

Next time I’ll have a look at some of the products in my cupboards and see how they rate. I'll have a look at some of the recipes/meals I regularly cook - and see how they measure up in terms of their environmental credentials.