Faith that sustains in the darkest night!

In the 1990s I had a friend, Graham Turnbull, who gave up a safe job in the UK because he was sure God was calling him to Rwanda. After teaching there for a short while during the immediate aftermath of the genocide, he sensed God calling him to work for the UN as an observer. His friends and family also saw this as God’s call. After Graham had been some weeks working in Rwanda and Burundi, I heard a BBC report of the death of UN observers, ambushed and killed. Graham was one of them.

People like Graham and like James Foley are modern martyrs – people who have sought to bring peace and hope, or to raise awareness. People who have seen the light of God and have chosen to follow that light wherever it leads.

While they have not sought death, they have seen the goodness and justice of particular actions and have undertaken them even at risk to their own lives. They call us to greater efforts for peace, justice, honesty, openness.

RIP Graham and James.

See the article below from The Huffington Post  | By Antonia Blumberg

Remembering James Foley’s Remarkable Faith

I’ve been deeply impressed over recent years by the careful thought that a number of people such as Steve Chalke have given to how we listen to God speak through the Bible. It is so easy to read the scriptures and have our existing positions strengthened rather than allow scripture to speak clearly to us.

I continue to feel a tension between different passages in scripture. It seems to me that the more I listen to scripture, and the more I listen to others, there is no clear scriptural position on matters of sexuality. Clearly worded proof texts do little to help as they seem to me to speak contrary to other clear scriptural statements. It seems to me that many of the texts that are relied on to support traditional positions on sexuality do not carry the strength of certainty and gravitas that many commentators suggest they do. We are always left uncertain of the social context into which those texts spoke and we cannot be clear what was being addressed by the original authors. Almost inevitably we hear our own ideas and values reflected in scripture. However, those passages exist and are part of God’s word and we need to listen to them.

On the other hand we have some amazing passages in scripture which affirm that we are all created in the image of God. These passages assure me that God’s love reaches out to all of us. I am also sure that he affirms who we are as his children, created in his image, carefully and wonderfully formed in the wombs of our mothers. Our status before God is determined not by our correct theology, nor by our obedience to God’s rules, but ultimately, primarily and only by the strength of God’s love for us.

I listen to the personal testimony of people like Vicky Beeching I am challenged about where I stand in the debate not so much on an intellectual level, nor on a theological level, but most of all on a pastoral level.

Vicky has courageously put her income at risk as a Gospel Singer in the States by coming out as gay. This for her and many others is not just a theological issue, not an intellectual issue, but an overwhelmingly personal issue. It is about who she is.

I am still a ‘fence-sitter’ as far as theology is concerned.

I am, however, very clear about the pastoral issues and the acceptance God offers to us all regardless of sexuality, and perhaps, since our sexuality is so integral to who we are, because of our sexuality. I know that God does not condemn us for who we are, rather he reaches out to all of us in love.

I want to listen more carefully to Vicky Beeching and to what she chooses to share on her blog:

http://vickybeeching.com/blog

There was an excellent article in the Independent which tells much of Vicky’s story:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/vicky-beeching-star-of-the-christian-rock-scene-im-gay-god-loves-me-just-the-way-i-am-9667566.html

It has been so difficult, hearing about the difficulties that Yasidis and Christians are facing in Iraq at the moment – the deaths of so many under persecution. Churches around the world are uniting in prayer for peace and for restoration, deeply concerned for those families affected by persecution. It also seems as though the Christian faith is in retreat, no longer present in cities controlled by IS (Islamic State).

Daily prayer for my wife Jo and I has recently been based on the Northumbrian Office ‘Celtic Daily Prayer’. During August we have been thinking about St. Columba and his ministry on Iona and to the Picts across Scotland.

A sentence written by Fiona Macleod which appeared as part of the reflection for 11^th August struck me as significant:

“In this little island (Iona) a lamp was lit whose flame lighted pagan Europe.”

Like so many of us, I have been struggling with what has been happening to all minorities in the areas of Iraq controlled by IS and perhaps most of all to the large numbers of Christians who have had to leave their homes and who cannot see anyway open to them of returning. All they can see now is a hostile Sunni Muslim population around them in the places they called home, rather than neighbours with whom, until recently, they happily shared their lives. These Christian people have been part of faith communities that have been in cities in Northern Iraq since before Islam was founded.

I have been wondering this week whether this experience is in fact similar to that of many different peoples, Christian or not, over the centuries. Hearing Fiona Macleod’s words left me thinking of Europe at the end of the Roman Era. As Roman civilisation was pushed out of the countries of Northern Europe including England, the Christian faith also retreated. The land was taken by groups of people, probably our forebears, whose faith was pagan. In our islands, Christianity retreated to the fringes of Wales and Ireland; and during the Dark Ages, Christian faith was kept alive by small communities around the Western Coast.

If people had been able, in those days, to see what was happening across Europe. It would have seemed to be all encompassing. The Christian faith was pushed out and remained invisible, or non-existent, for generations. Over time, faithful missionaries, at first from Ireland, began once again to share the faith with those in England and across northern Europe. St. Columba was one, and he founded Iona. As time passed, other Celtic Saints travelling out from Iona, drew many back to faith in Christ as they traversed the land setting up small monastic houses.

As the light of Christ seems to be going out in significant parts of Iraq at the moment, and as increased secularism dominates in many countries of the West, where is the light of Christ being faithful kept alive in the world today? What different forms does that Christian faith take? Where will those new Christian missionaries come from?

We have to believe that this is in God’s hands. Much as we in England and Scotland saw revival first through Celtic missionaries before Augustine’s own mission in the south took root, so we can trust that God will prepare messengers of the Gospel for the future. They will be messengers who will once again bring the light of Christ into lands where that light seems only to flicker feebly or indeed even to have been extinguished.