Taste and See . . . Part 2

“How can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them?. . .”

Romans 10:14-15 Message

After writing my last blog Taste and See I realised that, as is too often my wont, in my enthusiasm for the subject I had missed the point - or at least a large part of it. By focussing my attention on the outward expression, and in part my own experience (or otherwise) in the church of the sweetness of God, not only was I being fairly self-indulgent but I was also forgetting that the principle way in which I first ‘tasted’ a God who loved me and in whom I could safely place my trust was through the Bible.

All those years ago my new Christian friend had piqued my interest in her God by the love and acceptance she showed me and by her obvious joy in knowing Jesus. Then, because I was full of questions and she didn’t have all the answers (as if any of us do), we started to explore the Bible together; it was for me like going on an adventure of discovery into a beautiful, liberating, life-enhancing new country, and I began to taste the beauty of God in the words of Scripture - and the more I tasted the hungrier I became. So I went to church with my friend - not the sort of church I had grown up in where the teaching was a brief homily that took a back seat to ritual and rote, but to a church where the Bible was foundational, and where for the first time in my life I heard passionate, authentic, inspired and inspiring words that poured grace, truth and love into my hungry soul.

So, having recognised the gaping omission in my previous blog, I have gone back in recent weeks to some books that were formative in my early life as a pastor, and for which I am so grateful to Eugene Peterson, pastor, theologian and translator of the Message Bible.

Peterson writes in his book The Unnecessary Pastor “The point is, before you trust you have to listen. But unless Christ’s Word is preached, there’s nothing to listen to”; crucial starting point surely for all Christian communities?

If people are to taste and see that the Lord is good, I believe it will not principally be through our warm welcome, our social and eco consciences, our inclusivity, our high-tech facilities or low-tech tranquillity - any club or organisation can offer all of these things. As important as all those things are it is only as the truths of God, as revealed in the Scriptures he has given us, are taught and absorbed and lived out with grace that we will become more authentically the people He created and saved us to be and will have something to offer a world that, despite much evidence to the contrary, is basically hungry for grace and truth.

I realise that promoting preaching is not a trendy viewpoint in some church circles - but then I’ve never been good at following trends. We are led to believe that with the overarching influence of social media people have the attention span of a gnat, that we are all visual rather than auditory learners, that Twitter has trained us only to cope with instant soundbites and to offer un-thought-through visceral responses to anything and anyone we disagree with. No community, let alone a community of Christ followers can be built on such a model, but it may explain why so many seemingly thriving church communities crash and burn when they fall prey to a selective agenda-led culture.

Peterson writes “A spiritual community that is not formed under the shaping influence of Jesus is vulnerable to anyone with strong, charismatic, authoritarian personality, whether it has anything to do with Jesus or not. High on the agenda of pastoral work is . . . the development of a leadership of a Holy Spirit community. This is countercultural leadership, refusing to buy into the power-based management styles our culture presents” (Unnecessary Pastor p.186).

The evidence of our video game and super-hero culture is that we all love a good story and we all need heroes and villains. We have an amazing, true, life-changing, epic story in the Bible, rammed full of heroes and anti-heroes. It's not a handbook, nor a textbook, certainly not a moralising weapon to batter those we consider 'sinners', but is “basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative . . . (that) doesn’t just tell us something and leave it there, it invites our participation. . . . gathers us into the story” (Eat this Book p.40). When I was first a Christian that was how it felt to be going along to join with the church community every week - I, and many others, couldn’t wait to get there - to be gathered into God’s story, knowing that I would hear something from Him that would excite me, challenge me, enrich my life.

How fantastic would it be if every week, in every church, pastors and teachers told the story of the Bible in winsome ways that awakened our spiritual taste buds and drew us into the heart and mind of God? No pressure, no manipulation, no guilt inducing sin-managing sermonising, but women and men sharing the Bible in ways that bring us into the liberating life-enhancing world of the Gospel.

So - going back to my theme of Taste and See - Peterson takes the title of his book Eat this Book primarily from John’s visionary experience on Patmos when an angel stands before him, holding the word, and says “Take it, then eat it. It will taste sweet like honey, but turn sour in your stomach” (Rev.10:9). ‘Eat this book’ is Peterson’s metaphor of choice for “focussing attention on what is involved in reading our Holy Scriptures formatively, that is, in such a way that the Holy Spirit uses them to form Christ in us. We are not interested in knowing more but in becoming more” (p.59).

It’s about digestion. If I eat and digest good food I will be healthier. But if I am not fed I have nothing to digest. Paul wrote his pastoral letters from a prison cell in Rome to a young Timothy and Titus, to remind them of their primary responsibilities as pastors to teach truth in Christian communities which, in Paul’s absence had become hotbeds of opinions and trends, a breeding ground for powerful personalities to gather followings for their own weird, and less than wonderful ideas on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Into this situation Paul wrote “Get the word out. Teach all these things . . teach believers with your life: by word, by demeanour, by love, by faith, by integrity. Stay at your post reading Scripture, giving counsel, teaching” 1 Tim.4:11ff Message.

The world may have changed since he wrote that, but people fundamentally have not, and nor has the Gospel. Since I retired and am no longer preparing weekly messages, I am well aware of my own shortcomings when it comes to feeding on, digesting and allowing the Holy Spirit to change me through his word - and I want to reignite that hunger. I want to be within a community that is not self-centred or complacent but willing to wrestle with the indigestible bits of Scripture, to change in response to the Holy Spirit’s prompting through sound teaching and the shared input of my fellow travellers. To be a Christian is to be part of a community whose raison d’être is truly all about Jesus. It’s not about us - not about our entertainment, our comfort, or shoring up our own long held, sometimes erroneous understanding of Scripture. Allowing the Bible to enter our spiritual digestive tract isn’t about ripping selected chosen verses out of their original context to fit our life choices, it’s more often about learning to digest the indigestible; and to do that we need teaching and we need one another.

Jesus said before telling his parable stories “Let anyone with ears to hear listen”and the apostle John wrote “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches” Rev.2:7,11,17,29;3:6,13,22 . Scripture for thousands of years was an oral tradition, passed down faithfully from generation to generation. In this internet obsessed, social-media led society, if we are to rediscover true community, don’t we need to learn again how to listen and to discuss the important issues of life and faith with one another?

My experience over many years has been that joyous, Holy Spirit inspired, diligently and prayerfully prepared and authentic preaching arouses a spiritual hunger in me that has helped me to read, learn and inwardly digest God’s wisdom for my life. What I did with that wisdom is another story!

Taste and See . . .