Doing theology from where the world is...
Rev Alison Morley
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a recognition service for a new Methodist Local Preacher as she was welcomed into the area and her calling was acknowledged. We also celebrated with David, 50 years of preaching and we thank God for them both. It was a joyous celebration!
In preparation for today's service I opened my Preacher's Bible and noticed to my surprise that I was only accredited to preach in 2006 - it seems like an age ago! And, of course, David was preaching before I was born! So I am still very much a beginner!
Preaching has always been central to Methodism. John Wesley believed and was witness to its power as a converting experience for the listeners. He believed that to preach was to convict the listeners of their sins and inspire repentance and therefore conversion.
That may have been true for Wesley but it is not actually the case for most preaching today, my own included. This may be, in part, because I am ‘preaching to the converted’ and there are others who I am sure would have an opinion on the standard and content of the preaching in our churches!
You know that we are taught to preach in a very definite way these days! We are supposed take a Bible passage and tell you about its context and back ground; we then move on to tell you what the impact of the words of the situation would have been to the people ‘at the time’; we then move on to tell you the relevance of the words of scripture for today (and somewhere in there we try to get our 3 points!)
Sometimes I wonder if we ever really get to the relevance for today and, if we do, whether that relevance merely bounces off the walls of this building and don’t really equip us for our real lives. Have you ever experienced that strange shift as you come out of church and back to your Sunday dinners; off with the Sunday clothes; and so on? My poor mum used to be in a terrible mood as the life that she walked into did not conform to the preacher's golden ideal - children not up, breakfast littering the table, and, inevitably, the Good News forgotten!
Many of you have been in church for a long time and if it is as long as 50years then you have heard 2,500 sermons; you have listened to the Bible read to you, and probably studied the Word at home in your daily notes. You are converted and, presumably, find pleasure in listening to sermons!
Now I am going to dare to take issue with John Wesley and say that very rarely these days does a sermon, or an act of worship, convict people. Today sermons have a very different function. They inform, educate, they may even inspire. Over the years you have heard the Bible ‘opened up to you again and again, time and again but I now would like to make a plea for a new way of preaching that begins NOT with the Bible but with the world. And for this move I do take inspiration from John Wesley who preached outside the walls of church buildings and lived his preaching.
Just recently there was a tragedy not a million miles from here, when a 17year old girl committed suicide. There was some comment and whispering around in her peer group that she had been influenced by Christian web sites proclaiming the end of the world. In the light of this tragedy I was asked, by the girl's local vicar, if I could touch on the subject of a Christian response to these rumours in a series of assemblies that I was doing in the local school the following week. In my preparation I entered the world of these young people and drew my theology from there.
This is what I found on an American advert on the Internet: "The Bible Guarantees it. Judgement Day. 21st May, 2011. Cry mightily to God…. FamilyRadio.com"
The Bible guarantees it!
You know young people do not need telling that the world is going to end - they live in a dystopian and distorted video world. They spend hours on video games that are set ‘after the fall out’, after nuclear or chemical annihilation. The roam trough bombed out cities where survivors are plague-ridden zombies and everyone encountered has to be killed before they kill you. They watch movies that show the end of the world and climate destruction. In the film 'Avatar' the human race is not satisfied with just destroying its own planet, it goes to other planets to ‘rape’ their resources. Their music reflects this in songs such as ‘Armageddon Please’ and ‘This is the End of the World’.
So when we enter this world - the 'real' experience of our young people - we are hit by a sense of desperation, of hopelessness, anger and fear. In response to this, what will we preach?
I told those young people in the assembly what I truly believe is the root and bone of our faith: that God is, by definition, the source of all creativity and Love. Any idea that God would wish the destruction of the world is Bad religion - it is wrong theology and it is wrong religion.
We can dare to say to the fundamentalist Christians who are spreading their opinions all over the Web that they are misrepresenting our God of endless compassion and creativity.
We can dare to say that our reading of the Bible is through a lens of the God of abounding love.
We dare to say those historic interpretations of Judgement and the last days are just that - historic. Such medieval artistic impressions of judgement do not represent our understanding of God.
We, as postmodern generations, have seen hell in Auschwitz; we live in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, of the annihilation of all life and we dare to say that even there, even here, God is at work, ‘redeeming at measureless cost’. We take God at God's promise.
At the end of that week I was chatting to an 'unchurched' 14-year-old boy at the art group. (By the way, never think that they don't want to talk about God - what they don't want is for you to tell them about God!) He said to me, ‘People who commit suicide go to Hell, don't they?’ I said... ‘No, they don't.’
He said that Christians say that they do, and I said that that was wrong, “People who commit suicide are lost and lonely, broken and desperate. These are the very people who are closest to the heart of God. God's compassion could never turn them away.”
He said to me, ‘Yes that's right, God forgives doesn't he.’
YES!
Doing theology from where the world is, is not a watering down of the Gospel. Nor is it a liberal fuzzy faith. It is encountering God in the only place where God can be truly experienced and known.
If you have been in the life of church for many, many years, you have listened to thousands of sermons; you have done your theology from the book. I urge you to lift your eyes and look into the world and see the living God at work; let your theology start with God, where God is - not in the letters on a page; not in traditions from the past, but in flesh and blood, in the here and the now.
The conversations we have are the texts where God is hidden, and the bodies that we touch are the temples where we pay homage. Look Jesus is Here.
Copyright ©: 2011, Rev Alison Morley. All rights reserved.