11/11/98 Faith
& Ministry Course Assignment
What
the Industrial Chaplain Said
We were asked to try and crystallise what he said:
Jesus was being radical when He put in the Lord's
prayer:
Thy will be done on Earth as it is in
Heaven
In that He thereby destroyed the distinction between
Heaven and Earth.
(The divine was not a tourist He came to
stay).
God had decided to redeem from the bottom up
Church is not there for comfort, there should
be a seamless relationship between Church and Society
Ambulance activity is only a part of the Church's
activity, the rest is to make world a better place for God to live in.
In his work he does not take God to the site but
rather seeks God who is already there.
My Comments:
Noting that he was goading us into thinking, (he
succeeded in my case), I have to disagree even though I have a lot of sympathy
with his opposition to "Holy Huddles" and his recognition that God is already
there in the world when we go out into it. I would not decribe that presence
in terms of Jesus having stayed, rather through the arrival of what Jesus
called "another comforter", the Holy Spirit*
Why did Jesus come into the World?
To give us a glimpse of Heaven certainly;
to encourage us to begin the Kingdom here definitely; but: (it
seems to me), Church History screams with evidence that we cannot succeed
in making Earth into Heaven. And Jesus said In
this world you will have tribulation (He
was certainly right) and He pointed to a time when He would return and
we have enshrined that promise in our Creed: He
will come again to judge both the living and the dead.
But even more than that, my main concern with
this radical thought is that it seems to destroy our hope for the
promised release from this world, its suffering and its tears. If
the Church does not preach that promise, it preaches nothing and it goes
along with the ever present worship of this world and its promises. That
will lead to a future generation of 90 year olds demanding access to heart
transplants. None of that is to say that our life here is unimportant nor
that we should neglect health and welfare issues and preach pie in the
sky when you die. Nevertheless we must recognise the inevitability
and acceptability of death and prepare for it as the final adventure. Jesus
told us to amass Treasure in Heaven, not
corruptible treasure on earth.
*Footnote.
The Holy Spirit didn't
get much of a look in (in the Church's preaching) until relatively recently
and indeed until then was called the Holy Ghost. Ghost is a very
poor translation of the word we now translate as Spirit, since it
means the very essence rather than a pale shadow of, in this
case, God.
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