Back to Basics
The purpose of this session was to open our season on Christian Basics. For reasons I will get into later, I thought that the story of Jonah, a powerful story in our community, would be a good place to begin.
A Provocative Question
What do you think the Bad News in our society right now is?
Don’t overthink it. I doubt there are right or wrong answers here, because our society is complex and multifarious. What’s your gut instinct here? At the base of all the various things happening up on the surface, what is really going on down in the depths of our society?
The Story of Jonah
https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=586973614
First Pass Reaction
· What appeals to you most about the Jonah story?
· What questions does it raise for you?
The Night Journey
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Alister’s Reflection on Jonah
The Jonah story starts in the middle of life. Jonah could be anyone. He is identified as the Son of Amitab, but we know nothing more about him. Nothing about where or when he lived. He could be any one of us. All of us are called by God to our own personal Ninevehs, all of us would sometimes rather head off to Tarshish, the furthest possible point, away from the presence of God.
Life can come at you fast. One minute you are asleep in your cabin, the next you are thrashing around in the waves, overwhelmed by all that life demands of you. Sometimes its definitely your fault, sometimes its definitely not, but whatever. It doesn’t even matter. When you’re sinking beneath the waves and you see the ship sailing on its merry way without you, questions like blame tend to be eclipsed by “what now?” and “how do I keep from drowning?” and “help!”
To be swallowed by the whale is to embark on the “night journey.” A journey which you do not want to make, and over which you have no control. Out into the midnight waves, soaked by the spray, with only the occasional visible star breaking the darkness and the mysterious depths below.
A kind of death.
All your answers, all your theories, all your carefully nurtured opinions are as useful as a bicycle in the ocean. Sometimes, all you can do is to sit in the belly of the whale and wait. All you can do is to sit in the belly of the whale and pray. All you can do is to allow the darkness and the passing of time to transform you. It is much more like being a seed cast in the ground than it is like studying for an exam or coming up with a cunning plan. It is a natural process, and it will not be hurried.
And it may destroy you. The belly of the whale is full of the bones of previous occupants.
But in the darkness, if you are able to listen, if you are able to still yourself, if your heart has been pulled out of your chest, if you are dead to your old self, if you can allow yourself, then perhaps then you might hear the still, small voice of God. Because it is only the pure of heart who hear God, the pure of heart who desire one thing, and now, for you everything else has been stripped away.
Finally, when the transformation is done, when it is time to leave the womb that the whale has become, you find yourself on the beach. Dripping, disorientated, covered in the digestive juices of a whale. A long way from home, an even longer way from wherever it was you thought you were going. Made, ironically, new.
And then, you hear God again. It might not be the same Nineveh as before. You are not the same prophet as you were when you began your night journey. God is calling you afresh. And here you find the Good News, that in what seems like chaos and despair and emptiness, God was calling you. The good news that life is not just a series of random events, but, somehow, the very matter through which the God who loves you is calling you into life.
That it all means something, it goes somewhere, it points to something – in fact it points to someone.
The Good News is that every new day is the gift of the God who loves you, the same God who upholds the whole universe in the palm of her hand.
The Night Journey
Have you ever embarked on a “night journey”?
Christian Basics
There are two ways to approach a series on “Christian Basics”, two ways to begin to think about what it might mean to be a Christian in our culture, two ways to try to engage the Good News about Jesus Christ.
First, there is what we might call the “classical” approach, where one might start with thinking about the idea of God, and working downwards from there. The sort of approach that Plato or Aristotle might utilise. The sort of approach that, frankly, my own education and formation has prepared me for. But perhaps it leans too strongly in to the idea that the Good News is primarily an idea about the cosmos, that it is primarily a theory which people arrive at in their leisured reflection, sitting in armchairs nursing a port, or leaning in earnestly over your espresso in a designer-shabby café in a gentrifying inner city suburb.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The pursuit of the beautiful, the true, and the good is a completely worth while way to spend your life.
I just don’t think it’s where we actually start. It’s too… abstract. Too protected from the vicissitudes of life.
Rather, I think I want to start from the bottom up. The universe is coming at you like an avalanche. All these events and things and feelings and everything in a never-ending torrent. Mountains and cups of coffee and friendships and suffering and all the rest, and the question which hounds me is: how do I live? In the face of all this stuff, what now?
This seems like a better place to start than with speculation about what God might or might not have done better or worse. My starting point is that the universe is (a) already present and (b) profoundly mysterious and (c) not going to stop coming at you while you sort yourself out.
The News (Bad and Good)
Bad News
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins, A River Out of Eden
At the beginning of this piece, I asked you what you thought the Bad News was. Where there is Good News, there has to be bad news, yes? The human condition is complex, societies are very different from one another, we live in very different worlds from one another.
We have different “social imaginaries” as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it – at the very least, different ways of making sense of the world, different takes on what is valuable, different questions we ask of the universe, different answers which we are capable of understanding. Different stories which we inhabit.
One candidate for “the bad news” in our society is a social imaginary which Taylor calls “the secular frame.” Taylor argues, essentially, that we live in a society which has been evacuated of transcendence. To us, only what we can detect with our scientific instruments is real, and everything else is an illusion, which the truly adult person will be able to see through. To be an adult in our culture is to hear something like Dawkins’ claim about the meaninglessness of the universe and nod sadly, but wisely, and say something to the effect that when we became adults, we put aside childish things.
We may, or may not, buy this story – because, no matter how convincing it feels, it is not in fact a scientifically verifiable fact, so it is in its own terms “merely” a story – but it is the background hum of our culture.
We will come back to this whole thing later, because it is important. But for now, just entertain it as an idea. Perhaps you have another candidate for the Bad News, and that’s fine. There is enough bad news to go around. Plenty for all!
Good News
Just like there is plenty of bad news, there is plenty of Good News. For every cultural setting, there will be an aspect of the Good News about Jesus Christ which will be most striking, will be the key that fits the lock most accurately. This is not because we are just making it up as we go along, rather it is because God’s decisive intervention in the universe in the person of Jesus Christ is a fact, and all our attempts to capture it in words are just theories about how it is supposed to work. Just like the way scientific theories change over time, our theories about how God’s intervention works, and what exactly its significance is also change.
Or, to put it another way, it is Jesus Christ in whom we have faith, not in the words we say about Jesus.
While the ideas are important – and we are going to spend a lot of time engaging them – as the Philip Melanchthon, 16th Century reformer, put it: to know Christ is to know his benefits. Whatever the Good News is, it isn’t some passive bit of information like, yes, the date of the Battle of Actium. It isn’t just interesting, it isn’t the best TED talk you’ve ever heard.
Rather, it has to be something like vanishing beneath the waves, being drowned in baptism and crucified with Christ, and then born again into a renewed life.
Whatever the Good News is, it is more like winding up on the beach covered in whale spit than it is like sitting in an armchair pontificating about the beautiful, the true, and the good.