View From The Basement

What's Andrew got to do with it?

Today is St Andrew's, a day on which the Scots, Russians and Greeks who have him as their patron saint do ….? Well what do we do? To be honest I’m not sure what most Scot’s do, we seem to have kept the day and lost all the traditions. We dressed Alastair up in his kilt and sent him off to pre-school and tonight we've invited some friends around who have no family near by for haggis, neeps and tatties.

I must admit that I’ve struggled a bit with this falling within advent. I mean whose idea was it to let St. Andrews day fall within advent, should our focus not be 100% on Jesus? Is this not a distraction from the “main thing?”

I thought about this as I walked home last night and concluded that it is actually quite appropriate for us to think about  St Andrews day during advent.

My sense of knowing that as a Scot I’m supposed to do something today but I know not what is perhaps like many who know there’s something special about advent and that there’s more to it than candles and coat hangers (this only makes sense if you grew up watching Blue Peter). But they don’t know what to do. We (i.e. society at large) have this period of advent and Christmas day but we’ve lost the context. So here’s the challenge….do I spend advent reflecting upon Emanuel in a privatistic or narcissistic way? Or is part of my reflection upon the birth of Jesus the imperative to help others to find Him, to this advent discover what it’s all about. This leads me to my second thought.

Glasgow at night

I went out late last night and took some pics of Glasgow at night. The results can be seen in the photo album in the side bar.

Advent Blog

It's snowed in Glasgow this morning which served to remind us that we're moving from Autumn to Winter. I need markers to remind me of things, especially things that are coming up - so Advent was probably created for people like me!

There is an Advent blog starting HERE where a group of different contributor's will share their thoughts. It should be good and I'm looking forward to it helping me focus on Jesus, on the giving of the Father and the work of the Spirit as we run up to Christmas. 

Universalism?

Hippo Critic has been rather exercised over the quote I posted on my door a few weeks ago –

“just as there is no God who is not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so there is no God who must be satisfied that we might be spared. We are the spared because God refuses to have us lost” – Stanley Hauerwas.

Now our friend Stanley is the master agent provocateur. As a friend of mine who was studying him for his PhD once said “trying to pin what Hauerwas thinks is like trying to pin Jell-O to a wall” – so it’s particularly hard to say what Hauerwas is driving at here. Which is fine as the idea behind posting these quotes is to provoke thinking.

Hippo critic seems uneasy with this because to him it suggests universalism. I don’t however think that’s something Hauerwas would want us to read into this (although I’m unaware of his stance on universalism). Given Hauerwas is essentially a theologian following the trajectory set by Barth, key to understanding this quote is knowing a little of Barths’, thus presumably Hauerwas’ understanding of election.

For

Bath

it is not the individual who is elected / pre-destined, it is Jesus. He is the chosen one, the one chosen before the foundation of the world. However, as representative man, we are chosen in him. “The election of Jesus Christ is the eternal choice and decision of God” – Karl Barth (CD 11/2, p12-3). Or as Bonhoeffer elaborates, “Christ stands for his new humanity before God. But if that is so, he is the new humanity. There where mankind should stand, he stands as a representative”.

For me the Hauerwas quote above speaks into the whole atonement debate that hit the consciousness at a popular level with Steve Chalks’ book The Lost Message of Jesus. The issue is in many respects far harder to answer than the tricky issue of universalism, cause the issue here is “why did Jesus have to die?” Brian McLaren in More Ready Than You Realize teases out this question for us;

“if God was going to forgive us why didn’t he just forgive us? Why did Jesus have to die so that we could be forgiven? Having an innocent person die for guilty people did not seem to solve the ‘injustice’ of forgiveness – it only seemed to add to the injustice. So, why did Jesus have to die?”

McLaren humbly admits that despite mulling this over for a couple of weeks he was stumped, and who am I to try and solve this for Him in a short blog post? God refuses to have us lost and provided them means by which we need not be lost, perhaps that’s all we need to know. Perhaps the questions we are left with, the why’s and how’s are there to draw us more into the mystery of God where in glimpsing something of His glory where the importance of the questions fades and we become transfixed by Him.

Worship

The quote on my office door this week is;

"Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God - it whets our appetite"

Eugene Peterson

Rescue me?

cheer's to Dougie's flat mate who sent these pics on email.

sore eyes

hat tip to Jonny for THIS rather cool illusion. However be warned if you look at it too long you get sore eyes, well I got sore eyes!

youth weekend

So 30 of us headed into the Scottish central highlands for our autumn youth weekend on Friday night. After supper we had our first .... 

Google Church?

Glenn on the 13th October wrote some interesting thoughts on programs, church and fluidity. This is something I've been thinking about too. I naturally drift toward the fluidity end of things. I am however at the moment trying to put down on paper the structure of our youth discipleship to help others (and myself) get an idea of what we're doing and where we're going. And there's the rub.....my leaders who are all pretty young themselves find it hard to work in fluidity. The struggle to feel that they can input into this or take any sense of ownership.

I thus interested to read here that Google has no plan, no sense of where it's going. Ok Google is not a church and the church is not a business, but I still want to ask the question what can we learn about connecting with this generation, with wider society from organizations like Google.  as I read the article here's what hit me between the eyes:

"The company refuses to hire people more than a year or two out of university, for fear that experience in the conventional business world will taint their freshness of mind".

hmmm...I'm away to read Roman's 12 again!

Quote on the door

I've just pinned the following quote on my office door.

“If God is truly God, then God must be found in the centre of everyday life, not in its margins; in health, not just in sickness; in life, not just death. But for many it is precisely their everyday lives that have become disenchanted; it is in everyday life that human mastery most exerts itself”.

Frederick Bauerschmidt.