The Cross: Not a Bloody Mess

I have a confession to make, so hold tight and here goes.

In our church at Charis we have a great worship team. No joke, they are the tops. Each week they gather together arriving earlier than everyone else to rehearse some songs which when we arrive later we all sing. There are four of them in the team, and because we are a small church (micro rather than mega church is how I would describe us) they have to do the stuff every week. And you know what – they do. They produce the goods, pull out the stops and make it happen. It’s great.

Anyhow, a couple of weeks back they introduced a new song. The songs they choose and how they lead the worship in our church often makes me cry. So, there you have it: my confession. I cry not only because they are great and do a fantastic job but also they choose such great songs for us to sing and worship through. This new song was brilliant. The words spoke about the blood of Christ and how that blood was shed for me. I know if you are not familiar with that Christian type language it sounds like it must have been a bloody mess, Jesus hanging on a cross: a terrible accident, an error of judgement on God’s part. But no! Not at all. It wasn’t a bloody mess – it was a bloody miracle!

And that’s why I was crying during the song! The miracle of Christ’s death was coming home to me again. His death, sacrificially on the cross has not only profoundly shaken the cosmos with eternal love, but has also captivated my heart with everlasting hope.

The Apostle Peter writes about it better than most in these words:

“For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”

This was no divine accident, but divine intervention and I for one need to sing about it. How about you? Oh, and by the ways guys, keep on doing your stuff at Charis – we need it!

No More Mr Nice Guy

 

I’ve spent some time over the past week considering the words good and nice. Now, you may consider there to be little difference between the meanings of these words – but bear with me.

Just because a person is nice does not necessarily make them good and likewise, a good person may not always appear nice. For me, nice has the ring of superficiality about it, like in the phrase, ‘He seems like a nice boy’. I’m not sure what nice boys do, but I’m pretty certain what they don’t do. I’m sure they don’t do adventure, bravery, and courage and without getting too contentious, if you were trapped in a boat cascading down a river towards an approaching chasm with a nice guy on the left river bank and good guy on the right, we all know who you would shout for, don’t we girls?

Nice is alright when life is drifting merrily along, but when the going gets tough, we need more than nice, we need good. So, there may be a lot of nice people in the world, but I have no interest in being one of them. As of now, I’m done with Mr Nice Guy. The word nice has no place in the Bible, and no function in my life. You can’t get by on niceties you need something more.

The Bible says that God is good, not nice. And those who follow after him should desire to be the same. I don’t want to whimper round in life playing up to everyone so as to give the appearance of being a nice guy. I want to be a good person, someone who learned how to make good decisions even on his bad days. And if I can attain that maybe the saying, ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord’, will become true of me.

The Killer in Me

ITV’s latest venture into the world of Genetics came last week by way of the programme ‘Killer in Me’. An introduction for the programme on their website reads.

The Killer in Me charts the journeys of GMTV presenter, Fiona Phillips, former England footballer John Barnes, Heart FM disc jockey Toby Anstis and former newspaper editor and political presenter, Andrew Neil as they undertake a one stop DNA test to find out which common killers could be hidden within their genes. For the celebrities this is an opportunity to look into the future, opening a window not just on their lives but potentially their deaths. But just how much knowledge can they handle?

The lightening pace with which science is progressing opens the door to many new therapies and recipes some of which might threaten mankind others which might save it from some of our deadliest diseases. This latest programme opened up the ongoing moral dilemma in our fast and changing world – the DNA test. Presented with the opportunity to have 11 serious illnesses marked off on their own personal score chart, the celebrities had to decide whether or not to take the test and if so would they have all the results available to them or simply pick and mix – the choice was theirs.

John Barnes has a family history of heart disease and prostate cancer and an ongoing love of fast food.  His wife was anxious for him to drop the fast food and keen that he take the test that it might motivate him to action. He scored low on the gene for prostate cancer, but high on the gene for heart disease. It was a sombre moment as he sat with Dr Paul Jenkins and listened to his results. He took it on the chin and went away with a desire to mend his ways. ‘You cannot change your genes,’ said the doctor, ‘but you can alter your lifestyle’, – one of the main reasons, in his opinion for taking the test.

Fiona Phillip’s mother beat breast cancer but died some years later in her sixties from Alzheimer’s disease. She spent time agonising over whether or not to take all 11 results from the test. An anxious and obviously uncomfortable Phillips sat and twittered in the chair opposite Dr Jenkins as he went through the results. The relief on her face was tangible as he told her she scored low on several indicators for diseases. When it came to the Alzheimer’s test, she declined to know the results.

The world in which we live is changing. What would you do if faced with such a test? Will a time come when babies are genetically tested at birth and dispatched to ward with an expected life span and the likelihood to certain diseases mapped and labelled? Will such information be required by insurance companies to either accept or reject us as clients? The moral maze of a technically advanced world is complex indeed.

The world of genetics is vast – the fastest growing area of medicine. The implications for humanity are simply colossal but as with all advancement there will be winners and losers. The losers are usually the poor and vulnerable – those without money and influence. Our response to such a world is how to use science to destroy disease without killing off the most vulnerable it needs to protect.

As for whether I would take the test myself. I’m really not sure. I’ve seen enough of hospitals of late to want to take a rain check on that one, at least that’s my excuse – but what about you?

A Gaff in the Making

When the producers of this week’s National Television Awards made the decision to get Lewis Hamilton to present the Special Achievement Award to Jeremy Clarkson it was only a matter of waiting to see the major gaff they’d created. It was a high on style low on substance choice which was bound to backfire. Who in their right mind is going to set up a young, talented, but inexperienced at presenting, racing driver against the giant that is Clarkson – sheer madness. It was clear that Hamilton was out of his depth, trying to lead a conversation that was beyond him and we watched him stumble when Clarkson turned the tables by asking him why he’d chosen to leave the country to live in Switzerland. ‘Switzerland’, asked Clarkson, ‘out of the 140 countries in our world, you choose Switzerland.’ Talk about inappropriate.

Their choice was indicative of the culture we live in: all style no content. If you are going to make a presentation to the likes of Clarkson then you have to set a giant against a giant otherwise the exercise looses grace and unravels into nonsense. You end up with a fiasco where inexperience presents to experience, it simply doesn’t work

Somewhere, we have lost the principal of seniority exchanging it for showmanship and no-one wins in such a world. You don’t get the best of the senior, since he is not given an adequate sparring partner, and you leave a young man floundering as he stumbles over his words and actions trying to keep up with someone who overshadows him. Should Hamilton be interviewed on Top Gear – absolutely. Should he present the top award to its loud mouthed presenter, goodness, no. Only an idiot, interested simply in ratings would come up with such an idea.