A New Kind of Life

With the exception of Romans, the rest of Paul's church epistles were directed to the churches he planted during his missionary journeys, recorded in Acts. They are the letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, although there is no mention (as far as I can recall) of the Colossian church in Acts.

All are full of thought-provoking messages and questions, and it's really something different to read them in their historical and human perspectives. Too often we quote from these great letters, without giving careful thought to the people addressed, the circumstances which brought the letters about, the context, and even Paul himself.

In a way, reading them this way did not bring about many theologically challenging discoveries nor any profound statements, but it was a candid experience, eavesdropping (what a convenient word; thanks Brian M!) along the way and getting a glimpse of life then. Indeed, I think it's the people (both the writer and the reader, and most of all the Author) who make them special, not so much the words. And it is from this angle that I'll offer my thoughts. Don't expect too much; it's more like "Ben's Casual Visit to the 1st Century Churches."

1 Corinthians

When Paul became a Christian, deciding to join Jesus Christ on the great mission to catalyse the Kingdom, he left behind many of his old ways (not all, or he would have ceased to become Paul), especially the ones that tied him down, preventing him from experiencing the new kind of life in Christ. Unfortunately, the Corinthians were still pretty stuck in that old rut.

He addressed many of these issues, and I think the one theme that threads throughout the entire letter, is that of love. The world-famous Chapter 13 is evidence enough.

Love is what God showed and shows us; God is love. And we must in turn live in love towards one another. I believe love is the most difficult of feelings to cultivate, and this is probably in part because it's an easy word to discuss, since there are so many facets to it, but one that isn't quite as easy in the living out.

It is by this love that we must be all things to all men, cherish purity, live with sinners, and show grace even as grace is continually shown to us. The precedent is that God has first loved us, and we are to allow the overflow to pour out into the lives of others. But we're selfish people, aren't we?

To be accepting of others, quick to forgive and constantly gracious are qualities that cannot exist on earth, and Paul begins his letter with a glimpse into what God is like. To man, God is foolish, and so we "follow God's own fool, for only the foolish can tell; believe the unbelievable, and come be a fool as well" as Michael Card wrote.

It means being the emissaries of something beyond us, exuding a God-like aura of the Kingdom to which we now belong. And all this will culminate in the resurrection -- not just life in heaven, but being made whole and what we were meant to be, bearing the image of God once again.

It struck me, as I was reading the resurrection chapters, that it might be a lie. What if there's no resurrection, no kingdom? I am reminded again and again of Puddleglum's statement in the Chronicles of Narnia, that "even if there's no sun, I would live my whole life looking for it, for it is much better than your [the queen's] world."

Can we live any other way that would not otherwise lead nowhere but to death?

2 Corinthians

One message resonates with me from this letter: treasures in jars of clay.

I can't quite remember the context in which Paul wrote this letter, but I do know that no other book in the New Testament, with the exception of Romans, has encouraged me as much as 2 Corinthians.

The fact that there is an indescribable treasure in the "unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives" brings meaning to each painful step in this world, the faith that the eternal makes itself known in the ordinary. These words bring to mind the lesson of Jeremiah, that God moulds us as a potter moulds clay. We're not much to look at, but God doesn't seem to think so.

Again Paul also mentions the new life, "the old life is gone; a new life burgeons!" It is in this direction that God is making something out of nothing, sons and daughters out of pieces of lifeless, broken clay.

Speaking of brokenness, my favourite verse from this book is 12:9, "My grace is enough; it's all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness." Steven Curtis Chapman expressed it in these words,

His strength is perfect
When our strength is gone
He'll carry us when we can't carry on
Raised in his power
The weak become strong
His strength is perfect
His strength is perfect

When there is less of us, God can show more of himself. I struggle to live with this knowledge, even though I know full well that it's the only way to live. It makes me more welcoming of distress, because the stars are only visible in the darkness.

Galatians

The kind of freedom Paul proclaimed was a little too much for the conservative Jews, who tried to tie the people down with rule-keeping, blocking everyone to life in the Spirit. On his first missionary journey, Paul was stoned by these very Jewish leaders.

Rule-keeping was the problem, not the law, as many are inclined to think. Conrad Gempf illustrated it this way (I paraphrase): "the law says 'thou shalt not exceed the 70 mph limit.' The Pharisees are the ones who say 'we don't really know if we're exceeding it, or how fast we're going, in case we accidentally skid or exceed by 0.01 mph, so it is better to limit it at 65 mph.' So, in the end, anyone who exceeds their limit is deemed sinful, even if they might be only going at 70 mph."

The trouble here is that the rule becomes some sort of god. People start worrying about the rule itself, and their focus is no longer on God. That explains the difference between 'reckless believers' like David and the ever-so-cautious Pharisees.

To this end, Paul writes on the fruit of the spirit, and how life on the vine is the only kind of life that will sustain us. ('Life on the Vine' is the title of an excellent book on the Fruit of the Spirit, written by Philip D Kenneson. I borrowed it from Keat Lim). When we're reconnected with the source of life, we are free to obey the law, and fulfill Jesus' words "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

Ephesians

Ephesus was a very commercial and cosmopolitan city, being somewhat the capital of Asia Minor and the heart of the goddess Artemis. It was here that Paul lectured daily in the lecture hall of Tyranus, until everyone in Asia Minor heard him, and here too that he later raised Eutychus from the dead.

(There are several opinions concerning his death; the most common is that the room was stuffy from the burning oil, but another is that Paul's sermon was boring and too long! OK... Lame one)
Paul's letter to the Ephesians expresses the immensity of life in Christ that is literally 'beyond life.' He writes, "here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head," and "God can do... far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!"

But we don't seem to live like that. The greatest Christians have always held a sense of awe where God was concerned. They made room for mystery, for the unknown, for sheer wonderment. Thanks to reductionism and the onslaught of discovery in recent centuries, the church has tried to understand and explain everything from the 'Christian point of view.'

We really could use a little silence at the 'overwhelmingness' of God. We need to go back to Job's stance and say "this is too much for me; I am silenced." Soo Tian suggested a full day of silence during d'NA this year. While that is unlikely, due to time constraints, it's an excellent idea, and I'm sure it would be no less instrumental in teaching us than a day of lectures and community service!

Paul ends with a passage on the 'armour of God', saying "this is... a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil," and it is probably for this reason that we are to maintain that sort of humility. Brian McLaren wrote of the connection between 'human', 'humour' and 'humility', and I daresay the forces of evil fear nothing more, save God himself.

The ability to truly laugh, taking things neither too seriously nor too loosely, makes us human, and being human means being supernatural and natural at once. Humility is probably the balance that keeps us sane, not some sombre-faced approach to life. It is in understanding that our knowledge is nothing compared to what's out there, and knowing that God is beyond us, that keeps us humble.

And maybe we could learn to laugh a bit at life, even a bit at faith and religion and this whole universe! Maybe we can let God run the world a bit more, and resign ourselves to standing open-mouthed at the immensity of God.

Philippians

In the introduction, Peterson writes "joy is life in excess, the overflow of what cannot be contained within any one person." Joy overflows, and anyone who has experienced it knows that laughter is contagious! Joy isn't really thematic in the letter, but it permeates every word.

Come to think of it, Paul didn't have many great experiences in Philippi. He was followed by a demon-possessed slave girl, whipped and thrown into prison. And... of all crazy things to do, he sang with Silas in jail. What did the guards think?

The sort of joy (not necessarily happiness) that accompanied Paul in Philippi is the same that flows through his letter to that city. To him, it's "life versus more life! I Can't lose." This joy flowed from God himself and sustained the apostle even in the darkest of experiences.

Singing when all else fails is no easy task. Don Moen wrote, "I will sing, I will praise, even in my darkest hour, through the sorrow and the pain..." in his song 'I will Sing,' inspired by Habakkuk's passage, 'I will rejoice even if the harvest fails' (or something to that extent; very last lines of Habakkuk).

The effect of this is obvious: "instead of being squelched, the Message has actually prospered." When holy joy radiates from believers, it becomes more contagious than the flu, and there are few, if any, who remain as they were after being overwhelmed by this joy.

Come to think of it, joy is very much like the flu. Just as the virus is able to mutate once a person is immune to a certain strain of it, so can joy; it constantly changes and evolves to once again surprise people who think they've outlaughed happiness. That's why heaven will be one continuous experience of joy and joy all over again!

This life that makes everything else pale in comparison, led Paul to "give up all that inferior stuff so he could know Christ personally." It's the same force that made the first disciples lay down their "nets at the water's edge" as Steven Curtis Chapman depicted in his song 'For the Sake of the Call.'

Colossians

Again, the themes of the new kind of life emanate from this letter. Paul draws centrality to Christ, how everything revolves around him.

"Everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him", "from now on everyone is defined by Christ", and "quit studying the subject and start living it!"...

My favourite is this: "you don't need a telescope, microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fulness of Christ."

(I'm stuck. Really, suddenly now I have no idea what to write. Maybe it's in part because the TV is switched on behind me and my concentration isn't 100% here. But probably also because I couldn't write anything without it sounding either phony or over-idealistic or both)

So I'll end here with Colossians 3:3-4; "Christ... is your life."

There's really no other way around it. No other way to escape it. We're all equally clueless about life at times, and it's worse than an ant trying to appreciate van Gogh. But then there's a joy and holy mystery surrounding us in all this, one that holds on to us more stubbornly than anything else we'll ever encounter.

Thessalonians

Hi. This part is a new addition, since I inadvertently forgot the Thessalonian letters, leaving them out at first!

The topic of Christ's second coming has been the centre of much debate and discussion in recent times, what with wars and the 'state of the world', yielding everything from the Left Behind series and Nostradamus to recent sensationalist material as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

Sometimes I wonder, Paul made the second coming seem so imminent, and yet some 2000 years have elapsed since, and still Christ has not come again. And so every generation comes up with its own myths and guesses, this one being no exception. We even have people from remote parts of the world claiming to be God incarnate!

Come to think of it, Abraham had to wait some 3000 years before the promised Messiah came. Jesus said "Before Abraham was, I am," and I can only imagine that he is saying to us now; "Once the world ends, I am."

Paul, having made clear that Christ is indeed coming again, draws our attention to the here and now, and rightly so. C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters, that the present is the only point in time where we have any power over anything. Since we cannot, by our greatest efforts, speed up or delay or anticipate God's coming, let's do what we can, what we must.

The exhortation is to keep fighting on, living a life that spells God's difference, to be faithful in the trust given us, to continue living justly, being gracious to one another, helping others grow in righteousness. Most of all, not to give up just because God doesn't seem to be around.

Again I remember Soo Tian's theory of 'human growth' (I'm not even sure the theory has a name), in which humanity is a developing process, each stage growing by different means, maturing at different rates, understanding God in different ways. The first, knew God as Creator. Then, he revealed himself as Father, then Son, and now Holy Spirit.

I once asked Soo Tian whether it might be possible that there's more than the Trinity; perhaps something this stage of humanity has not yet understood. Of course, many would say that the Bible doesn't say so, but then again, maybe it's the way we're looking at it. But that's besides the point; regardless, the main thing is that there is a God, and we're part of his plan.

We've thrown ourselves into an adventure that gets more and more exciting as it progresses; heaven won't be the end of our journeys, but the beginning of a new adventure, leading on from this one on Earth. In the last chapter of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis writes that in the New Creation, every world that opens up is larger than the first; it's something we cannot understand, limited as we are to a world whose physical concepts are determinate.

But Paul offers just the smallest glimpse of this so that we neither romanticise heaven, nor disregard it. Rather, the idea is so that we commit all of ourselves into the 'story we find ourselves in', making every moment count for God. He may return tomorrow, or in another few thousand years.

What difference does it make? Only this: that we stop worrying about dates or signs or wonders or things happening in the world, and start living for Him. To plant seeds patiently, neither hurrying for fear the Farmer will return this evening, nor too complacently as though he will never arrive.

Maybe what we need is a better balance between the two, being urgent in our work, yet planning everything out well. God is known to be patient, preferring the 'long way out', so that we might grow. Yet each step of this 'long way' demands our undivided attention, and I think that's where the urgency comes in.

Here's a very distant metaphor, but perhaps it's a bit like U2. Every album is complete in itself, and they pour themselves into each song, producing works of great quality (or maybe that's my bias!). Yet, the journey isn't over, since there is a sense of progression from album to album. Everything is taken seriously, yet not over-hurriedly as if the album will be their last work.

Perhaps then, we can focus on the Kingdom that begins here, and continues in the New Creation, rather than debate the events before and after Christ's return; a wise Teacher once said, "Who of you by worrying can add a single inch to his height?"