TYNDALE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE AND SEMINARY, TORONTO
www.tyndale.ca
Address at the Weekly Chapel Service for Faculty and Staff, June 4 2013
The seminary started as a Pentecostal Bible College and now claims to be the largest ecumenical seminary in Canada.
Bible reading: Luke 4: 16-20
ian McLaren suggests that as Christians raised in the Greco-Roman tradition that has dominated our Faith for the last 1500 years we are beginning to weep, as Peter wept after Jesus’ crucifixion, for a massive betrayal of our Lord; and that Jesus longs that we, like Peter, repent and move forward to our original calling to usher in the kingdom of God.
People talk of the death of Christendom and the top-down models of church, and of the Great Emergence of something yet to be fully revealed. This raises a question: Will the 1001 emergent expressions be shallow and short-lived, a modern version of ‘each man doing his own thing’ which the Bible condemned in Moses’ time? Or can we get rid of false superstructures but retain deep roots which enable something sustainable and truly of God to grow?
Last week at Farne Retreat, Elmwood I met a Toronto guy who has spent 30 years – with interludes – studying Irenaeus, the 2nd c leader of the church of Celts at Lyons. Those of you studying early church history will know better than I that Irenaeus is a link between the New Testament church of John, the loved disciple, who established churches that were like extended families in the east, and the church of the Celts in the west who were also beyond or on the edge of the legalistic framework of the Latin Church of the Roman Empire. Irenaeus knew that the charisms of prophets, healers and church planters, and the charisms of pastors and overseers or bishops are like the two arms of God. Where these remain as one, there is the Body of Christ. But these arms have become separated. So we must pray for bishops and overseers to discern the Spirit in each person within and beyond their own structures. We must pray for church planters and evangelists in emergent churches to humbly seek that which is of the Spirit in the keepers of memory and in the guardians of unity in the inherited churches.
Christ gives us a template in the Gospel reading. He relates to the inherited structures. The Sabbath. The synagogue. Its ritual of scriptures and prayers. His regular attendance. Such was his relationship with the institution that he was INVITED to read and speak. Yet when he does so, he steps out of the box and into the streets. He chooses a passage about the signs of the coming kingdom of God. Healings, good news for the poor, release … these things are to happen now. God is present. Jesus takes us from the institution into the kingdom.
If we only go for the D.I.Y Spirit stuff we have no communion. If we only go for the structures we have no life. Christ wished to bequeath to us not only a message but also his presence embodied in the world.
Celtic Christian spirituality offers us a way to sustain both communion and life, to bring in God’s kingdom by relating to the two arms of God. We get acquainted with God beyond the church machine, beyond the treadmill of our work for the Gospel. We do what secretly we’re scared to do. We go into that desert, that wild place, that unevangelised, unvisited continent inside ourselves; into our inner demons of fear, into the unaffirmed places, into silence, emptiness, the elements – a leaf, a snake, water, air, earth. For the first time we begin to know as we are known; we become willing to do anything or nothing for God, to take a lead or be laid aside, to enter into our vulnerability, our humanity, our oneness with the broken of this earth. And then we discover that the longings of the pure in heart are the longings of God; we are led by the Spirit of God not by our dis-eased and driven natures. When this happens we can inhabit God’s other arm, the organised structures, without being imprisoned or diverted.
The seeing eye. The honing of godly intuition. The awareness of heaven in the everyday. The nurturing in the marks of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. The strong serving the weak, the weak loving the strong in the universal Body of Christ– these are true signs of catholicity. These qualities mark our lives. We create a pattern, a rhythm of withdrawal and outreach, of aloneness and action, a work-life balance.
A friend of mine with strong links to Tyndale said ‘You must talk about vows’. Why? Because vows are committing to priorities without which our aspirations will be hi-jacked: the urgent will crowd out the eternally important, Jesus publicly announced his vows, his priorities, in this passage. He announced his values in the Sermon on the Mount. Vows, says Pete Greig of 24/7 Prayer are a Wow! Vows offer us an ABC of life:
A =Authenticity, because our Rule or Way of Life helps us live more consistently what we profess.
B – Balance, because our Way of Life calls us to look at deficiencies and excesses and so regain equilibrium.
C – Centredness, as the Way of Life repeatedly calls us back to prayer and our relationship with God.
Vows call us to rhythm. As the sun rises, we rise with God. As the sun settles, we settle down with God.
On your wall you have these great depictions of boats and voyagers. When we in the international Community of Aidan and Hilda take our vows we call it Taking the Voyage. We abandon ourselves to journey with God in the limitless ocean of His love. We abandon ourselves to God in the next wave that hits us.
As we learn to live this way we will no longer be driven. We will not be cluttered. We will be real. Evangelism and social care will flow from that single well-spring of compassion in the heart of Christ. The Kingdom of God will have arrived.
Ray Simpson www.raysimpson.org Daily Prayer Tweet: raysimpson@whitehouse views