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Part II, titled Theology: Believing and Belonging, continues the critique and deconstruction of American white evangelicalism by examining the doctrines of God, Jesus and Church. Gushee’s theology of God has six woven strands: Kingdom of God theology, social gospel theology, Holocaust theology, liberation theologies, Catholic social tradition, and progressive evangelical social ethics. Gushee is profoundly aware of the dangers attaching to claims of divine sovereignty, linked to biblical inerrancy infallibly interpreted within a closed doctrinal framework, and reflecting the agendas of male white power at the centre of a faith tradition. He has lived through the negative consequences of that mix.

As a scholar immersed in Holocaust history and reflection he insists that any Christian theology of God must stand questioned before Auschwitz, and the story of the Jewish people. He understands God in terms of the story of Israel, from which he draws this conclusion: the Hebrew Bible tells the narrative of “divine love for covenant peoplehood and mission on behalf of humanity.”(Italics original) Out of such reflection comes this: “The idea of a God who risks trusting us with freedom, and suffers from the choices we make, is critically important in moving us away from theologically problematic and morally disempowering understandings of divine sovereignty.” (80)

Using Jesus According to the New Testament by J D G Dunn as a starting point, the chapter on Jesus critiques ‘Jesus according to white evangelicalism’, as a pietistic, sentimentalised, prosperity Jesus, kept at a safe distance from the ‘apocalyptic prophet, lynched God-man and risen Lord’ of the New Testament. Gushee, like many of us, recognises the neglect and even silencing of Jesus in such an understanding of the Bible, God, and the Gospel. Those who suggest Gushee caricatures white evangelical portrayals of Jesus, may need to reflect more critically and honestly on the massive evangelical industry that lies behind the current dominance of the evangelical presence in current American politics.

Here again, Gushee blends testimony with critique, and his own past experience with his current thinking. Referring to the meaning of the Cross today:

 ”We kill one another. We killed our best. We killed God who came to save us. When we kill another, we kill the God who made them and loved them, who was in them and who came to save us. This is what I see these days when I look at the cross.” (99)

These words are fuelled by a lifetime spent within a tradition in which the cross is central to individual salvation but less prominent in discussions about injustice, poverty, racism, and environmental catastrophe. They are written by a Christian thinker steeped in Holocaust history and reflection, scarred by what he sees as the co-option of Jesus and the Christian Gospel for political ends, and in particular, a white supremacist understanding of human society and political vision; and these embodied in a Presidency and Administration given uncritical legitimacy by court Evangelical leaders.

The chapter on the Church gives a clear definition of what is needed: “The church is the community of people who stand in covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ and seek to fulfil his kingdom mission.” (104, emphasis original) This description is some distance from what Gushee and other ethicists, social analysts and theologians see as the characteristic forms and goals of American white evangelical churches, their leaders and their political spokespersons.

“Evangelicalism is a consumer culture…What many heavily consumerized evangelicals understand church to mean has been taught to them through the most successfully marketed musicians, authors, trinket salesmen, and parachurch groups. Evangelicalism is also a brand, a kind of proprietary product that those at the top defend for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they and their institutions have vested financial interests in doing so.” (108)

As a contrasting alternative, Gushee describes two church contexts with which he is familiar and within which he currently flourishes. In First Baptist Church, Decatur, he is a class teacher to a group of people who opt to meet every Sunday to explore, discuss and study the meaning and implication of Jesus and his teaching of the Kingdom of God. Then he tells of his regular attendance at Holy Cross Catholic Church, and his perception that in the United States the Catholic Church has so much more awareness of the multiracial and multi-cultural society of a country significantly populated by immigrants, and is itself ‘richly global’.

The balance and tension between these two regular encounters with people of faith, have in common a sense of covenant love for all humanity as the base line of Christian activism and ethical behaviour. For Gushee, ecclesiology is about being a people focused on following Jesus, held together in covenant and mutual commitment, their common life expressed in Christlike compassion, the basis of that life being relational rather than contractual, Kingdom oriented in worship and obedience, and including all whom others reject; in effect being to others what Jesus was, friends of sinners.

(Part III of the review, titled Ethics: Being and Behaving will appear tomorrow.)

This is Part I of 3, an extended review of After Evangelicalism. 

After Evangelicalism. The Path to a New Christianity, David P. Gushee. (Louisville: WJKP, 2020) 225pp.

This book is written under what the author sees as emergency conditions. Evangelicalism in its United States version is no longer a viable expression of morally responsible Christianity. White Evangelicalism has finally sold its soul by its uncritical support for all that the Trump administration and the Republican Party now stand for. What is more, the causes of Trumpism and evangelical collusion with its tactics, policies and goals, go back far and deep in American Christianity. In that sense this is a very American book, and some aspects of the arguments have less purchase in the British evangelical context. The history of American Evangelicalism, Gushee argues, holds within its DNA, certain attitudes, convictions, prejudices and social goals that are inimical to the teaching and person of Jesus of Nazareth.

For those reasons white Evangelicalism is on the decline. The last lines of any book are often worth pondering as possibly the most important final thoughts of an author:

“This I know: many millions of young people got lost in that evangelical maze. They couldn’t get past inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, divine violence, Hallmark-Christmas-Movie Jesus, rejection of gay people, male dominance, racism, God = GOP, or whatever else…I want to live for Jesus till I die. And I want to help other people find a way to do that too, if they are willing.  (page 170)

David Gushee has spent 40 years teaching, preaching, and writing from within an American Evangelical context, much of that time within the orbit of the Southern Baptist Convention. He writes out of a personal journey in which his mind has changed on a number of the key doctrinal and ethical issues he exposes and explores. Now a Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, this book is a long reflection on his relationship with the evangelical culture within which he came to faith, at times in the form of personal testimony.

But the driving impetus comes from his search for faith and practice that is consistent with the Jesus of the Gospels and the Kingdom ethics presupposed in the life and teaching of Jesus. He seeks to offer those who count themselves as post-evangelicals, and who are looking for a new direction in which to follow Jesus,
"a manifesto, a love letter, and game plan for fellow exvangelicals." 

The book has three main parts. Part I examines the origins and later developments of Evangelicalism in America culminating in its current alignment with Republican political agendas. One of the pillars of that alignment is an insistence on biblical inerrancy as fundamental to all else, and chapter 2 examines, deconstructs and critiques those claims, and the power games that underlie them. Chapter 3 is a reconstruction of authority, indeed authorities, in Christian faith and practice. What ‘the Bible says’ requires responsible interpretation,  humble listening, communal discernment and an openness to the Holy Spirit leading into new or newly understood truth.

Gushee acknowledges he is virtually commending the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. But he is arguing for something even more nuanced, a Christian Humanism which has the qualities of Reason, Experience, Intuition, Relationships and Community. This is both a searching and a generous invitation to followers of Jesus to move beyond a narrow ‘sola scriptura’. “Given human limits – even as humans with Jesus in front of us, the Bible open before us, and the Spirit within us – I am rejecting any inerrant path to infallible doctrine.” (45)

To listen to God’s voice, and discern God’s will, requires the hard work of humble listening, open-ended risk taking in the presence of God, and communal responsibility in moral decision-making and lived by convictions. In that sense an inerrant text, infallibly interpreted by 'sound' or 'authoritative' teachers, is a short circuiting of a process that requires an interpreting community engaged in communal discernment, and open to the truth as it is in Jesus and as it is prompted by the Spirit of God moving once again on the waters to bring forth life.   

Dear Friends

It was a year or two ago. Stevie was having a hard day. The previous day and through the night the wind had been ‘blawin’ a hoolie’. The West end of Aberdeen is a leafy suburb, and Stevie was a road sweeper. Through the night the wind had whipped through the trees, blown over the odd wheelie bin, and the pavement was a mess.

I was walking along Carden Place and stopped to say hello. Stevie wasn’t happy. It was obvious from the way he used his brush, like a defensive weapon pushing back the forces of chaos. You can say a lot about someone’s emotional inner climate by the way they use a brush!

It wasn’t just the litter; it was the carpet of green leaves, twigs and occasional branches that obviously annoyed him. “It’s July”, he said. Stevie poured so much heartfelt complaint into that two word answer. And I could see where he was coming from. Leaves are for October, when they have the blowing machines and extra folk to do the tidying up. And it was his day to do the streets that were tree lined – he even showed me the highlighted map of his day’s work.

I thought then, and I’ve thought a lot about it since. The wind of the Spirit of God blows where and when God pleases. The Holy Spirit takes us by surprise, inconveniences us, propels us from behind and pushes us forward, blows in our faces and wakes us up. “You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with those who are born of the Spirit” (John 3.8)

And sometimes the Holy Spirit gets in the way of our tidiness, tears up our wee roadmaps of what we plan to do with our day. Other times the Spirit blows when we don’t expect it, and is not required to explain or apologise for any inconvenience caused. It is one of the pivotal moments in the history of the church of Jesus’ followers, that the sign of the Spirit’s arrival was the sound of a rushing mighty wind. The result for that scared group of disciples, hiding away and silenced by their fears, was a regenerated hopefulness, a reckless boldness, and an overwhelming need to throw open the doors and follow Jesus out into a world where the wind blows and new languages of love, grace and hope are spoken.

I wonder sometimes if we occasionally have a Stevie attitude to the disruptive, creative, unpredictability of the presence and power and purposes of the Holy Spirit, blowing through our comfort zones, upsetting our set ways, tugging at us and even pushing us from behind with the latent energy of the Spirit of Life.

The work of the Holy Spirit, especially in the book of Acts, is the creation of the community of Jesus. Sure there is the miracle of the Gospel preached in whatever languages were understood by all the people in the busy cosmopolitan city of Jerusalem. The list of ethnic diversity in Acts 2.9-11 is always fun to read out loud. Healing and preaching, boldness and joy, grace and generosity, hopefulness and fellowship, compassion and courage – these and more were the gathering evidence that God was at work. The Holy Spirit was let loose on the world, a world which crucified Jesus and in which resurrection had negated the worst the world could do.

The stable centre of all this is described in Acts 2.42, and this too is the work of the Holy Spirit. “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayers.” Christian community is not something we create; it is the gift of the Holy Spirit who takes of the things of Jesus, explains them to our hearts and minds, draws us together, and orchestrates our gifts.

Quite understandably, the continuing disruption of our church life by the pandemic has deprived us of much that we have previously known and experienced together as a church. We don’t know how the future will look. What we do know is:

1. i) Jesus our risen Lord, will build his church just as he promised.
2. ii) The wind of the Holy Spirit blows where God pleases and will mean changes, disruption, and the hard work of being the people of God right here and right now.

iii) It is the work of the Holy Spirit to equip us, sustain us, guide us, energise us, and impel us forward to God’s future.

Yes, I too have a lot of sympathy with Stevie. Sometimes in the plans and purposes of God there are more leaves in July than in October! But don’t look at the leaves; listen to the sound of the wind, the loud, rushing movements of the Holy Spirit in the world.

   Spirit of holiness, wisdom and faithfulness,
   wind of the Lord, blowing strongly and free:
   strength of our serving and joy of our worshipping
   Spirit of God bring your fullness to me, to us, to your people.

Your friend and pastor,    

Jim Gordon

There is beauty in stones thrown together randomly over who know how long. The lapidary motion of the waves works a slow and relentless friction, and produces over time a softness of line and tone out of all proportion to the hardness and resistance of the material. I've often thought a human mind can be just as intransigent to the changes and influences of the forces around us. Or that the human heart likewise is capable of being moulded and shaped if it is exposed to those same environmental forces and movements.

Some years ago I wrote several Haiku expressing the delight and satisfaction of looking closely at the cobbles on the beach, and simply wondering at the randomness of relentlessness; or, to put it otherwise, being amazed at the results of millions upon millions of accidental collisions of stone with stone. Inevitably I pondered the parallel, or contrast, with how human community works.

A friendship over time begins to shape and form attitudes, affections, opinions and thought. I think of several of my closest friends and know that long conversations, time spent in each other's company, outbursts of laughter and sadness shared, and all those gestures of kindness, gift and affection that turn a relationship into a sacrament, these have shaped and formed who I am. That same friendship will have survived disagreement, disappointment, lengths of time when one or other has struggled and hurt, or been worried and uncertain, but always, always, the shaping of human character and relationships by those encounters by which something of our love, respect and commitment rubs off on them, or they on us, and we are again nudged towards inner change.

Or so it seems to me. The Haiku is a form that I have come to use as a way of reducing the amount of words needed to distil truth. There is a discipline in the self-constraint that sharpens the truth, and therefore makes the point. At the same time, in writing Haiku, there is a recognition of the necessary limitations of words to convey our deep and complex selves to others, who are similarly deep and complex selves.

That yearning for communication, community and communion, is one of the mysteries of those friendships that endure and grow through the lengths of our days, with their tidal rhythms shaping and enhancing who we are becoming. Of such rich encounters, these words try to speak.

       Remorseless friction,

      waves lapidary tumbling,                                 Tones in harmony

      the beauty of grey.                                            well rounded community

                                                                                     of shaped difference. 

      Cobbled together,

      aeons of geology,                                                 Pebbles of friendship

      placed by time and tide.                                     in easy togetherness;

                                                                                       colour and contrast.

For as long as I can remember I have loved mosses and lichens and all the locations where they are to be found. As a boy much of the days and evenings were spent tramping over miles of moorland, climbing over old drystane dykes, squelching through marsh and bog, or walking into and through woods and pine forests. In all of these places I became aware of this lovely green stuff, and how it slowly and gently covers stone and wood, a natural and beautiful form of organic upholstery. 

Over these months we have taken to walking in the woods, some of them on our doorstep, others further afield, though not too far. Several are old forests, planted in the 19th Century, and in all that time trees have grown, seeded, and fallen;they have shed their leaves and needles year on year, until the forest floor feels like the best Axminster carpets. For those who might not have heard of Axminster, in this age of convenience laminated floor covering, allow them to introduce themselves:

"Axminster Carpets has been synonymous with carpet luxury and craftsmanship for over 250 years. We are Britain's oldest, best known and most prestigious carpet designer and manufacturer." So there! 

These woods and forests are old, maybe some of them as old as Axminster, and they are the perfect environment for mosses and lichens to flourish. What I've noticed, and once you notice it you start seeing it often, is the way moss inhabits and enfolds old tree stumps. It's almost as if the tree having gone, there's now space and enough residual organic nutrition to entertain those plants that don't need much of anything other than some hospitable living room, some occasional light, and the nearness of water.

What I've found fascinating is the capacity of moss to fill in the spaces, to cover the nakedness of rocks, and to upholster tree trunks and roots. When Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, I know he wasn't thinking of the flora of the North East of Scotland. Nor was he making oblique references to bryology or lichenology. But the word that comes to mind when I look at, walk on, or step over, moss, is a word like meek. As Jesus used the word reported in the Gospels, the two English words used most often to translate it are meek, and gentle. There's nothing showy, loud or attention grabbing about moss. But once you notice it, you begin to see it, and it becomes part of the background pleasure of what we see. 

Take this tree stump for instance. It's old, broken and all that remains of a tree long gone. But its sharp points and jagged outlines are gentled by slowly encroaching mosses, providing a new habitat for who knows how many wee beasties and other living things.

Behind it is an ancient drystane dyke, and all around it the softening lines of moss covered stones, and alongside it a young holly tree. A dead tree stump is an encourager of life, sculptured by the years and clothed in shades of living green.

The meek shall inherit the earth. Those who gently intrude into places of little promise, and make them live again. Those whose presence makes possible new environments and living spaces and possibilities. Those who provide background colour and cover, texture and tone. Moss is a miracle of the mundane, a sacrament of life's patient persistence, a parable of change and decay in the cycle and circle of life. The moss covered rock is an interface of ancient geology and transient plant forms. The tree stump slowly clothed with moss bears testimony to what used to be, and what is now becoming. Moss is a specialist in slow, an understatement, but a true statement, of life finding ways to downsize and survive.

There have been times when walking in the woods and coming across old moss-covered tree stumps, familiar melancholic words have resurfaced: "Change and decay in all around I see, O Thou who changest not abide with me.." I know. Life's hard enough just now without humming funereal tunes. But actually I don't find those words depressing, or melancholic. They simply say what is. Change and decay are built into life, all of life, and each life. The Creator and giver of life  transcends transience, and is both Light and Life.

The moss covered tree stump is simply a reminder that we live in the temporary now. When I see the modest beauty of life at the later stages in such a photo, the deeper instinct is to trust the abiding presence of the One who calls us to live in the temporary now with an eye on the eternal Now. The mystery of our existence is beyond our fathoming; but the mundane miracle of moss is at least a reminder that our life is rooted and grounded in Love beyond our knowing.  

Yesterday was a day of high literary significance for me! It involved the delivery of a new chair, as pictured. On the wise assumption that reading is enhanced by comfort, context and location, I decided on a chair that fits my current size, shape and literary purposes. It's a small armchair, which fits me and suits me. I deliberately avoided choosing one of those chairs that are so comfortable and spacious, it's easier to fall asleep than to read. This wee beauty fits exactly into the space by the window and the radiator, near the heat and light.

This is a reading chair. No, that's not what it's called or how it's styled. But that will be its purpose; a place to sit and read, think, pray and listen. The study is already that kind of place of course, but there's a difference between reading, studying and consulting books at the desk, and reading and paying attention to one particular book as it is read from start to finish. 

For that you need comfort, space, and perhaps the deliberate training of the mind that, when you sit here, in this chair, you are moving into a different mode of learning, thinking and being. Over a lifetime of reading you learn to distinguish between reading that is informative, or formative or transformative; some books are a combination of these.

I'm thinking that at this stage of my life, I could do with a place for unhurried reflection, or imaginative rethinking of ideas that have become too comfortable and familiar. A place too for storytelling and story reading as a way of exploring how I have come to be me. But definitely a place for non-acquisitive enjoyment of what others think, feel and have experienced in their own search for understanding, wisdom and a life worth living.

I've had a reading chair before, of course, and I've often wondered why over the years I slowly became fixed to the desk. I blame the laptop, and the long learned and lived habits of writing on a keyboard to gather, accumulate, organise and harvest the fruits of all that reading! It's more complicated than that, but there's no doubt that information technology, the online world encyclopedia, and the infinite library of knowledge accessed by keyboard, has revolutionised the way we think, learn, and learn to think. Every day I benefit from this revolution like everyone else, and I'm grateful for it and would find life without the online world so much more limited. But it has its limits, this online world of unlimited information.

Which brings me back to books, and a reading chair. A book is such a beautiful concept, and its inbuilt finitude is an essential element of that beauty. For example. A novel creates a world in which the story is told; you read it and much that makes you human is invited, persuaded, even compelled to respond. But a novel has an ending and a resolution. And it is just that capacity to linger in the memory as a continuing lesson in human experience, that makes the novel such a powerful agent of transformation. 

Poetry, on the other hand, provokes and encourages an openness to other ways of seeing the world, ourselves, and what matters. But a poem too is finite, and indeed its form and constraint are essential poetic disciplines, requiring the reader to work at it, to feel and think and imagine new ways to the truth of who they are. One of the finest poets understood this deeply, and well: "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of one's self." (Seamus Heaney) 

Biography is the narrative of a life, and it matters greatly who writes it. Hagiography and hatchet jobs are the two extremes to be avoided. A well written biography has to be critically appreciative, selectively comprehensive, recount a narrative with impetus but interpreted and illumined by reflection on context, character and an evaluative honesty about the subject's achievement and significance. All of which depends on the integrity, skill, humanity and self-effacing instincts of the biographer.

As a theologian I read theology books, all the way through. Of course I do, you'd think that would be obvious. But I have in mind the kind of theology that unsettles untroubled complacency; writing and thinking about the mystery of God that provokes thought by asking awkward questions we'd prefer to silence; reading therefore theology that expands the dimensions of mind and heart to accommodate new ideas, because God is the new wine that bursts those useful and safe old conceptual wineskins that long ago were new but now need renewed. Not many theological books accomplish that. In my own reading they would perhaps fill a shelf or two if gathered together in one place. Which are they? That may be a post for another time.  

A reading chair, then, or at least this one, is for novels, poetry, biographies, theology, and other books intended to be read through, thought about, and allowed to linger in the mind, inform the imagination, and go on doing their work in the heart. So, what will be the first book read in the reading chair? The other day I took down a book I first read 8 years ago. It is more important today than it was then. So the first book will be a re-read: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs, (Oxford: 2011). I'll let you know how I get on.  

Just before the lock down in March, one of my friends who is an experienced mountaineer, had a serious and near fatal fall on a mountain in the Lake District. He lost his footing and his six hundred foot fall came to a halt just 20 feet short of a precipice. He was airlifted to hospital with fractures to his neck, left elbow and right ankle, and three deep cuts to his head which required 60 stitches, and a series of lacerations which were described by medics as looking like the gouge of a lion’s claw.

Last week Richard went back to thank the Mountain Rescue Team (MRT) and the A&E Dept. which received him and stabilised his condition. There were gifts, photos and emotional words of thank you. On his Facebook post about his visit there's a photo of Richard and a young nurse. “This is Laura”, he wrote. “She is the A&E nurse who looked after me for the evening after the helicopter delivered me to hospital in Carlisle. And, because I hadn't eaten anything for 12 hours, when Laura finished her shift – at midnight – she went to the 24-hour Tesco and bought me some food to eat and brought it to me on the ward, before heading home. That is called going the extra mile. Be like Laura.”

Richard is a Training Director with the Scottish Episcopal Church. He has spent many years developing mission strategy for the Church, was Principal of International Christian College where I first met him, and is still a key player in the formation of church leaders. What struck me about this story is the coincidence of human brokenness and the habits of kindness. Two people who had never met, are suddenly thrust into a relationship in which one is entirely dependent on the professional skill, and vocational commitment of the other.

Except visiting Tesco after midnight to buy food for a stranger is no part of a nursing degree, or a continuing professional development assignment. Which is a long, roundabout way to that other hillside, where Jesus made the radical suggestion, “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” Roman soldiers could give that order, and force someone to carry their equipment for a stated distance. People did that. But resented it, and did the minimum required.

Those who are children of God, followers of Jesus seeking to live by the rules of the Kingdom of God, act differently. By going a second mile we turn a duty into a gift, and constraint into freedom. We choose to be considerate, kind, of service to someone, beyond any claim they might have on us.

All of this had me thinking about how hard it is to make sense of what’s been happening these past months. Face coverings, physical distancing, hand hygiene, staying away from crowded places – no wonder folk are getting irritable, anxious, depressed and losing social confidence. And if I ask, “How best can I show the love of God in the shops, on the road, in conversation with neighbours”, perhaps it’s Laura the A&E nurse who has something to teach us about mission, service, grace and the enacted love of God. Go the second mile. Choose to do more than you need to. Live out of an overflow of grace. Make kindness the default setting of each encounter with another person. Use the element of surprise, do the unexpected, because the grace which has touched our lives in Christ is both of these – unexpected, and a surprise.

Have you ever wondered about the God who goes the second mile? “He was rich, but for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8.9) “God demonstrates his own love for us in this way; while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5.8) For Christians, going the second mile isn’t unheard of; it is simply to do things God’s way. Healing for our brokenness, forgiveness for our sins, kindness towards us in Christ, welcome to the least, last and lost, new creation for the heart in the power of the Spirit, springs of living water welling up to eternal life; God did none of that out of necessity, but from love. Grace is the gift of the second mile God, who in Christ came amongst us, walked with us, lived a sinless life of self-giving love, and when sinful humanity, ourselves included, have nothing left to offer, no further steps to take, He walked the second mile for us, to Calvary.

These are difficult times. But they are also times when Christians are called to witness to the God of the second mile. Kindness to anxious shoppers, understanding of people’s fear, attentive to those who struggle with loneliness, patience and restraint with folk who’ve just had enough, and that phone call, card, text, email that interrupts people’s feeling that no one takes much interest in them. As my friend Richard said, “Be like Laura.” As Paul said, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus”. Imagine a church being able to be called, by others, not themselves, "The People of the Second Mile"!

"Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 5.10)

It's an interesting thought that getting into trouble is inevitable for those who faithfully follow Jesus. You could argue that if as a Christian, my life is untroubled and in harmony with all that's going on around me, I have settled for less than the least of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. 

TheQuestions of justice, peace and mercy are not optional interests for those who are into that kind of thing. They lie at the heart of what it means to live as a child of God, to conduct ourselves as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, to be committed as a follower of Jesus.

Paul told the Roman believers, "The kingdom of God is…righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." (Rom 14.17) Christian living is counter cultural and endlessly questioning of all those everyday situations when people are treated unjustly, when life is made harder for the vulnerable, and people are diminished by systems loaded against them. Any reading of the Gospels confronts us with Jesus causing trouble for the powerful, questioning the acceptance of human suffering, challenging with anger and compassion the complacency of the rich, the powerful and those served best by the status quo. 

To be persecuted because of righteousness, means to be in trouble for not remaining silent about poverty that dehumanises, and hunger which demoralises. It is to notice, and pay attention to, and refuse to be complicit in structures and systems that grind down the poor, inflate the resources of the rich, create oceans and mountains of waste to satisfy the inordinate greed of global consumerism.

I know. That's all political, and whatever else the Sermon on the Mount was about, it was never spoken, remembered and written as a solution to global capitalism or as an alternative political platform for economic visionaries. Except that the underlying assumptions of the Beatitudes are full on contradictions of human life organised on assumptions of domination, exploitation, exclusion, individual self-interest, and life as economic and social rivalry.

In other words, the Sermon on the Mount sets the follower of Jesus on a collision course with all those forms of injustice that are built in assumptions of systemic power, constructed social worlds of exclusion, the reification of profit as the be all and end all of human life, and that contentment and complacency with the status quo so deeply characteristic of those for whom systems of exploitation are working well thank you very much.   

Which means to follow Jesus is to be out of step with the working assumptions of "the world", which in the New Testament is shorthand for "the way the world is organised." A Christian community is "a community of contradiction", "an incendiary fellowship", "a new humanity". Each of these phrases is the title of a book written by the Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood. They are telling phrases, and deeply indebted to the teaching of Jesus.

I suppose one way of quality checking our Christian obedience to Jesus is to ask if this Beatitude comes anywhere near reality in our life experience. And if not, we may wish to consider the world that is our daily world, of work, family, neighbourhood, and media mediated realities. When was I last persecuted for righteousness sake? When has my life been made harder by my protest at injustice, my persistent contradiction of lies, my questioning of the way things are for the poor, the hungry, the uncared for and the homeless?

I guess if I am living in a comfort zone, I'm doing this Christian thing all wrong. And I will only be Blessed, when my passion for righteousness, for things to be done rightly, justly, and humanely, ignites and fuels a life that cares enough to get into trouble for righteousness' sake.    
 

Matthew 5.9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” 

Who does God recognise as his children? Peace makers; bridge builders; reconciled reconcilers; lovers of enemies. Yes, that last one too. We are Christ’s ambassadors, ministers of reconciliation; not troublemakers, but peacemakers. God’s children bear the Father’s likeness, and are living reminders of “the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus.” (Hebrews 12.20)

Interestingly that Benediction in Hebrews comes a few verses after these no nonsense words: “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone…” v14 Being a peacemaker isn’t a part time interest, or a speciality for some; it is a barcode identity marker of the Christian. One of the more ridiculous ironies in the history of the Church, and in the history of many a local congregation, is that those called to be peacemakers have been more interested in being troublemakers.

Before Paul ever gets to the Fruit of the Spirit he draws up a mind boggling list of the Fruits of the flesh – you can read them all here at Galatians 5.19-21. Only then, read 5.22-23. Those who are led by the Spirit walk in the Spirit, are enabled by the Spirit, become instruments of the Spirit. Hence St Francis’ prayer, “Lord make me an instrument of your peace.”

In the office when likes and dislikes harden into alliances of them and us; waiting at the checkout and the person ahead of you has a handful of money off vouchers and it takes ages; the driver who ignores the lane closure signs and cuts in ahead of those sticking to the limit; racist or discriminatory comments left unchallenged; family fallouts that start as a wee line in the sand and threaten to become a grand canyon of grievances; the email that seems curt, inconsiderate, even just plain ignorant (in the Scottish sense!). Be like Florence Allshorn.

Florence Allshorn was a missionary who gave up the mission field and founded a College for missionary training because she had had enough of missionaries arguing, narking, competing, creating toxic relationships and contradicting the very Gospel they were called and sent to preach. She wrote in her journal, “All around us are situations going wrong, and our Lord asks us to share in his work and redeem them.”

Be like Florence Allshorn. Be an instrument of peace, a peace-builder, a peace maker, a peace giver. That way you begin to mirror the God of peace who in Christ reconciles all things, making peace by the blood of the cross.” (Col 1.21) Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Shalom.