This chapter is called Incarnation. It made me so excited about what
God did in Jesus coming to earth. It has made me fall in love with
Jesus all over again and become inspired by how He revealed the
fullness of God!
The chapter actually begins and ends with incredible poems which
really amazed me. But I\’m not gonna type them up, you\’ll have to buy
the book or come round to have a quick read of them! The following is
all quotes from Kester Brewins book. Please reply with your thoughts /
opinions / objections / questions.
Having waited, waited, waited for so long, the anticipation building,
the hype and rumour and false Messiahs, and all the while things
getting worse with occupations and punitive taxation\’s and military
machinations…into all this chaos Christ slipped virtually unnoticed.
How else did we expect God to enter the world?
The Old Testament is a story of our getting to know God and our
maturing spiritually. One can imagine Gods frustration in trying to
communicate with the people of the old testament. Having to channel
messages through the ranks of priests and scribes and judges led to a
kind of divine Chinese whispers, with layer upon layer of
interpretation and translation and subtle personal agenda being
carefully added until the original truth was almost completely
occluded from the people it was meant for.
God understood that the only way to communicate his character
truthfully and without distortion was to bypass the intermediaries and
to speak to us himself. The old way caricatured God as an angry,
malevolent revolutionary who demanded regular sacrifice to appease his
wrath.
And so we turn from Malachi to Matthew, those 400 quiet years reduced
to a single leaf of 20gsm paper, we waited and grieved, our Old
testament closed and finished in a metaphorical death and silence. It
was a cooling off period if you will; a chance for us to reflect and
break clean from the old, so that when Christ came we were able to see
this reborn God afresh from a new angle - a God of compassion and
wisdom and grace and non-violent force and loving holiness - not that
he wasn\’t these before.
We still take up our sword to do battle against Darwins and Galileos,
and in doing so put on the old masks of an embattled, violent and
intolerant God. If only we would look beyond our immature projections
and egocentric world views and contemplate what has been revealed to
us. God has been evolving, adapting and decentralising since
space-time began.
Go saw that the only way out of this old testament misconception and
misrepresentation was rather than shout down to us from the top of
Everest, God would climb down into the valleys below and join us - an
incarnate being in the same body as us, and therefore able to speak to
us unmediated in our own language and idiom.
Totally within character, God saw what needed to be done. He stripped
away all power, might, knowledge, glory, metaphysicality…all that
could obviously signify deity was ripped out.
Think again, God says.
Think again.
Free your minds from the old.
\”I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?\”
God knew that the only way to overcome the crisis of representation
and communication was to give up on the top-down approach that
demanded change by revolution, and be reborn, to re-emerge and change
things by evolution from the bottom up.
The church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood some 2500
years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as
narrow-minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings,
ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready
to lend support for unjust wars…And so we must do as God did, as
Christ commanded and exemplified: we must be born again. Become
nothing, removed of strength and power and voice and means and
language…
We must re-emerge and grow up again in the place we are meant to
serve. Understand it, learn from it, be in it, love it, listen to it,
wait 30 years before speaking to it.
Those looking for God to do \”regime change\” are again projecting and
co-opting like Joshua. They are stuck at stage 3. Only evolution
changes the genes, the whole person, the spirit - but it takes time
and requires patience.
At the end of his moving book of reflections on the 11 September
disaster, Rowan Williams meditates on why he title the book \”Writing
in the Dust\”:
\”When the accusation is made of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus
first makes no reply but writes with his finger on the ground. What on
earth is he doing? He hesitates. He does not draw a line, fix an
interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be.
He allows a moment, in which people are given time to see themselves
differently precisely because he refuses to make the sense they want.\”
God continues to \”write in the dust\”, refusing to offer immediate
solutions and pronounce hasty judgements.
As we wonder hoe the church could change, i have suggested that first
we must begin by waiting. Second, I am going to suggest that, like
God, we must be born again. That we must re-emerge. That there will be
no revolution, only evolution.
The newness that will be born will be incomplete and immature. It will
be newness not fully formed and unable to speak It will be newness
defenceless and unable to justify itself to its seniors.
Too often we kill off new ideas and inspirations before secure roots
are put down. The other danger is of surrounding new growth with too
much to battle against - requiring it to justify its existence. We
must not demand it act like an adult, but allow it to be a child.
We need to re-emerge and be reborn into specific places and cultures
in order to become truly incarnate to them and reach them. Just as for
Christ, it will take immense courage.
On the other hand it will take no courage to sit at the comfortable
tables of the priests, and no courage to do surveys and censuses. The
quiet force of God\’s evolution will not be detected by those looking
for revival or those demanding reformation. It\’s direction is revealed
to those prepared to search the heavens and remain unimpressed with
the powerful.