Aug 21

Rev Gav

Encountering God

Long Read. During Hurricane Ernesto, Rev Gav reflected on how we encounter God in and through each other.

1. The quest for a God-encounter

Times of Prayer Ministry

When I was a young charismatic Christian, the Holy Spirit was something we invited into our church meetings. After a time of musical worship, singing song songs back-to-back, we would have a Bible reading and a message, and then, finally we would have a time of what we called Prayer Ministry. We would begin this time by welcoming the Holy Spirit to come and then we expected to be filled and empowered with the Spirit. We would wait in silence and then speak in tongues or receive a word of knowledge that we would share with the congregation, for example, “Someone here has a pain in their left elbow.” The person with the pain in their left elbow would come forward for prayer, and we would pray for them, and as we prayed we would ask for ‘more’ of the Spirit to come, praying, “More of you, Lord.” The prayer ministry would continue and people would gradually drift away with some remaining for further prayer, until all of us would go back to our homes and lives snug in the knowledge that we had had an encounter with God. Or had we?

Why wasn’t I healed?

One of my enduring memories of those times, whether in my home church or at a church conference, was the number of people who told me, “I didn’t feel anything. I waited, I asked, but nothing happened.” They were not ‘slain in the Spirit’. They did not speak in tongues. They did not receive a revelation from God. They felt abandoned, but cheered on by the rest of us who had experienced a supernatural encounter with God. Was this how it was supposed to work? Some people encountered God and some did not?

Each year, our church would attend a charismatic church conference where ten thousand Christians would camp, gather, and attend different workshop streams, and worship together in large tents or conference rooms where we would sing along to loud Christian rock music and have extended times of prayer ministry in the power of the Holy Spirit. When my children were young, we took them along, but one year became the last year we attended as a family. As I write this, I can feel the tears begin to rise within me, such was the emotional pain we endured on that occasion.

My daughter, Gemma, has hemiplegia. Hemiplegia is a form of cerebral palsy that affects half the body. In my daughter’s case, it affects the motor control on the left side of her body. You would hardly know to look at her, as she copes wonderfully, but she carries herself a certain way. She would describe her condition as feeling like her limbs on one side are constricted. She cannot wiggle her fingers as fast on one hand, and she has one leg shorter than the other, forcing her to tip-toe on one foot. As a child she would trip a great deal, and she had all sorts of procedures to try and help her walk properly. She had botox injections, calf-lengthening operations, and wore day and night splints.

At the church conference, there was, for want of a better way of putting it, an emphasis on miraculous leg-lengthening. Can you believe it? Of all things, there was a focus on this particular healing ministry. Well, you can imagine how Gemma felt, this plucky, bold, 9-year old girl, who had all the faith in the world. Over and over again, people with one leg shorter than the other claimed to have felt and seen their legs lengthen during prayer ministry, including one of the main speakers at the conference, a pastor from a Vineyard church in the USA. Then on the second to last night, another pastor stood up and claimed that God was going to heal children. Gemma was convinced, with a faith that I have never witnessed, not before nor since, that she was going to be healed, and she went forward for prayer ministry.

As a parent in this situation, a parent who is a Christian, and who has witnessed his little girl go through so much pain and anguish, what could I do, knowing that if she was not healed, it could crush her faith, but at the same time not wishing to limit what God could do?

She wasn’t healed.

I cried. And cried. And cried, for my little girl who showed the purest trust in her Lord, and who left asking, “Why wasn’t I healed?”

Something had to change

My relationship with God changed that day, and so began a long journey — one I am still on — where I try to understand how to encounter God, and how to be ‘filled’ with the Holy Sprit. Somehow, the format of worship and encountering God, where encounters were randomly dispensed, did not feel right and did not fit with the pattern or hope found in scripture. I felt like I no longer fit in that form of church, yet, I had no other model with which to compare.

At the other end of the charismatic scale were what I call the ‘contemplatives’, and during my spiritual journey towards priesthood, I encountered many of them. I had Spiritual Directors with whom I met on a regular basis, and they all preferred a quieter spirituality, encountering God, not standing with hands raised in the rock-music filled stadium, but in the quiet silence of a garden, labyrinth, or cathedral cloister. Perhaps this would proved a better way to encounter God? I spent annual retreats in monasteries and convents, engaged in Gregorian chant, meals in silence, quiet times alone reading books from the giants of spirituality from Christian antiquity. Surely this would lead to encountering God?

I would sit or lie in the quiet, asking God to speak, and it is true that I often felt I had heard from God — no more and no less than I did in those times of loud, expressive charismatic worship, but there was still a sense of the numinous in those special times dedicated to spending time with God. I knew, and still know, in my heart that real, lived, experiential encounters with God change everything for the believer. It was supernatural encounters with God that had confirmed my faith as an 18-year old gap-year student hitch-hiking in Australia, and it would be supernatural encounters with God that would bring people to know Jesus.

When I first came to faith, I made a choice — a conscious decision — to believe in Christ, but my prayer to God was (and I do not recommend this), “Okay God, you have two weeks to prove you are real.” And God did. Over and over again. I had experience after experience that lasted well after the two weeks, and as far as I was concerned, there was no looking back. I was now, and forever would be, a Christian.

And so it was that I spent the next twenty years seeking encounters with God wherever they might be found — in the revival tent or the medieval abbey. As I reflect back on those years, it almost makes me chuckle, as I realise my quest to encounter God had me looking in entirely the wrong places, and when I think of the times I did encounter God, they all had one common denominator — other Christians.

2. A different eschatological perspective

It’s a hell of a problem!

I grew up with a pretty orthodox or mainstream idea about what Christianity was all about. There was a heaven and a hell, and Jesus came to save us from hell so that we could go to heaven when we die. Salvation meant believing in Jesus so I, and others could be saved. Evangelism (telling other people about Jesus) was all about this ‘gospel’ message, and sensing that I was called to be an evangelist, it meant telling them this ‘good news’, however, it did not seem to be very good news at all. It was not good news that unbelievers would go to an eternal punishment, and it was not good news that all creation (which I happened to like very much) would be destroyed and that we would have a disembodied existence in heaven. Of course, proponents of this theology say it is good news that we can be saved, but it really is not good news is it?

Over time, this black and white theology did not stack up and there had to be lots of caveats to deal with the blatant holes big enough to drive a whole fleet of buses through. How could a loving God eternally punish people for something many had little or control over? That is not loving, and even I who am unholy would never subject my own children to such a fate, no matter what they had done or the choices they made. Perhaps then, hell meant a place where God is not, but oh, hang on, if God is everywhere, there cannot be a place God is not! Perhaps then, hell means simply non-existence, something theologians call annihilationism? But then, why would Jesus reference hell at all?

Studying theology, I decided to make my own investigations into hell, and discovered that the word hell does not exist in the Bible at all. “What?” I hear you cry! Yes, you can open your Bible and you can find the word ‘hell’ but, and this is a big but, there are three different words and each word is translated as hell, and when you discover the meaning of these three words, it changes everything.

The three words for hell in the New Testament are Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna. Sheol and Hades are the same thing — the resting place of the dead. Sheol is the Hebrew word and Hades is the Greek word. Of the eleven or so times hell is mentioned in the New Testament, only three times is the word Sheol or Hades used, and importantly, neither is a place of eternal torment, but a very temporary resting place. Now this is where it gets interesting. Jesus most commonly used the term Gehenna, and although he used it as a metaphor, Gehenna was and is a real, physical, place on earth.

Gehenna was the valley outside the city walls of Jerusalem where they tipped and burned all their rubbish. If the walled city of Jerusalem was a metaphor for God’s kingdom, Gehenna was a metaphor for all that was outside God’s kingdom. In other words, there is no mention (apart from a brief allusion to an amorphous Sheol and Hades) of a created place outside of heaven and earth where people go who do not turn to Christ. Hell does not exist.

So this begs the question, what did Jesus mean then by using Gehenna as a metaphor? Well, he was saying, if you do not get with God’s program, and if you are not motivated by love and live a life in accordance with God’s ways, then what is your life worth? It is only good to be taken to the city dump where it gets burned up and eaten by worms (Mark 9:42-50). You can read other messages from Jesus in the same light. Think about how he talked about us being salt in the world but if salt loses its saltiness it is only worthy of being thrown out or trampled underfoot.

It is worth pointing out that Jesus used hyperbole a lot — exaggerated language to make a point. When Jesus said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, then chop it off, or if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out,” he did not mean literally! You do not see many one-eyed, one-handed Christians walking around. We know it was hyperbole but that Jesus was making a very serious point. Similarly, when Jesus was talking about Gehenna, he was using hyperbole to express the seriousness of getting right with God and becoming agents of a new way of being.

Salvation is bigger than you think

A second problem with the idea that salvation is about going to heaven when you die is that Jesus himself did not seem to use the word in that way. For example, when the tax collector Zaccheus changed his life around, Jesus said, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Jesus did not mean Zaccheus was now going to heaven when he died. He meant that salvation was happening in the very real and physical present — in the here and now.

In the same way, the Apostle Paul used the word salvation in all three tenses — past, present, and future. In other words he was saved, is being saved, and he will be saved. Salvation is therefore not a prayer you pray once but a process that transforms lives and the world around us. When Jesus came to save us, he did not mean to whisk us out of this world to a disembodied heaven, but to transform us into the people God created us to be.

But it is also bigger than this. Salvation is not just for us but for all creation. John writes in his gospel that Jesus was sent because, “God so loved the world,” not because, “God so loved humanity”. Salvation is for us and for all creation and as salvation is a process, then God is in the process of saving the world — all of it. This gospel, or ‘good news’ is actually starting to sound like good news!

How does it all end?

The final problem with the whole ‘Jesus came to save us so that we can go to heaven when we die’ theology is that it speaks of an end time when Jesus will finally come, what Christians call The Second Coming, but hold on, can we not meet Jesus in the here and now?

I once heard a talk by the eminent theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, who asserted that Jesus is in the process of returning, and I confess, that at the time, my head just popped. It did not compute! It went against everything I had been told from the pulpit. The point of Christianity was to get as many people as possible ‘saved’ before Jesus came again and it was judgement day, and game over for anyone still alive who did not believe. Yet, Jürgen’s words stuck in a corner of my mind, and like a piece of grit in a sock, just would not go away, for although I believed in the second coming of Jesus, I also knew it was and is possible to meet Jesus in the here and now. The only way these two doctrines could be reconciled was if what Jürgen said was true — Jesus is in the process of coming now — so how does that work?

3. The gospel is bigger and better than we imagine

Going beyond the full stop

The gospel message as I knew it was ‘Jesus died for our sins’ and even if we tack on the ‘so we can go to heaven when we die’ it still sells the gospel short. Way short. The kingdom that Jesus came to inaugurate was bigger and better than anyone had hoped. The purpose of Jesus life, death, and resurrection was, yes, that we might be made clean and holy before God, but not as an end in itself. It was not so we can respond with, “Thank you very much!” and carry on in the knowledge that we are now safe. The purpose of Jesus making us holy was so that God could come and make home in us — so that we could be united with God in the here and now and forever. The Spirit of God — the Holy Spirit — could now fill everyone who asks. At this point it is probably a good idea to reflect on the very nature of God. What is the nature or character of this God that makes home in us? If we are united with God through receiving the Holy Spirit, what is that going to mean for us?

The Christian understanding of God is that God is both one and community. Quite a number of people struggle to comprehend the idea of the Holy Trinity — God being one and also three persons — but to me it makes perfect sense. God is love and love has to be expressed. Love cannot exist in isolation. Before creation existed, God was, and God was still love. That love was expressed in what theologians call the ‘cosmic dance’. The Father expressing love to the Son and to the Spirit, the Spirit expressing love to the Father and to the Son, and the Son expressing love to the Father and to the Spirit. God’s love found expression in creation and creation is an object of God’s love. Again, we think of John’s gospel where John writes, “God so loved the world,” and it is this loving God — the loving Holy Spirit – that makes home in us.

The Holy Spirit does not become unloving when present in our lives, but quite the opposite. The Holy Spirit, being in very nature love, is always outwards looking and always looking to the interests of others. If we pair the idea that God is in the process of saving the world, and Jesus meets is in the here and now through being united with the Holy Spirit, then it becomes crystal clear that we have a role in God’s salvific plan, and we are divinely equipped to express the love of Jesus to the world. Love transforms and the Spirit transforms us to become more like Jesus, and that love flows out from us to others and to the world around us. We are heading for a time when, as the writer of the Book of Revelation (7:13-17) puts it, there will be no more pain, no more suffering, and no more tears. We are heading for a time when God’s kingdom will fully come, when the world will be fully restored and renewed, and today, we are called to join in with the ongoing mission of God in the world.

This theological perspective makes so much sense of scripture. When Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you,” (Luke 17:21) we understand what he meant. When Joel (Joel 2:28-29) wrote that in those last days the Spirit would be poured out, we get it. When Jesus said that people would no longer worship in temples or on mountains but in spirit and in truth (John 4:24), we finally click. The physical human manifestation of Jesus could not be everywhere. Jesus had to return to the Father, and because we were made right with God through his life, death, and resurrection (the whole taking on the sins of the world bit), the Holy Spirit could be sent into the hearts of every believer. If you are a Christian and you have received the Holy Spirit, then you have the very awesome, majestic, and powerful presence of God within you.

God seeks to save the whole world, and we are living expressions of the Kingdom of God that grows like a mustard seed and spreads through the whole dough. Oh, what a shame some of us Christians have made it about us and about our own personal salvation. Oh how I now cringe when we sing songs such as, “When we all get to heaven” as if this is the point of it all. Friends, we are called to be part of a much bigger story, the story of God at work in the world. The gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for us and for all creation.

The Jesus Manifesto

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus sets out his vision for what God’s kingdom looks like. Blessed are the poor. Why? Not because one day they will go to heaven, but because in God’s kingdom in the here and now, the poor are looked after. Over and over again, Jesus communicated his message of love, what he had come to do, and how it would open the door to the Holy Spirit being able to be united with everyone who asks in his name. He used his strongest words against those who sought to thwart or inhibit God’s work in the world, or who sought to exclude others from inheriting the Kingdom of God. Jesus said, “Come unto me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The message from Jesus, this good news, this gospel, is that all are welcome, and the promise of God’s presence in the here and now and forever.

As well as the misrepresentation of the word hell, there is another bug-bear of mine, and that is the phrase ‘eternal life’. Christians have used that phrase exclusively to mean ‘life after death’ but this is not what the phrase means. Think about it. Jesus says we can have eternal ‘life’ and life is what we experience in the here and now. In other words, eternal ‘life’ or salvation means to have life in all its fulness in the here and now and forever. Over and over, Jesus reminded us he came to give us life — a physical, experiential, here-and-now living life. So this leads us to think about what happens when we die, for I have not ignored the fact that none of us live (in this life) forever?

4. How it all ends

In the Anglican funeral service, at the committal by the graveside, the priest uses the words, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life…” I almost want to put the word ‘continued’ in there so it reads, ‘resurrection to continued eternal life’ because eternal life, as I have explained, is what happens from the moment you give your life to Jesus. So what is this resurrection of which Jesus spoke?

Christians believe in a bodily resurrection, that it is not our spirits or souls that live on, but our whole being — our bodies and our minds. The idea of resurrection was believed by many at the time of Jesus, and also by Jesus himself, but it was confirmed when Jesus was resurrected to a new physicality. Jesus was not resurrected as a spirit, and the gospel writers make sure we get the point. They even have the disciples thinking Jesus was a ghost but have Jesus asking for something to eat and allowing them to touch his physical, resurrected body. The body matters, and if you were ever in doubt of the value and importance of God’s physical creation, it is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus was the first-born into a new created order. This, again, is good news! Why? Because we too will be physically resurrected and this means we will be able to touch, eat, laugh, hug, and experience all wonderful things that being a created being has to offer. Yet it gets better, for the new creation, albeit physical, will be different. Jesus could walk through walls and materialise and dematerialise at will. It is going to be awesome!

We are destined for a world that is completely saved, restored, and renewed, and although, from our perspective as time-limited, created beings, we are not yet there, yet it is where we are all heading. Reconciling scripture and how Jesus could believe in the resurrection at the ‘last day’ and also say to the thief on the cross that, “today you will be in paradise with me,” my understanding is that when we die we are outside of time and in the blink of an eye we transition to the last day when all those who have died are resurrected to the completely restored and renewed creation. From our perspective, being in time, those who have died are ‘resting’ or ‘asleep’, but it is true to say they are already with God and, in the words of the Oracle from The Matrix, “what will really bake your noodle” is that as far as they are concerned we are there with them, yet as far as we are concerned, we are simply waiting to catch up. For all who have died, the resurrection has happened. For us who are still alive, we are still waiting for it to happen.

The point of all this is that life matters. Creation matters. This world matters. It matters to the God who is outside time who created it, it matters to the incarnate God who came in the person of Jesus who healed the sick and cured the lame, and it matters to God’s Spirit who lives and is present within us. The Christian journey, if you will, is to align ourselves with the way of love and the will of God. God’s presence in us does not mean we become automatons or robots. No, God has given us free will and will never take that away from us. God, being love, will never override our own wills. We are given great power but also great responsibility. We can choose to be led or driven by the Spirit, or we can choose to go our own way and ignore the leading of the Spirit. I cannot think of anything more disappointing than being given the greatest gift in the universe and then placing it on a shelf to gather dust in our hearts. The greatest adventure in life begins when you open yourself up to the filling of the Holy Spirit. Not only do you begin the process of transformation in your own life — becoming more patient, kind, generous, and self-controlled — but you begin to see the world as God sees it, and be the very voice and hands of Jesus in a broken and hurting world.

5. So what is church then?

So far, I hope I have laid some of the foundations or groundwork for this final chapter as we return to the original question of how we encounter God.

There is this bit in the Bible where the disciples ask Jesus to show them God, and Jesus replies with words to the effect of, “Don’t you recognise me? I’ve been with you all this time!” (John 14:8-9). This is, again, another pointer to how it is when we are filled with the Spirit of God and reminds me of a man I met recently who said to me, “I sit in church every week waiting to encounter God,” and I want to respond, “Have you not recognised God who has been with you all this time?” The fact of the matter is that we encounter God through each other. It feels a bit like an anticlimax now I have written it, but this is the key point I want to make and the reason for writing this whole little essay. We encounter God through each other!

I spent so much of my life limiting encounters with God to special places or worship services, be they charismatic or contemplative. I longed for a direct supernatural experience of God, but every significant supernatural encounter with God I have ever experienced has been through the Holy Spirit working through another Christian. Every single one. Yes, I have ‘sensed’ God speaking to me through scripture, and have ‘sensed’ God speaking through me for the sake of others, but for me, Rev Gav, the human being, God has spoken to me through others, and this makes perfect sense! The Holy Spirit, as I have described, is love and love needs to be expressed. The Holy Spirit is therefore always outward-looking and looking to the interests of others, therefore, the outward-looking Holy Spirit in others is looking towards me and looking to my interests.

Over time, I have learned to recognise the Spirit speaking to me through others. If it is unloving, impatient, unkind, selfish, arrogant, or rude, then it is not of God. If it is humble, selfless, gentle, wise, kind, sacrificial, and loving, then yes, it is of God. The Apostle Paul reminded us to test the spirits, and the test is simple: hold whatever is offered to you against the criteria of love, and if in any doubt, hold lightly to the offering and await confirmation.

Church is a group of people joining in with the ongoing mission of God in the world, with each member filled with the Holy Spirit and doing their best to follow the Spirit’s lead. For the stranger who walks into the midst of such a Christian community, we hope and pray they encounter Jesus in each of us. For the broken-hearted who sits in a church pew crying out, “Where are you God?” it should be us who are led to them to bring Christ’s comfort, love, and a healing prayer. As Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) wrote:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

I once attended a church that had no refreshments after the worship and I felt bereft, for how could we minister to each other though the indwelling of the Holy Spirit if we do not spend time with each other? I try and make sure that any church of which I am a part, recognises the vital importance of our fellowship together, whether online or face-to-face.

Can you, for a moment, imagine what a church community would be like where each person recognises and responds to the Holy Spirit working in and through the other? This, I suppose, is the vision for Fab Church, a radically inclusive and welcoming community that recognises the sanctity of people, not just because they are made in the image of God, but because they carry the very presence of God. We must be expectant to encounter God in and through each other, and perhaps to even look for it, and of course we must be open, and welcome the Spirit to work through us.

The beauty of the Kingdom of God is that it belongs to the meek. You do not have to be a mighty person of God to be filled with the Holy Spirit, just someone who says, “okay.” It is, as the Apostle Paul reminds us at the end of his letter to the church in Ephesus (Ephesians 3:14-20) the power of God working through you that bring blessings to others and to the world. Whether whole or broken, old or new, kept or neglected, all you need to do is be God’s vessel of love, now and forever.

Amen.