Whatever you do, don’t overtake!

There is a narrow road with cars parked on both sides near my house. Buses and lorries often try to thread their way through and hold-ups are frequent. Sometimes careless drivers get stuck half way along the 200 yard “gauntlett” stretch facing a vehicle attempting to come the other way. The resulting standoff can last several minutes as cars queue up behind in both directions.

The result is fuming exhausts and even more fuming drivers while smirking pedestrians try not to show too much amusement at the resulting display of fallen human nature.

Yesterday, I pulled into a gap to let a delivery van pass in the opposite direction and a driver (gender unspecified to avoid prosecution) selfishly overtook me and blocked the way to oncoming traffic. I leapt out and tried to share a few choice insights about road etiquette but she pressed the central locking and stared straight ahead.

She is doubtless convinced she escaped death from road rage by a whisker and that my shapeless anorak was shielding at least a murderous axe or possibly a suicide bomb belt. My wayward beard may give the impression that I am a fanatical Jihadist after all.

Yes folks, overtaking in London can seem dangerous. Overtaking in Baghdad, however, is lethal. There was a news report about six months ago about a carful of men being shot up by US troops as they overtook them. Ironically, they were going home from a funeral but they all died because the nervous Americans thought they might be lining up for an attack. I was reminded of this story by this article on the BBC site.

So little real news is coming out of Iraq now and we have to thank one brave Iraqi reporter for this story. If there is one thing more dangerous than overtaking in Iraq it is truth telling.

Why no time?

All my friends in ministry seem so busy. They rush from place to place, bolt their meals and often have no time for conversation. It is understandable for those who are not paid but this is just as true for those who have the privilege of being paid ministers.

There must be many reasons but one is, I think, because they feel guilty just reading, meditating, praying (and chatting). It seems so passive and lazy. So unproductive.

Everyone else in the congregation seems busy. Sometimes busyness seems to be the only commonly recognised virtue in London. All else is relative. And our role as the Pastor/Teachers of churches is easy to despise when secularism rules. If only people realised how busy we are we would feel justified and so we become busy. We dress and act as busy professionals. “See my diary”, “Hear my phone ring”, “Sorry, have to dash!”

So who will do the work of hearing God speak in scripture? thinking through its implications in a world going mad and churches going adrift? working out what lives we should live in consequence of the faith delivered once for all by the Apostles and Prophets of Christ?

Who will put the Gospel of God in the language of the City of Men? Who will stand before the Lord?

I’d like to think about these things when I am less busy.

The Weapons of our Warfare?

3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.
4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.

Is this quote [ESV] from 2 Cor 10 true of modern believers?

We are often socially engaged and campaign on issues of rights and justice. Indeed, you will commonly find campaigners on both sides of modern controversies each of whom sees him/herself as obeying God with their efforts.

And there are so many parachurch organisations who want to stir us to action. Write to your MP about debt relief, religious persecution, homosexual “marriage” etc.. Send more money to our organisation which is doing God’s work but strangely never seems to be properly funded by Him.

They all assume the power and the glory belong to the governing institutions - Parliament, UN, EU, etc. or to the Media and (that strange monster) Public Opinion.

The weapons of our warfare are no longer the weapons of the cantakerous Jewish convert who wrote Second Corinthians. Neither are they mighty.

Three approaches to Malaria

I have an interest in Malaria - having had a bout myself and helped at a funeral of a lively teenager who was taken away in a couple of days by an infection which got to her brain.

There are many approaches to trying to limit the damage. Here are three:

Corporate Route One: Rehabilitate DDT (yes, really!). There are nutty freemarketeers who think that that wiping out invertebrates and birds and leaving rising levels of DDT in humans are a small price to pay for “solving the malaria problem”. This is big news in the USA. If you want to see a “christian” version of the propaganda try this link The Kairos Journal but you will need to register. You can get a flavour of the arguments from this link from Pesticide Action Network.

Corporate Route Two: Fund the big drug companies and sponsor research into less harmful insecticides. This is the approach of Bill and Mrs. Gates. Yes, the man who brought you the Windows 95/8 blue screen of death and the open sesame to viruses and worms that is Windows XP is spending several of his ill-gotten millions on bribing the big drug companies to repent of years of neglecting this poor man’s disease. Here is a good link to that project.

A Human Scale Route: There is a herbal antimalarial that works, is cheap, and does not need a factory or bloated executives to make it work. Have a look at the work which Anamed (a tiny non-profit group) and many others have done. Needless to say, the big drug companies are highly unimpressed and are trying to take over production so that they can sell a highly purified and expensive version of the main ingredient. There is a real possibility that this could end up training the parasite to become resistant as it has to many other treatments (see this link).

Are Christians really meant to be good for society?

Last Sunday I preached on “Salt and Light”. I pointed out that the virtue of salt there is that it tastes salty and NOT that it is a preservative. I am sure that the reference is to be being tasty to God - as in Leviticus 2:13

Season all your grain offerings with salt . Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

and Jesus is not worried about preserving our culture. The context is that of being persecuted for the Gospel’s sake since that is when we are likely to play down our convictions to avoid suffering.

It occurs to me that the persecutors could be right. Loyalty to Jesus could make us a disruptive and divisive element.

The traditional Anglican interpretation of “salt and light” is that we are the preservers of all that is good in our culture and that we must continue to strive for social improvement. As I get older that looks more and more like a red herring. In any case, it isn’t working.