There's this blonde out for a walk. She comes to a river and sees another blonde on the opposite bank. "Yoo-hoo!" she shouts, "How can I get to the other side?"
The second blonde looks up the river then down the river and shouts back, "You ARE on the other side."
Continuing my exploration of words and reality, it is time to consider how 'truth' comes into play. I was watching The Bourne Supremacy the other night, and came across a scene where an assassin who was thought to have killed Jason Bourne was summoned out of the nightclub he was lounging in to the door of the car of his boss. The window is wound down and the boss says 'your phone was turned off, what the hell is going on?'
'You told me I could have the month off." He replied.
"You told me Jason Bourne was dead." And he wound up the window and drove off.
A short and simple transaction of just a few words, but there was so much in them. Everything had been rested on the words the assassin had previously told him. He took his words as reality ("as gospel") and based a whole future path on that. But the assassin's words were not true, they did not reflect the reality, and thus the two characters integrated their lives and decisions into a fictional reality.
What struck me was the importance of being told the truth in order to make correct judgments. We need to be told words that we can depend on. We need words that are true, that we can make decisions on, that we can trust. We make decisions that can affect the rest of our lives, and those decisions are often based on the words we receive.
"We can only go on the information we have."
What the assassin said was actually true as far as he knew it, but he didn't know the whole story. If I go back to my previous example of the various news articles about the real estate market and interest rates, they are largely making claims based on limited information. They do not know the whole picture and therefore are incapable of making a truthful claim (truth-full). As far as they can report a trend, that trend may be true, but it is not the whole story. Any claim deduced from this cannot be considered truth.
And so, in a world of people with limited ability to grasp the 'whole story', it would seem the truth is inaccessible. If nobody can know the whole picture, if we each are given but a piece of the puzzle, we are left to guess how it fits into the larger puzzle. Perhaps indeed we ourselves are that piece of the puzzle, and we all wonder how we ourselves fit in. And yet, every single day we find ourselves trusting the claims and words of other people; people who are just as limited as us. When we face it, we are confronted with the fact that faith is necessary to do anything in this world.
I am sure we would all love to have a reliable truth that we can put our faith in. Words from someone who does not have the limitations we have, who knows the full picture, and who can therefore speak the truth. And I am sure that, logically, those words might sound very different to what we might have formulated from our own limited perspective, just as it would be quite strange for that assassin to have shot Jason Bourne and seen his car career over the bridge and into the water and then to say "I didn't kill him at all", and for that to be a true statement.
It is funny that when we think about it, we can accept that truth might even sound foolish to our ears, and yet still be true. The Bible claims that Jesus is the truth (John 14:6). It claims to be words from a God who knows the whole story and can thus speak words of truth, reliable words to put our trust in. And yet so many people find it foolish to consider those words as true. My heart longs for a true word to trust in. Such a word, by necessity, can only come from God.
Tell a man there 4 billion stars in the sky and he will believe you. Tell him a seat has wet paint and he will have to touch it.
I didn't get any bites on my questions about what our church is up to, so I thought I would continue to meander along in my exploration of words and the communication of reality. I have had to step back this week and reflect on how this is affecting me personally, as I have noticed just how much we are reliant on words for our understanding of reality. To tell the story:
Adrianna and I are looking to buy a house, and this is a big commitment as many would know. Houses are very overpriced and unaffordable at the moment and have been for some time now, but we really want to get out and have a place of our own.
As we are in this space, we find that we are particularly attentive to news articles about what is happening in the housing market and interest rates and the economy in general, because these things affect affordability. Do we jump in as soon as we can because prices are going up, or do we wait because prices are coming down and will continue to do so.
I have found that the media is just as unreliable in reporting on housing as they are on any other topic. On the same day, one article will say house prices have come down 2% in the last month, another will say they are likely to come down 10% in the next year, another will say 'but wait, the reserve bank is going to cut interest rates so that will change', and then another will say, 'but maybe they aren't going to cut interest rates because employment figures show a growth in employment. All of these articles paint pictures of reality, but are not necessarily accurate or true, even though they are based on facts. They have the power to influence decisions, perhaps we should wait and see if prices settle and/or come down, and in the meanwhile build our capital so as to pay off less interest when we do buy. And perhaps this will lead to more houses coming onto the market, and thus more choice, as it starts to become a buyers market. But then, there are the reports that housing prices will continue to rise because of population growth and immigration which keeps the demand high.
And so, day by day, the facts we are given to make our decisions on are fed to us electronically with words and statistics, which paint pictures, which limit the options and set our focus and bias.
Alternatively, we could monitor the prices ourselves and look at trends, but we don't have access to what houses are actually selling for (just what they are listed for) unless we pay money for reports. So reality is mediated to us by various conflicting sources, and we have to make significant decisions from that information. This shows the power of the media to shape reality as they influence decisions of many people and shape the market. This is even more pronounced int he share markets, where people use mediated information to buy and sell, and rash decisions can be made, and crowd mentalities can be witnessed. The person who can 'mediate' reality and shape decisions has a lot of power indeed.
How do we assess what is 'true', how can we determine which article is 'reliable'? We have established that words have power to shape and influence our understanding of reality, and thus our decisions to interact with and change reality. We also know that if words conflict with other words about what that reality is then we need to decide what is true and reliable over what is false and misleading.
This problem brings us back to the garden of Eden once more, where Adam and Eve made a significant decision based on the words of a talking snake (yeh, nothing suspect there), which interpreted the reality before their eyes and 'deceived' them. As opposed to the true and trustworthy words of the God who created them, they chose to believe the creature instead.
On what basis can we trust the claims of one person over another? Or should we treat all such words with caution and seek to learn everything the hard way, through experience? In the case of the real estate issue, I do acknowledge that it is largely an area of speculation and trends, nothing is certain and it is all dependent on market forces, which are highly unpredictable. If this is the case, then is the speculations no better than the fortune tellers? Is it like the Oracle in the the film The Matrix, who asked Neo if he still would have knocked over the vase if she hadn't warned him about it?
I think we should wait until we find something we like for a price we are willing to pay, and just keep an eye on if prices are starting to come up again.
Our church congregation is trying to become more outward looking and not so much focussed on ourselves. We are adopting a metaphor of 'the front line of ministry' where we are to understand the Sunday morning services as a time of equipping us for mission on the 'front line'. The front line is defined as the place where the kingdom of God meets the kingdom of the world, i.e. our neighbours, workplaces, schools, kinder, shops, friends. In these places we are ambassadors for the kingdom of God. The place is described as the front line because it is taken to be hostile: people generally do not want to know or hear about Jesus Christ.
And so, if the front line is not the Sunday service, just as the church is not the building but the people, then what is the purpose of the Sunday service, and how is this reflected in what transpires during that time?
Historically, the Sunday service was a place where Christ is proclaimed, sinners are called to repentance, the gospel is preached, and Christians rejoice in song and commune with each other over the Lord's supper. The gospel is the most appropriate sermon and is to be drawn from or pointed to from any scripture passage that is being expounded, for this is God's call to the nations.
But if the Sunday service is not the front line, then is the gospel the most appropriate message to be shared there? While it is true that it is always edifying for a Christian to be taken back to the cross and its transformational power for their lives, in many ways if the congregation is made up of Christians behind the front line, then this message is literally preaching to the converted, and to what extent does it equip them for life beyond the cross (many Christians will wonder if there even is such a thing?).
In my understanding preaching (that is, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ) is something to be done to people who do not know Christ, and its purpose is to reveal him and his love to them, requiring a response in their part. Teaching, on the other hand, is something done to Christians and is about discipleship and development of the Christian life. If our understanding of the Sunday service is that it is about equipping the Christian for the Christian life and ministry and mission, then teaching is perhaps more appropriate at the pulpit than preaching.
Similarly, what function does our singing have, and the communion, and the congregational prayer? I believe these all do/can work into the service of equipping, but is it clear in what way this is so? And in this same line, how interactive should the Sunday service be? Should it even be called a service? We have come so far as to refrain from saying ‘we are going to church’, which can evoke unhelpful images. What does saying ‘welcome to our service’ evoke? To me it suggests that people sit (or stand) in their pews and attend a service put on by a ‘ministry team’. If the Sunday meeting is a place of equipping, is this a service at all, or is it a ‘meeting’, or ‘gathering’, or ‘assembling’ (all verbs), or perhaps it is a ‘workshop’ or a ‘school’ (to use some nouns) or could we describe it as a ‘re-centering’, ‘re-focussing’, ‘re-membering’ (putting it in terms of desired effect). As I am exploring the power of words in shaping people’s encounter with reality, I wonder how much our words at church end up leading to confusion and mixed messages.
So what should we call Sunday mornings?
Should we move more to teaching than preaching?
Are we restricted to passage exposition (and a one-way message for that matter [no pun intended])?
How interactive should the equipping be?
Are there more useful methods of equipping than singing reading and hearing?
Three qualifications: (1) I am not trying to explore a general ecclesiology here, but to reflect specifically on what our congregation is up to and how we are going about it, and (2) I am also aware that the Sunday meeting is not the only place/venue/format of equipping that our congregation employs, and (3) that to some extent, as long as the Sunday meeting is open to anyone, there will be non-Christians participating and new Christians also, in which case it is not strictly a ‘behind the lines’ meeting.© Blogger template Leaving by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
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