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Showing posts from 2010

Why England lose at Football and win at Cricket

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2010 has seen very different fortunes for our sports teams. The England cricket team is on the up, having retained (and surely about to win) the Ashes, the best competition in world cricket. The football team on the other hand had a dreadful World Cup, and if the recent home game against France is anything to go by, have not improved since then. There was a moment at the end of the recent test against Aussies that illustrated the difference between the teams and their approach. Having won the test and retained the Ashes, the entire England team performed the 'Sprinkler' dance in front of the barmy army. The question is: can you imagine the England football team doing that in front of England football fans? Basically, no. And I think there are a number of reasons for that, that perhaps go to the heart of why one team is successful and the other isn't - the cricketers realize that at the end of the day, sport is ultimately a matter of fun. The barmy army are very different f...

Advent Sermon

Preached a sermon on waiting in Advent, and why the second coming is hard to imagine recently at HTB - audio and video files are here - http://www.htb.org.uk/media/media/graham-tomlin/all/all/all - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Loving not Thinking

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I've been reading James Smith's 'Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation'. Very insightful. He takes what I have long thought the right approach that sees our desires as more fundamental than our thoughts. In other words we are driven more by our loves than our ideas, our hearts rather than our heads, our feelings rather than our principles. It is of course Augustine's anthropology reproduced in Pascal and others. At the end of the day we do what we want to do, because that is the way we are made. We are loving, desiring animals before we are thinking beings, and our ideas are shaped more by our loves and desires than we care to admit. So the key to Christian life and growth is not suppressing our desires but changing them. It is no use trying to get people to change by feeding them information, or just by 'teaching' them truth (even biblical truth!). First they have to learn to love truth. Smith puts it well - we are primarily lovers...

I have seen the future

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Tonight I watched something quite amazing. I am in Hong Kong for a few days, staying on the Kowloon side, and in a rare spare few hours wandered out towards the water. I stumbled on something called the symphony of lights, a light show unlike anything I have ever seen. It involved all the buildings on the Hong Kong island side lighting up in all kinds of synchronised patterns in time with music drifting across the channel. If you know the Hong Kong skyline, you'll know how impressive it is anyway at night. But this was something else. Lasers, whole skyscrapers changing colour, flashing lights ups and down the office blocks, all perfectly choreographed along the shoreline. It was a stunning piece of technology, far beyond anything I've seen anywhere else, all the more impressive because it was just a bit of fun for the tourists. If ever there was evidence that China and Asia are the future this was it. I felt like I came from a tired old continent, trying to shore itself up af...

Life has to mean something

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Watched 'About Schmidt', on a flight to Hong Kong yesterday, the 2002 Jack Nicholson film about a man who retires from his career as an Actuary. Soon his wife from a rather unfulfilling marriage dies, his daughter is getting married to a loser, he has nothing to do. He discovers his wife had an affair with his best friend that he never knew about, he visits his old firm and his old school, but they have moved on seamlessly without him. He tries to stop his daughter's wedding with no success. He travels across America in a Winnebago, visiting tacky places and making drab observations on them. It is the story of a life lived without depth or significance. It is the story of a dawning realisation of the need for significance and meaning beyond survival and routine. At the end he says: 'We are all pretty small in the big scheme of things and I suppose the most you can hope for is to make some kind of difference. But what difference have I made? What in the world is better...

God Owes us Nothing

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This is the title of a book I read a while ago by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic church rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the C17th, but that's by the by. What has got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom. Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something common to much mediaeval thought, to Luther, to Calvin and to Pascal. The book chronicles how it was firmly shown the door by the RC church in the Jansenist/Jesuit/Molinist controversies of the C17th. Although initially forbidding, I am increasingly convinced this insight is the way to a truly liberating way of life. If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don...

The God debate – why does it leave me cold?

There's something about the God debate that troubles me. The atheists demand evidence for God, and trumpet their confident assertions that he doesn't exist. The Christians (why aren't Muslims and Jews involved in this debate more?) argue back, fighting the battle on God's behalf. It basically boils down to the atheist argument that it is possible to explain the emergence of the world in its own terms, whether through physics (Hawking) or biology (Dawkins), with the religious coming back with the argument that even so, how can something emerge out of nothing? However the laws of evolution or gravity might provide a complete mechanism for launching the world and developing life, it is still hard to conceive of something appearing out of nothing at all, the basic problem the atheist argument has yet to answer properly, in my view at least. Nonetheless, all this does slightly leave me cold and misses something essential about the nature of Christian faith and theology. Even...

Calvin. Luther and Barth

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Just started reading Barth's lectures on Calvin from 1922. He comes up with the surprising statement that 'nothing really new came into history with the Reformation'. He has an interesting contract between the enthusiast Caspar Schwenkfeld who thought the Reformation was the dawn of a new age, with Luther's conviction that it was nothing new, but the re-discovery or reintroduction of something old, the Word of God, meeting history as it did in the 1 st century, the 5th and every other time when the Word has made itself heard. "The world now faces God's Word exactly as it did two thousand years ago. God's Word always comes down on the same time". It is a broader, grander philosophy of history that sees the connections of history not the disconnections. It warns us against the kind of historical excitement that is always seeing a 'new generation arising' or 'a new day dawning', but a proper humility about history and a sense of the eter...

Praying in the dark

I am not the kind of person who prays for people and they instantly glow or fall over. In fact most of the time after I have prayed for people, they smile politely, say thank you and nothing much seems to happen. I guess I hope it's been vaguely helpful and leave it at that. The other day I met someone I prayed for about three years ago. He told me that after that prayer he had been healed of a depression that he had endured for about 40 years. Now this doesn't happen very often. It certainly doesn't happen to my prayers very often. I dimly remember praying for him, and it seemed like most of the other times I've prayed for people – pleasant but a trifle disappointing. It was just an ordinary prayer, prayed because someone asked me to, with just a modicum of faith that he and I could muster - a very small modicum of faith on my part. Sore knees and headaches are one thing, but I'm not sure I really think God can heal clinical depression. But he did. And in some way,...

Rev - a triumph?

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I thought this TV review from the Evening Standard tonight was telling and hopeful... ...while young men feed the beast in Edinburgh, a comic miracle is taking place on our television screens. Last night was the final episode of Rev, BBC's against-all-the-odds hit about an inner- London vicar. The comedy flowed from the kindly but flawed Rev, played by Tom Hollander. It was like Richard Curtis but with melancholy shadows. London's curious coalition of C of E congregations — parents trying to get their children into church schools, black gospel, alpha, and the homeless and oddball — forms a tableau of humanity. I'm sure the Bishop of London recognises it, although I am certain he would not compare himself to the worldly and menacing Archdeacon Robert, played by Simon McBurney. The struggle to be virtuous is the deepest human conflict and Rev is a painfully funny study of ambition, envy and loneliness as well as fellow feeling. Great novelists from Trollope onwards have fo...

The Holy Spirit: Theology for the Twenty-First Century

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Well, our conference on the Theology of the Holy Spirit has come and gone. Quite a remarkable time in all kinds of ways. I’ll reflect more on it in time when the dust has settled. Meanwhile here is an article I wrote recently and which was published in the Church Times a few weeks ago. What kind of theology is needed in the twenty-first century? Perhaps more than most, it is a theology of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit used regularly to be called the ‘forgotten member of the Trinity’. No longer. The last forty years has seen a whole host of theological work on Pneumatology from Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Pentecostal theologians, at the same time as what many would call an outpouring of the Spirit on all kinds of churches around the world. Karl Barth, towards the end of his life, famously dreamed of a theology which would start with Pneumatology rather than Christology, but which he, like Moses, was only allowed to see from afar. Now is a time to imagine what such a theolog...
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The new Robin Hood movie is out soon. The story has such power that it gets re-told in every generation - Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner and now Russell Crowe. Maybe the story has such power because it appeals to something deep within - a desire for things to be different.  The legend is well known – Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, lives in Sherwood Forest with the merry men and Maid Marian, and regularly manages to annoy the Sheriff of Nottingham. What relationship the story bears to historical reality is hard to tell. However, the context in which the story is usually set is significant. In the twelfth century England’s rightful king, Richard, had left the country to fight in the Crusades. In his absence, his brother Prince John had set himself up as king in his place. Not content with this, John had also inflicted heavy taxation on and curtailed the hunting rights of the peasants, who were already kept firmly in their place by a strict feudal sy...

The Holy Spirit in the World Today

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On May 20th & 21st this year, we're organising a conference at Holy Trinity Brompton on 'the Holy Spirit in the World Today .' It's hosted by St Paul's Theological Centre and St Mellitus College along with HTB, and we have a pretty stellar line-up of speakers. Jurgen Moltmann is coming over from Tubingen, Miroslav Volf from Yale, David Ford from Cambridge, and Rowan Williams from down the road in Lambeth. Add to that Tom Smail as the grand old man of Pneumatology, Tom Greggs from Chester and a host of others doing seminars, and it promises to be a fantastic time. I'm convinced Pneumatology is theology for the twenty-first century. The Spirit connects us into God, transforms division into unity, renews the face of the earth and revives the church. Those all sound to me like things we need rather badly in our world, let alone the church, so looking at the theology of the Spirit is just what the doctor ordered right now. To book in, go to http://www.htb.org.uk...

Worship and Sacrifice

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In our church we were recently debating the needs of different worshippers. Do we remove the chairs, leaving a more relaxed atmosphere, with space to move around, lie on the floor, or keep them in, respecting the needs of older people (like me) who need a chair to rest their creaking limbs? It got me thinking about the relationship between worship and sacrifice. Old Testament sacrifices were not only made to atone for sin - they were often acts and offerings of worship. Pagan worship in New Testament times also took the form of sacrifice to the gods. And although Christian worship assumes the prior once-only sacrifice of Christ, it still involves sacrifice, if Romans 12 is anything to go by. Worship does benefit us - it inspires us to devotion, restores perspective etc. but perhaps that is only a secondary function of worship. Perhaps the primary aspect of worship is sacrifice - the giving up of my own energy, time, desires, preferences, to offer something to God that costs me somethi...

Christian Freedom

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Freedom to choose is one the ‘rights’ we all think we have.Yet global culture today seems poised between visions of freedom that look more like destructive license, and ways of life that restrict the liberty of huge sections of society such as women, ethnic or religious minorities, or the poor who have little access to the wealth that brings opportunity. In the gospel, Christ offers us freedom, but what does that mean? What kind of freedom does he offer? In 1520 Martin Luther wrote a short work called ‘The Freedom of a Christian’. In it he celebrated the freedom all Christians possess: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” In faith, a Christian is freed from the demands of law, of external human requirements that override personal conscience or liberties. The Christian enjoys what St Paul called the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God.’ Yet this is only half of the picture of Christian freedom in Luther’s mind. The other half he summarizes in the stateme...

One the best days ever...

Yesterday I took and preached at the wedding of Sam, our wonderful and only son, to the lovely Jenni. It was just a fantastic day all round. Jenni came in to Coldplay, they both walked out to U2, and in between, a really excellent band led some very fine worship with a great brass section. I preached on 1 John 4, with some help from Martin Luther. Sam and Jenni were on top of the world, loads of family and good friends were there. As it was a Salvation Army church, the wedding was dry - not a drop of alcohol in sight. But you know it didn't make any difference. The evening ended with with everyone dancing to Aretha Franklin numbers with as much energy as any other dance I've ever been at. No-one got drunk, no-one fell out, no-one had to worry about gettting breathalysed on the way home - you wonder what the fuss is all about. God is good. A great day - one of the best.

Three Cups of Tea

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I don't often use the word 'inspiring' for a book but I've just finished a pretty inspiring one. It's called 'Three Cups of Tea' by a chap called Greg Mortenson (and David Relin - a co-writer). Apparently it, and he, are quite well known in the USA, but I had never heard of him before my wife bought me the book for Christmas as it was about climbing and Pakistan, and she knows I have an interest in both. Greg Mortenson was a child of missionary parents, and a climber who made an unsuccessful attempt on K2 in the Karakoram in 1993 After a fairly harrowing time, he survived and stumbled into a small Balti village where he experienced real kindness and grace. In response he offered to help, and it turned out they were most in need of a school - so he promised to help them build one. To cut a long story short, starting with no resources or contacts, he gradually finds the funds and the network to build this school, however this turns out to be the start of so...

United: The Religion

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Went to the Carling Cup Final at Wembley today. United were the deserved winners, even though Vidic was a tad lucky not to be sent off early on. Rooney is sheer class - even with a bad knee and a stomach bug he was still the best player on the pitch. He is the complete player - scores goals, a great passer of the ball, reads the game so well. Carrick and Fletcher were in control in midfield and Valencia was always a threat.  This came after leading a good Communion Service at college this morning (not good because I led it, but it had a great sermon from Simon Downham and some good prayer ministry too). It's not often these two big bits of my life - God and football - come together quite so adjacent to each other. I feel like I ought to come up with some deep thought to connect the two, but I'm not sure I can. Both make me feel more alive. Faith does so in deeper ways, with less danger of aggression and resentment. but football does still stir deep things. I'm just gratefu...
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Tom Wright was at our School of Theology this morning. He did his usual 'New Creation' thing, but then spoke about his new book, ' Virtue Reborn '. Its interesting that a focus on eschatology leads to thinking about virtue. Once you start thinking about our future and the future of the planet, you have to think about the kind of people we are and will be. Its a link that was very much in my mind when writing my Spiritual Fitness , which also looked at virtue. The language of virtue is a fairly universal one and connects to both religious and secular contexts today. You don't have to be a Christian to realise you need to learn patience, courage and generosity. It's also language the NT uses quite a bit too, with the lists of virtues that comes towards the end of virtually ever NT letter. Virtue is the language that speaks most powerfully about discipleship today, adn Tom's book will do a great job at highlighting it.

American Beauty

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Just spent a very good week in the USA. I love being in America and Americans, but they do perplex me sometimes. Browsing through the bookshop in Charleston airport this week, I found all the Christian books (Rick Warren, Joel Osteen etc.) under the ‘Self-Help’ section. No trace of irony of course. It’s telling though: American Christianity has a fair amount of the ‘self-help’ variety: ‘Seven keys to improving your life every day”, ‘Six steps to build a healthy marriage’ and so on. I guess a lot of it can be explained by American origins – a land where everyone came to seek fortune and prosperity. The ancestors were the ones with the initiative to get up and leave their home countries to look for a better life (unless, that is, they were slaves and didn’t have much choice). Built into the American psyche therefore is a self-made, you-can-do-it attitude, which explains why it has been such a phenomenally successful nation. It also explains the quick-fix make-it-simple approach: if you ...

Airports

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I'm writing this in Washington Dulles Airport, waiting for a delayed plane to Charleston (already 2 and 1/2 hours late), surrounded by lots of frustrated passengers. It's snowing outside, which, added to the 3 feet of snow they've already had, is the problem. In airports life seems suspended for a while. Everyone is waiting, in transit, nothing is permanent. No-one wants to stay. It's a preparation for something else to come. Relationships and conversations are temporary. It has a superficial attraction to begin with - the delights of independence, but after a while it just gets very boring. We need to know we are rooted, we belong, that this world is not just a waiting room for something else.

The End of the Pew?

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What is the biggest obstacle to the growth of the church in Britain today? Creeping secularisation? Richard Dawkins? Infighting over women bishops or gay clergy? Let me make another suggestion: how about the continued existence of pews? For the first 1500 years of the church’s life, pews were extremely rare. In most medieval churches people stood or sat on the floor, with only a narrow bench around the edge of the building for seating. Eastern Orthodox churches never got around to having pews – still today in Russia and Greece, worshippers stand. When they did gradually get introduced, pews were a mixed blessing. They were intimately connected with social division and hierarchy, with pews ranked according to social standing. The rich would have large grand stalls at the front and woe betide anyone who sat in the wrong one. They were exclusive then, and they are exclusive now. Pews today effectively exclude the 90% of people who are not regular attenders of services. The problem i...

A thing of beauty

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There was a moment of sheer football beauty last week. It was in the 70th minute of the Man Utd v Man City game. The ball came out to Wayne Rooney on the half way line, just to the left of the centre circle. Within about a second, he turned with perfect balance, looked up, and swung a delicate right foot, a sublime pass, lifted just high enough to drift over the head of the frantically back-pedalling defender, low enough to keep the right speed on the ball to keep the momentum of the attack, direction spot on, to land right at the feet of the advancing Ryan Giggs about 40 yards ahead. Giggs didn't score -Carrick did a few moments later. But it was the pass itself that was the thing of delight. It's rare to see something so difficult performed at speed with such ease and perfection. You'd hardly call Rooney himself a thing of beauty, but when you see something like that, it fills you with wonder and sheer admiration, just for the pure delicate joy of it.

God and the Haiti Earthquake - 3

Three weeks on, the Haiti earthquake has begun to drop out of the news. the UN is beginning to get its act together and aid is starting to get through. A litle distance also gives the opportunity to think further with a bit of perspective. The first thing is to put the event into some kind of context. Despite the tragedy, this is no unique event unheard of before, but just one of many natural disasters which occur with some regularity.

God and the Haiti Earthquake 2

Events like the Haiti earthquake raise another question - if God can intervene to perform miracles sometimes, why doesn't he do it more often? If he can answer specific prayers, why can't he intervene to stop disasters like this? This is more than an academic question - it can be heartbreaking to pray for something for ages and it doesn't happen, or to to watch someone suffer while you pray desperately for healing that doesn't come, while God seems to happily find parking spaces for other people or answer seemingly trivial prayers. As always on here, only time for a brief answer, but here goes...

Luther on Prayer

Some of those who came to the HTB / SPTC 'School of Prayer' today (or anyone else who wants to learn how to pray, for that matter), might want to read the work of Luther on Prayer that I spoke about. It's called 'A Simple Way to Pray', was written in 1535 and contains some simple yet brilliant insights into prayer and how Luther himself prayed. You can find it here -  A Simple Way to Pray . If you want to be part of HTB's growing prayer movement, you might try looking at the Prayerforce site.

God and the Haiti Earthquake

The Haiti earthquke is a tragedy on any account. Natural disaster meets human disorganisation. As always on these occasions, the question soon appears on the horizon of where God is in it all. Various things have been given by good church leaders, but a couple of people have said to me over the last weeek that they've all been a bit unsatisfactory. So I thought I'd have a go.

Why we should get rid of 'Faith Groups'

In our multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society, a new phrase has entered our vocabulary: Faith Groups. Its way of describing religious groupings, those who apparently have a ‘faith’ that influences the way they view the world and motivates what they do – it includes Christians (like me), Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists (kind of), Sikhs etc. Sometimes they are called ‘faith communities’ but the idea is the same, and it is common government-speak including the report on “Faith Groups in the Community - Working Together: Co-operation between Government and Faith Communities” in February 2004.

A new blog site

I've moved to this new site - gives a few more options. I have still resisted facebook, twitter and everything else (OK I do have a facebook page but hardly ever use it). I don't think the world really needs to know when I'm hungry or bored. Don't thinkI want to know when I'm hungry or bored. So this will try to remain reasonably untrivial (apart from the occasional reference to Bristol City - not that thst is at all trivial, you understand...)

A Pagan Christmas?

There were a few stories going around before Christmas about the revival of paganism, the winter solstice, with druids dancing around Stonehenge and uttering long-lost pagan oaths. It brought up the old stories of Christmas being a pale Christian version of good old pagan revelry in the depths and darkness of winter. Yet there was a good reason why Europeans gave up on paganism.