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如鷹展翅 更新茁壯
最後一段。嗬嗬
8 New creation, Starting Now
Renunciation. The world in its present state is out of tune with God’s ultimate intention, and there will be a great many things, some of them deeply woven into our imagination and personality, to which the only Christian response will be “no.’ Jesus told his followers that if they wanted to come after him they would have to deny themselves and take up their cross. The only way to find yourself, he said, is to lose yourself (a strikingly different agenda from today’s finding-out-who-I really-am philosophies). From the very beginning, writers like Paul and John recognized that this isn’t just difficult, but actually impossible. We can’t do it by some kind of Herculean moral effort. The only way is by drawing strength beyond ourselves, the strength of God’s Spirit, on the basis of our sharing of Jesus’s death and resurrection in baptism.
Rediscovery. New creation is not a denial of our humanness, but its reaffirmation; and there will be a great many things, some of them deeply counterintuitive and initially perplexing, to which the proper Christian response is “yes.” The resurrection of Jesus enables us to see how it is that living as Christian isn’t simply a matter of discovering the inner truth of the way the world currently is, or simply a matter of learning a way of life that is in tune with a different world and thus completely out of the tune with the present one. It is a matter of glimpsing that in God’s new creation, of which Jesus’s resurrection is the start, all that was good in the original creation is reaffirmed. All that has corrupted and defaced it – including many things which are woven so tightly into the fabric of the world as we know it that we can’t imagine without them – will be done away. Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.
The problem is that it is by no means clear what to renounce and what to rediscover. How can we say no to things which seem so much a part of life that to reject them appears to be the rejection of part of God’s good creation? How can we say yes to things which many Christians have seen not as good and right but as dangerous and deluded?...Somehow we have to work out which styles of life and behavior belong with the corrupting evil which must be rejected if new creation is to emerge, and which styles of life and behavior belong with the new creation which must be embraced, struggled for and celebrated.
This takes nerves of steel, and a careful searching after wisdom. We are to be informed by the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus; by the leading of the Spirit; by the wisdom we find in scripture; by the fact of our baptism and all that it means; by the sense of God’s presence and guidance through prayer; and by the fellowship of other Christians, both our contemporaries and those of other ages whose lives and writings are ours to use as wise guides. Listing all these in that fashion makes them sound as if they are separate sources of teaching, but in reality it isn’t like that. They work together in a hundred different ways. Part of the art of being a Christian is learning to be sensitive to all of them, and to weigh what we think we are hearing from one quarter alongside what is being said in another.
Only when we have set all that our quite clearly can we ever speak of “rules.” There are rules, of course. The New Testament has plenty of them. Always give alms in secret. Never sue a fellow Christian. Never take private vengeance. Be kind. Always show hospitality. Give away money cheerfully. Don’t be anxious. Don’t judge another Christian over a matter of conscience. Always forgive. Etc. And the worrying thing about that randomly selected list is that most Christians ignore most of them most of the time. It isn’t so much that we lack clear rules; we lack, I fear, the teaching will draw attention to what is in fact there in our primary documents, not least in the teaching of Jesus himself.
The rules are to be understood, not as arbitrary laws thought up by a distant God to stop us from having fun (or to set us some ethical hoops to jump though as a kind of moral examination), but as the signpost to a way of life in which heaven and earth overlap, in which God’s future breaks into the present, in which we discover what genuine humanness looks and feels like in practice.
Justice revisited. Justice which wells up from our hearts, not only when we are wronged but when we see others being wronged. It is a response to the longing, and the demand of the living God…
But… we must go by a route very different from the one which he world normally expects and even demands. The majority language of the world in this respect is violence. When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn’t stop people from going on in the same way.
On the cross the living God took the fury and violence of the world onto himself, suffering massive injustice and yet refusing to lash out with threats or curses. Part of what Christians have called “atonement theology” is the belief that in some sense or other Jesus exhausted the underlying power of evil when he died under its weight, refusing to pass it on or keep it in circulation. Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of a world in which a new type of justice is possible. Through the hard work of prayer, persuasion, and political action, it is possible to make governments on the one hand and revolutionary groups on the other see that there is a different approach than unremitting violence, than fighting force with force. The quiet prayerful revolutions that overturned eastern European Communism are a wonderful example. The Extraordinary work of Desmond Tutu in
To work for a healing, restorative justice – whether in individual relationships, in international relations, or anywhere in between – is therefore a primary Christian calling… Violence and personal vengeance are ruled out, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear. Every Christian is called to work, at every level of life, for a world in which reconciliation and restoration are put into practice, and so to anticipate that day when God will indeed put everything to rights…
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Nor does working for reconciliation and restorative justice mean ignoring the fact that there is such thing as evil. Indeed, it demands that we take evil actions very seriously. Only when they have been named, acknowledged, and dealt with can reconciliation take place. Otherwise all we have is a parody of the gospel, a kind of cheap grace in which everybody pretends that everything is all right while knowing perfectly well that it isn’t. Discovering how to address evil both locally and globally is another of the major task facing us today. The Christian gospel challenges us to grow up morally in ways never dreamed of by much of the world…
Relationship Rediscovered. Relationships remain the Central of all human life… Justice speaks of the ordering of our relationships at all levels, not least on the larger scale of society and the world as a whole; but the longing for relationship goes much deeper than merely avoiding unfairness and getting one’s rights. It speaks of intimacy, friendship, mutual delight, admiration, and respect. It speaks of that which makes life worth living. Again and again in the New Testament it is clear that the Christian community is called upon to model new patterns of human relating, new standards for how to treat each other.
The key word is “love,” and much has been written about that in itself. But I want to draw attention to something else: that we should be positively kind to one another. “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Ephesians 4:32-5:2)… The quest for justice all too easily degenerates into the demand for my rights and our rights. The command of kindness asks that we spend our time looking not at ourselves and our needs, our rights, our wrongs-that-need-righting, but at everyone else and their needs, pressures, pains, and joys. Kindness is a primary way of growing up as a human being, of establishing and maintaining that richest and deepest relationships.
That is why Christians are called to learn how to cope with anger. It will happen; being angry is inevitable as part of the brokenness of the world. We would have to develop the hide of a rhinoceros not to become angry from time to time. But the question is what we will do with our anger. Here Paul’s command is clear, brisk and practical. Be angry but don’t sin. Don’t let sunset find you still angry. Keep short accounts – don’t let things fester and get worse. No bitterness; no wrath, anger, slander, malice, or abuse. No lying either. It is worth pondering the patterns of relationships we know about and asking ourselves how different they would be if everyone involved were signed up to live according to these precepts.
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The New Testament’s appeal for a new way of relating to one another – a way of kindness, a way which accepts the fact of anger but refuses to allow it to dictate the terms of engagement- is based foursquare on the achievement of Jesus
THE END
我也敬佩甘地，有空要讀讀他的故事，這樣的人那麽有毅力，讓人難以置信。
我還在練習禱告，比以前好多了。信基督是關於愛和RELATIONSHIP，要在一個COMMUNITY裏完成，而不是獨自的。我們要學習建立鞏固和神的良好關係，以及和兄弟姐妹的。
在家庭關係上，愛神第一位，自己對神負責是第一位。 然後按神的教導來對待喜歡和不喜歡的親屬， 發生的事情。 我們查經小組和姐妹的禱告聚會裏也常有分享， 互相的學習。
禱告很幫助我。
問好！