Why I am a Christian

So I believe in God but why am I a Christian?

I am a Christian because, through Christ I see a down to earth God who is relevant to our everyday lives; who accepts us in spite of our faults and limitations but points us towards the people we could and should be.

That is a short answer. A longer answer has to begin by acknowledging that I am a product of my culture and upbringing. It is a point non believers are quick to make and that most Christians would freely and quickly acknowledge. For me it reinforces the fact that I am a Christian not through any merit of my own but  through the grace of God. It isn't something I have earned it is something I was given and am called to respond to.

Whilst acknowledging  a debt to my upbringing there were choices involved. If religious faith is a product of brain washing, as atheists are apt to claim, you'd have to conclude that the church is particularly bad at it. Suffice it to say that many, of my contemporaries who had a similar upbringing to me are not believers.

I did not come from a particularly Christian family. My father was a lapsed Catholic who I only recall going to church for weddings and funerals and my mother a nominal C of E who seldom went to church either. As children we were sent rather than taken to Sunday school. We lived on a succession of military bases and I was exposed to a variety of denominations and styles of worship. I think what it gave me was a curiosity about religion and a desire to seek God out for myself. I have had an in and out relationship with the church, that I'll return to in a later post, but I have always been drawn to the person and character of Jesus as he leaped out at me from the scriptures. I've struggled at times to reconcile the Christ of the gospels with the organised church but it was this for me that made him all the more real.

The Christ of the gospels seemed to say, 'Look, there is organised religion and it can give a satisfaction of sorts but it is all about outward appearances. I'm telling you it is really about what is on the inside. It's easy to feel holy and self righteous but what are you really like? Are you in truth a loving person or are you judgemental and unforgiving condemning others for faults you dare not acknowledge in yourselves."

And yet this same Christ who judged by that high standard had another message which was, "You have your faults and will never be perfect but I love you anyway. It is not right for all your wrong doing to go unpunished but I will take the punishment on myself. I'll take the punishment so you can go free. You have failed and you will doubtless fail again but I am offering you another chance."

The very fact that, in Jesus, the Christian God came down to earth gives meaning and importance to our lives. Our faith is not about a once given set of rules it's about living the lives we have been given engaging  with God and one another and learning more about ourselves, the people we can potentially be and God's Kingdom, the world as it will be and has begun to be where God's influence prevails.

Jesus is God for our everyday lives but we can also glimpse, through him, the connectedness with God's wider purpose; withdrawing as he does for time of quiet reflection; seeking God in contemplative prayer and through him we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, the promptings of love and truth in our hearts that if heeded can take us to a better future.

I am a Christian because I am drawn to the person of Christ. I respect people of other faiths and religions and am confident that they are in some way part of God's purpose but it is through Christ I get a glimpse of God's Kingdom and, though I wriggle, go astray, lose the route and go up all kind of blind alleys I will continue to seek his way.

What is faith?

Faith is Trust

What is faith? I set out on my journey intending to talk about my Down to Earth God in down to earth language. 'Faith' is central to the Christian message but it is the easiest of ideas to get wrong, misrepresent or even lampoon.

Infobarrel, a site I like to write for, recently featured an article, 'A New Religion : The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster' reviewing the book the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The book, and by extension the review, are essentially an attack on 'intelligent design' and make the argument that if you can take something to be true by faith alone, without any scientific evidence, we can believe in what we like.

Pastafarianism, as the new religion is called, is entirely absurd but intended to be. The premise is that, if we can believe in one set of 'truths' without scientific proof we can believe in anything. I've never been a 'flat-earther' or believed in the literal interpretation of biblical creation accounts. I often find non believers are attacking a version of religion I don't believe in either; so their arguments go right past me but an attack on 'intelligent design' is something else. Isn't that more or less what I believe in I asked myself?

Well, it is what I believe and again it isn't. I don't see God in a white coat with a test tube or wrestling furiously with scientific formulae any more than I see him as an old man with a beard sitting above the clouds. So what do I believe about how the world was created?

The truth is I don't think a great deal about creation at all. In so far as I do it's not about how the universe was created. I'm happy to leave that to scientists and learn from what they tell me. I don't wake up wondering how everything began. I'm more interested in how I am going to get through the day and how I relate to the world and the people I'll meet. I do believe in God as 'creator' but its a not a nuts and bolts belief in how the world was created. It's an understanding about relationships because that is the territory that religion claims for itself. Religion is about how we get on with God and each other rather than an explanation of how things started.

But I do believe that there is a creative force in the universe. I believe that there is a force that holds it together, a context in which everything else happens. I believe that through that creative energy we are connected with each other and with all creation and that we are at our best and most in tune with the people we are meant to be when we make that connection.

I can not prove that this is true but it is not based on whimsy, hear-say or passed on ideas. I experience this sense of connectedness in periods of quiet reflection. I read of it in the writings of spiritual teachers across religions noting the similarity of their beliefs as opposed to the differences in their religious practises. On a few occasions in my life; too few and longer ago than I care to think about, I have felt drawn up into this sense of the oneness of everything, feeling larger than my body, at once part of it and yet able to look down on it. I believe, from experience and practise, that I can tune in to the creative force of the universe. There is as the Quakers say, 'that of God in everyone'.

I am all too aware that this is  less than the whole story. Bad things happen in the world, natural disasters, man made catastrophes, loss, disappointment and personal tragedy - but there is nothing in Christ's message that says we will not suffer pain. The early history of the church is one of martyrdom and suffering and bad things still happen to good people. I see creation as an on-going process. God's Kingdom  is still being created. We are experiencing as Paul tells us its birth pangs but I believe with Paul that all works for good in the hearts of men who love God. I believe that despite everything, in some way that is beyond my understanding, things will work out for the best. I have no evidence that things will work out for the best but I place trust in the sense of unity and purpose I feel in the world and that in my interpretation is faith.

Faith is trust. We have faith in God in the same way as we have faith in a parent. We place our hand in theirs without knowing exactly where they are taking us but confident that, even if they can't protect us from everything that might happen they have our best wishes at heart.

This doesn't explain why as a Christian I place my faith in Christ because that is another post for another day.
I will just say here that, when I read the Gospels Christ leaps out to me as a real person with insights I find helpful and in tune with my experience of the world. He is a Down to Earth God who questions the exterior practice of religion without evidence of spiritual insight and seems to pose questions that are all too relevant today.

If I haven't got the theology right or sprinkled this with enough scriptural references it's because I'm trying to talk about a Down to Earth God in down to earth language.

My God's a down to earth God
A feet on the ground
Sweat on the brow God.

No up in the sky
Head in the clouds God
A proper down to earth God.

Way of a Pilgrim

I love the Russian spiritual classic, Way of the Pilgrim and adapted its opening words for my profile.

 “By the Grace of God I am a Christian , by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast-pocket a Bible. And that is all.”

The book is the tale of a simple pilgrim who sets out to learn the prayer of the heart - also known as the Jesus prayer and how, through its practice, he can pray continuously.

I have dabbled with the Jesus prayer as a form of spiritual practice and turn to it often as a way to focus myself or when I am stuck in prayer but I am as much attracted to the prayer by its sentiments as by the spiritual practice.

I relate most closely to the first part of the pilgrim's statement. I can not as the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 thank God that I am not like other men. It is all too evident to those who know me that I am all too much like other men and that the appropriate prayer for me is indeed, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." 

 I am not a homeless wanderer of the simplest origins travelling from place to place with minimal possessions, dependent on the generosity of others. I carry a great deal of psychological and circumstantial baggage on my journey. 

There are several ways in which my journey will be different from the pilgrim's.

I am not a simple man in quest of wisdom I am a complicated man pulled in different directions by my internal contradictions and looking to be made whole. 

I will travel over the inter-net rather than hard miles. My failings and limitations will become self evident as we travel on and if there is any merit in the trail of words I leave behind me it will be through the grace of God rather than my own merit. There have been dead ends and false starts and the hardest part of the journey has been getting out of the front door. 

The pilgrim journeyed from wise counsellor to wise counsellor, fed and watered on the way by sympathetic and generous hosts. There are like minded souls on the internet but for the most part I will be travelling through alien territory where mention of Christ, or worse still his church will be met by indifference, ridicule and even hostility. The days of my youth when religion was regarded as a 'good thing' (providing of course it wasn't taken too seriously) are long gone. I've lost through my own fault most of the links into church that I once had and have become as such a traveller in a far country.

I believe in a God who loves us while we are still far off and who will bring me home but I still have some distance to travel. I am comforted to know that Christ too faced indifference and hostility and was even ridiculed as 'King of the Jews' but I am conscious too that it was those who did not profess a religion who he called to him and those who congratulated themselves for not being as other men that he was most critical of.

I believe in a God with dust on his feet and dirt beneath his fingernails a Down to Earth God for our messy world. My quest is to find voices crying out to God's people speaking to them in a language they will understand and relate to. 

"Pray for me a wretched sinner that the Lord in His infinite mercy will grant me a good journey."