To Do Justice, Love kindness. . .

Micah 6:8 says, 

“God has showed you O mortal, what is Good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” 

One of the struggles of people of the Old Testament was to determine and discern the will of God for them.  In this chapter, we read tension and inquiry to bring the best to the house of God.  Micah lists from offering thousands of ram to an offering of the first born as an atonement of sin and a way to please God.  But God revealed to him that the favour in God’s house is earned through the willingness to do justice and love kindness.

Emil Brunner, in his book, Justice and Social order suggests that God is the only just entity and that whenever anyone appeals to social justice, or political or economic justice etc., the person in essence has invoked God’s justice.  And that justice is based on love and the kingdom of God willing to embrace and make everyone a child of God. 

Justice in the scriptures, particularly the New Testament, reveals itself to incorporate, invite, include and accept those who were left out of the family of God.  Exodus 3:8 tells us that God informed Moses that he will lead his people to the promised land which was the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.  And certainly, the land of these foreign nations became the promised land of the Jewish people and several wars were fought over the control of the land. 

This division was steeped in the intention and attitude of God towards other nations.  Genesis 11: 1-9, tells us of the desire of the inhabitants of the earth to have one language and harmony among themselves.  It also informs us of the desire of God to scattered human beings to all corners of the earth and to create division among them.  So the Lord confused their language and human beings because of confusion dispersed to various parts of the world.  In other words, God divided the inhabitants of the earth on that day at the foot of the tower of Babel.  

On the day of the Pentecost, Acts 2:1-12, God who dispersed the nations of the earth, gathered them together through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit enabled the disciples to proclaim the message in the various languages of the visitors to the holy city.  Everyone heard the message in their own language, we have been told.  Those who were caste outside of the family of God were now members of it and recipient of God’s message in their own language.  The universality of the message was a clear symbol of inclusion of everyone in the family of God.  This is the example of God’s justice as he received the dispersed and outcastes in God’s family.  The division and enmity had come to an end as everyone was part of God’s kingdom and his greater plan for human kind.

The church has struggled with the concept of inclusion since its inception.  Saint Peter, in spite of all the revelations to him, struggled to accept gentiles and people of other traditions in the family of God.  We have, as a church, supported and advocated several oppressive and exclusionary practices.  Some of those are: slavery, exclusion of women in ordained ministry, burial of still born or unbaptized children outside of the cemetery, denying marriage to a divorced person.  Fortunately, the spirit of God led the church to include and revise the policies because of the just and equitable nature of God.  The church even rationalized the teachings of Jesus pertaining to divorce.  The changes were in obedience to the will of God to do justice and love kindness.  However much has to be done as the spirit is calling us to work towards the full inclusion of LGBTQ in our church.  Spirit is also confronting us to support self-determination (fifth non-geographical province or non geogrphical diocese) of indigenous members of our church.  The same spirit is imploring us to combat racism, sexism and discrimination of visible minorities in our society and culture.  The commandment to be just and kind is to be on a road less travelled and the determination to go miles before we stop or sleep. . .

Keeping Christ in the Centre

One of the greatest gifts of Anglicanism since its inception is an unequivocal affinity and allegiance to the local character of the church.  The church in the past five centuries has promoted and supported this concept in various parts of the world.  Simply defined, the local character of the church, means that the jurisdiction is in a context and the context is an ecclesiastical province i.e. the church of Nigeria, the Anglican Church of Canada etc.  The province within the International Communion shares the context with its dioceses and other geographical bodies as deemed  important and established by the General Synod of the church.  The churches in the communion globally have been able to define mission and ministry as contextually relevant and effective because of the adherence, acceptance and respect for the local character of the church.

The application of this principle allowed the churches and provinces of the southern hemisphere to engage with their culture through concerted and organized evangelism.  Their efforts and passion for the church in their culture and context translated in major numerical success and spiritual renaissance.  I am a product of a committed community from the global south.  I was born to a priest and a teacher in Karachi, Pakistan.  My earliest and most significant memories of church life are associated with the All Saints Parish in Karachi, Pakistan.  I was seven years old when my father was appointed to the parish.  I vividly remember worshipping for the first time in All Saints with the other five worshippers in the living room of a parishioner.  The parish had been recently created and did not have a church building.  A patriarch of the congregation was gracious enough to offer his living room for worship services.  Within a year the worshipping community grew to a hundred or more and took over the whole house of our gracious host. Congregation sat in the living room, dining room and even their bedrooms.  Sunday School for the children was organized and held in the house next door.  The parish continued to grow.  By the time I emigrated to Canada it had a church building, a parish hall, an healthy financial base and congregation of four hundred plus on Sundays.  At present it is one of the strongest parishes in Karachi.  The short answer to their success is the commitment of the parishioners.  The analysis of the parish reveals the dedication and faithfulness of the leadership, priest and lay, to preach and live out the gospel in their context.  The ethos and essential message of the church was to inform the lower middle class congregation that their struggles financially are real and not merely the will of God; that they are unjustly persecuted and harassed because of their financial status and religion; that they share equality in the house of God which is and should be a place of comfort and solitude to the weary; and that they can, through their mutual efforts, change the circumstances for themselves and others.  The parish organized and managed several ministries such as literacy program, free tutoring program, cricket team, community Christmas tree etc.  In their efforts and ministries everyone was directed to keep Christ in the Centre of their being, ministry and relationships with others.

According to the statistics gathered and gleaned by the sociologists, the churches in Canada are beginning to show signs of a renaissance after experiencing a major decline in the past forty years or so.  In that dark period for the churches, various churches adopted a quasi business and community development model as a measuring stick and perhaps conscience to be deliberate, focussed and united in their efforts to encourage and stimulate growth.  The model is called a Strategic Plan and has several variations, patterns, processes and steps to ensure that there is calculable, obvious and physical result after the careful implementation of the plan.  Strategic Plan and the process  is one half of Result Based Management style which operates on the premise and expectation to produce desired short term (after one year) and long term (after three to five year) results for the organization.  The danger with super imposing a business model on a church is that it can transform a faith based and grace seeking body into a group consumed with goals, objectives, time lines, action plan, long term/short term results and evaluations.  There is merit to being  focussed and concentrated in delivering ministry but to be committed to a process which cannot measure the commitment, faith, and movement of the holy spirit (metaphysical and spiritual) without concrete evidence of a physical result is not applicable for the churches.  The other danger is that result based ministry can exhaust and tire laity and clerics rather easily and unnecessarily. 

John Hick, an Anglican scholar, in Christianity at the Centre submits that every Christian man and woman through careful personal examination should discern the gifts they can offer to God in the service of other humans.  The collection of all those gifts given and received and shared in a congregation ensures that Christianity is central to their lives and is practised through their ministries.  It will also lead to keeping Christ in the centre of our ministry and will exhibit an individual’s efforts as an offering to God and a gift with others to share.

The Parish of All Saints in Karachi, Pakistan exemplified that through their humility and ministry. Members of our congregations all around us have been doing that every day in various ways.  Harnessing the desire to keep Christ in the Centre and making it an integral part of congregational development will enable the congregations to speak the language everyone can understand and loving others as Jesus has loved us. 

In Audience with. . .

Darśana, also darśana or darshanam, sanskrit दर्शन from dṛś, meaning "to see",vision, apparition, or glimpse. Darshana is described as an "auspicious sight" of a holy person, which bestows merit on the person who is seen. "Sight" here means seeing or beholding, and/or being seen or beheld. It is most commonly used for theophany, "manifestation / visions of the divine", in Hindu Worship, e.g. of a deity (especially in image form), or a very holy person or artifact. One can receive darshana or a glimpse of the deity in the temple, or from a great saintly person, such as a great guru.

The concept of seeing the divine image can be expanded to include all of the created order and creation. The creation stories of various religious traditions inform us that God (Divine Being) not only created the world but also rejoiced at the creation. The creation stories tells us of careful planning and strategy so all of the created order and creation compliment the other. Furthermore, it advises us that human beings were commissioned to be the custodians and stewards of the created order; to create harmony and to see the animals and birds and all of creation as images of the divine and his creation. Incidentally, the command to be a steward at times has been interpreted as 'Lord over other beings' and the manifestation and visions of the divine is being limited to holy people and holy places and extraordinary religious and spiritual experiences.

In Audience with (the title of the blog) is an attempt to see the divine in every aspect of our life. It will not, I promise you, be a discussion on how God is present in everything because that is given and taken at face value. Thus it will be the essence of every encounter, thoughts or reflections, I will share with you.