Uncertainty Principle

Life is uncertain. We would rather it wasn’t, but it unavoidably is. We live in a society that invests huge amounts of resource into trying to make things reliable. But not matter how hard we try, the uncertainty remains. For many centuries, we have had a fantasy of a perfect world where all uncertainties are brought under control. Within Christian cultures, we have tended to think of heaven as such a place. We would be wrong to do so. Uncertainty isn’t an expression of things going wrong; it is a fundamental feature of God’s creation.
Nearly a hundred years ago, a german scientist called Werner Heisenberg came to an understanding that uncertainty is woven into the fabric of the universe. Some things, he concluded, simply cannot be known. It is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
A very long time before Werner Heisenberg, Jesus’ disciple, Thomas, was having his own uncertainty dilemma. Thomas’ colleagues were telling him that Jesus - who had been expertly executed by the Roman army - was alive and well. This contradicted everything that Thomas knew and understood about the world. He was justifiably uncertain about his friends’ claim.
Nine days after Jesus’ undoubted death, Thomas met him in person - alive and well. Jesus did not criticise Thomas for his uncertainty. Instead, he urged the confused young man to take a different approach: to trust. “Don’t be suspicious,” Jesus said. “But trust.” Trust is a positive response to uncertainty.
God has not created a predictable universe in which we can rely on everything running to some unchanging plan. God’s creation is not like that, and neither is God. God created an uncertain universe and has given us intentionally unpredictable lives. He has done it because uncertainty is the crucible in which we learn to trust. And trust, like love, is the stuff of God.
Jesus wanted Thomas to trust him. Trusting Jesus is not a random spiritual mental twist. Trust is always specific. We trust that Jesus is God’s message to humanity. We trust Jesus that God loves us and cares for us (even when things seem to be going wrong). We trust Jesus that loving other people is always the best course of action. And we trust Jesus that there is another life beyond this one.
And that other life, which we call ‘Heaven’, will be uncertain too. You may not want to hear that! But without uncertainty there would be no room for trust. And trust is the stuff of God.

Recently published:

'The Scruffy Disciple'

the life and loves of a disciple of Jesus 

by Robert Harrison

Risky Business

I believe in God. That’s not a very challenging or informative statement. Commonly, it expresses that I believe that God exists; you may also infer that I consider God to be generally a good thing.
In English translations of the New Testament, there is a lot of talk about believing. Jesus repeatedly encouraged people to 'believe in' him. But Jesus wasn’t asking people to believe that he existed - that would hardly have been difficult for them - or even to believe that is was the Christ or the Son of God - those ideas were only just beginning to be associated with him. Jesus was asking people to trust him - thats the meaning of the word he was using.
Trust is subtly different from belief. Trust is specific. You may be willing to trust me with a small amount of money, or trust that I am a generally well-meaning person. But you would be unwise to trust me to style your hair, and utterly foolish to trust me to perform routine surgery on you. We trust specific people to do specific things. The same needs to apply to our relationship with God.
What are we trusting God for?
Often, talk about trusting God is unhelpfully vague. Trust is a decision to embark on a particular action when the outcome of that action is, at least in part, beyond our control. I get a mechanic to service my car because I don’t understand how my car works. When I next drive my car, I put my trust in the mechanic’s understanding and integrity.
So what do we actually trust God for?
Trust requires action, and it involves risk. When I sit on a chair, I trust that it will hold my weight. If it doesn’t, I will end up on the floor. We trust God when we perform certain actions which rely of him in a way that is beyond our control - actions that we would not perform if we didn’t trust God.
Jesus asks us to trust him. He asks us to live differently in this world, trusting that his way is a better way, even though it may be costly for us.
How often to you really trust God?

Real-World Belief - Sunday 22nd October 2017

We have a set of new chairs at our church. They look robust and comfortable, and I believe that they will hold my weight, but just believing that doesn’t mean very much. For my belief in the chairs to be of any real value I need to trust my backside to them and sit down. That’s what chairs are for. If I do lower my rear end onto a new chair, I will be taking a risk. If it isn’t robust, I might end up on the floor in an undignified clatter of broken wood. It's a risk. But it's a risk I have to take or my faith in the manufacturer will be nothing more than a pointless waste of money.
In the Christian faith we talk a lot about believing in Jesus. That’s only a start, like ordering a chair on the internet, believing it will be what is needed. The next stage is the critical one: trusting our lives to Jesus’ message and teaching. That’s the risky part. If it doesn’t work, we might end up on the floor in an undignified clatter of broken expectations.
Jesus' message was real-world insight, not a selection of fanciful sacred mysteries. He told people they could trust God’s love and forgiveness, that they didn’t need to be afraid of breaking religious rules or missing religious rituals. He taught that the only thing which ultimately matters is loving and forgiving the people around us. Jesus was liberating people from the fear and oppression of overbearing religion, and drawing them into real-world relationship with his loving heavenly father.
In today’s world we have different fears. We fear that life may be meaningless, that we may just be a cosmic accident. We fear that if we are not happy, we might be wasting our lives. We need to trust Jesus. Life does have meaning; we are loved; and the purpose of life is to love other people, not just ourselves.
If we lean on these principles, we risk failure. Trust always involves risk. But my experience is that Jesus’ teaching, when put to real-world test, won’t let you down.

Not Fake News - Sunday 19th March 2017

How much can we trust the Bible? Fake News is big news at present, with stories of prominent people making unsubstantiated claims to suit their political agendas. Many of the people around us - I don’t doubt - generally assume that most of the Bible is similarly fake news, cooked up to support an ancient religious agenda.
I came into active Christian faith through a tradition that presented the Bible as ‘The Word of God’, insisting that every sentence was true, whether or not it fitted with the discoveries of science. But it seemed to me that the people who called the Bible ‘The Word of God’ were making a claim that neither the Bible nor any of its key characters supported. Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is something different.
Years of study and investigation have shown me that the Bible does not need us to puff it up with inflated claims; it stands firmly on its own. Picking a random story from the Old Testament last week, I researched the Battle of Mediggo in which King Josiah of Jerusalem died, as recorded in 2 Kings 23. Within an hour I had confirmed that Mediggo definitely existed, that Pharaoh Neco (Necho II in Egyptian records) had indeed marched north in 609BCE to support the ailing Assyrian Empire which was under pressure from the expansionist Babylonian king, Nabopolassar, (who’s son, Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned over 50 times in the Bible. The dates, the names and the places all match up as Israel’s account dovetails in with those of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. I was even able to see what Nabopolassar and Necho looked like.
The Bible is not fake news. Neither is it a collection of other-worldly fables or far-fetched myths. What impresses me is that the people who wrote the different parts of the Bible took great care to get it right. They researched their story using official records, and double checked their sources. As Saint Luke expressed it at the outset of his Gospel, "I decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account” based on the testimony of "those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses”.
We can trust the Bible, not because it is the result of some undefined miraculous process, but because the people who wrote it worked hard to get their story straight.

Depths of Mercy - Sunday 25th September 2016

It feels easy to trust God when things are going well. We lazily assume that they are going well because God loves us and we are pleasing him in the way we are living. But what about when things go badly? What about when things go badly through our own fault? How easily can we trust God then?
Towards the end of his life, King David seriously offended God by conducting a detailed census of Israel’s potential army. Almost as soon as the census was complete, David realised his error: he had failed to trust God, trusting - instead - the strength of his military force. God took action to discipline the ageing king, and demanded that David choose from three proposed punishments. David made his choice immediately. He opted for the third, three days of plague, stating: “Let’s fall into the hand of God, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into human hands.”
Even though David’s trust in God had evidently become somewhat flakey, he was quick to trust God’s discipline. He did not think of God as being terribly vengeful, but as being essentially merciful. One of the features of David's story is that he was evidently an experienced sinner, and as such, understood more than many people the depths of God’s mercy. If he was going to be punished, David had no doubt that he wanted to be punished by God.
It is when we entrust God with our failures and our disasters that we begin to experience the depth of his mercy. And it is as we begin to experience the depth of God’s mercy that we learn how to show mercy to others.

When things go wrong - Sunday 11th September 2016

Things go wrong. Occasionally they go horribly wrong. The news is filled with such moments, but we don’t need to look that far. In our own lives, something goes wrong most days. The question is: what happens next?
Do you dissolve into tears or flare into anger? Do you look for someone to blame, or blame yourself? When things go wrong we experience an urgent need to respond somehow.
When King David was well settled into middle age, things went horribly wrong for him. His son, Absalom, usurped his kingdom, causing him to dash into exile. As David hurried away from Jerusalem, his life’s work in tatters, he was followed by an old enemy, called Shemei, who threw stones and curses at him in equal measure. One of David’s generals offered to kill the man. David was indignant at the suggestion. “It may be,” he replied, “that God has told Shemei to curse me.”
In the middle of intense disaster, David was trying to discern what God was doing in the situation. Perhaps God had raised up Absalom. Perhaps David had had his time. Perhaps Shimei was right to curse him. On the other hand: perhaps God would restore David to his throne, and repay him with good for the cursing he was receiving. David needed time to answer those questions.
Ancient European religion believed there were two sets of equally matched spiritual forces in the world: good and evil; life and death; light and darkness. Much of that primitive thinking has seeped its way into Christianity. King David, however, had no such thoughts. For him there was only one significant spiritual force: God. And he had learned to trust God when things went badly just as much as when things went well.
Christians often assume that nice things come from God, and nasty things come from sin or the devil. That is far too simplistic. When things go horribly wrong - and they inevitably will at times - we would do well to follow David’s example: trust God, and pause to consider what he might be doing.