Phill Sacre

Category: Christian

Anything I write about the Christian faith.

  • Does God LOL?

    Source: Flickr (martinsphotoart)

    For my birthday, I was given a copy of “Does God LOL” – a collection of brief thoughts by various people working in the field of comedy about the subject of God and humour. I actually found it a fascinating read!

    The book is, as you would expect from a compendium of different people’s thoughts, a mixed bag. But the sheer breadth and number of the people involved is – to my mind – pretty staggering: comedy is perceived as being a very ‘godless’ kind of place, and often Christianity is mocked (see my previous post on Comedy and Christianity, for example). But as I turned the pages, I kept seeing names I recognised – or at least, people involved with things I recognised. Tim Vine and Milton Jones have contributed, of course – both are well known Christian comedians. But there are also chapters by other familiar names who aren’t often associated with religious things – Jo Brand, for example. There were also people who were associated with (i.e. writers for or actors in) shows which you probably do know, such as Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow or Miranda. In general, I was pleasantly surprised by how many I recognised and how faith seems to be a really deep-seated thing and real for many of the writers.

    Is comedy godless? Well, on the basis of this book – definitely not!

    Some of the pieces were very thought provoking, though. (It got me thinking about whether it would be possible to do a Biblical Theology of laughter, although I suspect that any attempt might be a bit forced). One chapter got me thinking about Psalm 2, one of the times in the Bible where God is said to ‘laugh’. (more…)

  • A Dreaded Sunny Day at Highgate Cemetery

    Today Mrs Phil and I went down to Highgate Cemetery to have a look round. (The title of this post, by the way, is a reference to “Cemetry Gates” by The Smiths). Although you can’t get into the West cemetery without going on a tour (and there were no tours today), we had a look round the East Cemetery.

    It was really interesting – I took a few photos (on my phone, sadly – forgot to take my proper camera) which you can see above. It was nice to see the grave of Douglas Adams (pictured, above) – it’s probably one of the plainest graves in the cemetery! Fans have left lots of pens in a jar next to it, there’s a piece of paper with ’42’ written on it as well as a few other little bits and pieces. We also saw the grave of the East Cemetery’s most famous inhabitant – Karl Marx (also pictured above).

    One of the things that struck me whilst wandering around the cemetery was the fact that … 100% of the occupants were dead. Rich and famous rubbed shoulders with the poor and lonely. Those at the top of the pile died just the same as those at the bottom. Death is the ultimate statistic, isn’t it? 1 in 1 people die.

    It put me in mind of Psalm 49:

    Hear this, all you peoples;
    listen, all who live in this world,
    both low and high,
    rich and poor alike:
    My mouth will speak words of wisdom;
    the meditation of my heart will give you understanding.
    I will turn my ear to a proverb;
    with the harp I will expound my riddle:

    Why should I fear when evil days come,
    when wicked deceivers surround me –
    those who trust in their wealth
    and boast of their great riches? …

    For all can see that the wise die,
    that the foolish and the senseless also perish,
    leaving their wealth to others.
    Their tombs will remain their houses for ever,
    their dwellings for endless generations,
    though they had named lands after themselves.

    People, despite their wealth, do not endure;
    they are like the beasts that perish.

    This is the fate of those who trust in themselves,
    and of their followers, who approve their sayings.
    They are like sheep and are destined to die;
    death will be their shepherd …
    But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead;
    he will surely take me to himself. …

    People who have wealth but lack understanding
    are like the beasts that perish.

    It caused me to reflect on what really matters in this life. Building up wealth, building up our bank accounts, nice houses, even lands which we have conquered – all of it means nothing if we ‘lack understanding’. If we do not know the God of our salvation, we are like the beasts that perish.

    When I walk around cemeteries, I always like looking at the graves which have scripture verses on them: it gives me hope that those people are now with the Lord. Those people, who trusted in Jesus, are now alive with him and will be raised up at the last day. If you haven’t given much thought to death, I think it’s worth thinking about: ultimately we know that everyone dies on earth. What hope do you have?

  • Is Atheism a replacement for Religion?

    I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest “storm in a Twitter-cup”, but Richard Dawkins has hit the news once again. You can read more about it here and here. Suffice it to say, he’s not made himself a popular man!

    Earlier today, I tweeted this:

    https://twitter.com/phillsacre/status/365807088443736064

    This started a Twitter conversation with few people, and I just wanted to clarify what I meant. Part of the problem is how you define ‘atheism’: many people were quick to point out (both to me personally and in general) that atheism is simply a lack of belief in god or gods: it’s not a system of values. It doesn’t help you to live your life, per se. Its remit is very narrow. (Thus, Richard Dawkins does not speak for atheists, he is not the atheist leader, etc).

    (more…)

  • Sermon: Psalm 1 – The Righteous and the Wicked

    Quick post!

    I was preaching at Christ Chuch Cockfosters this evening on Psalm 1.

    My sermon has already been uploaded, and you can hear it online on the Christ Church website.

  • The Church is wiser than our secular society

    A BibleOne of the articles that seems to have been doing the rounds on Twitter lately is “Our secular society is wiser than the Church” by Oliver Kamm (most recently I saw it tweeted by my friend @pandammonium). I often read articles online without responding to them, but sometimes one annoys me sufficiently that I feel the need to write something about it here.

    The article itself is pretty short, it won’t take a minute of your time to read, but the argument is basically that the church always lags behind societal attitudes. Frankly I find the thinking in the article so muddled I don’t quite know where to begin, but I’ll quote a few sentences and try to explain:

    Gay marriage will become established and there will come a time when few of its current opponents (including Archbishop Welby) will be exercised by the issue.

    This is unbelievably patronising. Kamm is basically saying, “There, there, dear – your petty and ridiculous objections to same-sex marriage will be forgotten in a few years when you’ve finally caught up with society – and you will.” In other words, “you’ll come round, just give it time”. It doesn’t deal with any of the objections to same-sex marriage (hereafter known as SSM); it just assumes that SSM is correct and that any objectors are purely irrational hatemongers who will come round.

    (more…)

  • Sermon: Resurrection [1 Corinthians 15:12-28]

    As I mentioned a while back, I was preaching a few weeks ago at Christ Church Cockfosters. We were going through a series on the Nicene Creed, and my particular line was “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures”, i.e. Jesus’ resurrection. I didn’t really cover the ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’ bit, but I did look at 1 Corinthians 15 to try to understand why the resurrection is vital for Christians today.

    The choice is yours: you can either read the PDF version here (apologies for reference to slides and asking questions; you’ll have to imagine the slides but they’re not necessary for understanding the sermon), or you can listen to the sermon in this handy player right here:

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/101878371″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    Well, you don’t *have* to do one of those two things. I mean, you could ignore this, but give me a break – I’m trying to promote myself here 😉

  • John 19: Jesus’ Trial and Crucifixion

    crossAs alert readers will no doubt be aware, I have been studying John recently (you can read my previous blog posts on the subject here and here). I promised in my last post that I would blog about John 19, and I thought this would be as good a time as any – particularly while it’s still relatively fresh in my memory. I’m not going to spend much time on context here, because frankly – we’d be here all day. So I’m just going to say this post would be most profitable if you’ve read John 19 before we begin (and preferably have it open in front of you, or in another tab, or whatever it is you kids do these days.)

    Note that in this post I’ll only be able to touch on a fraction of what’s there, it truly is an amazingly rich gospel. I’ll just pull out some of the things which really struck me this time.

    (more…)

  • Saul to Paul: A few thoughts on Acts 13

    One of the things which struck me about our New Testament course this year was the idea of narrative criticism, i.e. reading the text critically (analytically that is – not ‘critically’ in the popular sense) as narrative. I’d never really thought about the gospels in that way before, and it’s been colouring the way I see things now. This goes for Acts as well: one of the big things about our Acts section was how to read it as theological history – not just history, but history with a particular theological point and purpose.

    This past term we’ve been studying Acts in our home group (after having studied it for our New Testament course last term), and I think I’ve even been seeing new things in the text which I didn’t see there before. The way the narrative is structured is far more complex than just “this happened, then that happened…” which I’d always read it as. One such example of this is Paul’s name change in Acts 13:4-12. (more…)

  • The Raising of Lazarus

    LazarusAs I mentioned in my post on the woman at the well, I’ve been doing a class on John’s Gospel the past couple of months. It’s probably been my favourite class of this year, which is no small feat! John is such a rich gospel, and it’s been a real privilege to spend some time in it this year.

    Today we reached John 11, which is all about the raising of Lazarus. This is a key chapter in John’s gospel: it seems to mark some kind of a shift. Some people talk about the ‘Book of Signs’, which culminates with the sign of Lazarus, and the ‘Book of Glory’ which talks about Jesus’ glorification as he is lifted high on the cross. Others talk about his public and private ministry (after this point Jesus’ ministry and teaching seems to move to just his disciples). It seems there there aren’t hard and fast distinctions, but however you look at it this chapter is the catalyst for the changes.

    What I’d like to do in this blog post is just draw out a few thoughts on various aspects of the chapter. I’m going to skip over a lot – there’s so much here, I don’t want the blog post to become massive! – but I hope to draw out one or two key or even surprising aspects.

    (more…)

  • Godless Ethics and Egoism

    Source: Flickr
    Source: Flickr

    Given that I’m on a roll of offensiveness with my previous post on marriage, I thought I’d see if I can break a record of the number of people I can offend in one week by blogging about ethics. This term at college, we’ve started a course on ethics, and we spent the first week or two looking at how ethical systems are defined. While it’s still fresh in my memory, I’d like to think about how this might apply to ‘godless’ ethics, of which I have already touched on before.

    Just to have a definition to be going on with, ethics is an answer to the question ‘how should we then live?‘

    Broadly speaking there are three models of defining an ethical system that we’ve looked at: virtue, duty, and consequence. Let’s look at these in turn and see how they might work out.

    (more…)