On the Rock Face

God’s question to me today, after watching a snippet from *Bob Goff, is “will I trust Him on the rock face?”

A part of me wants to respond immediately, “Yes, of course.”

Can I honestly say “Yes”? the temptation to be fickle and answer in the affirmative is immediate, but the truth is more complicated.

The last year has been challenging. Firstly, I suddenly had a published book that needed launching and I was like a rabbit caught in the lights. I still am to be honest. Marketing defeats me, the deriding voices of my past refusing to be silenced as I face this new challenge, but that is a story for another day.

The second unsettling came with the American election and the rapid ejection of the Christian Nationalist movement from whispered shadows into the global spotlight. The whole fabric of my Christian life has been turned asunder as I listen and read with mounting sadness, no, it’s deeper than that, to people I thought of as pillars of the faith dissemble into racial bigots, spewing hatred against women, gays, anyone darker than pale white, the “left”, the imagined enemy contained in the word and concept “woke”, the language ever more aggressive.  

The teachers I learnt from seem to have disintegrating feet of clay, and I struggle to hang on to my conviction of where Jesus stands in all this? Thankfully, I am not alone – there are others who see as I do and who are doing what they can to rescue our faith, our religion, from the shreds of the destructive rhetoric of power-hungry greed.

The waters around me are seriously muddied. At what point did the power of the world come to mean more than the power of the word? As I look back over the decades of my membership of the Pentecostal movement, it seems this need for world domination was already there, insidious but present, growing until now it has flowered with nuclear devastation. How did I not recognise it? Yes, Jesus told us to go into all the world, and make disciples of all nations, he did not say go and take by force and rule all the nations.

As my foundation began to splinter, an old longing began to speak louder. Ever since I left the Anglican Church to join the Pentecostals some forty years ago, there have been moments when my heart tiptoed back to the memory of that sanctuary, to the importance of some of the rituals, especially over Easter. I realised how much I missed the gravitas of the Eucharist, and the age-old prayers that direct our minds and hearts to the crux of the gospel as stated by Paul in 1 Corinthians: We preach Christ and Christ crucified and the redemption that is promised by His sacrifice.

it is the foundational stone of Christianity. If Christ had not died, had not risen after three days, our faith is baseless. Our Saviour Himself, Jesus, on the night He was betrayed instituted the covenant of the Eucharist, the breaking of bread, the drinking of wine in memory of His broken body and spilt blood – He said to do this in remembrance of Him. Jesus, His sacrifice central and integral to our faith, not as a flippant aside.

It is the one aspect of the Pentecostal and Evangelical movements that I have always found lacking, and worried at the almost cavalier approach to communion, but it did not plague me as it has these past months. The last meal I shared in the church I was attending the person introducing communion quoted a verse, maybe 15 seconds of recognition, and then with a wave of his arm in the direction of the table on which the bread and wine were, said “Help yourselves.”

I looked at the line of people coming to take a square of bread and a thimble of grape juice and wondered, how many of them knew what they were doing, or the significance of communion. Paul speaks clearly to the Corinthians about their lack of respect when coming together to celebrate the Eucharist, going so far as to warn that many, who partake with wrong spirit, without true repentance, become sick. If we are not rooted and grounded in the tenets of our faith, in the deep matters of the gospel, we are vulnerable to every wind of change that may blow through our universe.

Ash Wednesday arrived, and I knew I had to kneel at the altar of grace, return like a wounded child to the sanctuary of the Anglican Church of my youth, to the eternality of Jesus. I found a measure of peace in the steadfast reciting of the Nicene Creed, reaffirming that the Christ I know and love, is firmly on His throne at the right hand of Father in heaven.

Mariann Budde, the Bishop of Washington caught my attention with her message to the President Elect, when she spoke of the verse from Hosea 6 v 6: For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. Once again, a member of the established church stood up for the ethos of the gospel. The Anglican Church has been going for centuries, has withstood tests and persecutions, and still it stands, ready to move when needs be, rocklike in its steadfastness. I need that right now in this world of upside down!

Jeremiah 6 v 16: Thus says the Lord;

“Stand in the ways and see, And ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it. Then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

I love the years I spent in Pentecostal churches, their heart to serve, to share the Gospel, always ready to go where the Spirit directs them, and I will miss the energy of precious sons and daughters of Christ.

But for now, I need peace, I need to sit quietly at the feet of my Saviour, hear His word read over me, reaffirm my faith over and again, seek true repentance and be released by words of absolution. It is here, away from the clamour and busy-ness that I will find the answers I seek, re-establish my mission and calling in Him, and allow my soul to heal and be refreshed.

* Bob Goff is an American lawyer, speaker, author, missionary, philanthropist.