“DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS ADOPTED BY PEACE CONVENTION. “Boston, 1838.

“We the undersigned, regard it as due to ourselves, to the cause which we love, to the country in which we live, to publish a declaration expressive of the purposes we aim to accomplish and the measures we shall adopt to carry forward the work of peaceful universal reformation.

“We do not acknowledge allegiance to any human government. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests and rights of American citizens are not dearer to us than those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism to revenge any national insult or injury…

“We conceive that a nation has no right to defend itself against foreign enemies or to punish its invaders, and no individual possesses that right in his own case, and the unit cannot be of greater importance than the aggregate. If soldiers thronging from abroad with intent to commit rapine and destroy life may not be resisted by the people or the magistracy, then ought no resistance to be offered to domestic troublers of the public peace or of private security.

“The dogma that all the governments of the world are approvingly ordained of God, and that the powers that be in the United States, in Russia, in Turkey, are in accordance with his will, is no less absurd than impious. It makes the impartial Author of our existence unequal and tyrannical. It cannot be affirmed that the powers that be in any nation are actuated by the spirit or guided by the example of Christ in the treatment of enemies; therefore they cannot be agreeable to the will of God, and therefore their overthrow by a spiritual regeneration of their subjects is inevitable.

“We regard as unchristian and unlawful not only all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war; every naval ship, every arsenal, every fortification, we regard as unchristian and unlawful; the existence of any kind of standing army, all military chieftains, all monuments commemorative of victory over a fallen foe, all trophies won in battle, all celebrations in honor of military exploits, all appropriations for defense by arms; we regard as unchristian and unlawful every edict of government requiring of its subjects military service.

“Hence we deem it unlawful to bear arms, and we cannot hold any office which imposes on its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity. It follows that we cannot sue any man at law to force him to return anything he may have wrongly taken from us; if he has seized our coat, we shall surrender him our cloak also rather than subject him to punishment.

“We believe that the penal code of the old covenant–an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth–has been abrogated by Jesus Christ, and that under the new covenant the forgiveness instead of the punishment of enemies has been enjoined on all his disciples in all cases whatsoever. To extort money from enemies, cast them into prison, exile or execute them, is obviously not to forgive but to take retribution.

“The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration, and that the sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil can be exterminated only by good; that it is not safe to rely upon the strength of an arm to preserve us from harm; that there is great security in being gentle, long- suffering, and abundant in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth; for those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.

“Hence as a measure of sound policy–of safety to property, life, and liberty–of public quietude and private enjoyment–as well as on the ground of allegiance to Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, we cordially adopt the non-resistance principle, being confident that it provides for all possible consequences, is armed with omnipotent power, and must ultimately triumph over every assailing force.

“We advocate no Jacobinical doctrines. The spirit of Jacobinism is the spirit of retaliation, violence, and murder. It neither fears God nor regards man. We would be filled with the spirit of Christ. If we abide evil by our fundamental principle of not opposing evil by evil we cannot participate in sedition, treason, or violence. We shall submit to every ordinance and every requirement of government, except such as are contrary to the commands of the Gospel, and in no case resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience.

“But while we shall adhere to the doctrine of non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spiritual sense, to assail iniquity in high places and in low places, to apply our principles to all existing evil, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions, and to hasten the time when the kingdoms of this world will have become the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. It appears to us a self-evident truth that whatever the Gospel is designed to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now to be abandoned. If, then, the time is predicted when swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and men shall not learn the art of war any more, it follows that all who manufacture, sell, or wield these deadly weapons do thus array themselves against the peaceful dominion of the Son of God on earth.

“Having thus stated our principles, we proceed to specify the measures we propose to adopt in carrying our object into effect.

“We expect to prevail through the Foolishness of Preaching. We shall endeavor to promulgate our views among all persons, to whatever nation, sect, or grade of society they may belong. Hence we shall organize public lectures, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition every governing body. It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings, and practices of society respecting the sinfulness of war and the treatment of enemies.

“In entering upon the great work before us, we are not unmindful that in its prosecution we may be called to test our sincerity even as in a fiery ordeal. It may subject us to insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and calumny. Tumults may arise against us. The proud and pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, may combine to crush us. So they treated the Messiah whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. We shall not be afraid of their terror. Our confidence is in the Lord Almighty and not in man. Having withdrawn from human protection, what can sustain us but that faith which overcomes the world? We shall not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try us, but rejoice inasmuch as we are partakers of Christ’s sufferings.

“Wherefore we commit the keeping of our souls to God. For every one that forsakes houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for Christ’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

“Firmly relying upon the certain and universal triumph of the sentiments contained in this declaration, however formidable may be the opposition arrayed against them, we hereby affix our signatures to it; commending it to the reason and conscience of mankind, and resolving, in the strength of the Lord God, to calmly and meekly abide the issue.”

Immediately after this declaration a Society for Nonresistance was founded by Garrison, and a journal called the NON-RESISTANT, in which the doctrine of non-resistance was advocated in its full significance and in all its consequences, as it had been expounded in the declaration. Further information as to the ultimate destiny of the society and the journal I gained from the excellent biography of W. L. Garrison, the work of his son.

I have been thinking about how honestly I confess my sins and my motives for my confession.

Water of life!

If I confess my sin so that I am free from my guilt and my sin but do not at the same time confess and struggle against the injustice I see against the poor, oppressed and marginalised people of the world, I don’t believe I am being a true disciple of Christ (for my concern is on my need and remains a base and selfish act).

To be a true disciple I should not only confess my sin, but also confess the injustice I see in the world and thus fight against the powers of darkness and hell to help eliminate the societal sins and their root causes that keep people living in poverty.

When I fail to do this I fail to love my neighbour as myself.

Texts: Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-12, John 1:1-14.

Christmas is, at the same time, the most beautiful of festivals, and also the most puzzling. For, at this season, the church tells the story of a virgin who gives birth to a child, of angels coming to earth to announce the good news, of a strange heavenly body, star or comet, which certainly does not appear to obey Newton’s laws of motion.

We, by and large, are the children of the age of enlightenment, the age of reason, of the modern period, in which knowledge has come to be equated with scientific discovery, and history asks the question “what really happened?” It is small wonder that we are dominated by these ways of thinking. They have, for five hundred years driven western society. Not only that, but they have been spectacularly successful. Who among us would want to live in a world without electricity, without modern means of transport and communication, without modern medicine?

But the benefits of modernity have come at a price. The externality of life has become so all-important and all-consuming of our resources and energy, that we have lost contact with innerness, with our own innerness and the innerness of the whole of creation. From being a place of awe and wonder, the world and its creatures, including our fellow human creatures, have become an object of exploitation for our profit and benefit.

The reason why Christmas is puzzling is that, in line with this whole way of western rational thought, we come to the foundational stories with the question “Did it really happen?” “Were there really angels and shepherd and kings, was there a star, is a virgin birth possible?”

I suggest that to place such questions against the story of Christmas is part of the price we have paid for modernity. With our concentration on rational discovery, scientific method and historical accuracy, we have lost all understanding of the role of narrative in our lives. The reading of novel and poetry becomes a leisure activity, music becomes entertainment, story is something for children, legend and myth become synonymous with untruth. Both theology and popular thought have applied these modern canons to the Biblical stories, and one of three things has happened…

1. For the vast majority, the stories of the Bible have become simply meaningless and irrelevant to their world. At Christmas time even Santa Claus has greater credibility that Matthew or Luke.
2. For the liberal theologians, the mythical and legendry elements have been pruned out of the Biblical narrative, leaving bare historical facts, which are interesting, but of little worth celebrating.
3. In fundamentalist thinking the myth and legend have been translated into rational fundamental fact, cute if we are talking about shepherds, kings and angels, (just been to see William and Thomas in school nativity)but dangerous if we try to make Biblical story into political controlling agenda. Fundamentalists may feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a battle it is very difficult for those fighting to appreciate the other persons position.

What is clear is that modernism is reaching the end of its dominance of our world, of its intellectual, social and political life. We are realizing that the concentration on the external, together with our de-valuing of story, myth and legend, has led to a deep impoverishment of our lives.

In post-modern thinking we are beginning to realize that the important question is not “Did it really happen?”, but “Is it true?” As we try to begin, again, to fill that deep hole of spiritual yearning which modernism has left at the heart of our human experience, we ask whether the Christmas story among others, can bring us to a deeper and fuller humanity.

The end of modernism has begun to teach us that rationalism is a thin veneer on the surface of our humanity. We have begun to realize again that the roles of art, music, poetry, prose, drama and dance, together with story, myth, legend, religion and psychology are intertwined as they take us beyond that thin surface of our lives. As we begin to value again their place in the search for truth rather than fact, they will be our companions in that twin journey into the depths of our own being and into the heights of the infinity and unity of all being. This is the double journey, which is so often today described by the word “spirituality”. It is I think no co-incidence that a widespread renewal of interest in spirituality comes with the demise of modernity.

A journey to the depths of the self and to the heights of heaven is a journey fraught with many dangers. Those who suggest that it is simple and open to anyone to try, are not unlike those who would suggest we set off to the North Pole on skis or across the Atlantic in a rowing boat, without charts, compass or support system. The church community in all its breadth  exists to offer the guidance needed through the many pitfalls of the journey of the spiritual life.

I would suggest three starting points for the journey of the spiritual life, which I hope more and more of us will want to undertake in the coming years.

The first is an encounter with story, with text, with the Biblical story. The Bible is a collection of stories, which chronicle humanity’s encounter with itself and God, and God’s encounter with humanity. I think the time has now come to enter into the story as story and to find there, the echoes and guideposts of our own spiritual encounter and journey. That we become part of the story, (here Eugene Peterson’s book “Eat This Book” is helpful) Thinking of the Christmas story, the angels, the shepherds the star and the wise men, the baby born in the stable all relate to how we find the message and the meeting with the one who gives us new birth, new depth of meaning, new direction and new mission. We meet our God in a text, which takes us beyond fact and offers us insights into truth. Here I find my own new birth, my own vulnerability and experience my own humanity.

The second is to directly encounter God, this we can reach through inner stillness in the centre of our lives. Christian have meditated on the Word for thousands of years, stilling their minds and discovering again the sense of peace and joy and wholeness that can come from the discipline of meditation. I am reminded of that old carol “It came upon the midnight clear”

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
the world hath suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

Through such encounters with the divine we find a new vocation for our lives with new and deeper meaning, which we may have been searching for and thought we had lost forever.

The third is the meeting with God in the context of the meeting of the community. Our story is maintained through ritual and liturgy. Today, and each day of the year, we tell the story in word, in action, in poetry, music, art and dance. Through the telling of the story together, we affirm our community, we find new faith and hope, and again we find a new sense of the mission and a vocation of humanity i.e. to be human in our de-humanizing world – to be the image of God.

At this Christmas season we hear a story of journeys, the journey of Mary and Joseph, the journey of the shepherds, the journey of the wise men, the journey of angels and even of a star. May I invite you on a journey, a journey to the discovery of our true selves, a journey to find a new sense of humanity, which our world so desperately needs.

I was inspired by a sermon written the Very Rev Michael J.Pitts, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal and while I have largely copied his work it has been change and edited by me.

A BMW is more than a car, it is a status symbol.  I don’t mean to pick on BMW owners anymore than anyone else, but it is a good example to use as an illustration of how far away we are from living out the values and simplicity of Jesus.  In basic terms, if Jesus had £50,000 to spend and he knew that people were dying from the lack of the basic necessities of life – such as food and clean water, would he buy a status symbol or feed the poor?

The heart is deceitful above all things and it is easy to convince ourselves that we need things or deserve things (I recently heard a friend say they deserved a new car due to the stress they had recently endured).  I find it difficult to imagine Jesus saying I need a holiday in the Maldives, or I must have an iPod, and yet I hear this kind of language on the lips of many Christians including my own (I have never been to the Maldives but I do own and iPod).

Some years ago I had a conversation with an up and coming business manager.  He and his wife lived in an ex-miners’ terraced cottage.  It had three bedrooms and small garden.  The manager and his wife were both committed Christians.  When he got promotion at work he told me he had to buy a bigger house as his clients would expect it.  “It is important for my career.”He said.

I replied with the following question “I wonder what would happen when your clients knowing you could afford a bigger house, discoverer that you had chosen to stay in your cottage so that you could give more money to the poor?

He bought his big house and has been successful in business but I still wonder what the impact would have been if he had not moved and would he have been more or less successful in business.

It is easy to see the speck in my brother’s eye but the plank in my own is trickier for me to spot. As I said, the heart is deceitful above all things and it takes considerable effort to examine my own motives, but it is imperative that I do it. I try to focus on Jesus and compare my morality against him and in this process give permission to some members of the community of faith to speak into my life.  I need those who God has placed me with because they see the plank in my eye far more clearly than I do, they are not caught up with my fantasy – in fact we should all make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves , seeking others who can honestly reflect back to us what they see in us and turn both our will and our lives over to God.

In 1946 Mother Teresa heard Christ’s miraculous call to “Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come, be My light.” “Will thou refuse?” How could Mother Teresa refuse? For in 1942, she had made a personal, secret vow to Jesus, “Not to refuse Him anything, however small.” When I became a Christian in 1978 I prayed a prayer very similar to Mother Teresa’s vow – the prayer was in a booklet written by Norman Warren entitled Journey into Life.  The prayer was as follows…

Lord Jesus Christ, I know that I have sinned in my thoughts words and actions

There are so many good things I have not done. There are so many sinful things I have done.

I am sorry for my sins and turn from everything I know to be wrong.

You gave your life upon the cross for me.

Gratefully I give my life back to you.

Now I ask you to come into my life.

Come in as my Saviour to cleanse me.

Come in as my Lord to control me.

And I will serve you all the remaining years of my life in complete obedience.

Amen

What set Mother Teresa apart is the speed and faithfulness in which she honoured her vow.  I have been trying to fulfil my vow for 31 years, it has been a wonderful and exciting journey and it is a journey that is still challenging.

The thing I want to do I don’t do and instead I do the very thing I do not want to do – this is my story – so when I challenge others I am confronted by my own hypocrisy and my falling short.  I am fortunate to be part of a Christian community that challenges me to push in harder to God and who also forgive me when I don’t.  Who will save me from this body of death? Yes you know who!

What if…

What if being a ‘member’ of a church wasn’t about accessing communion, or submitting to the church’s  authority, but was about committing to one another’s lives no matter what.  A covenant even, that we will pursue God’s best for one another.

That we will do life together – through good times and bad.

That we will take down our masks, revealing what’s really going on in our lives and hearts.

That we ask each other difficult questions.

That when you sin against me, and when I sin against you, we are committed to forgive and work through the issues.

That there’s no bailing out when things get tough.

What if we made that covenant to each other?

What if the ‘church community’ wasn’t about weekly meetings, but about being in and out of other people’s homes and lives, day in day out?

What if it involved breaking down the different compartments of our lives – our homes, our families, our work, our friends, our neighbours, our communities – but instead tried to integrate them?

What if it didn’t pursue ‘ministry’ – but simply ‘life’?

What if it was committed to a specific geographical community, dedicated to bringing God’s values to that area?

What if it committed to pursuing love and justice, no matter the cost? How far is it willing to go for the sake of the lost?

What if it really believed that each time we walk past someone in need, we walk past Jesus?

What if it didn’t accept hard-heartedness to sin, selfishness, and poverty as an option?

What if it rejected the notion that Christian values = middle class values – that Christianity shouldn’t be ‘respectable’?

What if it committed to building friendships with the types of people Jesus himself preferred to spend time with – the broken, the forsaken, the poor?

What if it opened its homes, not just to one another, but to those in need as well?

What if we’re holding out for some sort of revival that we actually need to initiate?

What if our ideas about love have to take a step up?

What if Isaiah got it right when he said that only when we spend ourselves on behalf of others, then our light will break forth in the darkness?

(This blog was sent to me by afriend in my community http://www.communitychurchdundee.org)

Recently I made a brief appearance on a television show called the secret millionaire (I by the way am not the millionaire). In the show the secret millionaire asked me about living in the Hilltown and one of the things I said to her was how we have had to teach our small children not to pick up discarded hypodermic needles on the way to school.  This comment has led some people to suggest that I showed Dundee in a poor light and that Dundee is not like that.

However talking to one of the mum’s at the school gate last week she told me how in her block a drug addict had overdosed and looked like they might die, her friends seeing she was in a bad way (they too are addicts) tried to push her down the rubbish chute so that she wouldn’t die in their flat. After trying in vain to force the woman down the rubbish chute they took her down stairs and left her in the basement to die.

Most Christians in Dundee will never hear such stories first hand or have their children step over needles, condoms and used sanitary towels on their way to school (all of which are a regular occurrence for us). This is because of the transformation of their lives through their faith leads them to better parts of the city and keeps them out of the social paths where they would meet the people whose lives are blighted by addiction and abuse.  I am not trying to point the finger nor do I want to make us out to be some kind of saints, (we are defiantly not), but as I have asked the people I meet what they think are the top 5 issues that need to be solved in Dundee the following list has emerged

1. Drugs and alcohol addiction,
2. Crime (and the fear of crime),
3. Break down of the family,
4. Teenage pregnancy
5. Unemployment

These are the top favourites at the moment.  (I have not finished asking people yet and so the list may change I will blog more when I have completed my survey),

The question I want to ask is what is the church doing about tackling any of the issues in the list?

I accept that there may be Christians  doing jobs I know nothing about but as far as I can see there is no visible Christian response, presence, thinking and or debate on these subjects.

If the church is to be relevant then surely the top five issues of any city must become our agenda too?