Silent in the Background

This yea r’s   John Lewis Christmas advert   shows a fa mily preparing to welcome a teenager into their home as foster carers. The foster father’s attempts to learn to skateboard are part of his preparation for the arrival of a teenager into their home. This focus on the foster  father  is welcome. Approximately 40% of foster carers are male, but research shows that male foster carers are often seen in a negative light in contrast to female carers. Negative experiences The experience of male foster carers is that negative assumptions are often made about their ability to care for children and possibly even keep them safe. Male carers report being treated like a ‘risk to be regulated’ [1]  and feel that ‘the stigma of being a male foster carer runs deep… you are often portrayed as someone to fear.’ [2] Male carers also experience being seen as secondary to their female partner carers, who are assumed to be the main carers of the children. Even social work professionals admit to ‘resorti

Here are a few thoughts on the final chapter of this lovely short letter of 1 John. Like the gospel of John, this letter rewards a fairly quick read with encouragement about life with God. And it also has depths which can be found with more time and attention to what John is saying. So, I encourage you to read it through again as a whole, stopping along the way to think and pray when something grabs your attention. In this final chapter, John sums up his thoughts about his main themes. He refers to the assurance that everyone has who believes in Jesus, that we have the Spirit of God and participate in God’s victory over the world. He contrasts this with those who are against God and make God out to be a liar. As disciples, “we know him who is true, and we are in him who is true” (v.20). John refers again to sin, and, perhaps confusingly (see my earlier comments on chapter 3), to Christians’ inability to sin. He refers to the assurance we have that God always hears us when we ask “a

This letter of 1 John has themes that come around again and again. So in chapter 4 we read again about the opponents of Jesus (which John calls antichrist), the love of God, our sins, and the idea of abiding with God. In this letter these themes are intertwined, and John seems to be saying that they can’t easily be separated. We can’t look at one of these and then move onto the next. To gain a fuller understanding we must keep turning the ideas over and over. So, thinking about others people John gives a simple test: what do they think of Jesus? ‘Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God.’ Perhaps you’re starting to think about Christmas. What happened at the first Christmas is really important, John says. Baby Jesus was God born in human flesh, and that is really important to who Jesus is and what he did. John goes on to say that this sending of Jesus into the world was a revelation of God’s love, and through Jesus we have life because Jesus was

Have you been reading 1 John with me the past few weeks? I hope so! And I hope you’ll stick with it through this somewhat confusing central chapter. If you haven’t read 1 John 3 recently, click the link and read it through before reading on. (I’ll wait…!) Verse 1 includes one of those great statements of the Bible that we can hold onto in the toughest times. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. Another statement about God’s love, here emphasising that God’s love draws us into a family and means that we become children of God. In case we miss it, John emphasises, and that is what we are! Again ideas about love run through the chapter, and again it is very practical. Verse 18 exhorts us to love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action . Thinking about CCC I’m always encouraged when I see examples of love in action, when individuals help each other out, getting on with the business of loving one another. The chapter ends with a

1 John 2 is much longer than 1 John 1 which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and it contains a wide range of themes and ideas – sin (again), forgiveness (again), light & dark (again), warning of anti-Messiahs, and encouragements to abide in God. It’s well worth reading and meditating on. But as we’re thinking about the love of God, I want to highlight the first half of verse 5 – Whoever obeys Jesus’ (or God’s) word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection (that’s one translation, click the link to see a couple of others). This verse, and actually quite a lot of this chapter, is quite striking and challenging, because it links our actions (obedience to God) with the perfection or completeness of the love of God. How, we wonder, can God’s love depend on what we do? Aren’t we supposed to be saved by faith, through the free gift of God, not by our own works? I think we can say a couple of things. First, ‘love of God’ here probably does not mean God’s lo

Continuing our thinking about the love of God I was reading Romans 5.5 this week, which says that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." (NRSV) 'God's love' is the translation of ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ (he agape tou theou) which is in the genitive case - 'the love of God'. As it happened, in my beginner NT Greek class last week we were discussing how the genitive case has a wider range of meaning that simple possessive or ownership. (This was new to me, as a very beginner linguist.) My teacher pointed out the genitive can be understood in several ways: the love God has for others the love that another has for God (as in 'I have a great love of books') 'of' can imply authorship, as in 'the gospel of Mark' Translating the phrase above simply as 'God's love' seems to me to give it the first of these meanings. However, perhaps the original text (also?) carries the second