Above all else

Today's sermon was on the five loaves and two fishes, and I was reminded of this song by Corrinne May.  One of my favourite songs!

It's the politically correct thing these days to embrace plurality and tolerance.  Let's be clear.  In general, this is a good thing.  But the trouble is that we mix up tolerance with fuzzy thinking. Let's suppose you have a friend who likes to drink wine.  You have a view that drinking too much alcohol is bad for your health.  On the contrary, your friend thinks that drinking wine actually has certain medicinal benefits.  We embrace plurality and tolerance in that we don't condemn the teetotaler or the wine lover.  This seems to make sense. But, whatever we happen to think about a particular matter, there still remains a particular truth.  On balance, is drinking wine good or bad for you?  We may not know the answer, and may not have the means to find out conclusively, but ultimately, there is a truth out there as to whether drinking wine is, on the whole, good or bad for you. Let's adjust the scenario a bit to test this.  Sup...

Over the last few months, I've been at a fair few dinners where the topic runs into pretty interesting, sometimes controversial topics.  This can include tithing (a term which refers to the voluntary discipline of regularly giving to the church, usually 10% or more of one's income) and the propensity of some churches to overemphasise the causal link between tithing and material prosperity, the church's stand on lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual (LGBT) issues, and recently, even the existence of ghosts and demons! At each one of these dinners, I've found my non-Christian friends and colleagues to be generally forthright in their views.  In contrast, I find that Christians tend to be extremely reserved about their faith, and sometimes even in casual agreement with the non-Christian viewpoint.  In fact, it can be difficult to tell if they are Christian.  This is especially when the conversation starts to take on a not-so-gentle mocking of Christian beliefs....

I came home from work the other day and my wife asked me if I'd had a good day.  The day had just been another of those run-around-all-day types, with the usual problems and little frictions that are part of any workday.  So my instinctive reaction to the question was simply to heave a little sigh of relief to be home, explain that it was just another day, and that nothing particularly good happened.  My good wife's immediate response to that was to gently remind me that we have such blessed lives, practically any day in which nothing bad happens can pretty much be counted as an amazing day!  She's right of course.  We live in a country that's safe for our friends and family.  We have jobs, a home, a happy family.  We have a wonderful church family, and even have the means and opportunity to bless others. I remember that when I was growing up, I lived in a four-room flat with my parents, my brother, my grandmother, two aunties, one uncle and hi...