The Meaning of Marriage

Today is the day when women traditionally take the opportunity to propose marriage. This leap year there has been a lot of talk about marriage, both in Christian circles and in society as a whole.

The government in the UK last week announced the beginning of a process to consult on changing the definition of marriage to include same sex marriage. Even before the official announcement a group of churches and others had organised to fight the proposed change. The Coalition for Marriage (C4M) had 15000 signatures on their website within 24 hours of going live last week and that number has steadily grown. The online debates have begun on Facebook and other places and I have been involved in some of them.

Predictably enough the defenders of traditional marriage have been accused of being homophobic, reactionary, bigoted, out of touch and lacking in compassion for gay people. Also predictable has been the response of the defenders to these allegations, sometimes making assertions for which they have no evidence, sometimes chucking verses of Scripture about like ammunition, not caring where it lands. ( The words of Jesus about pearls before swine have sprung to mind here at times.)

Meanwhile,in America two well known pastors have published books on marriage in the last few months. Tim Keller has published The Meaning of Marriage and Mark Driscoll has produced Real Marriage to considerably more controversy. I have only read Keller's book which is a typically thorough and thought provoking exposition of Ephesians 5:18-33. At the beginning of the book Keller, who writes along with his wife, Kathy, defines marriage as 'a lifelong monogamous relationship between a man and a woman', a definition which previously would not have been required but which, increasingly Christian leaders are going to be required to give.

Keller's book also explains why, for Christians, the redefinition of marriage is more than just an extension of civil rights. Marriage is not simply for the stability of society or companionship or even procreation. Marriage, in Paul's terms is an illustration of the gospel and a demonstration of God's love for the church. Typically, therefore Keller's book is not simply a manual on how to have a happy marriage but a discussion of how our marriages can present the gospel of Christ to the world and how couples can help each other to draw closer to God (and to each other)through their determination to love one another and give of oneself to each other. (Although there are plenty of examples of both success and failure from the Kellers' own marriage.)

In the chapter written by Kathy Keller there is a discussion of the controversial area of headship and submission which concludes by asking each partner in a marriage to take on 'the Jesus role' in the marriage. The husband is to take on the role by exercising headship as a servant, always putting his wife's needs before his own. The wife is to take in the role by willingly submitting to her husband's servant leadership just as Christ willingly submitted to his Father even when he was co- equal in the Godhead.

At a time when traditional views of marriage are under attack and when attitudes to marriage are increasingly superficial, The Meaning of Marriage is a vital corrective. Married Christians are encouraged to recognise that their marriages are intended to present the gospel to the world. Unmarried Christians are reminded that marriage is not the be all and end all but rather only serves as an illustration of the ultimate relationship between Christ and his church; the only relationship through which every Christian (married or single)finds fulfilment.

If you are engaged to be married, read this book now. If you are married, read this book to remind yourself of the importance of your relationship and your covenant decision to love one another. If you are unmarried read this book to remind yourself of the proper Biblical perspective on marriage and singleness. All Christians should read this book to be reminded of the astonishing depths of the gospel of grace.

On the eve of a 200th anniversary

Studying English Literature in school can go one of two ways. It can lead some people to never want to pick up another book again in their lives or it can nourish a love of literature that lasts a lifetime. Often it depends on the material studied and on the teaching of it. Or it can depend on whether the immature teenage brain is capable of understanding the mind blowing nature of what it is taking in, rather than just reading Brodie's notes (remember them?)and desperately trying to remember key quotations for the exam.

I was very nearly put off reading the work of Charles Dickens when I studied Oliver Twist for GCSE. On reflection I don't think it was anything to do with the teaching which was very enthusiastic (to the point of reading dramatic episodes aloud and hamming it up ridiculously as Fagin). Rather it was due to the fact that I could not appreciate the revolutionary nature of what I was reading.

Thankfully I overcame my initial reaction to start reading some of Dickens' other work. His use of language to provoke a smile or a tear in his reader was second to none. He could lose his reader (and sometimes himself) in overlong passages of vivid description or wild tangents of social comment which did nothing to serve the plot but did everything to let you know what the author thought of the corrupt institutions of his day.

His personal life was a troubled one. Nobody could mistake Charles Dickens for a model husband and father and his attitude to women (both in real life and in his novels) was weird. But his novels shaped life in this country like no other works of literature could. Some of his characters were bland (Oliver Twist, Little Nell) but that only served to demonstrate the colourful character of many of the others (Fagin, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep).

But why am I writing about Dickens in this blog? Not just because he is one of my favourite authors and Great Expectations is almost certainly my favourite novel of all time but because his (almost prophetic) voice is just as relevant to society today as it was when he wrote. We have plenty of satire today but none of it comes with the moral outrage so often contained in Dickens' writing. We have plenty of campaigners for justice but movements like the Occupy protests lack the imagination, punch and vicious sense of humour that made Dickens incapable of being ignored by the powerful and corrupt.

Maybe it is going too far and maybe Dickens himself would reject the idea but I think it is entirely possible to see him standing in the heritage of the Old Testament prophets who were stark in their criticism of power and who often delivered their message with biting satirical humour. (NB Hosea also had a pretty strange personal life!)Our society with all it's dissatisfaction at the perceived corruption of financial, governmental and ecclesiastical institutions is surely ripe for a new Dickens. There are many blurbs on the back covers of paperbacks that use that tag about an author. None of them live up to the hype. Perhaps we need to recover the old Dickens and ask ourselves what he would write about 21st century society. Would it be any less scathing than his opinion of 19th century Britain? I think not.

Perhaps it would be even better if we re-read some of those Old Testament prophets and began to apply their voice to our culture today and echo their cries for justice and mercy. In May the Presbyterian Church in Ireland will launch its theme for the year 2012-13 which calls the church to be a prophetic voice in our society. I suspect Mr Dickens would approve. He might even ask what has been keeping us?

If God is there why doesn't he prove it

Big Questions

If God is there, why doesn’t he prove it?

This post is the text of a talk given in Ballygrainey on 29th January. It relies heavily on the work of much better communicators than me - namely Paul Williams and Barry Cooper ('If you could ask God one question'), Michael Ots ('What kind of God?'), Tim Keller (The Reason for God) and, of course, CS Lewis. If you find anything here that is helpful it probably came from one of them. Anything that you find unhelpful almost certainly came from me.

The Clues

I have no doubt that it is one of those stories that is told that has just grown and grown until every teacher in every pre-school classroom claims it happened to them but it goes like this. The teacher asks the pupils to sit down and draw a picture of what they did at the weekend.

They all happily go about drawing swimming pools and swings supermarkets and then the teacher discovers one child drawing something different. ‘What’s that Jimmy?’ asks the teacher. ‘That’s God’ replies Jimmy. ‘But no-one knows what God looks like’, says the teacher. ‘They will when I’m finished’, replies Jimmy.

And that is our problem. We don’t know what God looks like and so we end up coming up with all sorts of pictures for him ourselves. We start saying there are hundreds or thousands of gods, or we say that planet earth is a kind of god. We make God in our image.

The only way we can know what God is like is if he reveals himself to us. And we have a God who has done that and has left us with a number of clues to his existence.

I am going to talk a little about some specific clues God has given us to show that he exists and then, later on we’re going to look at the main way in which he has revealed himself to us.

I am going to deal with four questions about the universe, whose answers give us clues to the existence of God.

1. Why is there anything rather than nothing? Just about every scientist now aggress that the universe had a beginning. They call it the Big Bang, we call it Genesis 1:1. In his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller quotes Francis Collins one of the driving forces behind the Human Genome project; ‘We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.

The point is that if everything in the universe depends on the existence of something else, then the universe itself depends on the existence of something outside itself. This argument doesn’t prove that the God of the Bible exists, but it gets us to the possibility (or even probability) of a Creator. Either a creator outside of the universe started it all off or nothing just exploded into something.

2. Why is there life in the universe? Why is it that the universe is perfectly set up to support life, particularly life on this small blue-green planet called earth? Things like gravity, the speed of light, the composition of atmospheric gases on this planet all come together to support life. If any of these forces were out in even a tiny way, we could not exist. This suggests to many people that the universe was fine tuned by God in order to sustain life.

Atheistic scientists will come back on this and say that there might well be an infinite number of universes out there and we just happen to live in the one that supports life. There is absolutely no scientific evidence for multiple universes whatsoever and it almost certainly requires more faith to believe in that than to believe in a creator.

One philosopher called Alvin Plantinga, quoted by Keller, gives this example; Imagine a man in the Wild West dealing himself twenty straight hands of four aces in one poker game. As his companions reach for their guns, he says this, ‘I know this looks suspicious but what if there are an infinite number of universes out there so that for any possible distribution of cards in a poker game there is a universe where each one comes about and we just happen to be living in the universe where I always end up with four aces without cheating!’ What effect do you think that will have on the man’s fellow poker players? What effect do you think it will have on the man’s chances of making it out of the saloon alive?

It is possible that, purely by chance, we happen to be in the one universe out of trillions where life could exist but does it make sense?

3. Why is the universe ordered and regular so that it can make sense to a rational mind? Science itself depends on regular patterns in nature – gravity, speed of light etc. make sense to rational minds. To many people that suggests that there is a rational mind behind it. If there isn’t we have no justification in assuming that the patterns will keep going because there are, in fact, no patterns.

The interesting thing, when it comes to science, is that all science relies on these patterns to continue but, without God there is no guarantee that they will. Without God, scientists are just hoping that every day the patterns will keep working the same way they did yesterday and the millions of days before that. It probably doesn’t cause them to lose much sleep but it is what they are doing.

4. Why beauty? Here is one of the greatest clues of all. Somewhere out there is a work of art, a piece of music, a natural phenomenon or another human being who, when you look at them, they just take your breath away. Why do we find things to be beautiful and not just functional? And why is it that the things we find to be beautiful don’t satisfy our inner desire for beauty? For a moment, they take our breath away, but then we find something else that takes our breath away.

Could it be that our innate desire for beauty corresponds to something that will one day finally and fully satisfy that desire? Could that thing, in fact, be God?

From these four clues people have worked out that God is, at least possible. But then the atheists come along and say that belief in God is simply a part of the evolutionary process – that belief in the same God, even though it wasn’t true, was something that allowed communities to be formed and was, at one stage, helpful for natural selection. We don’t really need it any more but it has been hardwired into us by evolution for so long that it is hard to get rid of.

Here is what is being said; We cannot trust our minds to guide us into truth because all that our minds will do will be to guide us to what is appropriate for our evolution, even if it is not true. But hold on a minute. If we can’t trust our minds to guide us into truth, why should we trust the people that tell us through the use of their minds, they have discovered that atheism is true? Couldn’t their minds be deluding them?

Listen to what Tim Keller says about this; ‘It seems that evolutionary theorists have to do one of two things. They could backtrack and admit that we can trust what our minds tell us about things, including God. If we find arguments or clues to God’s existence that seem compelling to us, well, maybe he’s really there. Or else we could go forward and not trust our minds about anything. … It comes down to this: if, as the evolutionary scientists say, what our brains tell us about morality, love and beauty is not real – if it is merely a set of chemical reactions designed to passon our genetic code – then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should they trust them?

But if God exists then our minds do work and we can trust them to work because he made them to work in such a way as to understand truth and process beauty and recognise love and discern right from wrong and reason things out. If God exists then the fact that the universe had a beginning and the fact that it works in a consistent, regular way and is fine-tuned in a way to sustain life, makes perfect sense.

None of these clues PROVE, in a scientific way, the existence of God. But they are clues. And I think that, together, they make a pretty strong case and certainly explain what we see around us better than the theory that there is no God.

But if there is a God, why doesn’t he show himself to us more clearly? Well, he did. And we’re going to see how he did it in a few minutes.

The Man

Michael Ots tells this story in his book ‘What kind of God?’ A friend of his moved away to university and quickly got to know everyone in his particular hall o residence. But there was one student who remained a mystery. Despite continual knocking on door D23, they could get no response. Soon, they began to query whether anyone lived in the room at all. But then the clues started to appear. There was a strange smell from under the door – something like food but not particularly appetising. There was strange oboe music coming from the room late at night and a strange sound of something dissolving in the sink. None of those things conclusively proved the existence of the student in D23 but they gave some indication that he existed.

In order to demonstrate his existence he would have to have come out to meet them. The clues on their own would not have been enough. The same is true for God. The clues by themselves are not enough. In order for us to know that God exists he has to come and introduce himself to us. And that is exactly what he did.

The Gospel writers and the whole of the NT are in agreement. God did show himself to us on earth. He did it convincingly. He did it authoritatively. He did it in such a way that he could be heard and seen and touched.

The Word, who was responsible for creating everything, who was God, became flesh and dwelt among us. That is the claim the gospels make. That is the claim Jesus makes for himself.

Don’t let people tell you that Jesus didn’t claim to be God. In each of the four most reliable accounts that we have of his life, he claimed exactly that. When he forgave people’s sin he was claiming to be God. When he said ‘I and the Father are one’ he was claiming to be God. That is why, as soon as he said it, the crowd picked up stones to throw at him.

When he said ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, he was deliberately using the name God had given himself when he appeared to Moses and applying it to himself. Make no mistake. Jesus claimed to be God and people wanted him dead because of it, but he kept on doing it.

If you are going to claim to be something you need to be able to back it up. I could claim to be a great undiscovered footballer with more talent than Wayne Rooney, Thierry Henry, Gary Lineker and George Best combined. After 30 seconds on a five-a-side pitch you would soon find out I was talking nonsense.

Compare that to someone like Muhammad Ali whose constant refrain was ‘I am the greatest.’ If you are going to say it you had better be able to back it up. And of course Ali could.

And that’s the point about Jesus. He could back it up and he did it back it up. All the time. Calming storms at sea, feeding 5000 people with a packed lunch, healing the deaf, blind and lame, raising the dead. The evidence of the gospels is that Jesus walked this earth as if he owned the place.

Here is the point. We do not believe in God because of the clues that he made the universe and sustains it all, even though those clues are amazing and even though we believe that he did create it all. We believe in God because of the man called Jesus.

Here was a man who made stupendous claims about himself and did things that no-one else has ever done, including rising physically from the dead. No-one at the time was able to conclusively disprove the resurrection stories by bringing out a body. No-one since has been able to come up with another more plausible theory.

If we find all the clues about God’s existence compelling, they should at least make us consider the possibility that he exists. If Jesus made the claims he did and backed them up the way he did and if the  resurrection happened, then he would need to take seriously his claims about himself. There are a number of things that all these conclusions point us to.

First, God exists and has shown himself to the world in Jesus. Second, he is interested enough in us, not just to enter this world but to die for our salvation. Third, everyone who hears this has a response to make to him, he cannot be ignored.

Let me finish with that wonderful passage from CS Lewis’ brilliant ‘Mere Christianity’ because few people have said it better;

‘I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit on him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.’

What is evangelical?

A few things have got me thinking this week about what it means to be 'evangelical'. Last week, in Texas, there was a meeting of 'evangelical' leaders to decide which Republican candidate they could wholeheartedly support for the presidential nomination. Also last week my attention was drawn to a couple of blogs by Krish Kandiah - one, a review of a book on theology and politics by evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem, the other a report on some comments made by Mark Driscoll about the (from his perspective) lack of young, evangelical leaders in the UK.

The term 'evangelical' has always been one with which I feel very comfortable and by which I have identified my own theological position but it has always been subject to some weird and not so wonderful redefinitions.

The twentieth century saw a revival of broadly evangelical thinking and leadership in both the USA and the UK. Much of that leadership, in turn, sought to encourage the growth of evangelical thought and teaching in the developing world. This has brought incredible fruit in Asia, Africa and South America. At the same time evangelicalism saw itself as increasingly different from fundamentalism which seemed to focus too much on end times theology, anti-intellectualism, biblical literalism and a theory of biblical inspiration which owes more to Mohammad and Joseph Smith than to the Bible's understanding of itself.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century there seems to be a new shake up of attitudes in evangelicalism, especially in America, although it has an impact across the English speaking world. The church planting movement has taken off and given us a new model of church which is both exciting and challenging. The culture wars which began in America in the 1990s have not resolved themselves and are being played out in the Republican campaign at the moment. Traditional evangelical beliefs such as substitutionary atonement and the idea of hell as an eternal conscious punishment resulting from human rejection of God have come under fire or been ditched by some who still want to claim the title 'evangelical'.

It could seem that the evangelical community is in danger of breaking up over some of these issues and dissolving into an unedifying spectacle of blame and counter-blame. I suspect that now is the time for evangelicals to once again focus on what is important about our faith and to respond to John Stott's call for unity in his 1999 book, Evangelical Truth. I want to suggest a few guiding principles which might help us here.

1. Your commitment to evangelical faith does not imply within it a commitment to any one political party or grouping of the left or the right.

2. The touchstones of evangelical faith are not found in your responses to ethical or moral dilemmas, which may legitimately differ, but in your commitment to the historic good news of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, crucified Saviour and risen and returning Lord. To be evangelical is to believe in a God who reveals himself, a Saviour who redeems a sin-sick world and a Spirit who regenerates those who place their faith in Christ.

3. As an evangelical you will not reject out of hand other types of learning (especially in the field of science)just because they might restrict certain economic activities to which you are culturally or politically committed.

4. Your disagreements with each other should be carried out in a spirit of humility because none of us has apostolic authority and all of us need to listen to other people. These disagreements have, in recent months, had a tendency to take place on blogs like this one.They have also led, at times, either to people's views being condemned before they are even officially published or to provocative marketing producing unnecessary and unhelpful debate.In his book John Stott claims that the 'supreme quality which the evangelical faith engenders (or should do) is humility'. If that is true some of us (including me) have some repentance to do.

Our culture desperately needs a clear and united statement of evangelical truth. It may be worded differently from such statements in previous generations but it will contain the same historic truth which evangelicals believe goes all the way back to the apostles. Our culture needs the gospel and, as their name implies,it should be evangelicals who are most committed to bearing witness to it. And to God alone(not my church or my parachurch organisation) be glory.

So this is Christmas...

Well, here we are. The festive season is fully upon us. Shops are full of crazed shoppers buying food they will never eat and presents that not every recipient will appreciate and all the while being forced to listen to piped Christmas songs such as the one whose first line forms the title of this post. It is this mad rush that makes some of us sit back, observe the chaos and complain about the rampant materialism and commercialisation of the modern Christmas. It makes us long for times when Christmas was simpler - when chestnuts roasted on an open fire and you counted yourself blessed if you got a tangerine in your stocking and everyone remembered the real reason for the season.

But what purpose does our cynicism really serve? Do our complaints about the hassle and busyness and materialism really help us to focus on the Christ-child or do they just make us appear to be Scrooges?

Why does it have to be either-or? In the end, with all of our complaints about losing the meaning of Christmas in the mad rush of worldly celebration, most of us will still spend the 25th happily opening our presents, sitting down to a larger than normal dinner and watching (or Sky plussing) our favourite festive TV shows. Many of us will have been to church late on Christmas Eve or early on Christmas morning. There it may be the case that we will hear one last heartfelt plea to focus on the Christmas story over the course of the day itself but perhaps that is the wrong approach.

In the preceding weeks we will have been to carol services and nativity services. We will (hopefully) have had the opportunity to hear about the significance of the incarnation in an adult sermon as well as seeing it played out by our children dressed in dressing gowns and tea towels. We will have had the opportunity to contribute to causes that make Christmas that much easier for the less well off, either in our own country or overseas. And now we come to the day itself and we feel guilty because we haven't focussed enough on the child and another Christmas has passed without our expectations of the season being met.

Perhaps it is time to relax about all this. Observe all your normal traditions, whether they be food, presents and family time or serving Christmas lunch to a few homeless people or standing round the piano singing 'Hark! the herald angels sing' or watcing Doctor Who (or the Queen's Speech - sorry ma'am). God has given us many good things to enjoy and he intends us to enjoy them with gratitude in our hearts. All the gifts he gives us are brought to their completion and fulfilment in that one indescribable gift, given at Bethlehem.

Enjoy this Christmas season to the very best of your ability. If, for you, there is some sadness here with the absence of a loved one, don't cover it up or hide it away for fear of spoiling the day for others. Give people the opportunity to stand with you, pray for you and share with you the true meaning of Immanuel, God with us in every circumstance of life. Let that knowledge bring peace and, yes, joy into your heart.

He crossed time and space to be your Saviour. Enjoy that fact this Christmas by enjoying the day, however you choose to spend it. Happy Christmas!

Why the death of Christopher Hitchens is such sad news.

Today it was announced that Christopher Hitchens, one of the leading lights of New Atheism had died from pneumonia - a complication of the cancer from which he had been suffering. He was obviously a very bright man and possessed a great intellect. He was also a scathing and provocative debater There will be many people who (like myself) disagreed profoundly with him and who will be tempted to celebrate or crow over his passing. PLEASE resist this temptation.

Hitchen's death is sad because he leaves behind a sorrowing, grieving family for whom we all should have compassion. His death is sad because it reminds all of us that whatever intellectual heights we achieve or whatever career success, status or wealth come our way, we are all subject to the inevitable statistic that one in every one person dies.

His death, like every other death, is sad because it reminds that there is something not right about the very existence of death. In the comments on his death on the BBC website many of his fans and followers were using the letters RIP, or talking about the loss of a great soul or even expressing the hope that they might meet again the next time around. No doubt some of this will have been deliberately tongue in cheek but not all of it was. What was certainly not tongue in cheek was the expression by many of a sheer disbelief that their hero was gone. All of this, to me expresses an inability, deep within the human psyche, to reconcile ourselves with death as something normal, natural and part of life. We simply cannot reconcile the thought that humanity is just a random and meaningless colection of atoms with the feelings we experience when someone we love, or by whom we have been influenced, dies. We cannot help but feel that there must be more.

Now, Christopher Hitchens' followers will eventually suppress those feelings and carry on the New Atheist struggle but for those of us who disagreed with him, we should resist the temptation to jump up and down on his death. Instead we should try gently to show those who agree with him that their feelings about the wrongness of death are not, themselves, wrong but point to the fact that their needs to be a better solution than the one Hitchens, Dawkins et al have come up with.

From that point, maybe we can point them to the words of the carols (which Richard Dawkins apparently loves singing as a 'cultural Anglican') which tell them that the solution has come in Christ who was 'born that man no more may die'.

I am deeply saddened that Christopher Hitchens has died from such an awful disease. I did not share his opinions. I believe that much of what he wrote was wrong and often deliberately offensive to people of faith but that only makes me all the more sad, both for him and for his followers. I would encourage as many Christians as possible to express themselves carefully, thoughtfully and compassionately today and to do so for not other reason than the one given by the apostle Peter; 'Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.'

Thoughts on a Tenth Anniversary

At some point over the next ten days or so I will pluck up the courage to sit down and watch (for only the second time) Paul Greengrass's magnificent film about the September 11th attacks, 'United 93'. There is something about this 10th anniversary that makes me want to sit up and pay attention again.

Maybe it is the need to reflect on how the world has really changed since that awful day in 2001. We all thought, quite soon afterwards that the world had changed in some indefinable way. We all felt, as the magnitude of the events became clear, that 'nothing would ever be the same again'. In the intervening decade our world has been horribly transfixed by conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been traumatised afresh by attacks in Bali and Madrid and London.

And yet life has continued. The world did not change so irrevocably on September 11th 2001 that people stopped getting married, having children, starting jobs or graduating. Human beings, especially those in New York, have demonstrated their remarkable capacity to just get on with life. Air travel has become somewhat more inconvenient and we have got terribly used to the images of coffins being removed from planes at military air bases but for most of us life has just gone on.

But for all the attempts to carry on as normal we are a generation that has been marked by those attacks. We do remember where we were when we heard the news that clear autumn day. (I was in my car travelling to Downpatrick and listening to Simon Mayo on Radio Five Live as he attempted to describe to his listeners what he saw unfolding on the monitors in front of him). The images of first burning and then collapsing buildings are seared on our minds. The recognition that something so evil could come literally out of the blue and devastate thousands of lives haunts our memories.

The evil that occurred on that day scarred the beginning of the 21st century the way the loss of Titanic scarred the beginning of the 20th. It made us (for however brief a time) recognise that we needed help just to survive on a planet where such things were possible. It made us look beyond ourselves to something or someone greater just to supply the ability to get out of bed the next day and face a world where such events take place.

But then we got used to that world again. We decided that we didn't need to look beyond ourselves any more. We shifted back into the comfortable routines that didn't include the need to admit our own mortality, our own finiteness. For that reason alone perhaps it is important to mark this 10th anniversary. Because we need to remind ourselves as human beings that we are human. We are finite. In our own strength we are intensely limited. It is only then that we tend to look for something greater, something infinite, something with the limitless resources to supply our needs even if we don't have the answer to every question.

And of course that something is not a thing at all but a person. Like the apostle Paul we might beg for the pain and the hurt and the confusion of this world to be removed from us but when we do, like Paul we will hear the voice say to us, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'

If the events of that day a decade ago made us feel powerless, weak and inadequate in the face of evil, then we need to know that the power of evil is already broken. It was broken by love. It was broken moments after the planes hit when people ran into those buildings to get people out. But in reality it was broken 2000 years before when a man hanging on a cross endured the uttermost depths of human evil and cried out 'It is finished.'

My heart goes out to anyone for whom every September 11th is a reminder of a missing family member. I have never lost a family member to violence and I cannot appreciate the experience of anyone who lost someone on that day or in the foreign wars that have followed 9/11 but I know this; evil does not have the last word. God has not allowed it. At the cross and the empty tomb we hear the words 'Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.'