Serving Truth

A long, long time ago in a suburb far, far away, my parents, unbeknownst to me, had dinner with Michael Green. They were not Christians. He, on the other hand, was the vice-principal of the London College of Divinity and a celebrated evangelist—a man who combined his formidable intelligence with great wit and a winsome smile.

Fifteen years later, after I'd become a Christian, I discovered that my parents had sat at the great man's table. Naturally I was fascinated to know what had happened. What did my mother remember about an evening in the company of one of Britain's leading evangelists? A brilliant insight? Some penetrative question?

No, she remembered this: "He carved the meat with such dignity."

I was, I have to admit, a little disappointed, but quite intrigued. Clearly, he displayed more than just some Zorro-esque skill with a blade. It was not that he'd carved every slice to the translucent thinness of a tissue, nor that he'd negotiated the tricky cuts around the bone with the elegance and speed of Michael Schumacher taking a sharp right-hander.

Rather, this was about attitude. What was it, I wondered, about Michael Green's carving that made it so distinctive? The question lay unanswered but throbbing in my memory.

A few years hence, I went to a lecture on evangelism by… Michael Green. Strangely enough, he didn't mention the art of carving. But I was eager to solve the riddle, so I queued to speak to him afterwards. And finally, my turn came.

"Michael." I said, "Fifteen years ago you had dinner with my parents."

"Yes."

And there's something that I've been wanting to ask you. My mother recalls only one thing."

"Yes."

"She remembers how you carved the meat with such dignity."

"Well," he replied without missing a beat, "I suppose I would. After all the animal gave its life for me."

I was stunned.

Michael Green's theology not only flowed from his brain to his heart, but it kept flowing—down through the tendons of his forearms, through the wrist's carpal tunnel into the palmaris and abductor muscles of his hands as well

His biblical understanding of the animal's worth to God suffused his carving. His respect for the animal, as a fellow creature which had received life from God, together with his grasp of God's providential generosity in providing this creature to sustain his life, gave him a deep gratitude for this glorious provision.

And this, in turn, compelled him to carve with 'such dignity' that a non-Christian such as my mother could perceive the distinction and remember it more clearly than any words he had spoken.

This wasn't just some humdrum 'secular' act; this was a sacred act. This was holy carving. The Bible calls this 'proclamataion.'

In Psalm 19, we read:

'The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of his hands.'

You can proclaim and declare truth without the need for words. Indeed, this idea—that inanimate objects, made by God, can 'speak'—finds New Testament confirmation in Paul's letter to the Christians in Rome:

'For since the creation of the word, God's invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that [we] are without excuse' (Romans 1.20)

The created order speaks of truth beyond. In a book called 31 Songs, the erstwhile king of lad's fiction, Nick Hornby, made a similar point in reflecting on a song by Rufus Wainwright:

'I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs that bring me up short, make me do a double-take. When things add up to more than the sum of their parts, when the effects achieved are inexplicable, then atheists like me start to get into difficult territory…All I can say is that I can hear things that aren't there, see and feel things I can't normally see and feel, and start to realize that, yes, there is such a thing as an immortal soul, or at the very least, a unifying human consciousness, that our lives are short but have meaning. Beyond that, I'm not going to listen to stuff like this too often, though, just in case.'

Notice that wonderfully honest and revealing 'of course' at the beginning of the quotation, and that similarly honest determination not to 'listen to stuff like this too often, though, just in case'. God has revealed himself to Hornby through creation. It's plain to him, but for whatever cocktail of reasons, he chooses not to pursue the implications of that truth—to 'suppress' it, as Romans puts it.

So, the way we do things can also speak of God's salvation. And that is clear in the case of Michael Green's carving. The change that God brought about in his life by the Holy Spirit was so profound that it made an impact on my mother through a seemingly incidental action.

Psalm 96 uses similar language of proclamation and declaration in exhorting the people of God to global mission:
'Sing to the Lord, praise his name; Proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous deeds among all the people.'

Of course, we usually understand this kind of delcaration to be verbal, but the Bible—and communication theory—confirms that everything coomunicates: not just words, but our tone of voice and gestures; not just the sermon on a Sunday but the preacher's body language, her clothes, the lectern, the building, the décor, the signs, the coffee cups and indeed the coffee—fair trade, or otherwise.

Everything speaks. So, we proclaim God's salvation not only through what we say but in the way we do things. 'Let your light shine before people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.' Does this mean that we stand around suffused with a beatific glow—like a flourescent tube—or insted that, as we go around being and doing and speaking, something of Christ's spirit in us communicates? Just as Scrooge carried his temperature around with him, so do we.

This truth about the transformation of our being and doing is explicit in the language of new birth (John 3.3-8) and new creation (2 Corinthians 5.17) and as such it is also part of the salvation we proclaim. Jesus, through his death on the cross, not only resuces us from sin and death, and not only gives us the right to call ourselves children of God, but transforms us in ways that are 'hearable'. Salvation does not merely open up the way to eternal life in heaven but also abundant life on earth.

Of course, this is not to diminish our need to speak the gospel with words, for God speaks not only through creation and conscience and Spirit but through words. Nor is it in any way to unhelpfully exaggerate St Francis' adage "Preach constantly, use words if necessary." Words are necessary. Nevertheless, it is to affirm a wonder and a reality.

God is in the transformation business, and extraordinary things happen when he sets to work. The ordinary is transformed. Indeed, the wonder of Christianity is not just that extraordinary things happen or that people do extraordinary things for God; the wonder of our salvation is that the ordinary becomes extraordinary when God touches it. And this is at the heart of the cause for which LICC [The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, from whom this article is borrowed] was founded: Christ, the Lord and redeemer of all, did not come merely to take us to heaven but to touch every aspect of our life on earth and use us to be agents of change in his world.

He changes the way a man carves meat.

The reality that God can speak through the smallest of our actions is yet one more reason why 'whatever we do' can be done to the glory of God. This is not only because we can do it for God as our ultimate master, and because, in the process, we may do others good—bring food to their table, electricity to their computer, music to their soul—but, by his grace, because it can in itself speak of the 'kingdom come', of life transformed.

'There is' as Abraham Kuyper said, 'not one square inch of this earth about which Jesus does not say "This is mine."' And there is not one action or job that we cannot do for the glory of God. Amazingly, that includes carpentry and calculus and carving a joint.

Is that not a truth worth proclaiming?

Mark Greene, executive director of LICC

The above article is reproduced by kind permission of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. To receive their free bi-weekly emails, please email mail@licc.org.uk with the subject ‘Subscribe’.