Ouvir

O sermão de Domingo passado, que pergunta "Onde está a Lapa no mapa?", pode ser ouvido aqui (ou no Spotify).

Porque Jesus não fugiu do pior cansaço

Podemos sempre trabalhar melhor.

A live louca

A live louca de ontem com Yago pode ser vista aqui, meu povo! (Sim, reconheço que em vários momentos a acção na caixa de comentários tem ainda mais graça do que a conversa...)

"Odeio Artistas" com Bruno Vieira Amaral

 Eu não sou da família do Bruno Vieira Amaral. Mas sempre que ouço ou leio alguma coisa dele, sinto que sou quase. Não há muitos Baptistas em Portugal e quando és um deles é provável que tenhas amigos no Vale da Amoreira. E o Vale da Amoreira é único no país e tornou-se através da escrita do Bruno um dos nossos lugares literários mais inesquecíveis no primeiro romance que escreveu, “As Primeiras Coisas” (transformado por ele em “Bairro Amélia”).

Temos mais geografia em comum: o Porto e a Igreja da Esperança (actualmente Ministério Cristão Internacional) do final dos anos 90, onde o Bruno tinha tios e eu tinha a minha irmã mais velha. Apesar de agnóstico, ele, que cresceu nas Testemunhas de Jeová, passou bons tempos naquele ambiente evangélico aceso e acolhedor. Gerou-se um consenso pouco inteligente em esperar que não-crentes que tenham sido educados por crentes vivam ressentidos—o Bruno tem outra atitude sobre o assunto.

E depois há o modo sincero e sem sentimentalismos como o Bruno encara o seu papel como pai e como filho. Neste programa, passámos a primeira meia-hora a falar acerca das culpas que arrastamos e inadvertidamente lançamos aos nossos miúdos quando lidamos com eles. A determinada altura, o Bruno aponta a carga irónica e insuportável das expectativas desmesuradas de uma “parentalidade” consciente e obrigatória: “se tiras Deus da equação, tens de controlar tudo: a tua saúde, a tua família. Se estudares a fundo o mecanismo das coisas, [procurando] uma profissionalização de todas as esferas da vida, tu vais conseguir dominar todos os aspectos da vida”. Funciona como uma maldição, de facto.

São quase duas horas de conversa com um dos nossos melhores escritores, crescido às voltas com a religião e os subúrbios, com estar dentro e estar fora. Ouçam-na em qualquer plataforma digital!

Home Beyond Europe (the original and raw version)

I would frame the issue of “Why is sharing the gospel so hard in Europe today?” largely in terms of two categories: time and space. But even before that, let us go to the subject facing it like the word-obsessed Christians we are (or, at least, we should be). Reality can become real for us not because we have our eyes open but because we have our Bibles open: we need revelation to get real. As it is revealed to us in Scripture, sharing the gospel is always hard, independent of the century or the country we live in, because we love darkness (John 3:19)—we resist Jesus not so much because crucial information is lacking (and that can be the case) but because love for him is. Being lost or found is always connected with love: in the first case we chose to love other things in the place of Jesus; in the latter we are given to love him above everything else. Why is sharing the gospel so hard in Europe today? Because the Bible tells me so. But “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”—so we have work to do in order to get other people to sing this song as well. 

If we take stock of who we are outside the gospel, we won’t be needing it for anything else. Without trusting the Bible’s message, our need for God becomes completely subjective—if God existing/not existing works for you, go for it! I suspect that it would be helpful to understand what it means for so many people to not need God. We have to grasp the necessity of addressing something that people no longer see as necessary. How do we preach a message of salvation if we have lost the ability of feeling lost? We have been saving ourselves from the need of salvation, wrote Tim Keller in “How To Reach The West Again”, and he is right.

Let’s try to go deeper using the two categories of time and space. Being in time and space is simply about being human. God became man in Jesus, coming to a specific time and a specific space. Appreciating incarnation should always make us sensible to time and space. When Christians fall into the temptation of not caring enough about the season we live in and the room we take while doing that, we make Jesus’ coming in flesh and bone just a detail. And Jesus coming in flesh and bone was not just a detail but what made him able to do what no one before or after him could do. God in time and space should promote not only God’s importance but time and space’s as well.

Well, it is hard sharing the gospel in Europe because the gospel sounds simultaneously too old and too new. Let me try to explain.

For many in Europe, the good news of the gospel is seen as an old and oppressive structure of an ancient time. People feel lucky because they are no longer in a world where religion claims so much about their identity. So, a sort of cognitive dissonance happens: the good news some Christians think they are sharing is the old one that other people congratulate themselves that they got rid of. Europe may have been Christian, alright, but it is the fact that it is no longer Christian that tends to be celebrated most here. Christians strive to present Christianity as a present festivity to a bunch of people who are confident that a past funeral has already taken place.

At the same time, the good news of the gospel is seen as too new as well. In countries like Portugal, Christianity is being noticed as something brought by immigrants coming from the Global South (generally Latin America and Brazil in particular). In that sense, this fresh expression of faith looks recent, foreign and even exotic—people coming from the Global South can still feel excited about Christianity because they are inexperienced in it, we think, although we may not admit it. They are still to find out its worst outcomes and that only reinforces our cynicism, the unofficial companion we rely on. Europe knows all too well that Christianity is not trustworthy in the long haul. We have been playing that game for two millennia.

So, it looks like Christianity can be rejected because it fits too well with what was wrong about Europe’s past, and because Europeans do not fit within with this new future coming from outside our Continent. Sometimes, in Europe time and history is all we have.

Then, there is the specific aspect of space in Europe. To make it more tangible, I will compare Europe with the United States of America, as our biggest counterpart in Western Culture (this means I will be drawing broad simplifications). In terms of time, European Western Culture tends to feel old and haunted by the past and American Western Culture tends to feel young and idealistic about the future—the first believe too less and the latter believes too much. Thinking now spatially, I would suggest that for Americans to comprehend some of the complexities of space in Europe, they would need to spend a couple of centuries more having a hard time with Russia to become more aware of layers of old animosities (but even that would not be persuasive due to the geographical distance). In European History, the Portuguese would hate the Spanish, the French would hate the British and everyone would hate the Germans. Old animosities make our territories complex cradles of resentment where no one is just the content they are preaching. In Europe I would say we have a harder time listening to someone without chaining the speaker to the place from which he comes from. In America the place that claims your identity is less where you were born, but more where you want to get—it is a culture still on the move.

Our difficulties with Americans are especially deep because, in a way, the United States of America is a kind a European reboot experience that surprisingly has succeeded for several centuries already (at least, let’s hope). To make things more complicated to us here in Europe, Western Evangelical Christianity is, at least in people’s minds, mostly tied with the USA—Americans afford the luxury of facing religion without the skeletons that fill our closets. So, no American is given a neutral hearing when sharing the gospel in Europe. And no European is given a neutral hearing when sharing the gospel if he is going to sound American. Places matter a lot in Europe in different ways that they would matter outside.

And then, we have different Europes coming from the fact that we are facing all these subjects as Protestant Christians. If you come from the Northern European countries that to a large extent were built by the Reformation, you may feel weak going up against the grain of that society which is now more secularized. If you come from the Southern European countries, which were never influenced by the Reformation, you tend to constantly go against the grain, not caring that much about your surrounding culture. Some will feel tempted to only conform while others only want to confront.

What is the masterplan then to share the gospel in Europe? To have it would probably make me rich in America and simplistic in my own country, Portugal. Believing that things will work out fine sounds like a foreign language that Portuguese people cannot understand. I get some consolation from the fact that Jesus came in time and space, which makes me value my own culture, I guess. But I get even bigger consolation from the fact that he called me to be someone when this time and this space are no longer. The gospel is also about how Europeans will get to be for real when reality dispenses with Europe—receiving Christ will be the best way of finding the home we have beyond Europe.

Um cristão que não se confunde também não convence

"Odeio Artistas" com Adelaide Sousa Richardson

A convidada deste episódio do “Odeio Artistas” é a Adelaide de Sousa Richardson. Quem passou a juventude nos anos 90 em Portugal lembra-se de um rosto ruivo da SIC que em pouco tempo passou de assistente em programas dedicados ao jetset a actriz de cinema. Carreira fulgurante, como se costuma dizer.

Na dobragem do milénio, a Adelaide, que gosta de se dedicar seriamente a tudo, vai tirar um curso de representação a Nova Iorque (que outra cidade ensina tão eficazmente a podermos ser quem queremos?). Enquanto trabalha num restaurante para pocket money e people watching (ignorava esta designação mas já a pratico há décadas), conhece um galã americano que lhe descompõe a rotina em dois passos: nos bolsos traz cartões de multibanco que não funcionam na hora de pagar a conta, e nos lábios traz Jesus Cristo para a conversa nos piores momentos. Meet Tracy Richardson.

A Adelaide que regressa a Portugal vem estranha e, aparentemente, aderida aos “evangélicos”, cujo testemunho recente na comunicação social se limitava aos ímpetos purificadores da cantora Nucha (não acabaram bem… Pray For Nucha!). Toda esta história não é comum e, definitivamente, dificulta a nossa tendência de esperar pouco das palavras de estrelas de TV e de esperar muito de triunfos públicos. Nesta conversa, que é sobretudo uma história de vida, a arte é a da sinceridade—que não nos suscita ódio algum. Ouçam! E com a vantagem de, no Youtube, o poderem fazer com imagem.

Acho sempre estranho quando elogiam a sabedoria de Jesus

Ouvir

O sermão de Domingo passado, chamado "O amor é esperar por Jesus e dar no duro", pode ser ouvido aqui e no Spotify.