Unusual expres­sion though the title of this post may seem (“A feast for sore eyes”), it does make quite a lot of sense once thought about.  It is the amal­ga­ma­tion of the phrases “A sight for sore eyes” and “Feast your eyes on this” — the result of an attempted appli­ca­tion of Australian/English-speaking col­lo­qui­alisms by a foreigner.

Well, okay, not exactly a for­eigner.  An ex-pat of Aus­tralia… not even that!  An Aus­tralian cit­i­zen whose work requires time spent away from this coun­try in a semi-permanent set­ting.  Yes.  Some­thing like that.  Any­way, this man has been liv­ing in France for the past while (thir­teen years? four­teen? I hon­estly can’t recall what he said…), work­ing as a mis­sion­ary there.

Whoa, hang on, Josh… Aus­tralia Chris­tians are send­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to France?  But… isn’t France a coun­try with Chris­t­ian ori­gins and stuff?  Well… sort of.  That doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily result in a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple actu­ally fol­low­ing Jesus, though.  Much of France is either “cul­tur­ally” reli­gious (that is, they fol­low tra­di­tions with­out actu­ally believ­ing [in] the God or entity behind this), athe­ist, or Muslim.

Laws regard­ing sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State in France estab­lish reli­gion as a “pri­vate” thing, not to be shared (and cer­tainly not taught) in the pub­lic sphere.  That said, the Gov­ern­ment in France is very sup­port­ive of the beliefs of the indi­vid­ual, which means that peo­ple (of any faith) can­not be per­se­cuted for this.

So why, then, does our Church send peo­ple to France, if peo­ple are free to believe what they want?  Surely, there are plenty of Chris­tians in France if they can believe what­ever they want?

Well, these mis­sion­ar­ies are liv­ing and work­ing in a city called Toulouse, which has three uni­ver­si­ties, and approx­i­mately 100,000 stu­dents.  Toulouse is one of FOUR uni­ver­sity cities in this region of France, and Owen Chad­wick (the mis­sion­ary) is the only staff-worker work­ing with stu­dents in this area.  So, one to a few hun­dred thou­sand stu­dents kind of ratio.

Yeah.  So, this guy was speak­ing at my church (ESM) this evening, on a pas­sage from a book in the New Tes­ta­ment called Eph­esians.  It was kind of odd, because this is the sort of pas­sage which I’d nor­mally glance at and then skip past… it looks fairly generic and boring.

http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=Eph+1%3A15-23&version=NIV is a link to the pas­sage for any­one inter­ested (Eph­esians 1:15 – 23); it is a very excit­ing prayer, but I’d man­aged to com­pletely miss this until it was pre­sented tonight.

So what’s so excit­ing about it?  It’s ask­ing for “the Spirit of wis­dom and revelation” — okay, so that means some­thing has to be there to be revealed, that we don’t know about or aren’t aware of, right?  The speaker likened us to being in a black­out, mov­ing to the walls and feel­ing they were smooth.  Hang on, we’re in a crumbly sand­stone build­ing!  That’s not right!  And if the walls were made from gold ingots, we wouldn’t know — it’s the same with Chris­tians if God doesn’t reveal his riches to us.

And THAT is a good thing because…?  What’s there that is so good, so worth know­ing about?  Back towards the start of Eph­esians (Eph­esians 1:3), the writer of this let­ter, Paul, says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heav­enly realms with every spir­i­tual bless­ing in Christ.”

EVERY bless­ing.  So it’s not like a stack of gold piled around the walls.  It’s much, much big­ger.  It’ll prob­a­bly stay shiny for longer, too.

Tags: australia, France, Owen Chadwick, speaker, writer