Reformed

My perspective right now is Christian, C of E, and, if you'll forgive me, liberal and evangelical. Deal with it.

I have been observing social media whizzing past shouting Reformation jokes out of the window in a nasty outbreak of drive-by Lutheranism today. Some have been quite good although, as ever,  Archdruid Eileen (excuse me) nailed it.

But it is worth taking a moment to ponder the appalling atrocities that were inflicted upon theological dissenters down the centuries, whatever the nature of their dissent. TV's Gunpowder (see previous post) has left the smell of burning, treasonous heretic on the breeze and, frankly, roast Christian doesn't really do it for me. My particular gift has been to be a slightly controversial minister in times when that has been a safe thing to be.

Silence and respect to all who stepped on to the gallows on matters of doctrine or ethics.

But, after centuries of conflict, Catholic and Protestant Anglicans have a gentle truce which only occasionally overspills into minor jibes at diocesan conferences. Here at ground level we rock on pretty well and all pray together nicely. Puritan abstinence and higher tracts are both under the ecumenical umbrella these days. No bad thing.

Most times we don't change the church from the top down.

My concern for the LGBT gang wasn't imposed upon us from above. I like people. Well, most of them.

My desire to occasionally not wear robes is now legal but I have been doing it for thirty years or so. All that happened was that General Synod legislated that it was OK for the ship to sail after it had voyaged a few thousand times, returned and been sold for scrap. It has a reputation for that kind of speed. I need some new not robes.

My reading of the Bible leads me to christocentricity, co-operation, conversation, broad inclusivity, welcome, hospitality and creative exploration of ways to do and demonstrate faith. One supply of  water to return to but few fences to stop me roaming.

I think that is the nature of my Christian belief 500 years on from the Wittenberg church door becoming the centre of attention for a bit. My church don't own a door.

Empathy

We began to watch the much-trailed new TV series, Gunpowder on Saturday. Opening, as it did, with the horrific scene of the cruel execution of a Catholic woman for treason (hiding a Jesuit Priest) we chose to turn over. Maybe it is an age thing but I find it less and less entertaining, or helpful, to have to watch inhumanity.

Recently a song I love stopped me in my tracks. I must have sung When I Survey the Wondrous Cross a thousand times. I have even performed it.

I love lines such as:

Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my life, my soul, my all.

But I realised, for the first time, that I didn't like the word wondrous. Which victim of execution, looking towards the gallows, would be glad to imagine the method of  their destruction becoming an object of worship?

Gratefulness better than gaudiness, methinks. When I survey the empty cross, anyone?

Time for a bit of a rethink maybe. The writers of Gunpowder say they wanted the viewers to understand the level of anger that led to the Gunpowder Plot. Did it need to be that graphic? Reviewers are divided. I think they could have demonstrated the cruelty with more dialogue and less  screaming. Sometimes a cutaway says more than a lingering camera.

So why is this about empathy? In Karen Armstrong's excellent Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she has a chapter on empathy and shares this quote:

'...when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow-feeling - and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us.'
(Peter Abelard)

Now I imagine my extremist evangelical reader has probably gone elsewhere now, but should any new ones be around I know that we are saved externally, not by any action of our own. By grace and by God. But take a moment to ponder that any saving that has happened round here was not worth a thing without a response that makes the world less a place of suffering and more a place of love.

Grace and Peace My Friends

Writer, speaker and broadcaster Rob Bell has been a useful resource to me over the years. He was the creative muse behind the NOOMA series of short discussion starter films. Click here for an example.

His books have intriguing titles such as Velvet Elvis, Or Jesus Wants to Save Christians. They are always nicely laid out with lots of white space. Easy to read for those who don't read a lot. Plenty of points at which you need to stop and say hmmm though.

He is American and Bible-based. But he is neither Bible Belt nor Brian McLaren. He prods all evangelicals with a stick but does it gently. He was once asked to leave a church because of his attitude to women. But not how it sounds. Turns out he was far too enabling and promoting of them for the likes of his eldership.

Now I have found The RobCast. If I might start with a criticism it is that he starts with 20 minutes material and crams it into an hour, but it is a light hour and feels like someone chatting to you in his shed. In fact for the most part he is in what he calls the back house - which I'd like to imagine is a shed.

The episodes are a bit like an interesting uncle chatting about life and faith in the corner. You can phase in and out of concentrating.

But he also has guests with whom he has conversations. Pete Rollins is a delightful guest. Pete's delightful Belfast accent totally baffles Rob when he talks about seeing a cow from a car. Both nouns sound the same. Identical even. Pete is also an ace Christian thinker. Sometimes I think he has read and memorised everything. But as Rob gets him to open up, and to explain the tricky bits of theology and philosophy, we all learn.

My favourite guest so far has been the episode where Rob's wife (Christen, I think) turns the tables and interviews him. And in overhearing this conversation we are party to the amazing happenstance of the marriage of a creative communicator and an editor. She is clearly the one who makes his books more concise than his podcasts.

I commend this podcast very highly,. If you have not found it already, seek it out.

Which Festival?

Figure 1

I have been mining some of my of pre-iPad note books for gold.

And a warning. Incomplete thinking in progress. This is what blogs are for.

Recipients of my training technique will know that there are very few problems that cannot be better understood by reducing them to four boxes.

I am grateful to the unidentified (in my notes), and no longer recalled, conductor of the Bath and Wells pre-Advent retreat in 2012. I took jottings as the addresses began and then I disappeared, as I often do, into a world of my own. Quotes from the saints became imaginings from the St.

So let's imagine that we divide the church's year into two parts. Those that focus on memory and those that focus on hope. By 'memory' I mean those festivals that look back on some key biblical Christian event. By 'hope' I mean those festivals that look forward to something happening in the future.

I am aware that many festivals, with good preaching, can do both of these things but stick with me.

Now let us make a further division. We divide those festivals that look upon that thing with thanksgiving and gratitude (something has been or will be done) compared with those that require us to be penitent (we are sorry it happened, or will happen).

This gives us Figure 1's four box grid.

Figure 2

Now let us look at the church's year and see which festivals fill the boxes. Top left (Figure 2) we have Lent. We look back on our lives, on Jesus' temptation in the wilderness and, starting in the dust of Ash Wednesday, we proceed slowly and gently, head down, with humility and restraint.

Lent is a time for reflection, for looking back and for adjustment of behaviour in the light of the journey to the cross.

There is little thanksgiving and only the hope of death in the air.

Advent (Figure 3) is a shorter time for reflection. It is largely replaced, in the eyes of the world, by Christmas, a season which runs from the day the John Lewis Christmas advert first airs until the first whiff of a sale is in the air.

Figure 3

Christians reflect while the world rushes past. Upon what do we reflect? Firstly the incarnation - the truth that this story of a baby somehow universalises God with us. Secondly a look longer ahead to a time when we will be revisited and encompassing the desire not to be unprepared for that. It is hope but it is penitent hope.

We try and put the brakes on the world giving thanks until Christmas Day. We fail, but we keep trying. No-one wants a confessional at the office Christmas party, even if it is being held in Advent 1.

The parables of the kingdom fit here. Wise and foolish virgins. Tenants in the vineyard. Wedding banquets where folk don't turn up.

Figure 4

So when do Christians do happy? Ideally, and primarily, on Easter Day (Figure 4). The memory of what happened to Jesus on the third day is a thing of great joy. We look back on what the hymn writers see as the greatest day in history. We have a corporate memory to be thankful for. Thine be the glory, risen conquering son (we find it hard to shake off our military metaphors though).

Of course all these festivals are, really, is us telling our great stories again. Stories told in and of faith. About faith. For faith. The stories are all set in history - they grew out of a particular time and in a particular place, but their historicity is not completely available to us. It is what the stories are for that is important, which is why we ought to be able to point to a festival which adds hope to thanksgiving (Figure 5).

But no one Christian event gives us access to this combination, easily.

Figure 5

I wonder if this was the place where the great evangelistic rallies used to fit. They are largely replaced by the Alpha Course these days. Summer camp talks on how to find 'The Way' were an annual marker in my Christian walk for many years. They were certainly occasions of  thanksgiving for a new future and hope inserted where previously there had been none.

But I tentatively ask this question. Is there a festival we should make more of because it fits best in the bottom right box? All Saints?

If not then we need to remember that each one of our three markers, Lent, Easter and Advent, needs unpacking by preaching, that it may point to the future and do it with hope.

What does what has happened have to say to us about what will happen?

Comments gratefully received in any of the usual places.

13th Joke

A guy, born on the 13th of the month, proposed to the 13th woman he went out with. She accepted and they eventually married on the 13th. After a 13 day honeymoon on the 13th floor of a luxury hotel they returned to live in a new home - number 13 of course. After a blissful 13 months of marriage she eloped with Wigan Warriors.

Weird Weddings and All That

I took myself away again to another church as part of my sabbatical. Tried to sneak in quietly but was outed and welcomed from the front, 'But don't talk to him about religion'.

In the Church of England lectionary churches are still working through Matthew's Gospel. Towards the end of this book we reach a number of parables of the kingdom and yesterday it was 22:1-14 - known as the Parable of the Wedding Banquet although it is by no means the only thing Jesus is reported as having said or done with the context of weddings. More wine anyone.

Dick Lucas, who has devoted a lot of his ministry to helping preachers successfully handle the word of truth, has a number of key questions for the preacher to use in preparation. One of them is 'What seems odd to me?' When you have lived and breathed the scriptures for as long as I have it is hard to take this question fully on. Nothing much seems odd to me anymore. But, trying to be a newcomer to this passage (the preacher, in a place where the tradition is of short addresses only, gave us some helpful context about Matthew but not about culture) I wondered how odd this parable would be to those unfamiliar with the culture of the big, society wedding in Jesus' day.

(Friends I know every day is a Jesus day, that was shorthand.)

Here is an odd wedding.

1. It's the son of a king getting hitched. So it's special.
2. The banquet is prepared. Banquets in those days were prepared in the guests' absence and cooked in their presence.
3. The servants go to get people who have been invited. Invitations in those days were probably word of mouth. Once invited you got ready to come when you were told. It was not 7.30 for 8.00 on Tuesday 5th.
4. They don't come. This is outrageously rude. The king would normally be respected and it would be the well-to-do who had been invited, countrywide.
5. They are re-asked, reminded that the food is ready to be cooked. It isn't 'on the table' but the butchery has taken place and there are no fridges,
6. The invited guests kill the servants who have invited them. OK, now it gets really odd.
7. The king sends his army to destroy the city of the rude guests. That escalated quickly.
8. Then he invites anyone who is hanging around - good and bad - to come in their place.
9. Then he seriously chastises a guy who is not wearing the right clothes. Maybe he didn't have any? Where did the others get theirs from?

So what, apart possibly from all of it, seems odd to you?

Because it is a parable. And it tells us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. And in parables the secret to understanding is often in identification of the characters. I think this parable (which appears in slightly different form in Luke and the rarely referenced Gospel of Thomas) has been through several stages of redaction. The verse about the army destroying the city may have been Matthew's own commentary on what had happened to his people between Jesus' death and his writing.

But if we wrestle with these questions:

1. Who is the king?
2. Who is the son?
3. Who are the servants who have been put to death?

...we will be well on the way but will have no application. If we take this final question we will be there:

4. If I have been unexpectedly invited to something special, and I am 'bad', what do I have to change in order to come in? What is appropriate behaviour, for a guest?

(Thanks to Tom Wright 'Matthew for Everyone' and Geza Vermes 'The Authentic Gospel of Jesus' for the help.)

Sabbatical News

So, how's it going? You may not care but I know some do so here is a wee update. I am coming to the end of week five of a thirteen week sabbatical.

During the first week I was weary. Chatting to a couple of colleagues who had recently enjoyed sabbatical leave I discovered that this was a common theme. People who work with people and spend a lot of time giving out - speaking or listening; writing or reading - invariably survive on adrenaline quite a lot. Take away the deadlines and the stimulation and your body, often for the first time for ages, realises it can wind down. During my first week I successfully tidied the office, went to the gym and had a haircut. That's about it. Although I must say that having only one appointment in my diary for a week was both fun and stressful. I am used to waking up in the morning and running through a mental check-list of what faces me today. I had to keep checking that the answer was really 'nothing'. I also noted that not thinking ahead or planning ahead was weird. I am used to spending downtime contemplating stuff to happen in the future. I wonder at what point in the thirteen weeks I will need to place next spring in the mental sorting tray?

Week two was holiday. We travelled up to the north-east and visited a few old haunts from our Chester-le-Street days. One encounter was particularly helpful. Twenty-five years on, someone, a teenager then, thanked us for our work with young people. 'You made us feel we were the most important thing you did each week but by the time of the Sunday night meetings you must have been knackered.' That was lovely. Also true and we are glad it was noticed.

Returning home for week three I got going on the novel. I have always planned that this time would be about writing and had two ideas for books without a clear notion as to which one to pursue. Shortly before going off duty a new friend had advised me to go with the novel rather than the factual book (the other idea being volume three of my Christian help manuals) as it would be a more varied experience and thus more like a sabbatical escape. It is funny how people who barely know you can give you good advice. I took it.

The novel I have sketched out is a narrative at the moment, not a story. I used a method I read about from Will Self where I put every idea, scene and character on a Post-it note and then re-arranged them into order. Using several colours of Post-it I managed to get the various narrative streams to converge. I read a few chapters I had knocked out some years ago. To be honest the quality of the writing shocked me. It was excellent. Nothing seems to improve style like writing a lot and this stuff was from the days when I was working as a writer part-time. Could I ever get to that standard again? I realised that the answer was not necessarily to get on with the novel but to do more writing about anything (my journal suddenly sparked into life). But the existence of a table of Post-its helped me to begin inhabiting the world of Marco (working title) again.

Week four I read a lot. Not on any theme but in a wide and varied way. I needed to observe others' style and beware of copying any one writer too much. And I had to get some new facts in my head. The ones I had been hanging around with were not good enough. I played with the Post-its. I now had a tale but it was a bit too Dan Brown and my target was slightly higher up the brow. Then I had a moment. What if this (dramatic music in head) became (dan dan daaaan) that! A twist. Not one I ever saw coming so the reader won't either. Clever old me.

On Thursday of that week I wrote a short story in one sitting. It was quite dark and based on one scene of a screen-play I had helped a friend conceive some years back. But it came out quickly and will be finished with a single edit soon. I say quite dark. It was rural January midnight. Where had that stuff been hiding? Oh the sweet catharsis of murdering an imaginary parishioner slowly.

It is week five. No work on the novel but much reading and musing. When I am being a writer I write all the time. This is the point I needed to get to. I wander around constructing sentences, dialogue and writing descriptions in my head.

I have spent little money this month. I bought two DVDs, two books and a new jacket.

Twice in my life I have been given a story. An idea has popped into my head so completely formed that seeing it as God-given is as good a way to describe it as I can muster. With these stories I know they are given to be told and they will help people. They will work. They are probably not to be published for money but shared for free.

This week I have another such story. All I needed in order to write it down was to go and see the world from the point of view of the narrator. I needed to be high up and looking out to sea at an island. Luckily I live where that is possible and this morning I walked up to Cadbury Camp to see what I could see. It is an astonishing place. An Iron Age hill fort. I was alone there. When built it was probably surrounded by sea on three sides. A perfect defensive strategy.

The People of the Island (working title) is on its way.

So, says TCMT, you had two ideas for books and you're writing a short-story collection? Do you know, I may be doing just that. It's fun.

But I have three appointments next week.

Workers in the Vineyard

During my sabbatical break I intend to visit a few other churches. Last Sunday I found myself at Nailsea Methodist Church where minister Deborah handled Matthew 20:1-16.

A straightforward and clear message invited us all to avoid being grumpy when others were doing well if it was not at our expense. It also encouraged us not to begrudge those who came to faith late in life, especially as they might have done so because of our labouring long hours for the same reward. We can all only be who we are and do what we can do, so do that, would be my summary.

But, as ever when pondering a well-known passage, my thoughts drifted to context. Where did Matthew put this tale? What can we deduce from where he put it? It's a story unique to Matthew, which puts us on our guard, knowing that he had an axe to grind and sometimes used his Jesus stories to sharpen it.

We have had teaching on forgiveness, divorce and riches in the immediately preceding material. The last line of chapter 19 has been that the first will be last and the last will be first. So does this expand on that? Yes, to some extent.

First thing to remember is Matthew's axe. His Gospel is all about the status of the law of Moses in the light of Jesus and in the light of the fall of Jerusalem. Any material unique to Matthew is likely to illustrate this point. So, says this story, if you want rules you've got them. A generous contract of employment for a day's work, signed at the start of the day and honoured at the end. The rules are kept.

Second thing, which you maybe do not know, is that this parable is based on a story from Jewish folklore, in which an employer rewards a hard-working employee for achieving more in two hours than other labourers managed in the whole day. His audience may well have been familiar with that.

But what might Matthew's readers have missed about the rules? Because the vineyard owner has to be God in the story. Israel is always the vineyard. And God (who likes to seek and save the lost - Matthew 18:10-14) comes a-seeking for employees.

The Gospel of grace is a new thing. It is a gospel where people who have been waiting all day for work don't get sent home with insufficient money to buy supper on the way. You can play by the rules if you want to; if you do you'll be treated fairly. But if you accept the wonderful free good news of the grace of God delivered in Jesus Christ you will get a better deal than the lawmakers and lawkeepers could ever have imagined.

If you are a follower of Jesus and have committed your life to that for a long time, good on you. But make sure you have ditched the idea that you are in a meritocracy. For the people who come to faith late after a lifetime of sin will know, better than you, that they did nothing to deserve it. Nothing. Thing is, neither, my friend, did you.

And forgive me getting all messianic on you but whenever Jesus calls people 'friend' in the gospels he is about to prick their bubble. So the story ends with Matthew's little coda, again. Lastly beats firstly in the topsy-turvy world of Jesus.