Making decisions about future directions in life

Here's my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Catherine’s Wickford:

Am I in the right place? Following the right path? In the right work? What is God’s will for my life? What is my vocation? These are just some of the questions prompted by this passage (Matthew 4. 12-23), as we read of Jesus, those who heard him, and his first disciples all making key decisions about their future direction of travel. Hopefully, we shall see some of the factors which play a part in their decision making.

Jesus hears that John the Baptist is no longer able to continue his public ministry because he has been imprisoned. As John was his predecessor, the one who was preparing the way for Jesus' own ministry, Jesus judges that the time is now right for his ministry to begin. So circumstances seem to provide the trigger or opportunity for Jesus’ ministry to begin and can play a part in our lives too. Jesus seemed able to read circumstances well, we not always able to do that as well as he did and sometimes only understand what was happening to us at the time when we look back.

As a teenager, I didn’t get the grades needed to get into University and felt like dropping out of education altogether. I was persuaded to go through clearing however and got a place at Middlesex Polytechnic, so came to London instead of Leicester, where I’d been intending to study. As I was applying late, there was no accommodation available in Halls and so I had to find somewhere to live off site. Once I’d settled in, I started going to the parish Church which was where I met Christine, who became my wife. I thought at the time that doing less well in my A levels was a disaster, but without that happening I would not have had the marriage and family that I now have. I was being led through circumstances to something wonderful but had no idea that that was the case at the time.

While circumstances played a part, Jesus also allowed scripture to shape the form that his ministry would take. The Gospel writer includes a quote from Isaiah 9, a passage which is often read at Christmas, to explain what Jesus was doing. A key theme of the prophecies collected in Isaiah is that of Israel as God’s servant. Jesus takes this servant role assigned to Israel in prophecy as his ministry template or job description and so, guided by scripture, he chose to begin his ministry in Galilee.

We can also base our lives and ministry on a template or job description. Our template is Jesus himself - so, for example, the letter to the Philippians talks about knowing Christ in order to become like him. Christlikeness should be our goal as Christians; not that we ever attain in this life. Our job description is essentially Jesus’ own manifesto taken from the Book of Isaiah and read at Nazareth near the beginning of his ministry: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to … bring good news to the poor … proclaim liberty to the captives … recovery of sight to the blind … set free the oppressed … and announce that the time for salvation has come.

Jesus’ message to those who listened to his preaching was that Israel was on the wrong path and must turn around and move in the opposite direction. Tom Wright writes that, “Jesus believed that his contemporaries were going in the wrong direction. They were bent on revolution of the standard kind: military resistance to occupying forces, leading to a takeover of power … The problem with all these movements was that they were fighting darkness with darkness, and Israel was called - and Jesus was called - to bring God’s light into the world. That’s why Matthew hooks up Jesus’ early preaching with the prophecy of Isaiah that spoke about people in the dark being dazzled by a sudden light … Jesus could see that the standard kind of revolution, fighting and killing in order to put an end to … fighting and killing, was a nonsense. Doing it in God’s name was a blasphemous nonsense.

But the trouble was that many of his contemporaries were eager to get on with the fight. His message of repentance was not, therefore, that they should feel sorry for personal and private sins (though he would of course want that as well), but that as a nation they should stop rushing towards the cliff edge of violent revolution, and instead go the other way, towards God’s kingdom of light and peace and healing and forgiveness, for themselves and for the world.”

What do we as a nation need to turn away from in order to turn towards God? Some years ago, William Butler, then chief economist at the investment banking giant Citigroup, was quoted as saying that we have lived beyond our means year after year and the nation collectively has to consume less while Janice Turner argued that consumerism has become like a religion to us leading us to believe that living standards would keep being upgraded like mobile phones. The cost of living crisis means that we can’t spend as we did and can’t live beyond our means any longer, but, can we, as a nation, stop rushing towards the cliff edge of consumerism, and instead go the other way, towards God’s kingdom of light and peace and healing and forgiveness?

Maybe, if we catch once again a vision of Jesus as he really is, we can. The integration of Jesus' message with his personality and actions was so attractive for his first disciples that they left their livelihoods to be with him doing the things that he did and becoming part of his mission bringing the rule of love in the kingdom of God. Why did they give up the security which they had to follow a wandering preacher? “The answer can only be in Jesus himself, and in the astonishing magnetism of his presence and personality. This can be known and felt today, as we meditate on the stories about him and pray to know him better, just as the first disciples knew and felt his presence 2,000 years ago.”

So, are we able to demonstrate in some way the kingdom of God where we work or live? Is what we do currently contributing to the coming of Jesus' revolution of love? Do we need to turn around and leave what we are currently engaged with in order that we might be engaged with the kingdom of God or do we need to listen to circumstances and scripture in order to understand how to live under the rule of love in the place where we are right now?

These are just some the questions which arise from the varying ways in which see Jesus, his disciples, and those who heard his preaching, making decisions about their future direction in life. Lead us, Lord, in your ways that we may live under your rule of love revealing your kingdom where we live and work.

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Rev Simpkins - Sing Your Life.

Inspired to follow: Moses writing the Book of Genesis

What does it mean to follow Jesus today? How can I deepen my faith in God?

Inspired to Follow: Art and the Bible Story is a programme of hour-long gatherings over three terms which covers the Biblical story from Creation to Apocalypse. It uses fine art paintings that can be found on St Martin-in-the-Fields' doorstep as a springboard for exploring these two questions.

Today I gave the following reflection as part of this series:

JMW Turner was one of the greatest British artists whose desire to paint extreme weather conditions – blazing sun and swirling storm - resulted in Romantic art which also anticipated Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. His commitment to realism was such that he once had himself lashed to a ship’s mast for four hours in order to observe the actual conditions of a storm. This painting ('Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis') is one of a pair; the first being 'Shade and Darkness - The Evening of the Deluge', also in the Tate’s collection and which depicts the storm on the evening of the Flood.

By contrast this image depicts the calm after the storm in the form of “an explosion of sunlight which brilliantly exploits the warm side of the spectrum.” Turner’s title indicates that he has multiple ideas in mind with this image including colour theories which enable him to depict the sunrise, the Flood imagery that we have just mentioned and Moses writing the Torah (the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis), which is our focus for today. Light, in Turner’s paintings, becomes “a singular, haunting presence,” with the paintings literally drenched in light. The sun, was for Turner, the living core of all of nature, so much so that he is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “The sun is god”.

So, we have a painting in which God is depicted through the medium of light with Moses set within this corona of light whilst writing the Torah. Our readings from Exodus show the appropriateness of this unusual imagery because, after Moses has been in the presence of God on Mount Sinai to receive the Law, his face shines with the light of God; so much so, that he puts a veil over his face whenever he is not speaking with the Israelites. Turner’s painting gives us a sense of what this story suggests; that the experience of being in the presence of God irradiated Moses in a way which meant that he reflected something of God’s light.

At Mount Sinai the Israelites, as a whole, had been given the chance to become a nation of priests enjoying the kind of intimate, direct relationship with God that Moses developed. God offered the opportunity to draw the Israelites as a whole into an intimate relationship with him where they would be able (as happens to Moses in his relationship with God) to debate, argue and influence God and where they are not simply obeying an external set of rules but have internalised God’s framework for life and live freely within it (Jeremiah 31: 33 & 34). God’s vision for the Israelites’ relationship with him (Exodus 19: 6) is that they are all to be priests and, therefore, will be able to come directly into his presence.

He provides the tools to make this happen through the Law (Exodus 20: 1–17). The Law was not intended to be used just in terms of its literal external application but to operate as a developmental process enabling the People of Israel to learn what is the heart and spirit of the Law; that is love (love of God, our neighbours and ourselves). Limits are what parents set while they are teaching their children how to respond to the situations with which life will confront them. When they have learnt, they no longer need the external limits because they have internalised and can utilise these lessons. 

An analogy is that of a child learning to cross the road. Parents firstly lay down strict limits on what the child can and cannot do. Then the child is taught how to cross the road in safety. But when the child has learnt how to judge distance and speed then s/he is free to cross the road wherever s/he judges it is safe to do so and is no longer restricted to recognised crossing places. In the way that both the prophets and Jesus use the Law we see this developmental process in use because in their interpretations of the Law they consistently emphasise the core/the spirit/the fulfilment of the Law, not its external application (see, for example, Amos 5: 21 - 24 and Matthew 5: 17 - 48).

The people of Israel, at Sinai, are offered the opportunity to live in conversation with God, by moving beyond the literal and structure-legitimating application of the Law to the embrace of love that is its essence and core. The people refuse this deeper level of relationship with God whilst still promising to obey him (Exodus 20: 18 – 19). They ask that Moses enters into this intimate relationship with God on their behalf and then reports back. Instead of the intimate encounter they choose a contractual relationship saying to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20: 19). This then becomes the pattern for God’s relationship with the people of Israel throughout the Old Testament. They relate to God legalistically and through individual mediators (whether prophets, judges or kings) instead of being in an intimate relationship with God that would cause their faces to shine like that of Moses.

The Bible can then be seen as the record of a conversation between God and a human race which has, as a whole, rejected this conversation but which, in a remnant (mainly Israel and the Church), continues to oscillate between dialogue and independent rejection. This is, finally, why the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is so decisive. Jesus lives fully in this conversation with God and he enables us to enter the conversation too. When we do so, like Moses, our faces also shine with the light of God (2 Corinthians 3. 7 – 18).

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. Your light is most clearly seen in Jesus, who is the light of the world. Enable each one of us, with unveiled faces, to see his glory as though reflected in a mirror, and be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. Amen.
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Gungor - Let There Be.

The religions of consumerism and Christ

Janice Turner reflects on the false god of consumerism in today's edition of The Times reflecting young protestors on tuition fees and tax breaks are raging against consumerism's broken promises:

"Consumerism, the religion they grew up with, has let them down. The infrastructure of their lives - shiny shopping malls and coffee shops - led them to believe that living standards would keep being upgraded like mobile phones. And since less than half of under-24s are registered to vote, they believed in the power of shopping more heartily than in democracy.

How apt that they will show their political frustration, not just in angry protests, but by withdrawing their consumer support. Student unions are cancelling Vodaphone contracts and encouraging their members to do the same. The young built these companies; they can hurt them too.

As Naomi Klein pointed out in No Logo, brands win us by insinuating themselves into our hearts: a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup makes me feel warm and nostalgic; wearing my one pair of Prada shoes, I feel chic, though, in truth, they're nothing special ...

But those emotional associations matter ..."

A different attack on consumerism comes from comedian Richard Herring, currently touring Christ on a Bike: The Second Coming, who says that how show "is by no means as disrespectful to the Christian myth as all the barefaced commercialism that is going on in suposed celebration." He says that, though he is an atheist, he loves Jesus and thinks he is amazing - "It's just all the people who follow Him who tend to be such idiots. He's like the Fonz in that respect" - and notes that "if our society ran on genuine Christian principles of not judging or stone-throwing and looking after the weakest rather than rewarding the richest, then maybe we'd be better off."

There appear to be more than one artist publicly reconsidering the possibility of faith this Christmas. Tony Jordan, the writer of The Nativity (BBC1 from Monday), interviewed in Christianity says:

"I think I represent a huge swathe of people that say: 'Yeah I believe in God and all that,' but don't tend to do much about it ... It's true to say that I had a faith. I had a faith that wrestled daily with my intellect. I really struggled with God as something I could see and touch and that had some sort of physical presence that I would know if I saw it. But then the more I thought about it, I did find a route through."

For him that involved a discussion with a scientist about dark matter, while researching The Nativity, leading to the thought that this thing without which the laws of physics do not work could be God:

"... I think that whoever God is and whatever God is, it's beyond my comprehension. I can't even get my head around what it must be, or what he must be, I can't do it. And once you understand that, I think it suddenly makes sense. So the story of the Nativity for me, I kind of found I reinforced my faith along the way."

As a result, he says he genuinely hopes that people are converted through the series: "I'd love to think that people are moved enough to believe it, to find faith, but to find the beauty of faith and not to say, 'my denomination is right.'" What he hates about religion is the contrast between the beauty of "faith and religion and the teachings of Christ" - the simplicity of 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' - and the many people who have been killed in wars over denomination and interpretation.

Andrew Motion is another who is reconsidering. He writes about being in the ambivalent middle, with millions of others, "where faith flickers off-on like a badly wired lamp ... where honest doubt comes and goes, and in so doing keeps alive the argument with and about God."

For him, the catalyst has been a priest; clever, funny and moving, whose talks made him think about things he hadn't thought about for a long time and "then in not quite the same way." This has led to:

"the conviction that my faith is not proof of a God-down Universe in which human beings scurry around trying (or not) to do His bidding. But of a Universe in which the primitive hunger to imagine beyond ourselves is manifested in a series of overlapping stories that give us the possibility and permission to do so. They shape our ambition to think bigger and to live better, and they help to define our place in the scheme of things."

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Jakob Dylan - Nothing But The Whole Wide World. 

Greenbelt diary (1) & Windows on the world (13)

Greenbelt, 2008

I arrived early at Greenbelt on Friday afternoon; a sign of my eagerness to be back after a number of year's absence. Virtually the first people that I saw on arrival were my friends Paul Trathen and Heather Whicker who were volunteering on the Church Action on Poverty and Operation Noah stands respectively. One of the things I was looking forward to at Greenbelt was catching up with a number of friends but hadn't expected that to begin as soon as I arrived. But once we were onsite we were soon in conversation with other friends and, as expected, this continued to be a special feature of the Festival for me.

Tim Hull, who had been one of my tutors at NTMTC, was one of the friends that I met. Tim is now at St John's Nottingham where he has produced a number of very useful dvds on key theological issues. The two of us went off together to hear Brian McLaren speak about rediscovering Christian faith as a way of life. On the way back we talked about Peter Rollins' book How (Not) To Speak Of God which Tim thought may have put theology back 30 years or so through its emphasis on existential experience which ultimately may have no need of the Christian narrative at all. I pointed out that McLaren had also been emphasising experience over doctrine but we agreed that what he had said had been clearly rooted in the Christian story.

After that I checked into the Artist's Forum to confirm whether Meryl Doney (Director of the wallspace gallery) wanted me to show during the Festival the DVD of the Love & Light public art event which featured St Margaret's Barking.

I spent the remainder of the evening shuttling between mainstage and the Performance Cafe to sample sets by Emmanuel Jal, Michael Weston Smith, Juliet Turner and Michael Franti and Spearhead. It felt great to be back!

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Michael Franti - East To The West.