Licensing Service

Yesterday I was licensed by the Bishop of London at St Stephen, Walbrook, as (half-time) priest-in-Charge. I was also commissioned by Bishop Richard as (half-time) Associate Vicar for Partnership Development at St Martin-in-the-Fields. I will be welcomed into the latter role during the 10.00am service at St Martins on Sunday. I also led the midweek Eucharist at St Stephens earlier in the day and gave my first sermon.

The service of Choral Evensong was shared by the congregations and communities of St Stephens and St Stephens, representatives from the Worshipful Company of Grocers (Patrons of St Stephens), City clergy and others, the congregation of St John's Seven Kings, representatives of the London Internet Church, commission4mission and Sophia Hubs Limited, together with many family and friends. 

The Bishop of London spoke about "a transforming vision of a wider us." Giving a sneak preview of the sermon to be preached by the Revd Dr Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martins, on Sunday, he said that we have a message of "faith in the face of fear, hope in the face of death, and love in the face of suffering." Sam says that through partnership development "we want to find abundance in scarcity, we want to expand our programmes and deepen our common life so we too can be a blessing to communities beyond ourselves."

In my sermon at the midweek Eucharist I quoted George Monbiot, who wrote in a recent article, that individuation – the focus on the meeting of our individual needs - ‘is exploitable’ and therefore social hierarchies have been ‘built around positional goods and conspicuous consumption.’ As a result, ‘we are lost in the 21st century, living in a state of social disaggregation that hardly anyone desired but which is an emergent property of a world reliant on rising consumption to avert economic collapse, saturated with advertising and framed by market fundamentalism.’

In this messy world our partnership development will seek to "enrich common life and culture, alleviate and in time eradicate poverty and injustice, and promote love, joy and peace." 

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Felix Mendelssohn - How Lovely Are The Messengers.

Temptations, needs and fulfilment

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who is best known for creating a hierarchy of needs. ‘This is a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.’ At the bottom of the hierarchy are the basic needs of human beings; needs for food, water, sleep and sex. Maslow’s model works as a hierarchy because a pressing need must be mostly satisfied before someone will give their attention to the next highest need. The other levels of his hierarchy include: safety; belonging; esteem; exploration; harmony; and self-actualization.

The temptations which Jesus faced in the wilderness (Matthew 4. 1 - 11) can be mapped onto Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The first temptation is about his basic need for food – ‘command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ Jesus responds by, in effect, saying that his basic needs have already been met. As a result, the final two temptations come higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, being to do with the need for esteem.

The temptation to jump from the pinnacle of the temple is about the temptation of celebrity; in this case, gaining esteem by undertaking a sensational act. The final temptation is about the gaining of esteem through the exercise of power and wealth – the kingdoms of the world and all they offer in terms of wealth, power and worship are offered with the only price paid being the worship of someone other than God.

Jesus essentially responds to each temptation by saying that God is all he needs. Whatever our human needs may be – basic, safety, belonging, esteem, exploration, harmony or self-actualization - Jesus is clear that God meets and fulfils every need as we make him central to our lives.

Maslow observed normal human behaviour and used his observations to create his hierarchy of needs. The temptation to put the focus on ourselves and our needs as we go through life is strong in each one of us. Maslow sees that and designs his theory accordingly.

George Monbiot, in a recent article, says that we have built our society on our need to have our individual needs met. He writes that individuation – the focus on the meeting of our individual needs - ‘is exploitable’ and therefore social hierarchies have been ‘built around positional goods and conspicuous consumption.’ As a result, ‘we are lost in the 21st century, living in a state of social disaggregation that hardly anyone desired but which is an emergent property of a world reliant on rising consumption to avert economic collapse, saturated with advertising and framed by market fundamentalism.’

Jesus turns this on its head by putting the focus on God. Maslow says that what matters is that our needs are met; making us the central players in our own drama. Jesus says that God has to be central. It is when we put him first that everything else falls into place and we have the sense that all our needs are met in him.

In the wilderness, Jesus was hungry, was living in obscurity and was both poor and lacking in influence. Although his basic needs and his need for esteem were not met in human terms, nevertheless, because God was central to his life and being, he was fulfilled despite his evident lack of food and esteem.

In his second letter to the Church in Corinth (2 Corinthians 1. 3 - 11, 4. 8 - 9), St Paul writes of being so utterly, unbearably crushed that he and his colleagues despaired of life itself, but were consoled in their affliction by God. As a result of this consolation, though afflicted in every way, they were not crushed; though perplexed, they did not despair; though persecuted, they were not forsaken; though struck down, they were not destroyed. In the same way as we have seen with Jesus and his temptations, the testimony of Paul is that despite their needs not being met humanly, the centrality of God to their lives meant that they were fulfilled nevertheless.

So where is our focus in our lives? Do we do what Maslow observed was common to human beings and focus on the meeting of our needs - putting ourselves and our needs first - or are we turning Maslow’s hierarchy of needs on its head and making God central to our lives, our thinking and our actions? Our choice will determine whether we, as consumers, continually chase fulfilment throughout our lives never fully finding what it is we seek or alternatively, as Christians, come to know fulfilment even when the needs which Maslow noted are not met as he envisaged.

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Vineyard Worship - Jesus, Be The Centre.

Inequalities of wealth and power

Yesterday's Guardian had some excellent Comment pieces on the extent to which wealth and influence are unequally distributed as a result of the way political and market forces operate in the UK.

Polly Toynbee took on the Government's unthinking and unevidenced mantra that privatisation is always right and always best:

"There is no evidence about how well contracting and privatising work: the best experts can find is 1980s assessments of early contracts for simple local services. At the very least, there should always be a state comparator. NHS contracting is galloping ahead, with no centrally gathered monitoring for comparison. Other privatisations rush on – probation and the court fines collection service – while companies built by cashing in from the state, such as G4S, A4E and Serco, are in disgrace. While Serco is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office after overcharging on tagging, it emerges that its finance director sold £2.7m shares two months before the share price tanked on a profits warning.

This is the world David Cameron assumes always does better than public service, as a matter of unproven conviction. Laying out his Open Public Services policy, he said everything was up for sale, with "a new presumption" that "public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service". When he said: "The old narrow, closed state monopoly is dead," he forgot to say that services sold or contracted would become private monopolies making handsome profits at our expense. The dogma driving these privatisations wilfully ignores past experience."

George Monbiot calls Britain the new land of impunity because no matter what the criticisms made or damage done, fat cats and politicians seem able to cling on to the rewards of power and wealth:

"There has seldom, in the democratic era, been a better time to thrive by appeasing wealth and power, or to fail by sticking to your principles. Politicians who twist and turn on behalf of business are immune to attack. Those who resist are excoriated."

These specific and evidenced UK-related accusations are set against the background of debate regarding Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century with its powerful argument about wealth, democracy and why capitalism will always create inequality:

"When the maelstrom surrounding Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century dies down, as all such publicity storms do in the end, its lasting achievement may be to give economics back its sense of proportion. Diligently and unnoticed outside his field, Mr Piketty – together with Emmanuel Saez and Tony Atkinson – spent years mining international tax records to demonstrate how, in Britain and the US, the portion of the national output gobbled up by the richest had first fallen by two-thirds or more in the 60 years after the first world war, but had then, from the 1970s on, more than doubled again. Having settled one century-long story, in the new book the professor moves on from top incomes to (even larger) top wealth and traces this through more than 200 years of data, while discussing how population growth and the march of technology have shaped capital's place in society since antiquity. This long view discourages worry about passing matters such as individual elections, or for that matter recessions."

In one of it's leaders from yesterday, the Guardian suggests:

"Where mainstream culture had precious little to say about inequality during the long years in which the economic gap opened up, post-bust and post-bailout, a different mood has taken hold, and rage against the rich is now part of the zeitgeist. So fashion is playing its part here. But if the fashion is for finally facing up to a maldistribution of resources previously unnoticed, then that is all to the good."

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The Clash - Working For The Clampdown.