The improbable truth

Here's the sermon I shared at St Mary's Runwell this morning:

“Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

This is what motivates Professor John Polkinghorne. As a Cambridge physicist he might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

“Only a tiny handful of people have founded immense, influential movements. They shared three vital assets:

• a charismatic personality
• a long life
• a fast growing number of committed followers

Muhammad is a good example. He died in his sixties after a very energetic life. His following had momentum -lots of people, good organisation, a buoyant mood. So it's no surprise to find that Muhammad's charisma gave rise to a great movement, known today as Islam.

The single exception to the 'long life and growing movement' rule is Jesus. He died young - in his thirties. He spent only three years in the public eye and that in a small country under enemy occupation. He stayed local and didn't write anything down (apart from a word or two in the sand). Towards the end his popularity ran out and his followers ran away, their lofty dreams shattered.

To sum up ... it was quite impossible for this sequence of events to give rise to a movement of any size or consequence, let alone the largest movement in all history. Yet ... IT DID!”

(John Young, Build on the Rock – Faith, doubt and Jesus’)

As Sherlock Holmes remarked, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

We are not speaking here of proof. Just as the existence or non-existence of God cannot be conclusively proved and is therefore, for both Christians and atheists, a matter of belief; so the resurrection cannot be conclusively proved or disproved and, on both sides, is ultimately a matter of belief.

What is being said though is that we have to make sense of the historical facts about the remarkable rise of the Early Church and that belief in the resurrection makes sense of that story. As John Polkinghorne has said, ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced.’

More than that, the Christian story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection makes sense of life itself. For the early Church and for Christians ever since, this story enables us to understand life, to make sense of it, to see it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth.

Death AND resurrection. Suffering AND salvation. This is the journey which Christians make, following in the footsteps of Jesus, as we travel through Lent and Easter. While it is a journey which in no way minimises the reality and pain of suffering and bereavement, it is ultimately a journey of hope. One which leads to new life, where we proclaim that Jesus is alive and death is no longer the end.

As a result, to go on this journey, builds resilience and endurance in those who travel this way. As we look at our lives, the difficulties and challenges we might face, our Christian faith tells us that this is not the end instead change and new life are possible; indeed, that they will come. The story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future. Whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins.

In his book ‘Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis sets out the series of moves which led him to faith in God, using a chessboard analogy’: ‘What Lewis describes in Surprise by Joy is not a process of logical deduction: A therefore B, therefore C. It is much more like a process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things ... Things fall into place ...

It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern – a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true ...

Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis ... realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth ... he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned – and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study.’

(Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life)

So, we have seen that belief in the resurrection not only makes sense of the rise of the Early Church but also can make sense of life itself, seeing it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth. This gives us a means of enduring the difficulties and challenges we face now with resilience and endurance because of our belief that this is not the end and that change and new life are possible and will come.

As a result, the story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future because whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins. That is what made sense to John Polkinghorne and C.S. Lewis and is also what has made sense for millions of Christians over the centuries since that first Easter Day. May we also know Christ’s resurrection not only making sense for us but also making sense of our lives too.

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Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.

Augustine: Four foundational approaches to faith

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

Today is the Feast Day of St Augustine. Augustine was born in North Africa in 354. His career as an orator and rhetorician led him from Carthage to Rome, and from there to Milan where the Imperial court at that time resided. By temperament, he was passionate and sensual, and as a young man he rejected Christianity. Gradually, however, under the influence first of Monica, his mother, and then of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, Augustine began to look afresh at the Scriptures. He was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387. Not long after returning to North Africa he was ordained priest, and then became Bishop of Hippo. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Augustine on the subsequent development of European thought. A huge body of his sermons and writings has been preserved, through all of which runs the theme of the sovereignty of the grace of God. He died in the year 430.

In his Confessions Augustine tells of his travels which take him from Carthage to Rome, and then to Milan, until his conversion. He meets the Manichean leader, Faustus, but finds no answers. He also encounters the doubt of the Academics and comes close to total scepticism in his own philosophy. In Milan he listens to Bishop Ambrose, whose homilies, little by little, answer many questions about Scripture which have been nagging at him for a long time. Looking back on this time, in Confessions, Augustine shares several understandings that prepared him for his conversion. These are the place of science in belief, the value of questions, the necessity of faithful prayer, and non-literal interpretations of scripture.

In Confessions, Augustine compares the teachings of the Philosophers and the Manichees concluding that the teachings of the Manichees were rambling and confused when it came to phenomena such as solstices, equinoxes or eclipses. By contrast, the observations of the Philosophers about creation could be verified by mathematics, by the progress of the seasons, and by the visible evidence of the stars. 
Augustine was essentially saying that religious beliefs should not be in conflict with the findings of science and where they are, as in the case of the Manichees, that has to undermine the whole system of belief. How should we view this position in an age when scientists like Richard Dawkins believe there is no common ground between science and religion?

Sir John Polkinghorne, who is both a world-class physicist and an Anglican priest, is one who seeks to present an account of the friendship between science and theology, which he believes to be the truest assessment. Religion, he says, is our encounter with divine reality, just as science is our encounter with physical reality. He notes that a general scientific theory is broadly persuasive because it provides the best available explanation of a great swathe of physical experience. The cumulative fruitfulness of science encourages Polkinghorne to believe that this is an effective intellectual strategy to pursue. He then also engages in a similar strategy with regard to the unseen reality of God. God’s existence makes sense of many aspects of our knowledge and experience: the order and fruitfulness of the physical world; the multilayered character of reality; the almost universal human experiences of worship and hope; the phenomenon of Jesus Christ (including his Resurrection). So, he suggests that very similar thought processes are involved in both cases and that, in their search for truth, science and religion are intellectual cousins under the skin. This, it seems to me, is a position which equates to the approach advocated by Augustine.

Next, Augustine complains that in the crowd that came to hear the Manichee teacher, Faustus, he was not allowed to voice his anxious questions, and place them before him in the relaxed give-and-take of discussion. The asking of questions is fundamental to Augustine’s approach in writing Confessions. In the first Chapter he asks 6 questions, in the second he asks 12, in Chapter 3 he asks 8, and so it continues throughout the book. Augustine clearly believes that the asking of questions is fundamental to gaining true knowledge of God.

In Letters to a Young Poet the poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls for the unknown to be embraced, and not necessarily puzzled out. His call is one which I think equates with Augustine’s use of questions in Confessions. Rilke writes: “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing, live your way into the answer….”

That was essentially what Monica, Augustine’s mother, had to do as she prayed that Augustine would come to faith. Augustine writes in Confessions that God did not grant what she desired at the moment that she first prayed, but, true to his higher purpose, he met the deeper wish of her heart. Monica had to learn to persevere in prayer in the face of what seemed to be a lack of response from God to her prayer. When Jesus told parables about prayer, the stories he told were of those who did what Monica did and kept on praying no matter what. When Monica’s prayer was finally answered it was the deepest wish of her heart that was realised as her son becomes one of the most influential figures in the history of Christianity.

Finally, Augustine explains that the change in his understanding of Christianity comes as he changes the way in which he interprets scripture. He is impacted by hearing Bishop Ambrose in Milan because Ambrose explains the spiritual meaning of Old Testament passages by figurative interpretations. Previously, Augustine says, taking these passages literally had been the death of me.

Literal understandings of the Bible claim that the meaning originally expressed by the writer is clear and they deny the legitimacy of any approach to Scripture that attributes to it meaning which the literal sense does not support. The problem with this is that the Gospel writers and St Paul do not interpret scripture in that way. The Gospel writers constantly apply Old Testament passages to Jesus in ways that do not reflect the meanings that the writers originally expressed while St Paul, like Ambrose, regularly uses allegorical or figurative interpretations of Old Testament passages. As a result, if we are, like Augustine, to understand the spiritual meanings of scripture we cannot simply apply one interpretative method to our reading of scripture but have to embrace the diversity of ways in which scripture is interpreted and understood and used within the pages of scripture itself.

So, in Confessions, Augustine gives us these four foundational approaches to faith: the taking seriously of science, living our questions, perseverance in prayer; and a diversity of approaches to the interpretation of scripture. These four approaches return Augustine to the place where he becomes once again an inquirer in the Catholic Church. He would therefore, I believe, commend them to us as well in our ongoing inquiries and investigations into the truth of Christianity.

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U2 - Surrender.

The Improbable Resurrection

Here is my sermon from tonight's Easter Vigil Service at St Stephen Walbrook:

“Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

This is what motivates Professor John Polkinghorne. As a Cambridge physicist he might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

“Only a tiny handful of people have founded immense, influential movements. They shared three vital assets:

• a charismatic personality
• a long life
• a fast growing number of committed followers

Muhammad is a good example. He died in his sixties after a very energetic life. His following had momentum -lots of people, good organisation, a buoyant mood. So it's no surprise to find that Muhammad's charisma gave rise to a great movement, known today as Islam.

The single exception to the 'long life and growing movement' rule is Jesus. He died young - in his thirties. He spent only three years in the public eye and that in a small country under enemy occupation. He stayed local and didn't write anything down (apart from a word or two in the sand). Towards the end his popularity ran out and his followers ran away, their lofty dreams shattered.

To sum up ... it was quite impossible for this sequence of events to give rise to a movement of any size or consequence, let alone the largest movement in all history. Yet ... IT DID!”

(John Young, Build on the Rock – Faith, doubt and Jesus’)

As Sherlock Holmes remarked, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

We are not speaking here of proof. Just as the existence or non-existence of God cannot be conclusively proved and is therefore, for both Christians and atheists, a matter of belief; so the resurrection cannot be conclusively proved or disproved and, on both sides, is ultimately a matter of belief.

What is being said though is that we have to make sense of the historical facts about the remarkable rise of the Early Church and that belief in the resurrection makes sense of that story. As John Polkinghorne has said, ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced.’

More than that, the Christian story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection makes sense of life itself. For the early Church and for Christians ever since, this story enables us to understand life, to make sense of it, to see it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth.

Death AND resurrection. Suffering AND salvation. This is the journey which Christians make, following in the footsteps of Jesus, as we travel through Lent and Easter. While it is a journey which in no way minimises the reality and pain of suffering and bereavement, it is ultimately a journey of hope. One which leads to new life, where we proclaim that Jesus is alive and death is no longer the end.

As a result, to go on this journey, builds resilience and endurance in those who travel this way. As we look at our lives, the difficulties and challenges we might face, our Christian faith tells us that this is not the end instead change and new life are possible; indeed, that they will come. The story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future. Whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins.

In his book ‘Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis sets out the series of moves which led him to faith in God, using a chessboard analogy’: ‘What Lewis describes in Surprise by Joy is not a process of logical deduction: A therefore B, therefore C. It is much more like a process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things ... Things fall into place ...

It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern – a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true ...

Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis ... realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth ... he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned – and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study.’

(Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life)

So, we have seen that belief in the resurrection not only makes sense of the rise of the Early Church but also can make sense of life itself, seeing it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth. This gives us a means of enduring the difficulties and challenges we face now with resilience and endurance because of our belief that this is not the end and that change and new life are possible and will come.

As a result, the story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future because whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins. That is what made sense to John Polkinghorne and C.S. Lewis and is also what has made sense for millions of Christians over the centuries since that first Easter Day. May we also know Christ’s resurrection not only making sense for us but also making sense of our lives too.

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Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.    

Theological reflection: End of Life with Dementia

Here is the theological reflection that I shared last night as part of the evening on End of Life with Dementia held at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In her book, ‘My Year with a Horse: Feeling the fear but doing it anyway,’ Hazel Southam writes of facing the daunting task of telling her dad that he isn’t coming home: ‘I visit him as soon as I’m back and … sit down and tell him the truth. This is his home now. He’s not well enough to come home. And he won’t be getting better. This team of carers can look after him properly and we simply can’t. I am very, very sorry. He looks me in the eye and under­stands. We hold hands and cry. He never cries.

We have the kind of conversation that you have before someone dies. We talk of love and laughter, God, cats, The Guardian, and cricket. I remind him of the village where we all grew up, of its orchards, his football team. He asks, “Where do I live?” and “Where is my house?” a great deal these days. I used to try explaining, but as none of it makes any sense to him — the past 75 years having been wiped out — I talk about the village instead. That he remembers.

I feel, as my mother often says, like a wrung-out piece of rag. There are things that you don’t want to tell your parents: my A-level results aren’t very good; I’ve left my job with the big publishing company; I’ll be reporting from a war zone. But “You’re not coming home” is by far the worst. I comfort myself with the thought that, however bleak this moment, it won’t come again. Daddy knows now, and whilst we may discuss it in the future, it won’t be like this. Only, of course, it is. The next day and the day after and every day for years he will ask when he’s coming home and I will have to tell him the freshly shocking news that he won’t be. Every time it will be new to him, as five minutes later he will have forgotten it entirely. It is my own personal hell, and his, too, probably.’

Nicci Gerrard, from John’s Campaign, puts it like this: ‘When people are in the last stages of dementia, we who love them (we whom they have loved) may bend over them, trying to find in the sounds they are making some words, sentences, a form of communication and a kind of meaning. Even a syllable is precious now. It is a bit like a parent straining to hear language emerging from their baby’s babble of sound – but with a baby this emergent language marks the beginning of the great formation of the self, and is full of hope and possibility.

With the person who lives – and who dies – with dementia, the language that connects us to others is disappearing, the self is being broken up. An entire world is being un-made. We come to darkness, silence, the radical slowing of death: dementia’s long goodbye.’

Gerrard notes that this long goodbye occurs because ‘Telling stories is part of what makes us human’: ‘With stories, we make sense of the world and impose a kind of order on to chaos. We continually edit our own lives into a narrative that will give it a coherent meaning: without this, we’re lost.

And people with advanced dementia become lost: lost to us and lost themselves. They can no longer speak themselves and without memory to bind the pieces of their life together, they are trapped in an endless present.‘

That was Hazel Southam’s experience too, but, she instinctively found a way of sparking memories in her father by retelling part of his story: ‘I used to try explaining, but as none of it makes any sense to him — the past 75 years having been wiped out — I talk about the village instead. That he remembers.’

Healthcare professionals are increasingly recognising that ‘Storytelling sparks memories, encourages verbalization and promotes self-esteem among those with dementia.’ The Contented Dementia Trust who advocate the SPECAL method explain the significance of story in this way: ‘A person with dementia will experience random, intermittent and increasingly frequent memory blanks relating to the facts around recent events. However, some memories of past events are always available and can be readily recalled by the person, given the right circumstances.

The SPECAL method uses selected intact memories from the person’s pre-dementia past and links these to their activities in the present. This means that the person is able to maintain a relatively content life in the present, drawing on their own memories of situations and activities which may have occurred many years ago but still have useful meaning for them in their life today.’

Narrative theology says that, as human beings, we are storytellers, and, as Christians, we blend our story with God’s story. Roger Olson helpfully summarises the main aspects of narrative theology. The Bible, he writes, tells ‘the great story of God whose central character (for Christians, at least) is Jesus Christ.’ ‘Therefore, all must be interpreted in light of that story and its purpose—to reveal the character of God through his mighty acts leading up to and centering around Jesus Christ.’

‘Theology is our best human attempt to understand the biblical drama-story’ and that is done by ‘“living the story” together with a community of faith shaped by the story.’ ‘The task of the church is to “faithfully improvise” the “rest of the story.” Christians are not called simply to live in the story; they are called to continue the story in their own cultural contexts. First they must be grounded in the story. They must be people for whom the story “absorbs the world.” Second, they must together (communally) improvise the “rest of the story” faithfully to the story given in the Bible.’

These two stories - the personal story of the person with dementia and the meta-narrative of salvation history – should intertwine throughout our lives as Christians, but, perhaps, never more significantly as we approach death. One common experience for clergy after funerals or memorials is to hear people say, I wish the person we had been remembering could have heard those tributes while they were alive. That could always have been the case, if we had been more intentional about hearing, re-calling and celebrating the story of that person. In the case of those with dementia, to do so is even more vital as it sparks past memories which may have useful meaning for today but even at the point of death, although the person may be unable to respond, there may nevertheless be an ability to hear and take comfort from the celebration of their life through storytelling.

As Christians, we can do more because our personal story can be blended with God’s story. This is particularly so in relation to the Eucharist, where the key events in God’s story are re-enacted and re-membered. It has been my experience, in taking communion to parishioners with dementia, that this celebration has been the moment in the visit when those I have been visiting have become most engaged, most participative and most present as they remember and join in with familiar words and phrases, recalling the prayers and re-inhabiting the story.

As Christians, our hope is also that this story and our being blended with it does not end. This hope has, I think, been articulated well by scientist and priest, John Polkinghorne, who says that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

For all these reasons I agree with Nicci Gerrard, who ends the article from which I have quoted, by saying: ‘The question of how we care for those with dementia is also a question of how we live and how we die. It is about what it means to be human. We are all human. We all have stories.’

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Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker.

Start:Stop - Be the resurrection and the life

Bible reading

Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (Luke 24. 25 – 27)

Meditation

In Risen, the latest Jesus film to be released, “Roman military tribune Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) remains set in his ways after serving 25 years in the army. He arrives at a crossroad when he's tasked to investigate the mystery of what happened to Jesus following the Crucifixion. Accompanied by trusted aide Lucius, his quest to disprove rumours of a risen Messiah makes him question his own beliefs and spirituality. As his journey takes him to places never dreamed of, Clavius discovers the truth that he's been seeking.”

Alister McGrath has described the conversion of C.S. Lewis as occurring in a similar fashion: “It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern – a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true ...

Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis ... realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth ... he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned – and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study.’ (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life)

When Jesus unpacked the scriptures to his disciples on the Emmaus Road, they must have felt something similar. What he said made sense of a situation that seemed beyond their understanding.

As a Cambridge physicist Professor John Polkinghorne might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he has concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

Perhaps as “Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson … ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

Prayer

Risen Lord, speak into our foolishness and slowness of heart in believing all that the prophets have declared! Help us realise it was necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interpret to us, through your Spirit, the things about yourself in all the scriptures.

Risen Lord, be to us the victory, the end of strife; be the resurrection and the life.

Risen Lord, help us see and sense the deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which we can discern – and which, once grasped, makes sense of culture, history, science resolving the intellectual and imaginative riddles that have puzzled us until know. May we see that if your story is true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained.

Risen Lord, be to us the victory, the end of strife; be the resurrection and the life.

Risen Lord, help us by beginning in you to let you read our riddles and teach us truths your Spirit will defend. You are the End who meets us in the middle, the new Beginning hidden in the End. You are the victory, the end of strife. You are the resurrection and the life.

Risen Lord, be to us the victory, the end of strife; be the resurrection and the life.

Blessing

Sensing a deeper order grounded in the nature of God, making sense of culture, history and science, resolving intellectual and imaginative riddles, things falling into place, victory, the end of strife, resurrection and new life. May those blessings of almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Risen soundtrack.

Easter: Where do you stand?

Here is my reflection for the current Parish Newsletter at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Alister McGrath has described the conversion of C.S. Lewis as being ‘like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative … a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained.’ Lewis came to see the story of Christ as a true myth which, once believed, made sense of everything else.

As a Cambridge physicist Professor John Polkinghorne might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he has concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

“Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

An Easter advertising campaign has recently launched which allows you to investigate the story of the Passion yourself in the style of the television sci-fi series The X-Files. The advert “Easter: Where do you stand” — on television, radio, posters, and online — has been released by the ecumenical network ChurchAds.Net to coincide with the finale of the new series of The X-Files. It encourages us to “reopen the case on Jesus Christ”, and vote on the question: “Jesus: man, myth, or messiah?” Your investigation can be made and your vote cast at http://www.wheredoyoustand.co.uk/.

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The X-Files Theme Song. 

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth

I preached an abridged version of this sermon at the 8.00am service at St Martin-in-the-Fields this morning:

“Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’"

This is what motivates Professor John Polkinghorne. As a Cambridge physicist he might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

“Only a tiny handful of people have founded immense, influential movements. They shared three vital assets:

• a charismatic personality
• a long life
• a fast growing number of committed followers

Muhammad is a good example. He died in his sixties after a very energetic life. His following had momentum -lots of people, good organisation, a buoyant mood. So it's no surprise to find that Muhammad's charisma gave rise to a great movement, known today as Islam.

The single exception to the 'long life and growing movement' rule is Jesus. He died young - in his thirties. He spent only three years in the public eye and that in a small country under enemy occupation. He stayed local and didn't write anything down (apart from a word or two in the sand). Towards the end his popularity ran out and his followers ran away, their lofty dreams shattered.

To sum up ... it was quite impossible for this sequence of events to give rise to a movement of any size or consequence, let alone the largest movement in all history. Yet ... IT DID!” (John Young, Build on the Rock – Faith, doubt and Jesus’)

As Sherlock Holmes remarked, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

We are not speaking here of proof. Just as the existence or non-existence of God cannot be conclusively proved and is therefore, for both Christians and atheists, a matter of belief; so the resurrection cannot be conclusively proved or disproved and, on both sides, is ultimately a matter of belief.

What is being said though is that we have to make sense of the historical facts about the remarkable rise of the Early Church and that belief in the resurrection makes sense of that story. As John Polkinghorne has said, ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced.’

More than that, the Christian story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection makes sense of life itself. For the early Church and for Christians ever since, this story enables us to understand life, to make sense of it, to see it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth.

Death AND resurrection. Suffering AND salvation. This is the journey which Christians make, following in the footsteps of Jesus, as we travel through Lent and Easter.

While it is a journey which in no way minimises the reality and pain of suffering and bereavement, it is ultimately a journey of hope. One which leads to new life, where we proclaim that Jesus is alive and death is no longer the end.

As a result, to go on this journey, builds resilience and endurance in those who travel this way. As we look at our lives, the difficulties and challenges we might face, our Christian faith tells us that this is not the end instead change and new life are possible; indeed, that they will come.

The story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future. Whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins.

In his book ‘Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis sets out the series of moves which led him to faith in God, using a chessboard analogy’:

‘What Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy is not a process of logical deduction: A therefore B, therefore C. It is much more like a process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things ... Things fall into place ...

It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern – a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true ...

Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis ... realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth ... he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned – and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study.’ (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life)

So, we have seen that belief in the resurrection not only makes sense of the rise of the Early Church but also can make sense of life itself, seeing it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth. This gives us a means of enduring the difficulties and challenges we face now with resilience and endurance because of our belief that this is not the end and that change and new life are possible and will come.

As a result, the story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future because whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins. That is what made sense to John Polkinghorne and C.S. Lewis and is also what has made sense for millions of Christians over the centuries since that first Easter Day. May we also know Christ’s resurrection not only making sense for us but also making sense of our lives too.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Larry Norman - The Tune.

Held in the divine memory

Here is the piece I wrote for this week's parish newsletter at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

During the recent Living with Dementia evening at St Martin-in-the-Fields several people expressed the hope that has been articulated well by scientist and priest, John Polkinghorne, that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

I was reminded by this of the parables Jesus told in which a sheep, a coin and a son, respectively, are lost. Each story ends with rejoicing over the finding again of that which was lost. These stories hold out the possibility that, in God, nothing is lost. Certainly, the importance to Jesus of that which was lost being found is emphasised by his choosing to tell three different stories on this same theme.

In the context of a condition like dementia in which memory is progressively lost, it could be a source of some hope that nothing is lost and that all we are and have been is held in the divine memory. If we are, in some sense, as Psalm 139 suggests, fearfully and wonderfully made by being formed or knit together by God in our mother’s womb; if our frame is not hidden from God when we were being made in secret, if God’s eyes beheld our unformed substance, and if all the days that have been formed for us were written in God’s book when none of them as yet existed, then it would follow beautifully and logically that those memories and knowledge would be retained in the divine memory for eternity. Maybe, as the saying goes, nothing lasts but nothing is lost.

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Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends Theme.

Living with Dementia

On Tuesday, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, we continued our exploration of the experience of dementia and faith, through the insight of lived experience and theological reflection, as we looked at how our church life and worship might grow in a more dementia-friendly way. We were helped enormously in doing so by Clive Wright, David Warbrick and Sister Margaret.

David Warbrick said: "I was seeing, pared down, the very fabric of faith: imagination, analogy, metaphor, improvisation, musicality of speech, the power of words to evoke rather than confine and control. In his dementia, Dad laid bare the workings of the equipment God has given human beings for prayer. Half an hour in his real-yet-imaginary world burnished my vision of the world outside. The slowness and sense of presence made me see the exquisite delicacy of facial expressions and listen to intonation as much as to words, so something shifted in me. Just as his paintings have made me stop and behold rather than merely look at the world, maybe in his childlike dementia he has offered me a gift of perception I need to receive precisely now if I am to stay in touch with the kingdom of heaven during this exciting, potentially fruitful but also perhaps dangerously self-important, busily distracted decade of my life."

Several people spoke a sense of hope as a result of the idea developed by John Polkinghorne that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

Also of particular interest was the thought that it is our earliest memories which are the last to fade. This is an additional reason for seeking to ensure that children have positive experiences in their childhood, as those memories may well be the place that they inhabit again at the end of their lives.

These are just some points of particular note for me from an evening which was full of value for those who came. Much discussion about dementia is to do with increasing understanding and thinking about the small things that we can do to make a difference to people affected by dementia in our community. That is deeply valuable but this evening took the discussion in very different directions which confronted some of the very real questions and challenges that the experience of living with dementia raises.

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R.E.M. - Talk About The Passion.

Christianity: Making sense of life

“Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

This is what motivates Professor John Polkinghorne. As a Cambridge physicist he might be expected to disbelieve such an extraordinary miracle as resurrection, which appears to contravene the laws of nature. But in fact, it is the cornerstone of his faith. Reflecting on the remarkable rise of the early Church, he concluded: ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced. I believe that was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’

“Only a tiny handful of people have founded immense, influential movements. They shared three vital assets:

• a charismatic personality

• a long life

• a fast growing number of committed followers

Muhammad is a good example. He died in his sixties after a very energetic life. His following had momentum - lots of people, good organisation, a buoyant mood. So it's no surprise to find that Muhammad's charisma gave rise to a great movement, known today as Islam.

The single exception to the 'long life and growing movement' rule is Jesus. He died young - in his thirties. He spent only three years in the public eye and that in a small country under enemy occupation. He stayed local and didn't write anything down (apart from a word or

two in the sand). Towards the end his popularity ran out and his followers ran away, their lofty dreams shattered.

To sum up ... it was quite impossible for this sequence of events to give rise to a movement of any size or consequence, let alone the largest movement in all history. Yet ... IT DID!”

(John Young, Build on the Rock – Faith, doubt and Jesus’)

As Sherlock Holmes remarked, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

We are not speaking here of proof. Just as the existence or non-existence of God cannot be conclusively proved and is therefore, for both Christians and atheists, a matter of belief; so the resurrection cannot be conclusively proved or disproved and, on both sides, is ultimately a matter of belief.

What is being said though is that we have to make sense of the historical facts about the remarkable rise of the Early Church and that belief in the resurrection makes sense of that story. As John Polkinghorne has said, ‘Something happened to bring it about. Whatever it was it must have been of a magnitude commensurate with the effect it produced.’

More than that, the Christian story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection makes sense of life itself. For the early Church and for Christians ever since, this story enables us to understand life, to make sense of it, to see it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth.

Death AND resurrection. Suffering AND salvation. This is the journey which Christians make, following in the footsteps of Jesus, as we travel through Lent and Easter.

While it is a journey which in no way minimises the reality and pain of suffering and bereavement, it is ultimately a journey of hope. One which leads to new life, where we proclaim that Jesus is alive and death is no longer the end.

As a result, to go on this journey, builds resilience and endurance in those who travel this way. As we look at our lives, the difficulties and challenges we might face, our Christian faith tells us that this is not the end instead change and new life are possible; indeed, that they will come.

The story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future. Whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins.   

In his book ‘Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis sets out the series of moves which led him to faith in God, using a chessboard analogy’:

‘What Lewis describes in Surprise by Joy is not a process of logical deduction: A therefore B, therefore C. It is much more like a process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things ... Things fall into place ...

It is like a scientist who, confronted with many seemingly unconnected observations, wakes up in the middle of the night having discovered a theory which accounts for them ... It is like a literary detective, confronted with a series of clues, who realises how things must have happened, allowing every clue to be positioned within a greater narrative. In every case, we find the same pattern – a realisation that, if this was true, everything else falls into place naturally, without being forced or strained. And by its nature, it demands assent from the lover of truth. Lewis found himself compelled to accept a vision of reality that he did not wish to be true, and certainly did not cause to be true ...

Lewis finally bowed to what he now recognised as inevitable. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis ... realised that if Christianity was true, it resolved the intellectual and imaginative riddles that had puzzled him since his youth ... he began to realise that there was a deeper order, grounded in the nature of God, which could be discerned – and which, once grasped, made sense of culture, history, science, and above all the acts of literary creation that he valued so highly and made his life’s study.’

(Alister McGrath, C.S.Lewis: A Life)

So, we have seen that belief in the resurrection not only makes sense of the rise of the Early Church but also can make sense of life itself, seeing it as a journey with meaning, purpose and an ultimate destination which is not death and destruction but new life and rebirth. This gives us a means of enduring the difficulties and challenges we face now with resilience and endurance because of our belief that this is not the end and that change and new life are possible and will come.

As a result, the story of Christ’s death and resurrection takes us forward into a new life. The reality of his presence with us on the way helps us endure and persevere. The combination of the two brings hope for the future because whatever we may experience in the here and now, ultimately Love wins. That is what made sense to John Polkinghorne and C.S. Lewis and is also what has made sense for millions of Christians over the centuries since that first Easter Day. May we also know Christ’s resurrection not only making sense for us but also making sense of our lives too. 

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Alice Cooper - I Am Made Of You.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (2)

Saturday 25^th August

A hot shower, cooked breakfast and good conversation at the Rectory where I staying provide a great beginning to a day that will see torrential showers and the resulting quagmire.

John Polkinghorne highlighted the particularity of our universe by means of the specific conditions which created carbon. The universe was pregnant with rich potentiality and possibility from the very beginning but in very short spaces of time finely tuned chemical reactions were required for life to emerge; slight differences would have meant that the carbon necessary for life could not have developed. At the opposite extreme, a very large universe is required for life to emerge and our universe is sufficiently large. The particular conditions for life met within our universe point to a fine tuning of the laws of nature - creation. This is an enduring condition with new things coming into being under particular circumstances at the edge of chaos where life is neither too ordered or too haphazard. This is the snake in Eden – evolution comes at a cost; ragged edges and blind alleys. Creation has to exist at a distance from the Creator for free will to genuinely operate. Therefore, the mutation of cells at the edge of chaos has a shadow side; cells can mutate in ways that are malignant (cancerous) as well as benign. This is the inevitable cost of a world able to make itself through an evolving chemistry of life.

The universe is expanding and cooling; the eventual result will be its end in futility and decay. “The more I understand the universe, the more it seems pointless,” says Stephen Weinberg. Christianity speaks, however, of the faithfulness of the Creator and a destiny after death. Continuity and discontinuity is therefore implied. The constantly changing atoms of our bodies carry the information, pattern or structure of our character and memories. This pattern is the real person and could be preserved in the divine mind to be resurrected in the different matter of a future different body and world. New matter transformed from the old. Jesus’ resurrection is the seed event for this possibility and sacraments are occasions when the veil between this world and the next is thinned.

Based on this I write:

In the tension of the now and not yet,

between order and disintegration,

between anarchy and regimentation,

in between, the broken middle,

the crack where the light gets in,

is the edge of chaos where life evolves,

where change occurs not free of cost –

ragged edges, blind alleys, the snake in Eden –

evolution into consciousness, falling up.

Diarmaid MacCulloch spoke about his attempt to show the wider public the importance of Church history by reshaping the way the story is told. Christianity is a personality cult as Jesus is the one constant in the diversity of the faith. Christians tell stories about Jesus in which audacious claims are made about his divinity and continuing presence. The Bible is a diverse library of books. The ideas at the heart of all world religions are flexible and change as the religions mutate and change to survive.

Christianity has unstable roots are it has two different sources; Judaism and Hellenism. Judaism speaks of a passionate, angry God while the Greeks spoke of a perfect, unchanging God. The first four centuries of Christianity are trying to reconcile these two dichotomies. Christianity, therefore, is essentially a question. A key moment is this debate comes with the Council of Calcedon in 451CE. The compromise worked out there has come to characterise Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox expressions of the faith but at the time it was a disaster as it was not accepted by two-thirds of the Church. It was only because of the growth of Islam and its later development of a missionary aspect which caused the fading of the influence and ideas of that two-thirds Church which had rejected Calcedon. This was historical accident which could easily have been different if the influence of the Church of the East had been maintained. Historically, it is clear that the Church has always been diverse.

McCulloch was asked about accessible Early Church histories and didn’t provide much in the way of ideas but could have pointed to the excellent Video Timeline Project by Tim Hull at St John’s Nottingham which was being promoted in G-Source.

The rains came while Pádraig Ó Tuama, who seems to be the unofficial poet laureate of Greenbelt, was entertaining us with lengthy comedic introductions to the short depressive ‘Reading from the Book of Exile’ poems (his description). There were more poetic songs from Bruce Cockburn in an unplugged session at the Big Top. “I’m thinking ‘bout eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me,” lines from ‘Wondering where the Lions are’, which could sum up the GB12 content thus far.

My own poem seems to have reached what may be a realised final form:

There is no culmination, no end to need or greed,

no resolution - the need to dim the lights never ceases.

Your people age and fail and demand unless I cry,

‘No more, no more,’ and die. When will the culmination come?

When needs are met? When work ceases? When demands are done?

Always more, more, more. Human selfishness calls love without limits

into being –the tap of love turned full on – ever-flowing.

No end, no culmination, no resolution.

Take up the cross, become the host;

continually broken, consumed and re-membered.

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Pádraig Ó Tuama - Readings from the Book of Exile.