The best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness

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

Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Whatever you do, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.

The Christian life is so much more than how we gather together on Sunday; 98% of Christian disciples spend 95% of their time not in church. Everyday faith is all about how we express our Christian faith every day, in everyday situations, Monday to Saturday, not just on Sunday. It is about where and how we encounter God as we go about our lives and how we express that to others in our words and actions. It is found in our joys and cares, in our challenges and conflicts, in our work and rest, in our workplaces and homes, in our friendships and relationships as we lean into God’s presence and guidance.

Our faith connects with the wider community through our everyday lives and commitments. Whether because of our paid work, our family roles, or our community or political involvements, we are all intimately involved in the wider community. God calls us to do so as people of faith.

God knows each one of us intimately and prepares us for our calling before we are born, so we need to trust that our interests, skills and talents are gifts from God to be used for his glory. Then, as St Paul wrote to the Colossians, whatever we do, in word or deed, we do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Whatever our task, he wrote, we are to put ourselves into it, as done for the Lord (Colossians 3.23). The poet George Herbert wrote that this way of thinking is the “famous stone / That turneth all to gold.” So, this is where we begin with our calling, looking carefully at our natural interests, abilities and talents and putting them to use where we are doing what we do in the name of the Lord Jesus and for his glory.

Then, we develop and grow how we act as Christian people in our everyday lives. Living as a Christian is like getting undressed and then dressed again. The picture we are given in Colossians 3.12-17 is of taking off our old clothes (our old way of life – our vices) and putting on new clothes (a new and different way of life – Christian virtues).

This is something that we have to consciously choose to do. Getting dressed is not usually something we do without thinking about it. We take time when shopping to find clothes which we think suit us and generally we do not just put on the first thing that comes to hand with whatever the next item is. Instead, we match items until we are satisfied that we will look as we wish.

The new clothes that we are to put on as Christians are compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. That implies that the old clothes we take off would be their opposites; hatred, unkindness, pride, roughness, and impatience. Also implied is the idea that compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience do not come naturally to us, so we have to make a conscious change. Tom Wright has said that “the point about “vice”, the opposite of “virtue”, is that, whereas virtue requires moral effort, all that has to happen for vice to take hold is for people to coast along in neutral: moral laziness leads directly to moral deformation (hence the insidious power of TV which constantly encourages effortless going-with-the-flow). The thing about virtue is that it requires Thought and Effort . . .”

So, change begins with a conscious decision, not a magical or instant makeover. St Paul writes in Romans 12. 2, “let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind.” We know this is so because we only make changes in our lives when we break bad habits and form good habits. Tom Wright, again, “The point about the word “virtue” – if we can recapture it in its strong sense – is that it refers, not so much to “doing the right things”, but to the forming of habits and hence of moral character ... All behaviour is habit-forming … we [can] use the word “virtue” and “virtuous” simply to mean “behaviour we have had to work at which has formed our character so that at last it becomes natural and spontaneous to live like that.”

We can use a different illustration to see how this works in practice. Tom Wright says, “The illustration I sometimes use is that when you learn to drive a car, the idea is that you will quickly come to do most of the things “automatically”, changing gear, using the brakes, etc., and that you will develop the “virtues” of a good driver, looking out for other road users, not allowing yourself to be distracted, etc.; but that the highways agencies construct crash barriers and so on so that even if you don’t drive appropriately damage is limited; and also those “rumble strips”, as we call them in the UK, which make a loud noise on the tyre if you even drift to the edge of the roadway.

“Rules” and “the Moral Law” are like those crash barriers and rumble strips. Ideally, we won’t need them because we will have learned the character-strengths that St Paul lists for the Colossian Christians and will drive down the moral highway appropriately. But the rules are there so that when we start to drift, we are at once alerted and can take appropriate action – particularly figuring out what strengths need more work to stop it happening again.”

So, to sum up, Christian virtue comes “as the fruit of the thought-out, Spirit-led, moral effort of putting to death one kind of behaviour and painstakingly learning a different one.” When the Spirit is at work in us in this way, “we become more human, not less – which means we have to think more, not less, and have to make more moral effort, not less.”

What habits do we need to break and what habits do we need to build as a result of what we have thought about today? “So then, you must clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience … and to all these qualities add love, which binds all things together in perfect unity.”

The final week of our Stewardship month is to do with our community involvements. The Five Marks of Mission include: Tending - responding to human need by loving service; and Transforming - seeking to transform the unjust structures of society. Our Stewardship Pack suggests many things we can do to transform our community including:

• Volunteer with Project 58.7 or another voluntary organisation.
• Help at the Gateway Project.
• Pray regularly for your work and community.
• Make creative suggestions in your work.
• Write to your MP and/or Councillors about issues of international, national and local concern.

Can you commit to doing any of these or others mentioned in the pack? When we do, we are having a ministry of presence and engagement. Presence is what we often talk about here as ‘Being With’:

“The word ‘presence' points to our incarnational theology and the word ‘engagement’ to our pentecostal theology ... Presence can be largely passive, a simple acceptance that this is where we are, without any meaningful recognition of the relationship between our presence, the presence of others and the real presence of Christ who seeks constantly to bring human beings into relationship with each other in love. But the Spirit of God is constantly seeking to move us on from the fact of presence to the action of engagement – engagement as a public sign of our commitment to the wellbeing of the world and to the discovery of the Kingdom in the midst of the places where we are present.”

Jonathan Sacks has said: “Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good ... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness.”

David Ford has expanded on the opportunities that community engagement provides including the: “Opportunity to learn more about other human beings around us, especially those sincerely engaged in seeking God. Opportunity to present our Christian understandings of God by the lives we live and the words we speak. Opportunity to contribute to the common good and above all, opportunity to learn more about trusting in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” We can grasp these opportunities as we take up the challenge of our Stewardship Pack to be involved transforming our community and as we follow St Paul’s advice do everything that we do in the name of the Lord Jesus.

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Bob Dylan - What Can I Do For You?

Conversations that enlarge our world

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine's Wickford and St Mary’s Runwell this morning:

The two stories that we have heard read this morning (1 Samuel 3: 1-10 & John 1: 43-end) are linked by the idea that conversations can surprise us and enlarge our understanding of life.

Samuel is surprised by the voice that he hears in the night. At first, he can only think of it in terms of his known frame of reference and therefore he thinks that the voice he is hearing must be that of Eli, the Temple Priest, although Eli assures him that this is not the case. After hearing the voice three times his world is enlarged by the understanding that God can and wants to speak to him. What a revelation! His whole world is changed in a moment and the direction of his life shifts in that moment. He goes on to listen to and talk with God throughout his life and becomes one of the greatest leaders in Israel as a result.

In our gospel reading, Nathanael has a conversation with Jesus which begins with Nathanael closing down possibilities – “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” – but ends with him acknowledging Jesus as the Son of God and King of Israel. What a transformation brought about through a brief conversation.

Just think for a moment about what happens when we are in conversation with other people. First, we have to become aware of someone other than ourselves. Jonathan Sacks says, “we must learn to listen and be prepared to be surprised by others … make ourselves open to their stories, which may profoundly conflict with ours … we must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges … by the … process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own.”

Second, by these conversations we become aware of ourselves. As people, we are not autonomous constructions. Instead, our individual identities are gifted to us by the people, events, stories and histories that we encounter as we go through life. If there was no one and nothing outside of ourselves we would have no reference points in life, no way of knowing what is unique and special about ourselves. In conversations we become aware of how we differ from others and therefore what is unique about ourselves.

Finally, in conversations we also become aware of what we have in common with others. Conversation is something that you can only do with someone else. Therefore, Charles Taylor has argued that, opening a conversation is to inaugurate a common action. A conversation is ‘our’ action, something we are both involved in together. In this way, conversation reminds us of those things that “we can only value or enjoy together” and is, as Rowan Williams has said, “an acknowledgement that someone else’s welfare is actually constitutive of my own.”

Conversation with others can enlarge our understanding of reality, help us come to know ourselves better and make us aware of all that we share with others. It is perhaps because of these possibilities that the Bible is full of conversations and that God appears to want to draw us into conversation with himself. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, I know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as I respond with my whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

This way of thinking about life as a constant conversation with God, I think, makes sense of Paul’s statement that we should pray without ceasing. If we talk to God about all that we encounter and feel in our daily lives and if we constantly look to hear from and encounter God in the ordinary, everyday things, people and situations around us, then we will be in a constant conversation with God. Life itself will be a conversation and that enlargement of understanding, increased self-knowledge and awareness of what we share with others will become our reality.

These are particularly valuable reflections for us near the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Some measure of unity will only come within the Church as we engage in and remain in conversation with each other. Often the issues that divide us seem to push us towards the breaking off of conversation but, if we are serious, about the unity of the Body of Christ and about the importance that the Bible places on conversation then ending conversations should be the last thing that we consider.

So, as the week of prayer for Christian Unity approaches, let us enter into prayer as a lifelong constant conversation with God and let us enter into conversation with others as a means of affirming what we share despite our differences. Then we will know our world being enlarged in the way that was the case for both Samuel and Nathanael. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Gerry Rafferty - Who Cares.

Whoever welcomes children, welcomes me

Here's the reflection that I shared during today's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Jesus said, let the little children come to me, do not hinder or harm them, whoever welcomes children welcomes me and the one who sent me, the kingdom of heaven belongs to children, and anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.

Nicola Ravenscroft is a sculptor who is part of our congregation. She has a sculpture installation featuring seven lifesize bronze children, one from every continent on Earth. She sees her calling as an artist being to do what Jesus taught to welcome children and receive like children. She writes: ‘I am visionary, sculptor, mother to many, and grandmother to even more. I breathe life into life. I see a resilient and beautiful future for our children and their Earth, I hear their conversation, and I feel the pulse of a new understanding.

What is it about children that Jesus wanted us to imitate? What is that Nicola hears as she listens to children? ‘Creative, inquisitive and trusting, children are Earth’s possibility thinkers. They seek out, and flourish in fellowship, in “oneness”, and being naturally open-hearted, and wide-eyed hungry for mystery, delight and wonder, they embrace diversity with what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks so elegantly describes as the “Dignity of Difference”.’ It is, she says, ‘this life-giving, transformative gift in our children’ that feeds the unquenchable fire in her artist-heart; which inspires and gives her hope.

In words taken from the novelist Joseph Conrad, her urgent prayer is that the children she has sculpted, ‘shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders, that feeling of unavoidable solidarity: of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds all men to each other, and all mankind to the visible world.’ Her sculpture installation ‘calls us to unite, and invites us collectively, and with visceral response, to consider the fragile future of planet Earth.’

In a poem called ‘Sweet Breath of Life’ she writes about the installation saying:

It represents a world,
our world in seven little earthling children,
made from spirit, love and stardust,
gentle ..
spilling out in hope,
vulnerable yet strong:

Earth’s messengers
calling us to hear their urgent birthright-cry,
poised ..

and leaning
on tomorrow’s cutting edge.

these children are my artist-voice:
they are the voice of Earth,
and yours.

They challenge us to look at life
with a fresh sense of possibility.

These children are themselves a tender pleading ..
they plead for you, for me, for us all to work together,
and so achieve in oneness what we can’t achieve alone:

they challenge us to wear that “dignity of difference”,
bravely,
and so to find solutions,

and they challenge us to do whatever it requires
to learn Earth’s subtle language,
and to speak her truth:
as it is thus,
as one, we shall secure that precious gift,
that sweetest breath of Earth ..
our children’s future.

This is what is there at the heart of children – an innocent trust in one another – which is quickly lost, but which we need to regain if we are to unite and find solidarity in mysterious origin. The prophet Isaiah spoke of the wolf living with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child leading them. Isaiah also said that to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Jesus is the little child who can lead us into peace as we welcome children and receive like children.

Nicola’s seven lifesize bronze children, one from every continent on Earth:

hesitate in time,
leaning forward, hopeful,
poised to dive,
eyes closed, dreaming into their future,
anticipating things unseen:

a little child shall lead

trusting feet, plump and bare,
remind us of our duty of care
to life, to love, to planet Earth

they stand together, peacefully, as friends,
vulnerable and strong,
silently singing out to us
their call to change.

Will we hear their call? Will we welcome them and what they have to say to us? Will we receive like children remembering our duty of care to life, to love, to planet Earth? Earth’s children are life’s heartbeat: they are her hope, her future .. they are breath of Earth herself. Amen.

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Whitney Houston - Greatest Love Of All.

Abraham - The Legacy

Tonight I had the pleasure of giving the final reflection in the Lent Study Programme at St Martin-in-the-Fields. In this year's course we studied Meg Warner's book Abraham: A Journey Through Lent, where the final chapter considered 'Abraham - The Legacy':

Meg Warner writes in the final chapter of our Lent book that with Abraham's death, we are in a position to explore his legacy. Abraham grew during his life, both in maturity and in faithfulness to God. Over time he seems to have 'become' the special person God chose him to be. His obedience has long-term consequences which apply not just to Abraham and his immediate descendants but to the whole world. That is his legacy, and I want to briefly explore three aspects of that legacy now.

First, that the maturing of Abraham’s relationship with God included learning to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate and in argument with God, in order that Abraham could find God for himself and actually embody God’s characteristics and interests. We see this most dramatically in Genesis 18. 16-33 where Abraham argues and negotiates with God in relation to saving people who live in Sodom. God chose Abraham to “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”. Abraham throws that phrase, “what is right and just” back in God’s face in the course of their argument – “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” - “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?". Through their debate, God teaches Abraham to argue passionately for what is right and what is just. As he learns to do so, Abraham becomes more able to do what is right and just with his children and household.

The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, says that the legacy of this is that there then began that ‘dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years’; a dialogue in which God and human beings find one another. Only thus, he suggests, ‘can we understand the great dialogues [found in Scripture] between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job.’ As with those key figures in scripture, arguing or debating with God in prayer can also be a vital and vitalizing part of the maturing of our relationship with God.

A second part of Abraham’s legacy relates to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Here the key to understanding its legacy is the realisation that child sacrifice was the norm in the religions of the day and that the reason Abraham obeys God so unquestioningly may have been because, horrific and distasteful as it seems to us, there was nothing at that time unusual about the idea that the gods required human sacrifices in order to be appeased. The stories in Genesis about Abraham are foundational stories for the People of Israel. Imagine for a moment that you want to create a foundational story for a group of people that will change their understanding of sacrifice from the understanding with which they have grown up to one which is completely different from the religious practices of all the people that surround them. What kind of story might you tell? It may be that you would tell a story in which the person founding this new nation is taken all the way to the brink of child sacrifice and then dramatically and suddenly pulled back from taking that step.

The legacy of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the philosopher and anthropologist René Girard has suggested, is that Israel developed a system of animal sacrifice that continued until shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus’ crucifixion, Girard suggests, was both about God identifying himself with all the victims – the scapegoats – who have been sacrificed down through the centuries and also, because in Jesus God himself was scapegoated and sacrificed, the ultimate demonstration of the reality that, as Hosea first stated and Jesus then repeated, God requires mercy, not sacrifice.

The final area of legacy that I want to briefly explore is in relation to the common origins of Jewish, Christian and Muslim peoples; all descended, as Meg Warner reminds us, from one ancestor, Abraham. In his book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence Jonathan Sacks examines our common origins in the story of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac and gives us a reading of these stories which ‘is an ingenious and often moving turning upside down of a rhetoric of “chosenness.”’

Sacks notes ‘the extraordinary length to which the text goes to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God.’ He notes too that because of the way the story is written ‘our imaginative sympathies are with Hagar and her child’. ‘That is what gives the story its counter-intuitive depth’. Further, he notes that Isaac spends time at Beer Lahai Roi, the place of Hagar in the desert, and that Ishmael and Isaac are together when Abraham is buried. Finally, he makes us aware of a Rabbinic tradition based on these aspects of the story to the effect that Keturah, who Abraham marries after the death of Sarah, is actually Hagar returned to Abraham by Isaac as his wife.

Sacks concludes his chapter on the story of Ishmael and Isaac by saying this: ‘On the surface, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is about sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder by the younger. Beneath the surface, however, the sages, heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story: the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael. To be sure he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God.’

The futures of the two brothers diverge, ‘but there is no conflict between them, nor do they compete for God’s affection, which encompasses them both.’ ‘This reading becomes all the more powerful when, in the Midrash, it is extended to the relationship between Judaism and Islam.’ ‘Brothers can live together in peace’ this counter-narrative implies and Sacks notes that it perhaps ‘needed the twenty-first century, with its ethic and religious conflicts, to sensitise our ear to the texts’ inflections and innuendoes’ and to then grasp this aspect of Abraham’s legacy.

Through this Lent Course and Meg Warner’s book, we have seen Abraham undertake a significant journey. The whole way along the journey he struggled with his faith in the God who had chosen him so unexpectedly. At the same time as all of those struggles, Abraham appeared to grow in his responsibilities and in his relationship with God, so that by the end of the journey he had become the person God chose him to be – a true patriarch, whose faith and obedience had consequences for everybody around him. In a similar way, we can benefit from struggling with these three aspects of Abraham's legacy, as they constantly need claiming and reclaiming, both in our individual lives and our world, particularly because of the ways in which populism and nationalism are currently being used to shape politics and social structures.

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T. Bone Burnett - Every Time I Feel The Shift.

Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation

My latest article for Artlyst is entitled 'Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation'. In the article I try to explore the interface between art and religion in a world in which:

'ISIS destroys the art of civilisations wherever its reach extends, most notably at Palmyra. Brexit threatens to cut off EU arts funding without alternative national sources existing, as demonstrated by the threat from austerity cuts to the wonderful New Art Gallery Walsall. This may leave the Art world, despite its avant-garde image, ever more reliant on the largesse of capitalism and consumerism. Then, in the US those who will come to power in 2017, are those who have consistently sought to censor and neuter the liberal Arts.'

The article references Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks' 'Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence', Andre Serrano's 'Piss Christ', the At Our Mothers' Feet campaign, and Stations2016.

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Lou Reed - Busload Of Faith.

Paying Attention: Emotions

Here is my second address from our Silent Retreat:

Paying Attention: Emotions

Many of the great figures in the Bible seem to have viewed prayer as being more like a constant conversation with God than they did a scheduled time for making requests. In some ways there seems to be a greater understanding of this in Judaism than in Christianity. I’ve been helped and challenged by some of what Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, has said about this understanding of prayer in a fascinating lecture called Judaism, Justice and Tragedy - Confronting the problem of evil.

He sees Abraham as being the starting point in scripture for this kind of dialogue between God and human beings and said that “there begins a dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years”. He calls it the dialogue in which God and Man find one another and says that the mood of these dialogues between the prophets and God has been a never-ending feature in Judaism.

Have a look at the conversation between God and Abraham in Genesis 18. 16-33 and see what goes on there. The first thing to see in verse 17 is that God invites the conversation. He could have hidden his thoughts and plans from Abraham but he chooses not to. Instead he shares with Abraham and invites not just conversation but challenge from Abraham. Because that is what Abraham does in this conversation – he challenges God. What Abraham says to God, recorded for is in verse 25, is stunning - "God forbid that You should do such a thing! To kill the righteous with the wicked so that the righteous should have the same fate as the wicked, God forbid! Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?" It sounds blasphemous that a human being, who as Abraham says of himself in verse 27 is “nothing but dust and ashes”, should speak in this way to his creator. It sounds blasphemous until we remember that God chose to initiate this conversation and this challenge.

What is God doing then through this conversation? Let’s go back to what God said about Abraham before beginning this conversation. In verse 19, God says that Abraham has been chosen to “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”. Remember that phrase, “what is right and just” because it the phrase that Abraham throws back in God’s face – “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” - “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?". Through their conversation, God is teaching Abraham to argue passionately for what is right and what is just. As Abraham learns to do this he becomes more able to righteousness and justice to his children and household.

In the same way, God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, in arguments with him so that we can find him for ourselves and actually embody his characteristics and interests ourselves. He wants us to learn to do right through discussion rather than by rote. If all we do as Christians is to learn a set of rules then we will never be able to apply those rules to real life. Because in order to do right we need to apply the Spirit of the Law, not the letter of the Law. Jesus did this constantly and his application of the Spirit of the Law continually brought him into conflict with the religious leaders of his day who were concerned with the letter of the Law. A good example is the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. 1-11.

We can see this acted out for us by the people of Israel at Mount Sinai. Let’s look quickly at Exodus 19. In verse 6 we read of God saying that the Israelites “will be for him a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. Priests in Israel were the people who went into the holy place, into God’s presence. So God is saying that he wants all the people of Israel to come into his presence and to speak with him face-to-face. But turn over the page to Chapter 20.19 and you’ll find the people of Israel saying to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die”. In other words, they are saying we’ll obey God’s rules but we won’t speak with him face to face. They appoint Moses to be their mediator, to go into God’s presence on their behalf.

Moses learns to mirror God from his conversations and debates with God. So much so, that his face begins to shine with the reflection of God’s glory. But the people never really learn what God is like because they will not speak with him face to face. They keep him at arms length by using Moses as the mediator and by trying to keep rules which they know but don’t understand. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3.18 that we, like Moses, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are to be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. That transformation comes as we dialogue, debate, argue and converse with God.

Other people in the Bible who have these kind of conversations with God include: Jacob; Samuel; Job; Jeremiah; Jonah; Habakkuk; Jesus and Paul. The Psalms though are where most of the conversations between people and God are recorded. Virtually all the Psalms are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations though e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.

This approach to prayer is one that a number of Christian poets have picked up and used over the centuries:

•             Dialogue – George Herbert

•             Love III – George Herbert

•             Bittersweet – George Herbert

•             Thou art indeed just, Lord – Gerard Manley Hopkins

The conversations with God that are recorded for us in the Psalms are one’s that involve a whole range of different emotions. You might like to read through some Psalms and identify what is the emotion being expressed. Once you’ve done that then choose three of these different emotions that connect with you and think, if you were to have a conversation with God which involved that emotion, what you would be talking about with him and what you would be wanting to say to him. 

We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. Would today be a good opportunity to start including some of these more difficult emotions in your prayer life?

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Mark Heard - Strong Hand Of Love.

Start:Stop - Faces shining with God's glory

Bible reading

Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? …

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside … when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3. 7 - 18)

Meditation

After Moses has been in the presence of God on Mount Sinai to receive the Law, his face shone with the light of God; so much so, that he put a veil over his face whenever he was not speaking with the Israelites. 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. Moses learnt to mirror God from his conversations and debates with God; so much so, that his face began to shine with the reflection of God’s glory. But the people of Israel never really learnt what God is like because they would not speak with him face to face. They kept him at arms-length by using Moses as their mediator and by trying to keep rules which they knew but didn’t fully understand. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3.18 that we have the opportunity to be like Moses, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. That transformation comes as we dialogue, debate, argue and converse with God.

Many of the great figures in the Bible seem to have viewed prayer as being more like a constant conversation with God than they did a scheduled time for making requests. Other people in the Bible who had these kinds of conversations with God include: Abraham, Jacob, Samuel, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Jesus, and Paul. Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, sees Abraham as being the starting point in scripture for this kind of dialogue between God and human beings and says that there begins with Abraham “a dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years”. He calls it the dialogue in which God and Man find one another.

When we find God in this way that is when we, like Moses, with unveiled faces, will see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, and will be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another so that our faces begin to shine with the reflection of God’s glory.

Prayer

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.

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

Like Moses may we enter into the dialogue in which God and human beings find one another. May we learn to dialogue, debate, argue and converse with you. With the poet-priest George Herbert, may we pray, ‘Ah my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like. / I will complain, yet praise; / I will bewail, approve: / And all my sour-sweet days / I will lament, and love.’

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

We recognise that much of life in the city is struggle: the struggle to keep the children from crime; the struggle to make the money last the week; the struggle to find energy after a heavy day at work; the struggle to keep the house decent; the struggle to find quiet space in overcrowded rooms. And especially, the struggle to find space to be conscious of your presence: energy to live out your loving forgiveness. Yet somehow your blessing is discovered in the struggle, just as Jacob wrestled and struggled with you. And although he was left with a limp, your deeper blessing never left him. Lord, we pray for our friends and neighbours that they may know your blessing in this struggle of living and their faces shine as a result.

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

Blessing

Seeing God’s glory, dialoguing, debating, arguing and conversing with God, blessing in struggle, faces shining with God’s light. May those blessings of almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and remain with you always. Amen.

  

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Van Morrison - In The Garden.

Quiet Day: Daily Divine

 

Today I led a Quiet Day at the Retreat House in Pleshey for the Parish of St Andrew's Sandon. Entitled 'Daily Divine,' this Quiet Day explores experiencing God in the events and emotions of the everyday or, as the poet George Herbert put it, ‘Heaven in ordinaire’. During the day thoughts are shared on the idea and reality of having an ongoing conversation with God in which we pray through our emotions and our everyday encounters.

Over the course of the day we used an eclectic range of materials from: David Adam, Brother Lawrence, Ruth Burgess, Alexander Carmichael, Jean Pierre de Caussade, Bill Fay, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jonathan Sacks, Ray Simpson, Simon Small and Victoria Williams.

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Bill Fay - Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People).

Our Holy Scriptures: an invitation to share in a conversation about the nature of life

This evening I spoke on 'Our Holy Scriptures' at the East London Three Faiths Forum where I said the following:

In a context where we are attempting to dialogue about our different faiths and where the strapline is that “there can be no peace between the religions without religious dialogue,” I thought it may be appropriate to speak about the Christian scriptures as a site for dialogue.

‘Scriptural Reasoning,’ which is championed in the UK by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme sees Jews, Christians and Muslims meeting to read passages from their respective Holy Scriptures together. Together they discuss the content of those texts, and the variety of ways in which their traditions have worked with them and continue to work with them, and the ways in which those texts shape their understanding of and engagement with a range of contemporary issues. The goal is not agreement but rather growth in understanding one another's traditions and deeper exploration of the texts and their possible interpretations. 

What I would like to explore is why, from a Christian perspective, it is possible to do this with our holy scriptures and to do that I need to begin by talking about the form or shape of the Christian scriptures.

When we think about the form and shape of the Christian scriptures we need to remember that we are not speaking of one book but a collection of books. Maggi Dawn has, for example, written that the Bible’s: "stories are not laid out chronologically, and it is the work of so many different authors, in different genres and from different times, that although it seems like a book it would be more apt to call it a small library." Similarly, James Barr has said that the Bible needs “to be thought of not so much as a book but as a cave or cupboard in which a miscellany of scrolls has been crammed."

Other images for this diversity of form and content which I have found helpful include Mike Riddell’s description of the Bible as "a collection of bits" assembled to form God’s home page or Mark Oakley’s more poetic image of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have.” Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states:

“The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”

This is not surprising when there are in the New Testament, for example, four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of St Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation where we don’t have all the letters which originally formed that conversation.

To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian scriptures is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us:

“ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”

The Christian scriptures, then, do not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded.

The literary critic Gabriel Josipovici describes well how this works when he writes of the Hebrew scriptures. He suggests that the scriptures work “by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”. This form then affects the content because “events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern”:

“This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.”

Despite the Christian scriptures having this form there is also a clear story which is threaded through the disparate and fragmented books and genres of the Bible. Josipovici also writes:

“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’.”

So, what we have in the Christian scriptures is a both/and. A linear narrative thrust is combined with fragments of writings or story that are laid side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others.

The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, similarly, suggests that the Bible has both “a central direction and a rich diversity” which means “that not all parts will cohere or agree” although it has a “central agenda.”  The Bible is, therefore, structured like a good conversation with a central thread but many topics and diversions. On this basis, Brueggemann emphasises that “the Bible is not an “object” for us to study but a partner with whom we may dialogue.” In the image of God, he says, “we are meant for the kind of dialogue in which we are each time nurtured and called into question by the dialogue partner.” It is the task of Christian maturing, he argues, “to become more fully dialogical, to be more fully available to and responsive to the dialogue partner”:

“… the Bible is not a closed object but a dialogue partner whom we must address but who also takes us seriously. We may analyze, but we must also listen and expect to be addressed. We listen to have our identity given to us, our present way called into question, and our future promised to us.”

It is not only the form of the Bible, however, which makes it a site for dialogue but its content as well. Again writings about the Hebrew scriptures can help open our Christian eyes to aspects of the scriptures we may have overlooked. For example, Jonathan Sacks commenting on Midrash Raba in his fascinating series of Faith Lectures, states that:

“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.”

“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job”

Similarly Mike Riddell has noted that for Christians “Jesus represents the essence of God’s desire to communicate with humanity.” Jesus is “the self-communication of God.” This is why he is ‘the Word of God’ and this is why Erasmus, in his 1516 translation of the New Testament, translated ‘logos’ as ‘Conversation’ not ‘Word’. A contemporary paraphrase of the Prologue to John’s Gospel based on Erasmus’ translation reads as follows:

“It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of men, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity.

John, a man sent by God, came to remind people about the nature of the light so that they would observe. He was not the subject under discussion, but the bearer of an invitation to join in.

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

Rowan Williams makes a similar point in his book ‘Christ on Trial’ where he writes:

“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”

So, for Christians, to be able to enter into the conversation initiated by God by encountering the subject of the conversation – God made vulnerable – is what forms our identity. This puts dialogue at the centre of our faith and our holy scriptures which can then mean that the kind of dialogue between scriptures which occurs in processes like Scriptural Reasoning can be seen as a significant expression of something which is at the very heart of Christian faith.  

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Sufjan Stevens - All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands.

Covenant of Noah: Conditions for life

What legacy will we pass on to those we leave behind? In what way can we hand on the torch of faith to future generations? What does my life say to others and what do I want it to say? These are all questions from sermons preparing us for Lent and questions that will recur as we study our Lent course ‘Handing on the Torch’ together.

In 2008 the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks gave some remarkable answers to questions of this sort in an address to the Lambeth Conference based, in large part, on today’s Old Testament reading (Genesis 9. 1 - 17). What he had to say has not been given sufficient attention although it unpacks a neglected part of the story told within the Bible and so I want to share with you today some of what he said.

He began by speaking about power and wealth. The state is about power, the market is about wealth, and they are two ways of getting people to do what we want them to do. One way is to force them to do it – the way of power; the other one is to pay them to – the way of wealth.

Imagine, for a moment, you have total power, and then, in a fit of craziness you decide to share it with nine other people. How much power do you have left?  You have 1/10 of what you began with. Suppose you have a thousand pounds and you decide to share it with nine other people. How much do you have left? 1/10 of what you had when you began.

But now suppose that you decide to share, not power or wealth, but love, or friendship, or influence, or even knowledge, with nine others. How much would you have left? Would you have less than when you began? No, you would have more; and why is that - because love, friendship and influence are things that only exist by virtue of sharing them with others? These are what we can call covenantal goods – covenantal goods are the goods that, the more I share, the more I have. And that makes covenant different from wealth and power.

In the short term wealth and power are zero-sum games. That means if I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. Covenantal goods are non-zero-sum games, meaning, we both win; the more I give away the more I have – we both win. And that has huge consequences.

Because you can see with wealth and power, economics and politics, the market and the state, they must be arenas of competition but covenantal goods are different because they are arenas of co-operation.

And the question is where will we find covenantal goods like love, like friendship, like trust, like influence? You won’t find them in the state, you won’t find them in the market, but you will find them in marriages, in families, in congregations, in communities – you will find them in society, so long as you remember that society is something different from the state. If we're searching for the big society, this is where we will find it.

Another way of thinking about this is to think about the difference between a contract and a covenant. A contract is an agreement between two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, and they come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So you get a commercial contract that creates the market, and you get the social contract that creates the state.

A covenant is something different. In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and the integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives and, by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither of them can do alone.

And that is not the same as a contract at all. A contract is a transaction but a covenant is a relationship or, to put it slightly differently, a contract is about interests but a covenant is about identity. And that is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform. Economics and politics are about the logic of competition, covenant is about the logic of co-operation.

Now let’s turn to our passage from Genesis 9. The world had been almost destroyed by a flood. All humankind, all life, excluding Noah's Ark, shared the same fate. God says to all those who survive, those who will build a new world: “I promise I will never again destroy the world. But I cannot promise that you will never destroy the world – because, you see, I gave you free will. All I can do is teach you how not to destroy the world.” 

How? Well, the answer is found in the covenant about which we read in Genesis 9. 1 – 17, a covenant of human solidarity, which is known as the covenant of Noah or the Noahide covenant.

The covenant of Noah has three essential dimensions. Number one: “If anyone takes human life, he will be punished ... [because] Human beings were made like God”; that is about the sanctity of human life. As creator, God is universal. We are all in God's image, formed in His likeness.

Number two: look carefully at Genesis 9 and you will see that there are five times in that one chapter emphasizing that the covenant of Noah is not merely with humanity alone, but with everything that lives on the face of earth. Five times; the covenant is not just with human beings but with all of nature. So the second element of the covenant of Noah is the integrity of the created world; what today we call the Environment. As human beings, we are fellow citizens of the world God made and entrusted to our care.

And number three: the sign of the covenant is a rainbow; the white light of God fragmented into all the colours of the spectrum  or as Sacks puts in the title of one of his books ‘The dignity of difference’. The miracle of monotheism is that unity up there creates diversity down here. 

And so these three elements - the sanctity of human life, the integrity of the environment and respect for diversity - are the three elements of the global covenant that God made with Noah and still makes with us.

All three elements of this global covenant are currently in danger. The sanctity of human life is being ravaged by political oppression and by terror. The integrity of creation is being threatened by environmental catastrophe. And respect for diversity is imperilled by what one writer has called a clash of civilisations. 

So Sacks says that the call of God in our times is to renew this global covenant, the covenant that began with Noah. We have to honour this covenant now, in our time, in order that future generations will be able to live. To come back to the questions with which we began, Sacks is saying that: we will not have a legacy to pass on to those who come after us; we will not be able to hand the torch of our faith on to others; our lives will not have anything to say to others, if the sanctity and diversity of life is not respected and if environmental catastrophe occurs. The covenant of Noah precedes the covenants made with Abraham and Moses and precedes the New Covenant made through Jesus. This covenant creates the conditions in which life and faith can flourish because before we can live any faith we have to be able to live and this covenant is about the fundamentals of life itself; the sanctity of life in all its diversity. 

Sacks is saying that there are fundamental moral truths that lie at the basis of God's covenant with humankind: that co-operation is as necessary as competition, that co-operation depends on trust, that trust requires justice, and that justice itself is incomplete without forgiveness. Morality is not simply what we choose it to be. It is part of the basic fabric of the universe, revealed to us by the universe's Creator, long ago.

He is also saying that the nature of covenant shows how to fulfil the covenant of Noah: respect for the dignity and the integrity of the other, coming together in bonds of love and trust, sharing our interests and our lives, pledging faithfulness to one another in order to do together what none of us can do alone.

What legacy will we pass on to those we leave behind? In what way can we hand on the torch of faith to future generations? What does my life say to others and what do I want it to say? When we pass on covenantal goods we fulfil the covenant of Noah.

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Peter Case - Put Down the Gun.

The Big Society and the small acts of individuals

Redbridge deanery synod tonight was on the topic of the Big Society. The main speaker was Daniel Singleton, National Executive Director of FaithAction, a network of Faith based and Community organisations serving their communities by delivering public services (such as childcare, health and social care, housing and welfare to work). Daniel has recently written a FaithAction booklet setting out a faith-based response to the Big Society called ‘How to eat an elephant’.Daniel said that the Big Society is not a policy but a philosophy. It is to do with the choices made by individuals and, therefore, is at the micro level of society. It will be shown by random acts of kindness and involves a move towards a more neighbourly society. The Big Society has to start and end with the small acts of individuals.

In our church clusters we then discussed what we could contribute to the Big Society in Redbridge in future, what will we want to question about the Big Society in Redbridge in future, and how will we do that.

In my introductory remarks I said the following:

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has said that "If we're searching for the big society, [religion] is where we will find it."

He had two reasons for making that statement. First, he quoted new research by the Harvard sociologist Robert Puttnam, showing that places of worship still bring people together in "mutual responsibility": “The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbours.”

Second, he argued that: “Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness.”

The truth of this can be demonstrated through research commissioned by the Cinnamon Network; a group of over 100 Chief Executive Officers of faith-based charities developing responses to the Government's Big Society agenda. Their research reveals that churches and their congregations contribute significant time as well as monies to their communities.

The 284 churches involved in the sample delivered a total of 439,000 hours of volunteer service in the last 12 months, which equates to 1,925 per church on average. These churches contributed £1,234,000 to finance social action work, or £7,568 per church, spent on an average of 3.3 projects.

Projecting these figures against population and church going for the UK gives an estimate of 72 million hours of volunteering for Church-led initiatives over 12 months.
We don’t have equivalent figures for Redbridge but we do know on the basis of the Big Society Mapping Event that was organised last year with Redbridge Council that a wide range of services are currently delivered by faith groups including:

·   Services/facilities for children – toddler groups and crèche facilities; uniformed organisations; support for parents;

·   Services/facilities for young people – detatched youth work; football clubs; drug and alcohol projects;

·   Service/facilities for adults – ESOL classes; healthy living classes;

·   Services/facilities for elderly – day centres; nursing homes; inter-generational projects;

·   Other services/facilities – counselling and bereavement services; confidence building; book and art classes; fitness classes; and Neighbourhood Watch.

We also have an agreed database where a fuller and more detailed picture of faith-based contributions to the Big Society can be gathered – that is the database maintained by Redbridge CVS – and you have all been given a copy of the form to use for entering details of your voluntary and community services.
Once we have this better map of the voluntary service contribution of faith groups to this borough then, as well as our contribution to the Big Society being better recognised, two further possibilities can come into play. First, our buildings could be considered for the delivery of Council services and/or the services of other Government agencies. It makes no sense for precious local authority finances to be used on new builds when existing community buildings may have spare capacity? Use of existing community buildings, such as those we own, locates Council services firmly in the local community and provides support to the voluntary and community sector through rental income. That is a win win situation.
Second, faith groups, the wider voluntary and community sector and the local authority can then together take an informed look at the range of existing provision in the borough, signpost to existing services more effectively, identify gaps in provision, and work together to develop new services which meet real local needs.

An example of that occurring has already happened in the borough since the meeting as the increased numbers of homeless people in the borough was a major topic of discussion at the Mapping Event and since then the churches in the borough has started the new Night Shelter based at the Salvation Army in Ilford.
Our response to the Big Society should be that of a critical friend able to ask many questions about the direction of travel both here in the borough and nationally. The Archbishop of Canterbury articulated some of these issues last year in the edition of the New Statesman which he edited.

He wrote that:

“If civil society organisations are going to have to pick up
responsibilities shed by government, the crucial questions are these. First, what services must have cast-iron guarantees of nationwide standards, parity and continuity? (Look at what is happening to youth services, surely a strategic priority.)

Second, how, therefore, does national government underwrite these strategic "absolutes" so as to make sure that, even in a straitened financial climate, there is a continuing investment in the long term, a continuing response to what most would see as root issues: child poverty, poor literacy, the deficit in access to educational excellence, sustainable infrastructure in poorer communities (rural as well as urban), and so on? What is too important to be left to even the most resourceful localism?”

Our role as faith groups is, I believe, to ask these questions at the same time as we play our part in expanding the Big Society within Redbridge.

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The Harbour Lights - Last Port Of Call.