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.

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

Bob Dylan - What Can I Do For You?

Visual Commentary on Scripture - Faith: To Our Hopes

The Visual Commentary on Scripture’s Lent offering this year is based as usual around 14 ‘Stations’ which began on Ash Wednesday and continue on Mondays and Fridays until Holy Week. All the commentaries in the series have an audio feature so that you can listen to them while viewing the works of art. Their 2024 Stations share with you a series of seven works exploring, first, the seven vices most commonly included in lists of the ‘deadly sins’, and then, second, the seven cardinal and theological virtues.

The Christian practice of listing vices and virtues has a long history, going back at least to the times of the very early desert monks in the fourth and fifth centuries. As they cultivated their little patches of land in order to sustain themselves, they also cultivated their bodies and souls to make them as fruitful as they could. Later, medieval Christian manuscripts featured the motif of the ‘virtue garden’, in which the virtues (usually seven) are shown as trees, being watered by prayer.

Christianity, like Judaism, likes having things in sevens. The sixth-century Pope Gregory the Great codified what he thought of as the seven ’capital’ sins—the vices from which all other wrongdoings flow—establishing what we still commonly refer to today as the seven ‘deadly’ sins. The list has varied a little over time. Some vices have dropped out and others have been dropped in. But overall, it has been remarkably consistent.

There has also been variety in the seven virtues Christians have listed for special consideration and imitation. Some lists are based on Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (‘the Beatitudes’); some were developed to describe specific antidotes to each of the capital vices; and one was a combination of four ‘cardinal’ virtues, celebrated in ancient classical philosophy as well as in Jewish and Christian tradition—Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude—with the three ‘theological’ virtues outlined by St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13—Faith, Hope, and Love.

Their commentaries explore what some of the more archaic-sounding virtues, like fortitude and temperance might have to teach us in a 21st-century context. Perseverance and self-restraint are, after all, things we need as much as ever.

And because vices are usually good things gone wrong—inordinate or disordered love for something that isn’t necessarily bad in itself, but bad when desired too much or in the wrong way—then you may find the occasional surprise along this Lenten journey: for example, a ‘vice’ having more of the qualities of a ‘virtue’ than you expected.

Lent is a time for spiritual gardening. They hope you will find this year’s Lent Stations a helpful way to take stock of what you might like to weed and what you might like to nurture in your own contexts.

 
Today's Station - Station 12 Faith: To Our Hopes - uses my second exhibition for the Visual Commentary on Scripture which can be found at A Question of Faith | VCS (thevcs.org). It's called 'A Question of Faith' and explores Hebrews 11 through the paintings of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon.

McCahon is widely recognised as New Zealand’s foremost painter. Over 45 years, his work encompassed many themes, subjects and styles, from landscape to figuration to abstraction and an innovative use of painted text. His adaption of aspects of modernist painting to a specific local situation and his intense engagement with spiritual matters, mark him out as a distinctive figure in twentieth-century art.

The VCS is a freely accessible online publication that provides theological commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art. It helps its users to (re)discover the Bible in new ways through the illuminating interaction of artworks, scriptural texts, and commissioned commentaries. The virtual exhibitions of the VCS aim to facilitate new possibilities of seeing and reading so that the biblical text and the selected works of art come alive in new and vivid ways.

Each section of the VCS is a virtual exhibition comprising a biblical passage, three art works, and their associated commentaries. The curators of each exhibition select artworks that they consider will open up the biblical texts for interpretation, and/or offer new perspectives on themes the texts address. The commentaries explain and interpret the relationships between the works of art and the scriptural text.

The McCahon exhibition varies the usual VCS format slightly by providing a greater focus on works by one artist than is usually the case. That is possible in this instance because all of the works in the exhibition explore aspects of Hebrews 11.

My first exhibition for the VCS was 'Back from the Brink' on Daniel 4: 'Immediately the word was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men, and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.' (Daniel 4:33). In the exhibition I explore this chapter with William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, 1795–c.1805, Arthur Boyd's Nebuchadnezzar's Dream of the Tree, 1969, and Peter Howson's The Third Step, 2001.

Find out more about the VCS, its exhibitions and other resources through a short series of HeartEdge workshops introducing the VCS as a whole and exploring particular exhibitions with their curators. These workshops can be viewed here, here, here and here.

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

King's X - Faith, Hope, Love.

Putting on the Christian virtues

Living as a Christian is like getting undressed and then dressed again. The picture we are given in Colossians 3. 12 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 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. Bishop 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 tire if you even drift to the edge of the roadway.

“Rules” and “the Moral Law” are like those crash barriers and rumble strips. Ideally you won’t need them because you will have learned the character-strengths and will drive down the moral highway appropriately. But the rules are there so that when you start to drift, you 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 you need to break and what habits do you 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.”

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

Hurtsmile - Jesus Would You Meet Me.