This estate we're in

Why did Jesus die? (A rather political answer)

2012-03-11T12:44:00.001-07:00

(A sermon for Lent 3B, 11/3/12, at Hodge Hill Church)

The longer I go on as a parent, the more I realise that children’s questions need to be taken with utter seriousness.

In the last few years of my previous job, every Easter we’d invite classes of primary school children to church to ‘experience’ the Easter story. And at the end of every session, there’d be at least one child who asked the same question: ‘why did Jesus die?’

And every time, it was clear that the traditional answer – ‘to save us from our sins’, or something similar – just didn’t work. Just try it – with the nearest child to hand. I’m willing to bet that, like me, the succession of ‘why?’ questions that follows ends up in a great tangled mess, with you saying things that either don’t make any sense, or that you actually have great trouble believing yourself.

The thing is, that’s just not the kind of ‘why?’ question that the children are really asking. When they ask, ‘why did Jesus die?’, they’re asking, ‘what did he do to get him crucified? Especially,’ and you can almost see the cogs whirring in their heads, ‘as we’d been led to believe by you grown-ups that he was ever so nice and kind and good and well-behaved…?!’

It really is a much more interesting question. And if we dare to explore it, it inevitably brings us to today’s gospel reading [John 2:13-22]...

If you want a short answer (and forgive me for descending into the ‘vernacular’ for a moment), then Jesus died because he pissed people off. Powerful people especially, but also what our politicians today fondly call ‘ordinary, hard-working people’ too – people, that is, a bit like you and me.

But I’m guessing you’re interested in a slightly longer answer. Jesus died, I suggest, because of three things he did...

1. Jesus made friends with the wrong kind of people

Just think of the kind of people Jesus shared meals with, and called to follow him: the ‘tax-collectors and sinners’, in the gospels’ words; the hot-headed freedom fighters, the uneducated fishermen.
Just think of the kind of people he touched: the lepers, the ‘demon-possessed’, the sick, the dead – all those officially deemed ‘unclean’.
Just think of the kind of people he talked to with respect: children, women, foreigners…

Jesus made friends with the wrong kind of people – and that made the ‘respectable’ and ‘religious’ types uneasy. Envious. Angry…

And then we get to today’s reading…

2. Jesus went right to the heart of his nation’s power and turned it upside-down

Why the Temple?

It was the place not just of religious power, but of political power too.
It was a place built by the rich & powerful, on the backs of the poor & powerless.
It was a place caught up in ‘the market’ – where ‘transactions’ were the rules of the game: having to buy God’s favour with costly sacrifices, having to pay the extortionate Temple tax every year, and getting ripped off by the money-changers in the process.
And it was a place that excluded. Its walls and courtyards made a series of concentric rings, like the skins of an onion, designed to keep at arm’s length, or outside completely, those who couldn’t afford its prices, those who were deemed ‘unclean’, women, disabled people, foreigners… exactly those people who Jesus called his friends.

That’s why Jesus came to the Temple. And he got angry. And he placed himself, his body, right in the middle of its business, literally ‘in harm’s way’, to face down and challenge, to disrupt its ‘business as usual’, to clear a space for something completely different to happen…

A bit like 81-year-old Shirley, who chained herself to the railings outside the House of Lords, angry at the government’s selling off the NHS to private companies.
Or the chain of wheelchair-users blocking Oxford Circus, angry at savage cuts to disability living allowance.
Or like the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp, until a couple of weeks ago outside St Paul’s Cathedral, angry at the power of international markets to make the rich richer and the poor powerless. And like the Christians who were dragged from the cathedral steps by Police as they knelt in prayer on the night of the camp’s eviction.
Or like Chris, Martin & Susan, 3 Roman Catholics who cut through the fence of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire last year, and fixed a sign to it saying ‘open for disarmament – all welcome’…

Jesus dared to challenge, to disrupt ‘business as usual’, to put himself – his body – literally in harm’s way, fully knowing what the consequences would be. And he cleared a space, for something completely different to happen...

Listen to these words of St. Augustine of Hippo, 4th Century teacher of the faith: "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

I’d want to add a third ‘daughter’ – Imagination – to see what a different world might look like. A glimpse of the possible – of the kingdom of God.

It’s no coincidence that just before today’s gospel reading, just before Jesus comes to the Temple, he’s making the wine flow freely at the wedding in Cana, ‘the first of Jesus’ signs’, as John calls it. Which brings me to my third reason why Jesus died…

3. Jesus played by different rules – or better, he started a completely different game – and the powerful just didn’t ‘get’ it…

At Cana, Jesus shows the power of celebration – using the stone jugs for water for the rituals of purification, to pour out the best wine anyone had ever tasted.
At Cana, Jesus changed the game from ‘run out’, ‘not enough’, to ‘overflowing’, ‘too much!’. Suddenly we’re in a different ‘economy’ – one of gift, grace, abundant generosity.
And at Cana, Jesus showed us a different society – where no one is left out, no one is deemed ‘unclean’ or ‘underserving’, no one is excluded because they can’t afford it… and no one is in charge of who gets what…

So why did Jesus die?

Because he made friends with the wrong kind of people
Because he went right to the nation’s centre of power and dared to disrupt its ‘business as usual’
And because he started a new game that those in power just didn’t ‘get’...

And what about us?

Here in Hodge Hill, we might well feel a long way from the centres of power in our country. Even in England’s ‘second city’, we might well feel rather on the edge of things. But there may well, in the coming years, be places in our own community, lines in the sand right here in Hodge Hill, that will demand our presence, our bodies, to stand or kneel in solidarity with our neighbours, and against the forces which seek to exclude, deprive and demean them.
And in the mean time, let’s get on with making friends, as Jesus did, with all the ‘wrong’ kinds of people, the kind of people our current government apparently class as not worthy of respect or value, but who our God counts, and knows, and loves as made in his image. Let’s find opportunities, through what we do as a church, and through who we meet as neighbours, to cross boundaries, open arms, share meals, make friends, break down divides…
And as we edge closer to Easter, let’s use these days of Lent, and beyond, to get trained up in the utterly different game that we call ‘the kingdom of God’, where passion and compassion, gift and abundant generosity, vulnerability and trust, celebration and friendship are the only rules we need – and where, like a seed that has been dead and buried, hope springs up and blossoms from seemingly barren ground.

What’s the point of Lent?

2012-03-04T02:28:00.001-08:00

(A sermon at Hodge Hill Church, 26/2/12)

The desert waits,
ready for those who come,
who come obedient to the Spirit’s leading;
or who are driven,
because they will not come any other way.

The desert always waits,
ready to let us know who we are –
the place of self-discovery.

And whilst we fear, and rightly,
the loneliness and emptiness and harshness,
we forget the angels,
whom we cannot see for our blindness,
but who come when God decides
that we need their help;
when we are ready
for what they can give us.

(Ruth Burgess)

One of the gifts of the ‘Everybody Welcome’ course that we’re following during Lent in Hodge Hill is the way it seeks to open our eyes to how church looks and feels to someone who comes as a ‘stranger’ – passing by, coming in, meeting people, joining in, for the first time. And thinking about this again, I was moved to remove a poster which has been bugging me for, oh, the 18 months or so since I started here.

The poster has a simple message: “Life before Jesus” (sad face), “Life after Jesus” (happy face), “Any questions?”. I have two big problems with it. The first is it’s not true. Any of us who have lived through the loss of a loved one, or illness, redundancy or divorce, or who have suddenly found ourselves unable to do what we’ve always done or loved dearly, or have found ourselves suddenly ‘not at home’ – we know it’s not as simple as that. As if being a Christian somehow makes it ‘smiley faces all the way’, no questions, no doubts, no struggles.

My second big problem with it is that it’s not anything like the gospel. Or to put it in Lenten mode, it hasn’t been ‘tested in the desert’. In Mark chapter 1, just before the desert, we see Jesus baptised: the heavens are torn apart, the Spirit descends like a dove, a voice from heaven says, “you are my son, my beloved, with you I am well pleased”. Wonderful. Awesome. Joyful. And then he’s slung out into the desert.

And then just after the desert, out comes Jesus, proclaiming to anyone who’ll listen, “the kingdom of God has come near – repent, and believe in the good news”. But he doesn’t just proclaim it, he lives it – he brings the ‘good news’ to life, and specifically among those who have been pushed to the very edges of society. Those who know the desert as he does.

The ‘good news’ of Jesus is good news that has been tried and tested in the desert. We talk about Lent as a journey, and it is – but a journey through the desert – the ‘testing place’, the ‘training ground’, of Christian faith. The place where we learn to live with limits (some chosen, many more unchosen). The place where we discover our attachments (what are the things we think we can’t do without?). The place where our insecurities emerge (what are the things that make us ‘edgy’? what inner voices come out when we’re not feeling ‘at home’?). The place where we learn to live with boredom! The place where we find ourselves wrestling with ‘internal dialogues’ like this:

Are you hungry?
I am famished.
Well, what's wrong with that? Are you dying?
No.
Can you stand being hungry for a while longer?
Maybe. I guess so.
Okay, so what else? Are you lonely?
Yes, I am! I am terribly lonely!
What's wrong with being alone? Will it kill you?
I don't like it.
That's not what I asked. Can you live through it?
Probably not, but I'll try.

(Barbara Brown Taylor)

I want to offer three ‘rules of thumb’ for the desert journey of Lent. The first comes from the Iona Community’s daily liturgy: “We will not offer to God offerings that cost us nothing”. Or, we might also say, “We will not offer to others ‘good news’ that has cost us nothing”. The second is this: “We will not give up, or take up, anything during Lent that we don’t expect to leave us changed by at the other end.” What’s the point, if it’s just a 40-day blip and then ‘business as usual’? And then the third: “We must expect to be changed, not just for our own good, but for the good of others.” The desert is for anything but self-indulgence, or self-improvement. In the desert, we learn to resist turning stones into bread for ourselves, so that we come out of the desert ready to share our bread with our neighbours.

And if none of that is specific enough, let’s remember the five ‘values’ that we as a church committed to nurturing, just over a year ago – compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope – and which we explored together last Lent. Easy to say, harder to do. But let me share with you just a little of the hard-won, painstakingly-learnt wisdom we shared and discovered together last year, that points us not just to the ‘what’, but the ‘how’ of Lent. Maybe pick one, rather than feel like you need to try all five. And stay with it for the next six weeks. And see what happens…

Let a stranger in. Physically perhaps, but certainly ‘emotionally’. Notice someone – maybe in the news, maybe on the street, perhaps even your next-door neighbour. Maybe someone who’s been labelled: ‘old’, or ‘young’, or ‘disabled’; ‘single mum’, ‘homeless’, or ‘asylum seeker’. And try asking them (or, if that’s not possible, ask yourself), “what’s your story? how do you feel?”. And you’re learning the beginnings of compassion.
Give up grumbling, take up gratitude. Simple! Well, for some of us, moaning takes a lot of ‘weaning off’, so 40 days might end up feeling like an eternity. But as we discover the gifts that we have been given, and slowly open our hearts to be thankful for them, we discover that we are freed to share those gifts generously with others too. And we discover that generosity, like gratitude, is infectious.
Admit a mistake or two. This is one that I find really difficult. I hate having to say I’m wrong. But how about finding someone that I need to say ‘sorry’ to, or even just to tell them that I’ve screwed up somewhere, each week of Lent? What better way is there to restore, and nurture, trust?
Listen to someone. I mean really listen. Not necessarily a stranger – maybe someone you know well. But give them a good listening to, rather than our normal half-distracted efforts. And don’t try and get in there with ‘answers’. Don’t try and ‘fix it’. Don’t even dare to suggest you ‘know how they feel’. Try practising a bit of gentle, patient attention. It’s how real friendships are grown.
And finally, how do we nurture hope? It’s easy to tell people there’s hope, to talk about hope, to encourage people to ‘be hopeful’. But that’s to fall back into offering good news that hasn’t been tried and tested in the desert. It’s not about talking, it’s about doing it. ‘Enacting’ hope. Making it a reality that can be seen, felt, lived in. Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see”. We can’t do better than that.

(with thanks to Stephen Cherry for many of the insights here)

Jobs, a ‘local economy’, improvisation and… church?!

2012-01-26T13:52:00.001-08:00

I am perhaps the last person qualified to write about jobs. I have one – of a kind. I have also spent a small fraction of my life on Jobseeker’s Allowance. But to have been ordained to an, inescapably ‘vocational’, ‘job for life’, with no career structure to speak of but large amounts of job satisfaction – well, I guess that puts me in a tiny and rather curious minority of the ‘labour market’. Nevertheless (and partly because it’s what I’m paid for), I want to attempt some reflections on ‘work’ from this rather odd position…

Here on the Firs & Bromford, the Daily Mail very kindly labelled us, a while ago, the 7th most ‘workshy’ neighbourhood in the country, with a very neat bit of short-circuited logic that somehow ‘not being in work’ means ‘not wanting to work’. One of the facts they neglected to mention is that, round here, a hell of a lot of jobs have vanished in the last 10 or 20 years. Lots of people worked in factories, and the factories have gone.

So what we need is jobs. We need to create jobs. We need to have create local businesses and industries, or attract businesses and industries, that will offer local jobs. That much seems obvious.

But let’s just allow ourselves to be stopped in our tracks, for a moment or two, by the words of one of your local young people: “I don’t want a job. I want a career.” More than just something which pays some bills (and often even paying the bills is a struggle). But what’s the ‘more’? This is where I want to traverse some unfamiliar territory…

Livelihood

Let’s start with the basics. Making ends meet. To be housed, to be fed, to be clothed, to be warm (and the same for those ‘dependent’ on me). And here’s where ‘local economics’ must surely challenge some of our normal assumptions. Do we need money for food? What if there are some people in our community who are good at growing fruit and veg? What if there are things we can do for them in exchange? Would money need to be part of the equation? What if we as a community had invested in ways of generating local energy? What is it about the bricks and mortar of a home that demands thousands of pounds a year, for life (and yes, I write as someone who lives in a house provided free by the community of which I am a part)? Are there other ways of meeting our basic needs, that ‘keep it local’? The network of ‘Transition Towns’ suggests there might be – in ways that are sustainable for us human beings, and the earth’s resources.

Relationships

What else do jobs normally do for us, though? How about the network of relationships we have through work – at best (although it seems to be getting rarer and rarer), a relatively stable community of friendships that provides mutual support. And there’s the relationship that ‘working’ gives us with the wider community (and wider society), of having ‘value’, perhaps bound out with a sense of reciprocity – that I, by working, am making a valuable ‘contribution’, and I am being given back something (normally in the form of money) for doing so. But again, let’s just unpick this a little. Does money have to be the key currency of exchange in these relationships? Do we absolutely need to be ‘employed’, in the conventional sense, to be part of a stable, mutually supportive, community of friendships, where I have a sense of making a valuable contribution, and am given a sense of being valued in return? As a vicar, it strikes me that church might surely be one example of a place where all of this should happen – and not a penny changes hands (well, not as a necessary part of the community’s ‘currency’, at least).

Vocation

But there’s yet more to ‘work’. That ‘career’ that our local young person talked about, surely has a lot to do with a sense of ‘journey’, of ‘going somewhere’ – a sense of purpose, and of meaning, to my existence and my labouring; of learning and growing and developing. Of course I’m a fine one to talk about vocations. But why shouldn’t everyone have their own sense of vocation? Why should some people have to be content with a sense of ‘going nowhere’, doing meaningless, repetitive chores day after day? Even if, as you’ll no doubt argue, the world needs lots of people doing persistently repetitive tasks, who says that is the only task they are allowed to perform? Who says they have nothing to contribute to design and development, to sales and marketing, to care for fellow employees, to making their environment, and the world, more beautiful, more happy, as well as more well-equipped with whatever…? And again, why should ‘vocations’ be limited to only those things someone expects to pay us for? Why do we value the vocation of child-rearing, for example, so much less that we refuse to pay for it? Why can’t every community have its poet, its artist, its head gardener, its jester, its singer – and for these to be their occupations, and for their livelihoods to be met by the community, in whatever way the community is able to do so, in exchange for them occupying that role?

Improvisation

I was away overnight last week with friends and fellow-clergy from Birmingham’s ‘Strengthening Estates Ministry’ group. Among many earthed, passionate and stimulating conversations, we spent some time playing with the metaphor of ‘improvisation’ – something I’ve written about here before (just after the August 2011 riots, in fact):

“In improvised jazz, the musicians in the group are practised at listening carefully to each other. Anything any of the musicians play we might call an ‘offer’ – a snippet of tune, a clever harmony, even a wrong note or two. And the other musicians make choices, in every moment: to ‘block’ an offer – ignore it, write it off as a mistake, or simply pursue their own thread of music unaffected by the other musicians; or to ‘accept’ an offer – to echo it, develop it, creatively run with what they’ve heard from their fellow musicians to make something more of it. The best improvisers are those with the daring and creativity to ‘overaccept’ all offers – to take even what might have been a mistake or a crashing discord, and develop into something musically new, different, beautiful, exciting.”

I’m going to try, in 2012, to stop using the word ‘empowering’ – or at least to cut back considerably – with its suggestion that somehow it’s all about ‘us’ giving power to ‘them’. I much prefer the idea of ‘overaccepting’ – starting with the assumption that those around us have always, already, got something to offer; and just working out how we can be daring and creative enough to receive it, draw it out, be part of a relationship that enables such offers to become more than any of us can ever intend or imagine. I reckon it’s what church does with people, when it’s at its best. Maybe it’s something we might even be able to offer to the wider communities of which we are a part (or indeed discover as already present within them!). Maybe it’s what we’re all crying out for. It’s got to be more than just a job…

Benefit caps, the housing market, and Jesus

2012-01-25T01:47:00.001-08:00

Of course, common sense says it’s crazy that someone can be on benefit payments of more than £26,000 a year. The trouble is, common sense gets a lot wrong.

Firstly, let’s get these in perspective. As Andrew Simms put it so well yesterday, they’re really small beans compared to city bonuses – with 1,200 senior staff averaging £1.8million in bonuses each last year. Where should we really be expended heat and light on ‘capping’ debates, hey? But blaming the victims of economic crisis is so much easier than blaming the perpetrators, isn’t it?

But as I understand it, one of the principle reasons for these rare, highest-level benefits payments is that people who were once in social housing have ended up (through policies of previous governments, both Labour and Conservative) in private rented accommodation. And the areas that they may have lived in all their life have, through ‘market forces’, found house prices (and rental prices) driven sky high. And a debate that began with the proposed housing benefit cap in November 2010 continues. For David Cameron and his mates, apparently the solution is simple: the poor should move out of expensive areas. Social – and often inevitably ethnic – cleansing.

All very convenient. An economic crisis caused by the rich, in which the rich still end up getting richer, targets the poor, slashes and burns the benefits safety net, and tells the poorest that they have no right to live near rich people anyway. Demonising, marginalising, displacing, disappearing. Out of sight, out of mind – as well as out of public finances, out of pocket, out of long-standing homes and communities…

So maybe benefit payments of £26,000 are crazy. But what’s the root of the madness? It’s easy to pile blame on ‘indolent’ individuals – and again, very convenient, so that we don’t ask questions about the system itself. But what is the morality of a ‘market’ that allows house prices to sky-rocket in areas that, thanks to the choices of the rich, have become ‘desirable’, pushing out the non-rich in the process? If instead we valued stability and diversity of relationships and community; if we genuinely believed in knowing, and loving, our neighbours (and not just those who look, and sound, and earn, like us); then we would turn our attention to ensuring a mixed economy of housing provision, outside or beyond the socially destructive forces of the ‘free market’. Housing affordable for all, where rich and poor can live side-by-side, and where, as neighbours begin to look into each other’s faces, even those inequalities of wealth begin to break down.

Jesus’ parable, the one about ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’, doesn’t end well for the rich man. And it’ll be no use blaming the poor, or the market, then…

Changing the world from a tent… (Midnight Mass sermon 2011)

2011-12-24T17:10:00.001-08:00

(I’m going to begin and end with poems by other people.
All the muddled stuff in the middle is my own. So...)

‘This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.’

(BC–AD, by U A Fanthorpe)

A tent
appeared, in the middle of this church
just before Advent,
the sign over its opening,
‘Welcome
to the Kingdom of God’.

If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

From Egypt’s Tahrir Square
to Wall Street
and the City of London,
tents have been springing up:
canvas occupations
of places
the powerful thought they had
under control;
makeshift villages
where only tanks
or tourists
or money-changers
on fantasy salaries
were supposed to feel at home;
places
where the rich got richer,
where power concentrated,
where the poor were sent away empty
and brushed into the shadows,
suddenly had tents
popping up
and minds
opening up
and questions
bubbling up
and hope
springing up
that there is –
despite the evidence –
an alternative
and we can
imagine it
and even
begin to live it
here and now
from our village
of tents.

We have had toddlers
in our tent here.
Busy making
their own little world,
free
from the order
and conventions
and sometimes
disapproving looks
and anxious parental whispers
of ‘grown-up’
worship.

And we should not
have been
surprised.

Isaiah for one
caught a glimpse
of wolves and lambs,
calves and lions,
babies and snakes
playing together,
and led by a little child.
A recipe
for parental anxiety
if ever there was one.

And Jesus,
‘grown-up’
allegedly,
told his followers,
arguing again
about who would be the greatest,
that unless they became
like little children
they would not even enter
the kingdom of heaven.

Yes.
If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

Or a stable.

We have had a stable here too.
With a real baby -
a girl -
and battle-hardened
teachers
who had to bend low
to get through
the stable door
have been dumbfounded
by children
struck
by awe
and wonder
and peace
and a sense
that something exciting
new
and different
was happening
here
and that they
the children
and even the teachers
were somehow
part of it.

And we should not
have been
surprised.

If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

Or a stable.

Or a seed in a womb.

Mary
deep inside her
knew
a new song
bubbling up
a new hope
springing up -
despite the evidence –
a new world
opening up
where the little ones
had been raised up
the hungry
filled up
and the rich
and the powerful
tripped up
brought down
sent away
emptied out.
And so Mary knew
and sang
and set out
and now
here we are
at the opening
the threshold
the doorway
to the Kingdom
of God.

The womb
the stable
the tent.

Not
a big space
a big idea
a big project
least of all
a big society.

A little space
no bigger
than the eye
of a needle.

A little space
where heaven
and earth,
past
and future,
old
and new,
meet
in wordless,
fragile,
vulnerable
flesh.
A little space
shared
with cows
and sheep
and weary shift-workers
and tired travellers
and a teenage mum
who knows
the world
has just turned
upside-down
and has dared
to open herself
to be part
of it.

‘It’s a long way off,’
said the poet
of the Kingdom,
‘but inside it,
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

(RS Thomas, ‘The Kingdom’)

A Graceful Death, Big Society, and the mundane littleness of love

2011-11-05T04:13:00.001-07:00

I'm a wordy person, but sometimes the words take a while to come. We went as a family into Birmingham yesterday to see 'A Graceful Death', an amazing exhibition of paintings by the extraordinary Antonia Rolls. At its heart is a set of paintings of the last few weeks, days and final day of the life of Antonia's own partner, Steve - and of herself, as she begins the journey of loss and living 'after Steve'. The exhibition has since grown to include others who have been near the end of their lives, and those who they have left behind.

Looking at the pictures, and reading the stories, was a profoundly moving experience. The gracefulness - and in some pictures, golden glory - of the journey through death, somehow shines out of, and surrounding, the inescapably tissue-delicate fragility and raw vulnerability of the dying person. And in the pictures of bereavement, the absence, the isolation, is stark. A triptych of pictures moves from Antonia sitting on one of two chairs, near a pair of Steve's slippers, to two empty chairs with the slippers, to just the slippers on their own, in one corner of a gaping, empty space.

But it was a tiny, simple diptych that lodged itself in my head and heart. One of Antonia's self-portraits: on the left, a solitary, lonely figure; on the right, the same, but with a teapot and a cup of tea. A mundane moment, physical action, of familiarity and continuity, of survival and self-care, of resilience - even of hope, as Antonia describes it herself.

Why was I so drawn to this one? So seemingly trivial, unemotional, alongside the much bigger, more dramatically profound, images of dying and death itself? Perhaps a bit of a personal connection - most of my own encounters with death are in conversations with bereaved family-members; 'what do i do now?' is often one of the questions I'm trying to help them wrestle with; and yes, we do get through a fair amount of tea, as we talk through everything from the emotionally cataclysmic to the most mundane detail.

But I want to speak up here for the vital importance of the mundane detail in the bigger picture.

On the road between our house and church, there is a house with a garden wall. A man - white, possibly Eastern European, in his 60s, quite possibly single - is out there most days, if it's dry, patiently restoring the wall with a painstaking attention to detail. A true labour of love. I've passed him many times, on foot or in the car. I've smiled. But it was only recently, with Rafi on his bike, that we stopped, because my 3-year-old son decided to, to admire the man's handiwork. And it was only when we stopped, and tried to begin a conversation, that we discovered that the man was deaf. So with makeshift sign language, we told him we thought his wall was great. And the broadest of smiles cracked across his face. From impressionistic labels and background scenery, that man began to emerge for me as a neighbour I could learn to love.

“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” Mother Teresa hits the nail squarely on the head. We can only ever love, not in big generalities, but in and through the little details of life. And it's the little details that nurture and sustain our relationships, and nurture and sustain us when those relationships are lost or broken.

In a seminar this week, on 'Urban Ministry in a Climate of Austerity and Unrest', there was hardly any talk of 'big projects', and much talk of small 'micro-actions' of enacted hope, of 'everyday faithfulness', of 'mundane holiness'. This is the domain not just of the possible, the realistic, in these tough times, but of the vitally necessary. What we need to keep going are relationships of trust, friendship, love. Real, genuine community. And that's where 'Big Society' is fatally flawed. Because it's not about 'big', it can't be. We should have learned by now that 'big' is to be treated with serious suspicion. We are learning now that 'big' does anything but love - quite the opposite, in fact. We need to re-focus on 'little'. And that may well often start with a cup of tea...

Occupy, St Paul’s and the theo-politics of space

2011-10-31T07:53:00.001-07:00

I honestly don’t know whether to be delighted or despairing. I suspect I’m a fair bit of both at the moment.

On the one hand, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Bishop of London, and – implicated through inextricable association – the whole institution of the Church of England (of which I am a part) have embarrassed themselves in the most public way, and seem intent, in a bizarre frenzy of self-destructiveness, to continue to do so. On the other hand, in the last week or so I’ve seen, read and heard more thoughtful, appreciative engagement with the Christian faith, and faith-full, politically-engaged theological reflection in public, than I can remember for a very long time (I’ve pasted links to some of my favourites below).

It’s gone some way beyond asking ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, and references to the over-turning of the money-changers’ tables in the Temple – although it has been encouraging in itself to hear those flying around as common currency, from the Today programme to Question Time. With the promise of a ‘protective ring’, bodied by Christians, to surround the Occupy camp should the Cathedral- and City-sponsored heavies arrive to evict them, the revelation that there is a diversity of opinions and commitments within ‘the Christian community’ has also been something to cheer. And more than these, the members of OccupyLSX have surely achieved one of their first goals – to shift the sovereignty (divinity, even) of ‘the Market’ into the open, into a space where it can be questioned, challenged – even, quite properly, ridiculed.

And it’s ‘space’ – as Madeleine Bunting highlights in a brilliant Guardian article – that is one of the crucial issues in it all. Where Market ideology has been firmly in the grip of ‘TINA’ (There Is No Alternative) for a generation, she argues, the Occupy movement “want to create the space to think of alternatives”. “Their first agreed principle is that the current system is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust,” and that means “taking key symbolic public space … to use it for conviviality, living, learning and participation. That’s no easy task in a city designed to facilitate only three activities – working, transport and shopping – with as little human interaction as possible. Metal fencing is springing up around even small public spaces in the City of London to preclude new camps. The protesters’ aim is to open up space, physically and socially, for people to connect and thereby open up space in people’s imaginations.”

But, dear Lord, isn’t that close to the heart of what the Church should be about? From the inept and, frankly, arrogantly self-absorbed actions and pronouncements from the Bishop of London and ‘within’ St Paul’s – at least, to be charitable, as they have been reported to us mere mortals – it would seem not. Or at least, they seem interested in the idea, but imagine they have the monopoly on it. Witness these great words from Bishop Richard Chartres: “The original purpose of the protests, to shine a light on issues such as corporate greed and executive pay … these are issues that the St Paul’s Institute has taken to heart and has been engaged in examining… If the protesters will disband peacefully, I will join the dean and chapter in organising a debate on the real issues here under the dome. We will convene a panel … and will invite the protesters to be represented… Our message [is] simple: pack up your tents voluntarily and let us make you heard.” (There was also, later in the week, a subtly sinister ‘or else’, as the Cathedral launched legal action to evict the camp.)

I’ve mentioned Michel de Certeau before on this blog, but now has his moment truly come. De Certeau, a postmodern theorist of the city, makes a vital, and incredibly helpful, distinction between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’:

A strategy ‘postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats … can be managed’. … A tactic, by contrast, has no place of its own. It always lives in another’s space, and must abide within another’s rules. It has no general strategy, but makes ad hoc engagements as occasions arise. (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp.35-7)

Get it? The powerful work with ‘strategies’, the powerless with ‘tactics’. McDonald’s use ‘strategies’ for world domination, Al-Quaeda have to rely on ‘tactics’ (thanks to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove for that one). ‘Tactics’ is what Occupy are about (and UK Uncut, for another example, in a myriad of imaginative ways), ‘strategies’ are the preserve of governments, and, it seems, London’s Diocesan and Cathedral hierarchies. And Jesus? Yes, silly question…

“Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13:12-14)

The Church, unfortunately, has always felt the lure of strategies, even while it has believed itself to have been intently following the master of divine tactics. It’s the temptation of power – something, the gospels tell us, even Jesus knew about all too well. It bedded down so much that it became synonymous with the faith itself: ‘Christendom’, we called it. And my beloved Church of England, caught up, as it always has been, in its entanglements with the State and its heady (pointy-hatted) trappings of hierarchy, is more prone than most Christian communities to such temptations.

But is it irredeemable? I wake up some mornings, at the moment, and my embarrassment at the institution within which I am a minor cog is so intense that my imagination wanders towards self-righteous denunciations and even more heroic acts of departure – but I am, to be utterly pragmatic, aware that a parish priest in Hodge Hill is rather less in the public eye than a Canon of St Paul’s, and that the symbolic value would be quite minimal. De Certeau suggests that the ‘strategic’ places of the City are transformed through the humble ‘tactical’ act of walking. And none other than one of the present Pope’s favourite theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar, argues that “[t]here exists no other form of ‘abiding’ … than that of walking: ‘Anyone who says that he abides in him, must himself walk in the way that he walked’ (1 John 2:6).” But simply walking ‘out’, walking ‘away’, surely has pretty short-term effects within the bigger story.

Maybe, just maybe, in the tented village of Occupy LSX we might catch a glimpse of what the Christian community does well, when it is at its best. Occupy is resisting, not by walking, but by staying – ‘abiding’, we might say. And that’s what the Bishop of London really didn’t get when he dismissed them with something along the lines of “OK, you’ve made your point, and it’s quite a good one, but now go home, thank you”. We Christians – we Anglicans – know about ‘staying’, ‘abiding’. It’s in our DNA. As local Christian communities, we commit ourselves to this patch of earth, here (we sometimes call it ‘parish’), and to seeking and serving God in it for as many centuries as God gives us. As Frederick Bauerschmidt puts it, reflecting on de Certeau, we need to be very careful, in our desire to ‘flee’, that ‘adaptability’ doesn’t become ‘accommodation’, “a kind of otherworldiness which hands this world over to the governing powers of the prevailing regime”:

In the culture of modernity, which seeks to ‘disembed’ us from all traditions, which turns us into portable units of consumption, it may be that sinking roots deep into the earth, cultivating a sense of place, refusing nomadic existence … these are the most profound forms of resistance. (‘Walking in the Pilgrim City’, New Blackfriars, Nov 1996)

But we Christians – we Anglicans in particular – also need to recover a gospel sense of homelessness, of profound discomfort with the established order of things, and with ‘strategies’ of all kinds, whether within or without the Church. We need to recover a proper humility, that acknowledges the sheer and inevitable ineffectiveness of most of what we do (and quite rightly so, for we are not primarily about effectiveness, but faithfulness), our own susceptibility to mixed motives and abject failure, and the inescapable truth that there are many beyond the Church – or even camped on its steps – who are ‘getting it right’ even as we are bungling and bickering. And we need to make a move back to the edges, to the neighbourhood of Jesus, which is the neighbourhood of the marginalized in dispossessed, the neighbourhood in which the Word of God has taken flesh and pitched his tent (John 1:14). These are the kinds of places where we most desperately need to stay – for the sake of the Kingdom, and for the sake of our own souls. “Homelessness,” Bauerschmidt suggests, can be a curse for the Church, but also a blessing, “because it relieves the Church of any absolute need to defend a particular territory or structure, giving a freedom to live the Gospel of peace…”

Now, where’s my tent…?

Some of the best reflections, from the past week…

Paul Hackwood, Chair of Church Urban Fund:

http://www.cuf.org.uk/blog/2011-10-30/paul-hackwood-%E2%80%93-chair-church-urban-fund-reflects-events-steps-st-paul%E2%80%99s-cathedral

Jim Wallis, of Sojourners:

http://blog.sojo.net/2011/10/13/an-open-letter-to-the-occupiers-from-a-veteran-troublemaker/

Two brief and brilliant pieces from my friend Rachel Mann:

http://therachelmannblogspot.blogspot.com/2011/10/not-resigned-giles-fraser-and.html

http://therachelmannblogspot.blogspot.com/2011/10/drains-are-hardly-worlds-most.html

And from a Macclesfield vicar:

http://lostinthenorth.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/were-the-99-so-im-told/

Bishop Alan Wilson:

http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2011/10/shutting-shop-showing-off-or-showing-up.html

Stephen Tomkins, on whether the C of E is inside or outside the Establishment:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/magazine-15497618

This from the Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/god-vs-mammon-britain-takes-sides-2377387.html

And these various pieces from the Guardian…

Madeleine Bunting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/30/occupy-london-nursery-mind

Andrew Rawnsley:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/30/andrew-rawnsley-occupy-protesters-grown-up

Marina Hyde:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/28/jesus-st-paul-occupy-london-giles-fraser

Maurice Glasman, on Occupy’s emerging focus:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/28/st-pauls-protesters-democratise-london

Andrew Brown:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-establishment-delusion

Marina Warner (on Mary as the patron saint of ‘Occupy’):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-resignation-st-pauls-occupy

And this interview with Giles Fraser:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/27/st-pauls-canon-occupy-london-camp

‘Broken Britain’ and the holy ground of community – a sermon

2011-09-26T03:00:00.001-07:00

(preached 28/8/11)

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15 (burning bush), Romans 12:9-21 (how to do ‘love’ in Christian community), Matthew 16:21-28 (Peter gets ‘Messiah’ all wrong)

A few years ago, before Janey and I started having children and could go on holidays to far-flung places, we spent a week in Sharm-el-Sheikh, and one day, having perused the tourist guide books, we took a taxi ride into the Sinai desert. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived, in the middle of nowhere, at the small, walled monastery of St Katharine’s. And with hundreds of other tourists just like us, we were given the guided tour. We rounded a corner, and there, said our guide, was ‘the bush’ – the bush out of which God spoke to Moses. I have to confess to having been a bit underwhelmed. Firstly, it wasn’t burning; and secondly, it seemed to be a very well-maintained creeper, climbing up the monastery wall, fenced off carefully, with information plaques in countless languages explaining its significance. In short, it was more than a little domesticated.

More often, I suspect, the times when we have found ourselves standing on ‘holy ground’ have not been the places the guide-books have signposted us to – they have been much more unexpected, coming to us in our peripheral vision, beckoning us to turn aside from our busyness and give them our attention. And so the bush, so the story goes, beckoned Moses when he was out in the middle of nowhere, looking after his father-in-law’s sheep, on the run from the Egyptian authorities for murder. Often it’s when things are tough – illness, bereavement, redundancy, relationship break-up, some of the other real struggles of life – that we suddenly discover (or with hindsight realise) that we’re standing on ‘holy ground’. Sometimes it’s got something to do with the place we’re in. More often, it’s about the relationships of the moment – with family or friends, church community or neighbours – even, and perhaps more often than we expect, with complete strangers.

But these spots of ‘holy ground’ are not often ‘easy’ places to be. Someone who knows that better than most is Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities for people with profound physical and mental disabilities, their families, and their ‘assistants’. Vanier describes 4 distinct stages of ‘entering community’…

first, there is an initial JOY – when the warmth and love is exhilarating – and people begin to lift their masks and barriers and become vulnerable to relationship with others
but quickly, this joy can become TERROR – as the vulnerability of relationship reveals our wounded emotions, the difficulty of living with others (‘especially with some people’, says Vanier!) exposing ‘our limitations, our fears… our poverty and our weaknesses… our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies…’, our ‘inner monsters’, that we can more easily keep hidden when we don’t have to relate to other people the whole time
and our immediate REACTION, Vanier suggests, ‘is to try to destroy the monsters, or to hide them away again, pretending that they don’t exist. Or else we try to flee from community life and relationship with others, or to assume that the monsters are theirs, not ours. It is the others who are guilty, not us.’
but finally, slowly, pains-takingly, community can become a place of safety and ACCEPTANCE – ‘At last some people really listen to us; we can, little by little, reveal to them all those terrible monsters within us, all those guilt feedings hidden in the tomb of our being. And they can help us to accept them by revealing to us that these monsters are protecting our vulnerability and are our cry for and our fear of love. They stand at the door of our wounded heart… Community life with all its pain is the revelation of that deep wound. And we can only begin to look at it and accept it as we discover that we are loved by God in an incredible way. We are not awful sinners, terrible people who have disappointed and hurt our parents and others. An experience in prayer and the experience of being loved and accepted in community, which has become a safe place for us, allows us gradually to accept ourselves as we are, with our wounds and all the monsters. We are broken, but we are loved. We can grow to greater openness and compassion; we have a mission. Community becomes the place of liberation and growth.’

The passage from Romans that we heard earlier is talking about a similar kind of ‘broken’ community. It’s concerned not just with how to ‘get along’, but points us to begin to discover community as holy ground through, and not ‘in spite of’, the brokenness and vulnerability. ‘Be patient’, and ‘persevere’ are, perhaps, the key words.

And this, as Peter discovers (and Moses too, come to that), is ‘the way of the cross’. It’s not about ‘getting it right all the time’, a way of painless victory, of one success after another. It’s not about ‘fixing’ brokenness with ‘targeted interventions’ with the right ‘expertise’, let alone some kind of tough, ‘zero tolerance’ approach to failure, as current government rhetoric seems to argue. It’s about discovering community as ‘holy ground’ through, and not ‘in spite of’, the brokenness and vulnerability, the monsters and the failures.

For Moses, this means accepting both his murderous past history, his ‘anger issues’, and his present overwhelming sense of inadequacy. For Peter, it embraces his blundering mistakes, his endless capacity for putting his foot in his mouth. And it’s possible because “‘I am’ will be with you” – ‘I am’ who has heard our cries, who knows our suffering, who sees our monsters; ‘I am’ who knows us and loves us; ‘I am’ who, knowing us through and through, still sends us with a mission: to ‘Go… tell… set free…’

There’s a little ‘PS’ to this sermon, from my wise friend Rachel Mann. Writing days after the riots and looting a couple of weeks ago, she said: ‘Concerning the rioters and looters my instinct is not to punish with ‘extreme prejudice’, but to suggest that – alongside custodial sentences – they be exposed to the reality of living in monastic settings – Buddhist, Benedictine, whatever, I don’t mind. Absurd as this may sound, there is no doubt that the world of the monastery is a world where folk have to learn to get along with each other despite vast difference and simmering anger, and in which ‘what we own’ is much less significant than ‘who we are’. Take the piss out of me if you like, but given thirty years of failed government schemes and rampant consumerism, I suspect that in many cases it may yet be worth a try.’

How is this kind of community beckoning us, here, in Hodge Hill? And how might we open it up to those who need it most?

Our emerging vision…

2011-09-06T07:45:00.001-07:00

OK, so fine words maketh not a church, but often they’re a start at shaping what we’re about – and even more importantly, opening ourselves up to let God shape what we’re about. So here’s what we in Hodge Hill have just agreed to adopt as our ‘strapline’ and purpose statement as a church… (I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or your experience of similar journeys elsewhere…)

Growing
Loving
Community
in the love of God ♥ with all our neighbours ♥ across Hodge Hill

‘Growing...’

...as a diverse, all-age, journeying community of friends and followers of Jesus

...as a partnership of Christians from different church traditions – Anglican, URC, Methodist and others

...in seeking to live lives (a ‘Rule of Life’?) of:

listening and learning,
worshipping and praying, [‘attending to God’]
working and caring, [‘tending the world’]
rest and recreation, [‘tending our selves’?]
hospitality and healing [‘attending to others’]

‘Loving...’

...we recognise, and seek to express, God’s love in:

compassion,
generosity,
trust,
friendship
and hope

‘with all our neighbours...’

...we recognise signs of God’s kingdom in the life and work of our neighbours – of all faiths and of none

...we will not do alone what we can do in partnership with others

‘across Hodge Hill...’

...across the diverse neighbourhoods of Hodge Hill (including Firs & Bromford estates, Bucklands End and Hodge Hill), we seek to nurture God’s love through:

Neighbourly presence – growing community from the ‘grass roots’, beginning with our relationships with friends and neighbours
Partnership projects – working with partner organisations to address particular issues or needs
Community ‘hubs’ – working with partner organisations to develop safe and welcoming ‘centres’ of community

How do we respond? (A sermon after the ‘riots’)

2011-08-16T04:53:00.001-07:00

In the face of the events of the past week, how do we respond? Our faith demands we ask the question – not as Daily Mail readers or Guardian readers, but as Christians. And our faith will not allow us to lock our doors, board up our windows and hide safely inside – it compels us to open our doors wider, to look outwards, in fact, to go outwards to seek to work out how we ‘do our faith in public’ now.

There’s a natural first response, and it’s the right first response for us. It’s to lament– to seek to voice our shock, our anger, our grief, and to join our voices with those others who lament today: for destruction and lost livelihoods, for the death of loved ones.

And bound up in that first response for us is a second obvious one: to pray– for all those who’ve been affected; for those who’ve been seeking to re-establish calm and order and clean up the mess; for those in authority, for wisdom in choosing their words and making their decisions; and, of course, for those who have been involved themselves in the rioting and looting…

And beyond lament and prayer…? As Christians, we are driven back to our Gospel: where is the ‘good news’ to be found?

And our lectionary, as so often, comes up trumps, offers us the right story at the right time. Today, we encounter Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15:21-28).

Jesus is on a journey here – both literally and metaphorically. He is far from home, the other side of the lake, ‘the other side of the world’, in the district of Tyre & Sidon. Seeking a bit of calm, perhaps. But a woman finds him, pursues him, shouts after him. A parent, a desperate parent. “Lord! Son of David! Have mercy on me! A demon controls my daughter. She is suffering terribly.”

And Jesus responds. With silence. He ignores her completely.

She tries again. And this time, Jesus responds with indifference. “I was sent only to the people of Israel. They are like lost sheep.” He washes his hands of her. ‘Nothing to do with me’ he says.

A third time, and she’s begging on her knees in front of him. And Jesus says “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to their dogs.” Jesus calls her the woman a dog, less than human, not one of ‘the children’. Vermin.

There is, thank God, a fourth stage in this encounter. The woman persists: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners’ table.” And finally, Jesus catches a glimpse of this woman, this ‘other’, as a fellow human being, a child of God; finally, he hears her desperate cries for help; finally, he opens up to respond to her with compassion. “Woman, you have great faith! You will be given what you are asking for.” But it’s taken time – even for Jesus, it’s taken time – to get to this point. He’s had to go on quite a journey.

And so must we. Our faith demands it of us. In a very different context, in 1960s America, Martin Luther King said this: “at bottom, riots are always the language of the unheard.” As everyone from politicians to archbishops have said this week, this is not about condoning the destruction and the violence. But we need to start listening today – amid the destruction, the violence – to seek to hear the cries of the unheard.

Listen to these four voices then, from the London Borough of Hackney:

"There's two worlds in this borough. More and more middle classes are coming and we're being pushed out. The shops are pricing stuff like it's the West End, we can't afford the rents. We're the outcasts, we're not wanted any more. There's nothing for us."
"Youths are frustrated, they want all the nice clothes. They ain't got no money, they don't have jobs," a 41-year-old youth worker said. "To live, to have money in their pocket, they have to thieve, they have to rob. The people that run this country, they got money, they are rich, they got nice houses. They don't care about poor people."
"Everyone's heard about the police taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example," the youth said.
"The only way we can get out of this is education, and we're not entitled to it, because of the cuts. Even for bricklaying you need a qualification and a waiting list for a course. I signed up in November, and still haven't heard back," one young Kurdish man said.

What we have seen this week are not ‘isolated incidents by a minority’ – not, as David Cameron would have us believe, ‘pockets of society’ that are ‘sick’. The events of this week have laid bare a sickness in society as a whole – in all of us…

The multiple pressures on families today – on working parents, on those who can’t find work, on the single parent who struggles to do everything, on the poorest who battle to make ends meet
The breakdown of community – where neighbours don’t know, let alone trust and support each other, where children and young people are ‘someone else’s problem’
The long-term neglect of our poorest neighbourhoods, including those in our own area, our own parish – and the cuts that will simply make things worse
And then… the ‘state religion’ of consumerism that says ‘I shop, therefore I am’; an economy that depends on us ‘buying now, and paying later’; a system designed to foster our discontent and our constant desire for more ‘stuff’
And an inequality, where the richest 10% of our society are a hundred times – a hundred times – richer than the poorest 10%; and that says to the poorest, ‘you don’t have, therefore you are not’
A breakdown of trust in key institutions – where police officers are paid by newspapers, politicians claim expenses for non-existent houses, and bankers pay themselves ridiculous bonuses while their workers are getting laid off
And a society where young people are dehumanised and demonised – as ‘hoodies’ and ‘feral rats’, long before the events of the past week; where so many of our young have no place to call their own, no future to look forward to, no self-worth, no hope, nothing to lose…

Listen again to Martin Luther King: “There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it." Prophetic words, from over 50 years ago.

So how do we respond? We are driven back to our Gospel again… but let’s first spend a moment thinking about jazz.

In improvised jazz, the musicians in the group are practised at listening carefully to each other. Anything any of the musicians play we might call an ‘offer’ – a snippet of tune, a clever harmony, even a wrong note or two. And the other musicians make choices, in every moment: to ‘block’ an offer – ignore it, write it off as a mistake, or simply pursue their own thread of music unaffected by the other musicians; or to ‘accept’ an offer – to echo it, develop it, creatively run with what they’ve heard from their fellow musicians to make something more of it. The best improvisers are those with the daring and creativity to ‘overaccept’ all offers – to take even what might have been a mistake or a crashing discord, and develop into something musically new, different, beautiful, exciting.

The Canaanite woman is an improviser ‘par excellence’. She won’t be put off by Jesus’ persistent blocking, and when he calls her a dog she says ‘Yes, but…’ Even the dogs get crumbs of bread. She takes Jesus’ indifference, resistance and hostility, and daringly, creatively, turns it into a life-giving, healing ‘Yes’. And in doing so, she reflects a God who, as we see in the cross and resurrection, does likewise: takes our indifference, resistance and hostility, and daringly, creatively, turns it into a life-giving, healing ‘Yes’.

So how can we do likewise? Well, in the last few days, we have been offered glimpses of what such daring, creative ‘overaccepting’ in the face of destruction and violence might look like. The ‘riot wombles’, the multi-coloured army wielding brooms and mugs of tea, a great symbol of down-to-earth practical support, togetherness, ‘Englishness’ even. So too have been the Sikhs and Muslims in our own city, who’ve come out to protect not their own, but each other’s places of worship. And more than any, perhaps, Tariq Jahan, just hours into the grief of losing his own son, calling not for revenge and reprisals, not for more violence, but for calm, for peace, for solidarity together, as parents, as people of faith, as citizens of one city.

Our own journey towards daring, creative ‘overacceptance’ starts with these examples.

We can join in the positive action – the clean-ups, the peace vigils – where we can – and where we can’t, we can give thanks for them, because gratitude, as we are discovering here, is the first step towards generosity.

We can, and must, come alongside the young people of our area – and we can, particularly, through our partnership as a church with Worth Unlimited at The Hub – through the work that Paul, Matt and Tim do, and volunteering ourselves in simple practical ways, whether through making tea or chopping up fruit, like Phyl – to listen to young people, hear their voices, their stories, their struggles, and begin to see them more clearly as human beings; to ‘invest’ in them our time, our trust, our friendship.

We can, and must, lobby our politicians – for investment in our poorest areas, in the most marginalized members of our society – in things like mentoring programmes, employment opportunities, support in education and within families.

But more than any of these, perhaps, we need to become, as a church, a different kind of community to the society that has been laid bare this week. A community of radical welcome, of radical listening; a community that values people not for what they have, or what they’ve done, but as beloved children of God; a community of young and old together, dedicated to peace-making, healing and reconciliation; a community, as our own vision proclaims, seeking to nurture compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope. Those five words have, this week, become more important than ever.

Can we even come close to being that kind of community – one that might make a real difference to those who come into contact with it? Dare we? Beginning today?

Making Easter faith visible – some quotes

2011-05-09T14:41:00.001-07:00

(from an article by Kathy Galloway, ‘Hope in a time of war: a religious perspective on peacemaking’, Annual Public Lecture of the Movement for the Abolition of War, London, November 11th 2008)

http://www.iona.org.uk/ebulletin_feature.php

The Japanese-American theologian Kosuke Koyama writes:
What is love if it remains invisible, inaudible, intangible. ‘Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.’ The devastating poverty in which millions of children live is visible. Racism is visible. Machine guns are visible. Slums are visible. Starved bodies are visible. The gap between the rich and the poor is glaringly visible. Our response to these realities must be visible. Grace cannot function in a world of invisibility. Yet in our world, the rulers try to make invisible the alien, the orphan, the hungry and thirsty, the sick and imprisoned. This is violence. Their bodies must remain visible. There is a connection between invisibility and violence. People, because of the image of God they embody, must remain seen. Faith, hope and love are not vital except in what is seen. Religion seems to raise up the invisible and despise what is visible. But it is the 'see, hear, touch' gospel that can nurture the hope which is free from deception.¹

Bearing witness is about more than just making violence visible. David Stevens, the Leader of the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, writes, (Christians) are called to make this reconciliation visible – visible in terms of a quality of relationships, visible in terms of openness and hospitality. It is a visibility which serves the same purpose as Christ’s visibility, namely, to reveal God and God’s reconciling love. This is true holiness and is the ministry of reconciliation.²Bearing witness is also about making reconciliation visible, about making alternatives visible.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
April 1996, East London, South Africa
On the first day
after a few hours of testimony
the Archbishop wept.
He put his grey head
on the long table
of papers and protocols
and he wept.
The national
and international cameramen
filmed his weeping,
his misted glasses,
his sobbing shoulders,
the call for a recess.
It doesn’t matter what you thought
of the Archbishop before or after,
of the settlement, the commission,
or what the anthropologists flying in
from less studied crimes and sorrows
said about his discourse,
or how many doctorates,
books and installations followed,
or even if you think this poem
simplifies, lionizes,
romanticizes, mystifies.
There was a long table, starched purple vestment
and after a few hours of testimony,
the Archbishop, chair of the commission,
laid down his head, and wept.
That’s how it began.³

1. Kosuke Koyama, from an address given at WCC General Assembly, Harare, 1998.

2. David Stephens, from ‘The Land of Unlikeness: Explorations into Reconciliation', The Columba Press, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 2004

3. Ingrid de Kok, from 'Terrestrial Things: Poems', Snailpress, Plumstead, South Africa, 2002.

What do we do now?

2011-05-09T14:32:00.001-07:00

(notes from a sermon preached in Hodge Hill, 8th May 2011 – on Luke 24:13-35)

In Jewish tradition (in the Talmud), as the Israelites escape through the Red Sea and the waters come crashing down on the Egyptian army, the angels of God burst into songs of praise and celebration. And God silences them: “the works of my hand are drowning in the sea, and you would sing in my presence?”

There has been cheering, singing and flag-waving outside the White House this week, and claims inside it that ‘justice has been done’, because a man has been killed. Assassinated, it seems, quite deliberately. But what has really changed? Al Qaeda lives on, and martyrdom is in their bloodstream. There are threats of revenge attacks already. And what has the USA communicated clearly to the world? That whoever is strongest, wins. The spiral of violence continues. What do we do now?

Much closer to home, in Comet Park, just down the road from where I live, £30,000 of new play equipment was installed, some 6 weeks ago, after a long battle by local residents to get the money and see the results. On Palm Sunday, one of the three pieces, a big climbing frame, was completely destroyed by fire. Last Thursday, the huge 12-seater swing was totally destroyed in a similar way. Destruction seems to have won the day. What do we do now?

The two disciples walking back home to Emmaus are on no gentle afternoon stroll. They are going home because it’s all over. The one they followed, placed their hopes in, has been brutally executed by the authorities. Now they are running for their own lives. Their words to each other are full of fear, grief, and perhaps more than anything, crushing disappointment. “We had though he was the one…” But now he’s dead. It’s all over. What do we do now?

And then someone joins them on the road. A stranger. A strange stranger, by all accounts – one who seems to have missed the recent headline news, but has some challenging things to say of his own. And here’s a small miracle: these crushed, grieving, fearful ex-disciples dare to let this stranger walk with them, open their hearts to him, listen to his strange words, and invite him home to eat with them. This is brave hospitality in deeply troubling times.

And what do they discover? Their stories, as well as their bread, given back to them, broken open, re-told as if a different world had just dawned…

Firstly, that the judgment of the authorities, the ‘powers-that-be’ was wrong – that not justice, but scapegoating, had just happened: that getting rid of the troublesome one to make everyone else feel better; that division of the world into the ‘baddies’ and the ‘goodies’, that turns out to be a lie.

Secondly, that violence, and the powers that rely on death and destruction, don’t have the last word. However much the Empires and the lynch mobs may want to believe they can make full stops, dead ends, they’re deluding themselves. Here is a witness that says “it was inevitable… but…”.

But thirdly, and crucially, this victim returns without the faintest trace of victimhood, resentment, blame or vengeance. He is completely free of that whole destructive game. He returns to those who had given up on him, and to those who had betrayed, denied, judged and executed him too, breathing peace, gratuitously offering new life: ‘open your eyes, turn around, begin again, trust me, love me, follow me…’

This is why we need seven weeks of Eastertide, and year after year of repeating it. It’s barely believable, so alien to common sense, what is being given back to us here: our imaginations are being broken open, slowly but surely, to learn to live this different story.

We follow Jesus by following in the footsteps of those Emmaus disciples. Easter faith begins with a receiving what the risen Jesus offers us. But as Christ’s body, we, the community of Christians, aren’t just passive recipients – our actions and words and ways of living are also deeply shaped, ‘patterned’, by those of the risen Christ himself:

coming alongside the grieving, the disappointed and the fearful – in gentle humility, as guest
listening to others tell their stories, ‘hearing into speech’ the laments
finding God’s grace and imagination to gratuitously ‘give back’ what we have heard, what we have been offered (by our neighbours, even by our ‘enemies’), peacefully, creatively, within a bigger story, in a way that doesn’t close down, but opens up new life between us and beyond us
in the journeying, in the listening, in the re-telling, in the breaking of bread, making love visible, to ‘see, hear, touch’…

This ‘making visible’, this ‘telling’, this ‘bearing witness’ is perhaps the core ‘resurrection practice’ for Christians. It begins, often, with lament: making visible, heard, the suffering, the anger, the pain, the crushing disappointment, that is so often hidden, silenced; ‘watering the cracks in dry ground’ with tears shed and shared. And somehow, this lamenting makes space to make visible something new – something creative, hopeful, peaceful – reconciliation, restored community, new creation.

At dusk on Easter Eve, in Comet Park, half a dozen of us from church gathered for our Easter Vigil, making a circle of makeshift seats in the ashes of the burnt-out climbing frame, with lanterns to help us see each other’s faces as the sun went down. We had come armed, with ‘seed-bombs’, the weapon of guerilla gardeners – clay, compost and wild flower seeds – designed to bring splashes of colourful new life to otherwise inaccessible patches of waste ground. And we’d come with stories of hope to share – to remember the possibility of new life, even in the darkness of night. We’d planned to be here several weeks before the fires, but it felt all-the-more right to be here now.

And as we gathered, so too did a group of young people. Muslim young people, as it happened. They had come to the park to play, but they were intrigued by us – not so young, and here with no doubt strange accessories and strange purpose. We tried to explain. And the seed bombs we’d planned to spread around on our ways home, we shared with them, and they went away, with just a little hopeful excitement, it has to be said, that they might be able to grow something, from an unpromising grey ball. We went away, of course, with the great privilege of having made some new friends. One of the stories we told that evening was of a sunflower which once grew on a bomb-site, which was trampled into the ground in a fit of mindless, angry destruction – but which, entirely unexpectedly, a year later, was to leave a patch of waste ground covered in bright yellow life.

Judgment, resurrection and reconciliation

2011-05-02T13:20:00.001-07:00

‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.’

‘We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.‘ (Nicene Creed)

These two eschatological clauses of the Nicene Creed name the two traditional dimensions of the transition from ‘this world’ to ‘the world to come’: ‘the last judgment’, and ‘the resurrection of the dead’. Miroslav Volf, in a carefully argued article, claims that these two — at least as traditionally conceived — are necessary but not sufficient to transform ‘the existing world of enmity into [in Jonathan Edwards’ phrase] a world of love’.[1]

Volf’s argument begins with Augustine’s conception of the ‘peace’ of the world to come (distilling the eschatological visions of both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures) as being the ‘perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God’.[2] If, for Augustine, ‘the last judgment’ is about separating ‘the good’ from ‘the bad’, and ‘the resurrection’ about ‘clothing’ weak flesh in immortality, then, Volf argues, ‘either only those who are already fully reconciled in this world could be admitted into the coming world’, or a third dimension to the ‘eschatological transition’ is needed: ‘reconciliation’. The first option, he suggests, is excluded by Augustine’s belief that complete peace is impossible in this life, and so it is the second (not explored by Augustine) which needs developing.[3]

Turning to Luther, who integrates ‘judgment according to works’ into the wider, ‘overarching judgment of grace’, Volf argues that, while ‘the final justification of the ungodly’ would, on its own, ensure that we would meet in the world to come even those whom we have not considered particularly lovable in the present one’, it would not, on its own, mean that we loved them. For that to happen, we would also, in some ‘carefully specified sense’, ‘need to receive ... “justification” from each other’, and more than that, we would ‘need to want to be in communion with one another’. In other words, ‘[t]o usher in a world of love, the eschatological transition would need to be understood not only as a divine act toward human beings but also as a social event between human beings; more precisely, a divine act toward human beings which is also a social event between them.’[4] This Volf terms ‘the final social reconciliation’: ‘the Holy Spirit’s perfecting of the inter-human reconciliation which God has accomplished in Christ and in which human beings have been involved all along in response to God’s call’.[5]

[1]M. Volf, ‘The final reconciliation: reflections on a social dimension of the eschatological transition’, Modern Theology 16:1 (January 2000), 92.

[2]Augustine, The City of God, XIX 17 (quoted in Volf, ‘Final reconciliation’, 92)

[3]Volf, ‘Final reconciliation’, 92-3

[4]Volf, ‘Final reconciliation’, 93 (my emphasis)

[5]Volf, ‘Final reconciliation’, 106. Volf’s work of ‘careful specification’ is worth spelling out in a little more detail here. ‘The divine judgment,’ he says, ‘will reach its goal when, by the power of the Spirit, all eschew attempts at self-justification, acknowledge their own sin in its full magnitude, experience liberation from guilt and the power of sin, and, finally, when each recognizes that all others have done precisely that... Having recognized that others have changed — that they have been given their true identity by being freed from sin — one will no longer condemn others but offer them the grace of forgiveness.’ Reconciliation will have finally been achieved when ‘one has moved toward one’s former enemies and embraced them as belonging to the same communion of love.’ (Volf, ‘Final reconciliation’, 103; 104, original emphasis)

‘To Live in Peace’ – part 3 – ‘Dynamics of Community Rebuilding’

2011-02-22T08:13:00.001-08:00

OK, third instalment now, and possibly the last, summarising what Gornik outlines as “some basic dynamics that guide community development”…

One: Neighbourhoods Require Care and Stewardship

(Roberta Brandes Gratz) “Cities do not deteriorate overnight and, similarly, are not reborn overnight. Quick-fix responses at best camouflage problems and at worst exacerbate them. Cities respond most durably in the hands of many participants accomplishing gradually smaller bites, making small changes and big differences at the same time.” (149)

‘urban husbandry’… “Instead of replacing things… strengthening what is there, allowing an incremental pace and an organic process to emerge from the bottom up, not the top down… celebrat[ing] those efforts that are small and more community-grounded and honest.”

“A well-defined concrete geography or focus area… enables those involved to set measurable goals and objectives and establish a clear, holistic vision. Just as importantly, a focus area limits the options that can be attempted. It sets the agenda, which means that the unrealistic goal of trying to do ‘everything everywhere’ is eliminated.”

“the relationship of the church to the community is best described by the word covenant. A covenant is a free commitment that says, in effect, ‘Whatever happens, no matter what, we as the church will stay and deal with it.’ This means that the church takes a vow of stability, that it is committed to being a church of the community.”

“the importance of small-scale projects and micro-narrative approaches” (150)

Two: Rebuilding Moves Between Lament and Celebration

“Just as the urban cry of Lamentations precedes the rebuilding of Jerusalem in Nehemiah, so tears and shared pain must precede the joys of rebuilding in the inner city. … Just as reading the laments of Scripture can enable us to ‘read’ the laments of the inner city, so the laments of the inner city can inform our reading of Scripture… The urban laments of our day can be seen and heard everywhere…”

“rebuilding can be considered ‘embodied worship’… Celebration is crucial to fulfill the aims of community redevelopment, for it sustains and keeps in focus the end of community rebuilding, which is the glory of God.”(151)

Three: Change Percolates from the Bottom Up

“The community’s impetus for change, its interests, its language, and its sense of pace must lead. Drawing on a community’s journey of survival, courage, self-care, and even anger is a starting point… For the church, this means passionately loving the community in all its beauty and hurting with it in its brokenness, as well as trusting in the genius and ideas of the community and drawing on its spirituality and depth of commitment, recognizing the community as people created in God’s image. For the church, believing in the community also involves a Pentecostal belief in the gifts and capacities of the people of the community. All members of the community – not just a few ‘leaders’ – have an important contribution to make to the rebuilding effort. Every person has gifts, and every gift is a grace for the common good…” (151-2)

“as history shows, women’s experience and leadership are especially important… The Christian story also reminds us of the leadership role of children and young people… God’s chosen way of redeeming the world – working not from the top down but from the bottom up, through Christ – unleashes power from the ‘edges’ of society through women, children, and the poor. Here is where we must look for the lived stories and theologies for the urban future, giving testimony to the way of salvation…” (152)

(John P. Kretzmann & John McKnight) “four main assets can be identified in any neighborhood: (1) the capacities and gifts of local residents, (2) the power of local associations and organisations, (3) the potential of local public institutions, and (4) the diverse streams of local economic activity, including the neighborhood’s land and other physical assets. Community change, they argue, really can begin from the inside and move out… Moreover, focusing on what God is doing in the community rather than maintaining a consuming focus on ‘needs’ aids in the prevention of burnout, personal and communal.” (153)

“authentic community transformation will not only engage wider economic and political issues but will also provide opportunities for the rich and powerful to be involved and spiritually challenged” (153-4)

“the community must not be reduced to one ‘stakeholder’ among many, but must instead be the subject of its future” (154)

Four: Community Organizing is the Basis of Empowerment

“By mobilizing people to unite around what they value and hold most important, community organizing creates the space for the people of the community to define their issues, address shared concerns, confront the principalities and powers, hold public institutions accountable, determine their own future, and create their own institutions.” (154)

“Community organizing is a discipline that is learned – it demands skills that include dialogue, listening, deliberation, and negotiation… Organizing is about learning and applying what is learned. And then its task is the celebration of success. Thus the continual dynamic is reflection – action – celebration.” (154-5)

(Robert Linthicum) “Empowerment… takes place when the people of a community name the hostile forces that are harming them, decide what strategy and steps to take to challenge them, and then organize action that brings about change. A process of continual reflection and action is essential, because it yields new ideas and insights… The analysis of harmful forces must include social, political, economic and religious realities. Such analysis… yields not only physical and material alterations abut also an affirmation of human dignity and the seeds of spiritual renewal in the community. Upon this basis, church and community are able to form the creative and critical partnerships necessary to attain a more just and whole neighborhood.” (155-6)

Five: Community Development is a Vision of Justice and Joy

“Driven by a vision of community rightly ordered, a vision rooted in the biblical concept of Jubilee, Christ-centered community development is particularly committed to the most vulnerable. With a Jubilee perspective, community development offers not charity, relief, or advocacy but the resources for people to achieve healthy families and sustainable community. This vision emphasizes responsibility, accents assents (economic, physical, social, and spiritual), precludes displacement, and does not measure results apart from people. The Jubilee is a vision of justice and joy unmatched in contemporary community development theory and practice.” (156-7)

The End Result: The Composition of a New Story

“Community development is a storied activity, and the best community developers are storytellers and narrative theologians. Thus it is crucial that the church begins with and holds in great respect a community’s stories, both individual and collective. Hearing these stories is a process of discovery that ultimately can lead to forming a new and shared story. One of the primary roles of the church is to draw attention to the larger story of God’s presence, salvation, and new creation. In this story, a community moves not just in a different direction but also towards God’s future of reconciliation, justice, and joy in the city. Because of grace, Christians know that the human story is always open to new endings. However, a new direction for a community does not result in the removal of the fetters that constrict the community. A new community story does not always erase the subjecting forces of oppression but finds a way through the maze of oppression to begin to establish a new vision and reality of what is possible. Most importantly, the story of the community belongs to the community and is not imposed from outside.”

“This story, which is about communal transformation, cannot be ‘written’ overnight. ‘When we talk about community transformation,’ Robert Linthicum observes, ‘we are talking about a conversion process in an entire community. It is most often not a sudden conversion. It is a slow, driving process causing an entire community to change their way of understanding themselves.” (158)

“To bear testimony in public settings – to vocalize in word and song how lives, families, and communities have been healed – and to interpret these testimonies as stories of divine power express the encounter with the Spirit. … It is when community members hear each other testify to the changes in community life that God’s work can be discerned.” (158-9)

‘To Live in Peace’ – continued…

2011-02-21T13:49:00.001-08:00

Some more notes and quotes from my book of the moment (see post below)… This gets to the heart of it for me: Gornik argues that Jeremiah’s ‘proposal to the exiles’ in Jer.29:5-7 offers “an overarching wholistic vision for the city”, offering a basis on which to explore presence (“a theology of context”), prayer (“a theology of spirituality”) and public activity (“a theology of mission”)…

Presence: Dwelling as Neighbours and Friends

“To share as neighbors and friends in the everyday experiences of life, to invest as neighbors and friends in the development of others is both the extension and the foundation of shalom. It means to reject – as individuals, families, and churches – withdrawing into privileged social and economic enclaves inside and outside the city.” (115)

On social capital in inner-city neighbourhoods…

“the more people build and remain in relationships of reciprocity, particularly in local institutions and associations, the greater the increase in trust that builds among them”

“while there is no question that local institutions in the inner city have been harmed and that the social fabric has been torn, every neighborhood also has considerable strengths, capacities, and reserves of mutual responsibility and caring. Indeed, without strong relationships of caring, survival in the inner city would be impossible.” (116)

On ‘neighbouring’, ‘hesed’ (‘faithful commitment’) and friendship…

“Neighboring [for the people of Israel, as in the book of Proverbs] entailed the daily work of building a just and supportive community characterized by trust. ‘Without such trust … a healthy social environment could not be established, and where there was no such feeling of interdependence and solidarity (hesed) the very foundations of morality would be undermined.’ In hesed, the mutual commitment to the flourishing of others, we find the glue of community.” (117)

(Walter Brueggemann) “The Deuteronomic tradition presents society as a neighborhood and enjoins attitudes and policies that enhance neighboliness. Deuteronomy insists that economic life must be organized to ensure the well being of widows, orphans and immigrants. This response to dislocation insists that maintaining a public economy of compassion and justice is a way to move beyond despair.”

“A relationship with Christ, as the parable of the Good Samaritan expresses, is defined not by being a neighbor in the passive sense but by finding ways to cross boundaries and to be a neighbor to the afflicted in ways that advance their flourishing.”

“a deeper goal of relationships is friendship… Friendship that is in imitation of Christ’s friendship with women and men is both something of the peace that God desires and the relational bridge to the peace of the city.” (118)

Prayer: the Urban Future Belongs to the Intercessors

(Walter Wink) “Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out the future, the longed-for new present.” (118)

“For Wink, prayer constitutes resistance against the powers. When Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer, which recognizes the authority of God over the powers of the age, the hope of the kingdom over the fallen world, they declare resistance and a counterview of the city.”

“Prayer is the cry from the depths to God, a plea that the world be different, that our children not die before their time, that our homes be decent, and that our hearts be made new.”

“When justice is required, when the daily struggle for life seems overwhelming, Jesus teaches us to pray and not give up in the face of oppression.” (119)

Public Activity: Putting Faith into Action

“To seek the peace of the city means that Christians are to be active participants – not spectators – working to bring alternative forms of urban life into being. Seeking the peace of the inner city therefore enjoins activity that enhances the social, physical, aesthetic, and economic world in which we dwell.” (120)

“In seeking the peace of the city, we do well to avoid beginning with complex plans and major proposals. Certainly community plans are important, but they should emerge out of genuine local ownership and responsibility. Responding to real needs, they will have an ad hoc, organic character. This means that what the church is called to do and how it should go about answering that call will not always be clear. The church is to bring its faith into the messy world of the city because it is called to ‘look… to the interests of others’ (Phil. 2:4).” (120-1)

The difference of peace-making

“The social and economic violence that created the inner city is not overcome with the simple announcement of a counter-narrative of peace, but rather requires the hard work of forging concrete new beginnings of shalom.” (121)

Peace-making without manipulation

“’serving’ others can get in the way of building community. All too often… human service ends up being about our own needs and desires, not the underlying human fabric of a neighborhood. … Whenever a church defines a community and its needs apart from the people of the community, a manipulative process is set in motion, one that often serves only the extension of the church’s own interests, goals, and power. Language, agenda-setting, and unconsciously held notions of superiority are common conductors of a manipulative process. … Inner-city neighborhoods are skilled in discerning between the well-intentioned and the self-serving. By necessity, they know and signal that they know the difference between sincere yet fumbling efforts (made by the church that is honestly attempting to be with the community) and insincere yet ‘professional’ attempts of ‘service’ (made by the church claiming to be ‘for’ the community). Inner-city residents are highly gifted in the art of discernment; they have often watched people trying to import their agendas. … My experience is that inner-city communities do not judge as harshly the stumbling yet humble. Indeed, they are quite likely to show an amazing grace in response. But to that which is self-serving and manipulative in the name of ‘service’, these communities react in ways that protect their own interests. At times it may seem like a community ‘buys in’ to a development plan or a religious project, but in subtle ways usually invisible to outsiders, resistance to such manipulation is constantly taking place.” (122-3)

“the church’s goal is to be God’s peace in the broken places and to bear witness to the kingdom of God. It sides not with the privileged and powerful but with those the world counts as nothing. This is the politics of Christ and the cross.”

“Miroslav Volf has called such an approach the ‘soft difference’. Developing this insight in an important reading of 1 Peter, he writes, ‘I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one’s identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either ‘become like me or get away from me’. In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves – more accurately, who are secure in their God – are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even ‘without a word’ (3:1).”

“Not only should urban faith be soft, gentle, and humble in its witnessing and often non-conforming difference; it must be alive in practice. … Oriented to the plight of the non-persons in the urban world, Christianity is to offer living expressions of its hope founded and centred in Jesus Christ.” (124-5)

Making a difference

(Nicholas Wolterstorff, addressing children’s ministers) “It is your calling to struggle to make the world a place in which their innocent, vulnerable playfulness is appropriate… Be under no illusion that your efforts will bring about the holy city for children. But likewise, do not despair of making a difference. For it is God’s cause; and God will take both your fumbling and your skillful efforts and use them as building stones for God’s holy city.”

“Faithfulness toward the advance of more whole communities, not the development or promise of perfect ones, is the measure of peacemaking.” (125)

“Nourished by the guiding image of shalom, not the logic of the market, in a neighborhood where God’s peace runs like a deep current, weary families would find new strength and joy. Every gift would be appreciated and called into service. Those able to work would have employment that both served the common good and provided a living wage. Miserable housing would be a thing of the past, replaced by homes offering beauty and safety. Vacant land would be turned into gardens filled with flowers and vegetables, reclaimed for local economic development, or designated for affordable housing. Children would attend schools that nurtured the whole person, mind and spirit, enabling them to navigate the world successfully. Streets would be safe, and the innocent would not fear those who protect. No more would the emergency room be a doctor’s office, for quality health services would be personal and available when needed. An atmosphere of neighborly commitment would reinforce bonds of trust. And by virtue of all of these things being signs of shalom, at the center of this experience would be the acknowledgment of God as the giver of this gift, the One in whose service human beings are called to live responsibly. This is how the neighborhoods of the city should work.” (125-6)

“To be peacemakers in the … inner city is the opposite of giving in to apathy, of razing neighborhoods, of imploding buildings, of excluding the poor, of insulating oneself from risk. To seek the peace of the city is to have a vision of friendship and community and a commitment to justice, joy, forgiveness, and salvation. It is to engage in kingdom work in the city based on a distinctive understanding of what it means to be the people of God, an understanding that expresses itself in love and sacrifice in service to others, especially the most vulnerable. … As a model of God’s new urban social order, the church signals an alternative to all forms of exclusion.” (126)

‘To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City’

2011-02-20T13:25:00.001-08:00

(Mark R Gornik, Eerdmans, 2002)

This is a brilliant book. It unfolds a ‘shalom-focused’ theology through the very concrete practices of being church, building community, and rebuilding the streets of Sandtown, an inner-city neighbourhood in Baltimore. There’s some great and inspiring stories, some subtle and in-depth analysis of the issues social and political, some thorough theological reflection (it’s the most readable and comprehensive summary of the Biblical theme of ‘shalom’ I’ve come across, I think), and some helpful bits of ‘categorisation’ (I’m someone who does actually enjoy ‘3 words beginning with the same letter’ lists, if they’re backed up by real substance) as Gornik outlines the approach of his grassroots, activist, radical Christian community.

I think I might share some quotes here over the next little while, and see how far we get. My hope is that there’s some stuff in this book that might spark and/or feed a valuable conversation here in the UK, Birmingham and beyond, among those of us who live and work in inner-city and outer-estate areas…

On oppression and injustice…

(Quoting Iris Marion Young): “oppression reveals itself in five faces: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. … In Sandtown, and in the inner city generally, all five faces of oppression can be seen at work in the racial and economic construction of space and the burdens of existence.” (51)

(Quoting Nicholas Wolterstorff): “God’s love for justice is grounded in his love for the victims of injustice. And his love for the victims of injustice belongs to his love for the little ones of the world: for the weak defenceless ones, the ones at the bottom, the excluded ones, the miscasts, the outcasts, the outsiders… God’s love for justice, I suggest, is grounded in his special concern for the hundredth one.” (51)

“[D]oing justice in Scripture is not the abstract balancing of ‘rights’… but the ‘restoration of that community as originally established by the justice of God; it is a community of equality and freedom from oppression.’” (62)

“One of the marks of a Christian response to the inner city must therefore be its direct and meaningful response to the closure of everyday opportunities and the closure of future horizons.” (59)

On ‘shalom’ and peace-making…

(Nicholas Wolterstorff again) “Shalom in the first place incorporates right, harmonious relationships to God and delight in his service. When the prophets speak of shalom, they speak of a day when human beings will no longer flee God down the corridors of time… Secondly, shalom incorporates right harmonious relationships to other human beings and delight in human community. Shalom is absent when a society is a collection of individuals all out to make their own way in the world… Thirdly, shalom incorporates right, harmonious relationships to nature and delight in our physical surroundings. Shalom comes when we, bodily creatures and not disembodied souls, shape the world with our labour and find fulfillment in so doing and delight in its results.” (100-1)

“sin is the vandalism of shalom… [S]halom is God’s urban renovation project, the restoration of a defaced urban existence. It is the reversal of human alienation from God, from creation, and from one another. Because shalom is the end of poverty, injustice, and exclusion, to seek the shalom of the city is to work to reverse the effects of sin … on the city and to proclaim the news of One who comes in peace.” (103)

Jeremiah 29:7: “Seek the peace [shalom] and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for if it has peace [shalom], you too will have peace [shalom].” … “There could be no separate peace for God’s people apart from the general condition of the city as a whole; the two were bound together. … Jeremiah is advocating a ‘nonviolent social resistance’ that emphasizes trust in God’s sovereignty, hope in God’s future, the practices of nonviolence, and the everyday acts of cultural production… this project of God’s is the renewal of community.” (103-4)

“Urban settings are full of different power interests, competing ideas, and conflicting demands. Peacemaking, and in particular loving one’s ‘enemies’, not only puts the church in a different light in relationship to its neighbours but is also a means of social change. … If Christ is the peace that forms the church and determines its identity, then the church as a peaceable community exists for the city. The church is a body renewed by Christ to represent hope for a broken world. Committed to reconciliation and the practices of repentance and forgiveness, it should not fail to recognize the possibility of peace for the inner city.” (109)

(Wolterstorff, again!) “Shalom is both God’s cause in the world and our human calling. Even though the full incursion of shalom into our history will be divine gift and not merely human achievement, even though its episodic incursion into our lives now also has a dimension of divine gift, nonetheless it is shalom that we are to work and struggle for. We are not to stand around, hands folded, waiting for shalom to arrive. We are workers in God’s cause, his peace-workers. The missio Dei is our mission.” (110)

On the church…

The church “as a community of grace… welcome… reconciliation… and sharing…” (76ff.)

The church as “in the community” (but with no real attachment to its neighbourhood), “for the community” (but not grounded in the experience of the community, and treating the community “as the other and as helpless”), or “with … and of the community”, becoming “one with its neighbours in the struggle”… “Here the church and the community work in mutuality for reasons that grow out of their common history and their shared future. The church brings its faith commitments both to the questions that are asked and to the actions that are taken. It is involved in the mix, flow, and fray of community life, not isolated and removed. The church discerns its life in the life of the community. Such a church rejects a privileged moral, social, or even epistemological position… It does not see itself as a saviour, for it knows too well its own frailties and weaknesses. Rather, by way of the cross, by way of sharing suffering and hope, sorrows and joys, a church of the community pours itself out so that God’s shalom can be more deeply experienced.” (113-4)

More to follow soon! If this resonates for you, why not join in the conversation…?

Christmas in January?

2011-01-11T09:25:00.001-08:00

The further into gloomy January we get, the stranger the looks you get if you wish someone a ‘Happy Christmas’. But is the Christian tradition of celebrating the Christmas season for 40 days an anachronistic eccentricity, or does it hold within it something prophetic, counter-cultural and life-giving?

Think of the presents. How many are unwrapped and, if we’re honest, ‘shelved’ or discarded by the end of Christmas Day itself? Let alone if, for whatever reason, we’ve not been able to wait, and have opened them before ‘the day’ has even arrived?

If we’re to do Christmas properly, I reckon we need time and space to unwrap our presents slowly, turn them over in our hands, explore them, play with them, savour them, put them to work and discover what ‘more’ they will give us.

Calling Christmas itself a ‘gift’ is pretty clichéd these days, but I think the analogy is worth running with. We need a good amount of time and space to even begin to ‘unwrap’ the gift of divine incarnation, let its truth sink in, inhabit, learn what it might possibly mean to us in this particular here-and-now – and to the ‘others’ of our neighbourhood and world that we are confronted with or try to avoid.

Re-discovering the art of celebrating the gift of the coming of the light and incarnate presence of God needs a generous, spacious season. And it goes hand in hand, I’m sure, with re-discovering the waiting and longing and staring into the darkness that Advent offers us.

So, how on earth could we do it, when it sounds so strange even to our own ears?

Can we possibly, for example, hold off on the family and neighbourly gatherings to give and receive presents, until Christmas Day itself has arrived, and let it continue in the weeks that follow? So that, instead of a mass of waste paper by Boxing Day, we can enjoy unwrapping and delighting in presents in the presence of those who have given them – wherever and whenever (between 25th Dec and 2nd Feb) we manage to meet with them? (As an economic spin-off, it also means that many presents, if they are bought, can be purchased in the post-Christmas sales, and money saved for other kinds of generosity or necessity.)

Can we possibly hold off on many of the parties and opportunities for feasting, until ‘the day’ and the gloomy January days that follow, stubbornly saving the lights and the candles and the fun and laughter for the time when the rest of the world looks greyer than ever? And then, rather than trying to ‘do it all in a day’, take our time over the feasting, so that we are energised over 40 days, rather than bloated and exhausted within 8 hours?

And can we spend that generous time singing carols and telling the story, in 100 different ways and contexts, as we celebrate it not as a one-off event long-gone, but as an ongoing reality that begs room in the narrowest corners of our life and our world, and in those corners offers a spacious invitation to come and find our true home?

Christmas in Hodge Hill

2010-12-25T13:57:00.001-08:00

Monday

It’s Monday evening, and a small group of us from church are in Hodge Hill Grange nursing home, singing carols to the residents – elderly people, many seriously ill and frail, many living with the acute memory loss of Alzheimer’s

Among the handful of residents in the main living room are a couple of ladies, holding baby dolls, cuddling them, stroking them, rocking them, feeding them from pretend milk bottles. And as we sing ‘Away in a manger’, and as they cuddle and stroke and rock and feed their baby dolls, we can see tears rolling down their cheeks. These ladies, who can barely remember what they did 5 minutes ago, who are able to do so little themselves, are suddenly young mums again, children even – given a precious, precious gift, from an angel called Jenny – something, someone, to look after, to care for, to love – something, someone, who turns them in an instant from ‘nobodies’ into ‘somebodies’.

Tuesday

It’s Tuesday afternoon now, at The Hub on the Bromford. There must be a good 30 or 40 children, with mums or dads or nans, busily munching mince pies, getting their faces painted, and excitedly queuing to meet Santa.

Towards the end of the afternoon, those who want to come and find a costume and dress up and join in our own little ‘Bromford Nativity’. A 7-year-old girl finds the shiny blue dress for Mary, but none of the boys seem particularly keen on playing Joseph. In the end, our ‘Mary’ finds Carl, a teenaged lad who’s spent the afternoon refusing to wear a Santa hat. As if by magic, there stands Joseph, complete with brown robe and tea towel head-dress, all of a sudden with the willingness of a small child.

Wednesday

Wednesday next, and I brave the snow and ice to visit Mariam [not her real name]. A Muslim mum from Pakistan, with four boys, she’s been in Birmingham for 5 years. Her visa expired earlier this year, and since then, she’s not been able to work, or draw benefits, and so hasn’t been able to pay her rent, or buy clothes or food or toys for her sons.

People at church here have been incredibly generous – buying clothes, knitting clothes, rooting around to find books and toys that would make good presents for four boys.

So laden with bags, I ring her doorbell, and there’s no answer. After a few minutes, a next-door neighbour comes along. ‘I think she’s moved,’ he says, and my heart sinks. ‘She might be calling back to the house in the evening.’ So in the evening, I phone, and again, no answer.

Thursday

It’s Thursday morning now, and it’s early, because our boiler’s broken down. In the midst of trying to fix it, I phone Mariam again, and she answers the phone. She’s moving into a hostel today. I ask her if that’s good news or bad news. She says it’s good news – she and her family will be fed, and they won’t have to worry about the rent they’ve not paid.

So we agree to meet in the afternoon at the house she’s just about to leave, me on my way to Heartlands Hospital. She opens the door with a beaming smile – we exchange greetings, ‘Salaam aleikum’, ‘Peace be with you’. Her children couldn’t have been more excited if I’d had a big red suit and a fluffy white beard. And I find myself, a strange traveller in an unfamiliar place, kneeling down on her bare living room floor, offering precious gifts to a family on the move – on the move because a hostile government has made it that way.

Thursday again

Half an hour later, and barely half a mile down the road, Janey and I watch as a 9cm-long baby, a mere twelve weeks and two days from nothing, but already with eyes, nose and mouth, legs and arms and beating heart, dances in her womb. I wonder at the miracle of it, and ponder the responsibility, entrusted to fallible hands like ours.

The truth of Christmas is right in the middle of the story – that’s where we need to make our home. Who will we find waiting for us there?

(preached on Christmas Morning 2010, St Philip & St James, Hodge Hill – a not-entirely-typical, but true, week in the life of this local parish priest)

Advent reflection #2 – Hope in 4 dimensions

2010-12-13T11:37:00.001-08:00

The group of friends, 5 adults and a toddler, sat around the kitchen table, looking at a large photocopied map. The map was a plan of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, the place that designs, manufactures and maintains Britain’s multi-billion-pound weapons of mass destruction.

Around the kichen table, armed with felt tips and crayons, the 5 adults and a toddler began re-designing the site. A micro-brewery went in here, a deer sanctuary there, a hot tub with a bar, a church and a mosque, and some allotments, all found their places on the plans.

When the re-designing was done, mum and toddler stayed behind to do prayer and emailing, and the other 4 piled into the car and headed off to Aldermaston. Two of the friends waited by the car with cameras at the ready, the other two climbed over the fence, and began wandering the site, placing labels, attached to big glow-sticks, where their imagined new developments would go.

It was 45 minutes later that the MoD Police turned up, seven officers, with dogs and guns. The two friends explained what they were doing – surveying the site for these exciting new developments – and invited the police to join in. As they were taken off to Newbury police station, some of the officers chipped in some bright ideas of their own.

For the few hours they were in custody, the two friends prayed and sang. In their interviews, they told the Police Officers of their vision for a transformed world. They were released on bail, and a few months later the charges were dropped, without explanation

What do we mean when we talk about hope?

Because it’s not remotely the same thing as optimism. It’s not a fuzzy ‘things can only get better’, ‘always look on the bright side of life’ feeling, or a carefully-evidenced prediction based on the best available data, like a weather forecast, say.

Hope is a choice. A choice in 4 dimensions:

1. Hope is a choice to imagine the world differently – not ‘what’s the most likely future?’, but ‘what could the future look like?’

2. Hope is a choice to desire, to passionately long for that imagined future to become reality

3. Hope is a choice to believe that it can & will come true... As one radical Christian activist, Jim Wallis, puts it, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change”

4. And hope is a choice to act – to start living as if the hoped-for future has already become reality

Take Isaiah’s vision (Isa.35:1-10), for example:

a dry, dead desert bursting into life;
springs and streams and pools of water bubbling up from parched ground;
plants and flowers springing up and blossoming abundantly;
places of fear and danger made safe and happy;
a fearful, exiled, grieving people getting to their feet and coming home, singing for joy as they walk, their weak hands made strong, their feeble knees made firm.

Or take John the Baptist (Matthew 11:2-6) for another: the great ‘ground-clearer’, road-builder, sending messengers from his prison cell to find out if Jesus is the one he’s been preparing the way for. And what does Jesus say? “Go and tell John what you hear and see... recognise the kingdom of God when you see it – people’s bodies are being made well, life is coming where there was death, the poor are for the first time waking up to good news...” Does it look like the kingdom of God is springing up around you? Then that’ll be exactly what’s happening!

And what about Mary? The church invites us, on the 3^rd Sunday of Advent, to the Magnificat, Mary’s song of the powerful brought down and the rich emptied out, of the hungry filled with good things and the humble lifted high. One Yes to an angel, and Mary – an unmarried girl with a tiny child growing in her womb – has become a revolutionary. She sings of a world turned upside-down – and she sings of these outrageous, impossible, world-changing things as if they have already happened. Mary has chosen hope – she has chosen to live as if the world has changed into the world of God’s promises

So here’s the deal:

God invites us to imagine a different world

a world where the places of death and danger and dereliction blossom with streams of water and beautiful flowers
a world where people live in safety, and peace, and delight with their neighbours
a world where bodies are made well, the hungry are full, and the poor wake up to good news for a change

God invites us to imagine this different world, and to long for it with all that we are

And God invites us to believe it is possible, in spite of the evidence, and to live and act and talk and sing as if it has already happened – and to watch the world change around us. That’s the deal – that’s what Christian hope means.

But what does it mean for us in our neighbourhoods? Here on the Firs & Bromford estates? Or wherever you, reading this, find yourself? What would Isaiah, and John, and Mary see, and sing of, right here?

Here in Hodge Hill, at the beginning of November, in our first ‘Big Conversation’ as a church here, we identified 5 signs of the kingdom of God in our neighbourhoods, 5 ‘markers’, by which we might recognise God’s new world springing up around us, and which we will seek to nurture and encourage where we find them, and plant them where they are not. Those 5 things are: compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope. It’s the beginning of our own work of ‘imagining’ our neighbourhoods as they can be – as God longs for them to be – as truly ‘flourishing’. Our next task is to be equipped to go out and look and listen for these things, in the lives and relationships of the people of our parish, and in the work of volunteers and organisations around the place. And to celebrate those things where we find them. And to long for, and believe in, and begin to incarnate those things where they are not.

But for each and every one of us, the work of hope begins right now.

Let’s put our faith in Isaiah’s promise, that God will strengthen our hearts (however fearful), our hands (however weak), our knees (however fearful).

Let’s start looking and listening around us, like John the Baptist’s messengers, to signs and whispers of the kingdom of God, that new, transformed world, coming in our midst.

And let us, like Mary, say our ‘Yes’s to God, and live and act and talk and sing as if that new, transformed world has already come.

And we will begin to see the world change around us.

Launching books and choosing your voice…

2010-12-13T08:59:00.001-08:00

I helped launch a book last Thursday. It’s a really good book, actually. ‘Presiding Like a Woman’ (eds. Nicola Slee & Stephen Burns, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Presiding-Like-Woman-Feminist-Christian/dp/0281061866/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292137210&sr=1-1).

As one of the contributors, I was invited to say something. And somewhere between opening my mouth and closing it again, I realised something I’d not been conscious of for a while – that every time you speak, you (to some extent, at least) choose your ‘voice’. On this occasion, partly intentional, partly by accident of the moment, I chose ‘apologetic’. When it’s working at its best for me, it’s a mildly Hugh Grant self-effacing Englishman kind of voice. But I don’t think it was working at its best on this occasion. I was an Anglican priest among four Anglican priests – and someone had already apologised for that, so I felt I needed to do likewise. But I was also the one man in a panel (and a book, quite understandably, given the title) full of women – and so I apologised for that too.

But reflecting back, I realised I could equally well have chosen other voices. Delight at being among friends (and some personal heroines) for one. And for another: excitement at having been given the privilege of a space in which to journey into discoveries, theological and personal, that I feel much the richer for, and the richer for being able to share with others too.

So here’s what I could have said…

The Christian tradition has had a near-2000-year history of making the audacious claim that the person who finds themself standing at the altar somehow ‘stands in’ for someone else. ‘In persona Christi’ is the Latin phrase – at once bold and ambiguous. But the ‘gender trouble’ that has accompanied that audacious claim over the years is rooted in an over-definiteness about who that ‘someone else’ is: ‘Jesus was a man, therefore…’.

So ‘presiding like a woman’ gave me an excuse to tease out a bit of a christology – a theology of what we mean when we say ‘Christ’. And naturally, I turned to the gospels. But what I found in them were the seeds of something more expansive, relational, and subversive than a narrow focus on the singular male body traditionally allows. There are incidents, quite crucial to the narrative, of interactions between – as it happens – women and Jesus, where it is really not clear where the ‘christliness’ of the encounter is located: if not ‘in Jesus’, then perhaps ‘in this woman’, but more precisely ‘in the space between this man and this woman’. Look at the encounters between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician Woman in Mark 7:24-31, Jesus and the woman with the haemorrhage (Mark 5:21-34), and Jesus and the anointing woman (Mark 14:1-9). Who takes the initiative? Who changes whom? Whose actions – and passions – most clearly embody God as we know her/him?

This ain’t writing Jesus out of the picture. That’d be pretty difficult to do – especially for someone who takes the gospels as the best kind of trustworthy source for revealing who God is and how God works. But it is discovering there is room in christology (or, as I rather clumsily try and re-write it in the article, christ-( )-logy)… for us. And for more than just us. Christ-( )-logy has a space at its heart for encounter, interaction, challenge, questioning, touch, embrace, and mutual transformation. It has space within it for interruptions to what we think we should be doing. It has space within it for the kind of creative improvisation that goes on between people who discover in their interaction something more than any of their individual contributions – and a creative improvisation (what theatrical improvisers call ‘over-accepting’) that can even weave potentially negative, destructive contributions into something life-expanding.

The liturgical ‘presider’, I go on to suggest, “might seek never to occupy for long one of the ‘foci’ of the christ-( )-logical space, but, instead, to move back-and-forth across and to the very edges and doorways of the space (close enough to touch those who may be there and to establish genuine, reciprocal relationship with them), enabling and encouraging the movement of others, and, in the process, making visible and tangible the ‘incarnational flow’ within the ‘space between’”.

And if that sounds far too complicated or abstract, I suggest that little children offer us the best examples of this kind of ‘presiding’ in action:

“It is not just in their ‘interruptions’ that [little children] question ‘the world as it is’ and gesture towards ‘the world as it could be’. They also are adept at re-shaping liturgical space, transgressing divisions and barriers, finding routes around, over and underneath, and freely walking across allegedly ‘sacred’ spaces. They will, given half a chance, touch those ‘holy things’ which are usually in only the presider’s hands, and with unconstrained imaginations, reverence the most mundane objects as holy. They have a knack of reaching out to those who are at their most fragile, and infusing the most serious moment with surreal comedy. Within the last year, I have witnessed a little child ‘preside’ from behind a pillar in a rabbit costume, minister to each member of the ‘communion circle’ while clinging to the altar rail, comfort a tearful woman from the neighbouring pew, and ‘absolve’ much of a congregation with delighted splashes of font water.”

But lastly, and this is where I think the theological rubber really begins to hit the practical road, these kind of subverted christ-( )-logical spaces begin to unfold outwards:

“We tend to imagine liturgy as a ‘strategic’ activity: safe in ‘our own place’, we are gathered, shaped and empowered for ‘managed’ engagement with ‘the world outside’. Little children introduce us, however, to what Michel de Certeau calls ‘tactics’: opportunist, surprising, ‘ad hoc engagements’ within a space which we do not possess.

“As a parish priest in an area of urban regeneration, Sam Wells discovered that ‘the power of the church’ lay not in the ‘strategies’ of the ‘parent’ – ‘greater resources, more experience, greater physical strength’ – but in the ‘tactics’ of the ‘child’ – ‘stubbornness and doggedness, and the tendency to ask awkward or embarrassing questions… still learning, potentially disruptive.’ What, then, if we were to perform our liturgies not ‘strategically’, but ‘tactically’?

“Presiders and congregations who seek to learn the way of discipleship by embracing, ‘overaccepting’, the interruptive initiatives of little children might, I suspect, be slowly but surely trained themselves in the child-like art of interrupting, and playfully, creatively, ‘overaccepting’ (rather than simply ‘yielding’ to), the ‘liturgies’ of the world: drawing attention to the ‘holes, silences, inabilities’ in the world’s cosmologies that tyrannically claim comprehensiveness; and temporarily creating, or occupying, spaces which subvert the controlling gaze of the state, through an attentive, transgressive touching of the apparently ‘untouchable’. Like the children crying out ‘Hosanna’ in the Temple, we may well anger the authorities (in and out of church), but through such child-like performances the ‘saving word’ might just be heard, the ‘incarnational flow’ between the divine and the human be manifest.”

I wrote these words about a year ago now, and the world, in some ways, now looks very different. The kind of ‘liturgies of the world’ I had in mind then were the so-called ‘war on terror’ and the myth of nuclear ‘deterrent’, the equally destructive myth that we can – and should – ‘buy ourselves’ out of an economic crisis, and the subtly but powerfully formative ‘school for consumers’ running in the background of the Labour government’s ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda.

There are other liturgies that have now joined them, that need just as much child-like passion, vigour and creativity in interrupting: the unspoken dividing lines between the apparently ‘deserving rich’ (and their ‘tax-efficient’ corporations) and the ‘undeserving poor’ (who, out of choice, apparently, sit around on their bums drawing luxurious benefits from the state); and the myth that central government can make us all better citizens and better neighbours by telling us to be so, and by investing less in public services so that we naturally feel the urge to plug the gaps.

From student protests to UKUncut’s tactics of occupation, from the Coalition of Resistance to the Common Wealth network, we’re beginning to see what ‘interruption’ might look like in this harsh new world. But what of the playful, creative ‘over-accepting’ of what the current government seeks to ‘offer’ us? For the predominantly middle-class ranks of the Church of England, there will be much to be said about a radical, sacrificial generosity from our own pockets, to establish genuine, touching, face-to-face solidarity with those of our neighbours who are much closer to the bread line. Movements like ‘Giving What We Can’ (http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/index.php) and ‘Relational Tithe’ (http://www.relationaltithe.com/) are showing the way here. An embracing of a model of ‘community organising’ (taking Saul Alinsky seriously) that genuinely empowers the powerless to ‘speak truth to power’ has got to be another candidate.

But we’ve got a whole lot more to learn. And personally, I’m looking to my toddler for leads…

Advent reflection #1 – ‘Why are we waiting?’

2010-12-05T13:41:00.001-08:00

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

(T.S. Eliot, East Coker)

In the heady ‘80s, adverts for Access credit cards had the slogan, ‘take the waiting out of wanting’. Three decades on, ‘waiting’ is, for many people, almost an alien concept, ‘credit’ seems, unbelievably, to have survived the tumultuous events of the last couple of years as a currency in its own right, and ‘wanting’ is what economies like ours are still apparently relying on to give them ‘health’. Our society needs us and values us, still, by our ability to want, and buy, and consume – and instils in us both a ‘need’ for instant satisfaction, but also a rapid dis-satisfaction and a need for ‘more, more, more…’.

So T.S. Eliot is on to something: “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing”. Our desires need a health check – or even a revolution. And for that to happen, we need to learn to wait.

I say ‘we’. Those who have least money already know what it means to wait. Waiting for the bus, when the service is infrequent, unreliable – an ‘out-of-control-ness’ that those of us with cars can avoid, if we choose. Waiting for pay-day, in those last few days when the meter’s on ‘emergency’ and there’s no food left in the cupboard and there are bills that need paying. And others too – waiting for that operation that will make life more liveable; waiting for the death that is around the corner, but God knows when; waiting for the birth, the due date circled in red on the calendar. Some of us are schooled in waiting, in some places, at some times. But many of us are captive to that need – to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’…

So the questions that ‘Advent waiting’ asks us… What are the things we “can’t wait” for? Where does impatience run our lives? What are the ‘wants’ (we might often call them ‘needs’, even) that we need to painstakingly strip away, distance ourselves from, begin to say ‘No’ to? And how might we do so, as individuals, as households, as churches?

The clamouring voices and images around us, says poet Jan Richardson, “will never tell us what we really want, what we really long for, what we desire with heart and soul. Those who have sat in the darkness know how the shadows give way to desire. Without sight, without our heads swimming with the images of what others tell us we want, we can turn our gaze inward and search our souls.”

And Richardson invites us to ‘plumb the depths of our waiting… “What speaks to us? What calls to us? What dreams have we buried? What wounds cry out for healing? What longs to be born in us this season? What is the yearning which we have not dared to name? Our desires reveal to us what we think about God, about ourselves, and about the world.

“In her remarkable book of prayers entitled All Desires Known, Janet Morley writes, ‘I understand the Christian life to be about the integration of desire: our personal desires, our political vision, and our longing for God. So far from being separate or in competition with one another, I believe that our deepest desires ultimately spring from the same source.’ Advent offers the opportunity to explore that source, to discern our desires and to find their common ground.”

As we learn to wait, what are the things we discover, deep down, that we really long for? And how, practically, might we begin to ‘inhabit’ those desires, dwell in them, and live out of them?

Or, as another poet, Carola Moosbach, puts it…

What
are we really waiting for
and what are the things
we need more
than ever
and how
should there be a beginning
of what
and who
still hopes at all
for what
and when
will it break
this day
of light
and who
still believes in it?

(Carola Moosbach)

Why I signed up to ‘Common Wealth’…

2010-11-29T12:17:00.001-08:00

OK. This might sound like a bit of self-justification. In truth, it probably is, partly at least. But as I have very little idea who’s reading this blog (I still haven’t quite got my head around that, but live in hope that conversations might begin here, or even spark real conversations out in the real world beyond…), it’s as much an attempt at a bit of self-understanding.

There have been plenty of public responses by now, to both ‘Big Society’ and to the cuts in welfare and public services. Many of these responses have been by Christians, some from Christian leaders. Some responses have been in the form of media soundbites, others have been much more ‘activist’. Others still have just got on quietly with the practical work of engaging, not so much with government policy, but with its effects on the ground.

I feel very much a ‘newbie’ at all of this. I’ve been doing the grass-roots engagement stuff, for a good 14 years now in one form or another, and been doing ‘on the hoof’ theology to try and make sense of the grass-roots realities as we’ve gone along. But actively responding to national politics feels fairly new territory for me – New Labour’s war-mongering being a notable exception. Signing up to ‘Common Wealth’ was partly, then, a ‘me too’ – a grabbing onto the coat-tails of others who I sensed were ‘thinking ahead of me’, to see where that journey would take us.

But more than that.

1. My sense of British politics, at least since New Labour, is that rhetoric – and rhetoric ‘spun out’ through the media – is at least as significant, on the lives and outlooks of ordinary people, as actual policy. To state the obvious: how we think and talk about life, and politics, and each other, profoundly shapes how we act and relate, and ‘sound-bite politics’ trickles down in powerful ways into everyday conversations. So when ‘new’ rhetoric comes along (and Big Society and all the talk around the cuts are two, inevitably intertwined, examples of ‘new’ rhetoric, I think) it’s helpful, vital, even, to interrogate it and de-construct it. CW does that – with the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ among other things.

2. CW also begins to imagine alternative possibilities – it offers the beginning of a theological imagining of a different way of doing ‘economy’. Imagining differently is the first step towards doing things differently. Can we imagine ways of ‘opting out’ of the economy, to produce all our fruit and veg through local co-operatives, for example? We should heed Jim Wallis’ warning that ‘alternative lifestyles’ can too easily function merely as ‘pressure valves’ to enable the system – it’s when ‘alternatives’ become ‘movements’ that they start to make a difference. But CW is an invitation to build a movement – just as Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne and others continue to do in the States. There is much more re-imagining and movement-building to do – but CW offers a place to start.

3. Closely connected, I think, CW puts down a marker in the mapping out of new political terrain. It helps ‘stretch out’ that terrain, by voicing a position that has not, as yet, seen much expression. It gives us more space in which to locate our own ‘position’. And for people like me, a morally-compromised mix of idealism and pragmatism, CW stretches out a space that helps me make decisions on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think the Con-Dem government are wholly ‘bad’ (as if New Labour were somehow wholly ‘good’!), and my natural inclination is to trust that the Big Society ideas originated in a mix of Machiavellian and much more worthy motives. There are sweeping areas of government policy that I need to say ‘No’ to – but other elements that I want to affirm, in however qualified a way. So I sign the ‘Common Wealth’ statement, I write an application for NESTA funding for local community organising – one of the ‘Big Society’ ‘big ideas’ – and I trust that such community organising, as it gets off the ground, will be clear-sighted about the political targets it needs to keep in its sights. Hypocritical? Maybe. I feel the inevitability of living with a complex conscience.

4. Lastly though, something more about guts than head. The need to lament, to cry and shout ‘No’, as something prior – chronologically, emotionally, theologically, politically – to any kind of constructive engagement. I cannot rush headlong into embracing the positives of ‘Big Society’ without first lamenting the effects – and many of the justifications – of the cuts. In these next few Advent weeks, Christians will be thinking a lot about hope – but Christian hope only makes sense not simply as a brightly-lit vision of ‘everything bigger and better’, but as a light shining in the darkness, when we have first stared the darkness hard in the face. Or, as Walter Brueggemann puts it rather better than I “loss grieved permits newness. And by contrast, loss denied creates social dysfunction and eventually produces violence… Without the hard, painful, preparatory work of loss and grief... the offer of hope is too easy and too much without context to have transformative power, much like having a Sunday victory without the loss of Friday.”

Are we “all in this together”?

2010-11-27T12:04:00.001-08:00

“We’re all in this together”. To hear those words from both David Cameron (as he heralded the ‘age of austerity’) and Jim Wallis (in Birmingham yesterday – more of him in a day or two) suggests that those same words can mean very different things…

For Cameron, it would be convenient if we all believed that the decisions he and his government have made recently are the only possible decisions, tough but, well, ‘tough’ – but that we, if we were in his position, would do likewise. But “we’re all in this together”, he tells us – we share the responsibility for these decisions. To use an old-fashioned phrase, we share the burden of guilt for them.

But as our school children get out onto the streets in protest, words from the Iraq war echo around again: “Not in my name”. This is not just adolescent shirking of responsibility – it is saying that there are other possible choices than these, and we will not be co-opted into the rhetoric of inevitability that the cuts must be this big, and this soon, and fall on these areas.

Because here’s the second use of that phrase that needs challenging: we are not, it seems, “all in it together” in shouldering the burden the cuts. The ‘age of austerity’ seems to mean destitution for the already-poor, and a minor inconvenience for the rich. Not only do the percentages of income reduction seem to be weighted against the poor, but the poorest are also the biggest victims of cuts to public services. Let’s be clear: the much vaunted rhetoric of ‘fairness’ is not remotely the same as the over-arching Christian priority of care for the most vulnerable – let alone the Magnificat vision of ‘turning the world upside-down’ so that the poor are exalted and the rich sent away empty. “We’re all in this together” is simply not true, when spoken by millionaires whose belts barely need tightening.

But there are other senses of the phrase that need to be spoken. One is to consciously undercut any self-righteousness we might be feeling as I write, and as you read, those last few paragraphs. There is no morally pure ground to stand on in this conversation, or argument, or battle. I write this as someone whose job and house are as secure as any in the current climate. I am, therefore, one of ‘the rich’. I am also inextricably tied up in the unjust system that I claim to want to resist. I put my money in high street banks, I spend my money with global corporations, I’ve bought a house as an investment in the hope that house prices will rise in the next few years… Christians use another old-fashioned word for the realisation that “we’re all in this together” and moral purity is unattainable – we call it ‘sin’. Whatever judgments we make about this current crisis of economic and social values, we do it from a position that is enmeshed in the sinfulness of it all, and there is a painstaking unpicking of our own mixed motives and dubious commitments that is just as necessary – if not more so – than shouting at George Osborne.

There is yet one more thing to be said. Jim Wallis, an American Christian with a passion for justice and the ear of the last few US Presidents, reminded those who heard him on Thursday that many of our political leaders have simply not met many poor people, let alone understand how they live, what the struggles feel like, what a difference a cut in benefit, or in local services makes, what the negative, stigmatizing rhetoric feels like when ‘people like you’ are the target. “We’re all in this together” is a call to solidarity. To looking people in the eye, valuing them as fellow human beings, listening to their concerns, and finding bold, humble, and compassionate ways to offer shoulders to share their burdens when it gets tough.

It is easy, and rhetorically necessary, for those in government and their supporters to demonise those in our society who are growing increasingly angry and fearful at the ‘age of austerity’, re-defining them as beyond the boundaries of ‘decent’ and ‘civilised’ citizenship. But it is too convenient to exclude them from the “we” and write off their claims to dissent and critique. If “we” haven’t yet summoned up the guts to get out there and voice our own protests at some of the decisions and rhetoric of our current government – then let us at least start ‘gossiping’ our solidarity with them. As reports filter through of the police in Westminster ‘kettling’ 16-year-olds for hours in the November cold, let’s dare to say, with conviction: “we’re all in this together…”

Common Wealth: CHRISTIANS RESIST THE CUTS - EXPOSE THE BIG SOCIET...

2010-11-15T02:56:00.000-08:00

Common Wealth: CHRISTIANS RESIST THE CUTS - EXPOSE THE BIG SOCIET...: "A Group of Christians - activists, ministers and theologians - have issued a statement calling upon Christians to unite with others in the m..."

Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?

2010-11-08T13:36:00.001-08:00

Yes. That’s the catchy headline of a discussion piece on the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11674864) that caught my eye yesterday. “The row over housing benefit has led to warnings of ‘social cleansing’,” it begins. “But can those on low incomes really have an entitlement to stay in expensive localities?”

Enter Shaun Bailey – a youth worker (curiously), and the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith: "You can talk about your right to live in the community where you grew up, but where do you get the right to spend other people's money? I'd love to live in Buckingham Palace but I can't afford it," he adds. "The flipside of having a right to stay somewhere is that people aren't prepared to move around. The middle class have always been prepared to go all over the country to find work."

And then there’s Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’, which ain’t half bad as books go, chronicling, as the article puts it, “the ghettoisation, social breakdown and increased pressure on services that resulted from moving the working class to peripheral housing schemes… Gentrification,” she argues, “has caused many low-income households to suffer pricing them out of communities that they once called their own.”

But look closely at her contra-argument to Bailey’s… “[Hanley] argues the poor have every right to live in wealthy areas - because the wealthy rely on them more than they admit: ‘We need these people to do many of the minimum-wage jobs on which we depend - cleaning, catering, retail and so on… If you take away housing benefit and shift them out, this country's high transport costs mean they'll have no incentive to come into our cities to work. What I'd say to David Cameron is: come back to me when the minimum wage is £12 an hour.’"

My first reaction was to cheer Hanley’s last sentence. And then the cheer got stuck in my throat. It was the “we need these people” that did it. But let’s first wind back a bit, to the premise of the article in Bailey’s comments…

1. ‘Rights’ and the housing market

‘Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?’ the article asks. But why should ‘place’, let alone ‘home’, be defined first and foremost by the capricious and pernicious whims of the housing market? Why should the fact that ‘the market’ has sent house prices through the roof in a particular area mean that people who have called that place ‘home’ no longer have a right to do so?

When Article 17 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”, did it imagine an exception clause to allow for ‘the housing market’? Or perhaps those who rent have no such rights?

2. Mobility vs. Stability

For Bailey, though, there is also a societal duty to remember: we should “[be] prepared to go all over the country to find work”, apparently. And work that can pay for, not the house you might want to call ‘home’, but simply the house you can afford, presumably (I don’t think the circular logic’s mine, here).

But more than that, it seems that being prepared to move to ‘find work’ (read: being a productive cog in the economic machine) trumps any value there might be in “staying somewhere” – like, rootedness in identity, stability in relationships, trust between neighbours, any kind of depth to a sense of community, commitment to a particular piece of earth, for example. All things that should be in the bloodstream of Christians, for whom the Benedictine vow of ‘stability’ – the commitment to finding God among these unlikely people in this unpromising place – sums up much of the incarnational gospel.

3. “We need these people”

But lastly, back to Lynsey Hanley’s throat-sticking phrase. “We” – the middle-classes, obviously. “These people” – that section of society whose purpose in life, apparently, is to do the minimum-wage jobs on which “we” depend. So we need them living close by, says Hanley, or they won’t bother coming to sell us sandwiches and suits and clean our offices.

I’m not going to labour (sic) here over the whole system of assumptions that assigns ridiculously different ‘wage values’ to different forms of work, although that surely needs questioning more than ever, in the world of sky-high salaries for footballers and (even failed) bankers.

What I want to pull apart here is the assumption that some people (“these people”) should be defined – in both their ‘purpose’ and their capacity to call some place ‘home’ – solely in terms of the ‘needs’ of some other people (Hanley’s “we”) – while the latter group apparently get away with defining their own ‘purpose’ and place called ‘home’.

I want to say to Lynsey Hanley: “these people” are not means to my middle-class ends, they are my next-door neighbours, they are my co-workers in our neighbourhood, they are among my friends. “Their” purpose, just as mine, is to grow into our identities as beloved children of God, who has chosen to move into our neighbourhood and call it ‘home’. And our homes (the places where we learn to ‘dwell in love’) and our neighbourhoods (our schools for loving others) must always trump the so-called ‘needs’ and whims of ‘the market’.

So I’ll concede this to Hanley: “we” middle-class professionals might “need these people” – but not as a definition of their identity, but of ours – “we” need “them”, because they are the neighbours that we need to learn to love. While they remain strangers, and not friends, we are failing to love. And while they remain at a distance, rather than next-door or around the corner, our opportunities to learn to love them are pretty slim.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (recently author of The Wisdom of Stability, among other things) suggests that Hanley’s “we”, the world’s rich, should get serious about “loving our enemies”, the poor. It’s shocking, at first listen. But let’s get real about this. What do you call people you do your best to avoid and distance yourself from? What do you call people you don’t look on as equals? What do you call people you implicitly blame for any misfortunes you perceive yourself to suffer? What do you call people you talk about ‘getting tough on’, or ‘cracking down on’? What do you call people you see as competition for scarce resources that you would rather have to yourself?

“Love your neighbour” is in danger of fitting in all-too-cosily with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ rhetoric – at least while the middle-classes sit comfortably with a narrow view of their neighbours as the nice family who live in the equally-nice house next-door.

“Love your enemy” is much more dangerous. It dares to highlight the relationships we would rather ignore, or define in distanced, economic terms – rather than in real, mutually vulnerable, face-to-face encounter. The relationships where power is seriously unequal, where mutual suspicion reigns. ‘Love’ here becomes anything but cosy and comfortable. It cries out for a courage that overcomes distance, a humility that re-balances power, a vulnerability that seeks to nurture reconciliation and mutual trust.

The good news of the gospel is that it is just possible for enemies to become friends. The one who made his home among the poorest invites us all into a kingdom – a common wealth – where, beyond anxiety, we discover there is more than enough for all, and where we can delight in making our homes together, enjoying the company of a glorious array of strange and wonderful, God-created neighbours. The invitation is also a challenge to us all: if we dare, we can choose to move in right now.

‘Big Society’ and theology – a reflection from All Saints Day

2010-11-03T02:19:00.001-07:00

Luke Bretherton in his article in the Guardian (‘Big society and the church’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/07/big-society-church) helpfully identifies two competing anthropologies (understandings of what it means to be a human being) going on in government rhetoric: what he calls the ‘Big Citizen’ – a continuation of Thatcherite modernity’s individualist, choice-focused worldview – and the ‘Big Society’ understanding of the person enmeshed in social relationships and commitments (‘whether in families, unions, or congregations’) as ‘the condition of individual flourishing’.

But from a Christian theologically standpoint, and perhaps Bretherton felt he couldn’t say it in the Guardian, there is a third, and quite distinctively Christian, anthropology, that understands the person as most fundamentally ‘en Christo’ – receiving their identity ‘in Christ’, bound up in, as Rowan Williams puts it, ‘solidarities they do not choose’: in loving responsibility to all their neighbours (even enemies, and especially the poor and excluded) ‘in Christ’, but also detached from their worldly allegiances and demands to the extent that those relationships, institutions, allegiances and demands are not Christ-shaped (or ‘kingdom-shaped’, we might also say). This is one of the insights the church rediscovers and celebrates on All Saints Day, among other times.

Jesus’ talk about ‘family’ is a prime example of this, as in the gospel words with which we in Hodge Hill finished our All Saints celebration on Monday night: ‘Jesus asked, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And pointing to his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother."’ (Matthew 12:48-50) Interestingly, I imagine our Muslim sisters and brothers might say something very similar.

The challenge for the Church is to embody and demonstrate this Christological anthropology – to form authentically ‘ecclesial persons’, to resist within its own life the temptation to underwrite either of Bretherton’s two alternatives, and to live out this ‘Christian difference’ in their worldly, political lives.

3 ‘R’s… or maybe 4?

2010-10-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take a particularly gloomy prophet of doom to hazard a guess that, in a place like this, there will, in the next year or two, be more people jobless, more people homeless, more people who struggle to feed, clothe and adequately care for those in their household.

It strikes me that the church – wot I work for – and other practitioners and community groups locally, might helpfully focus our responses around 3 ‘R’s, or maybe 4, a little different from those prioritised by government Education departments…

Relief – helping ‘plug gaps’ in providing those basic essentials of life – food, clothes, furniture, cash for the meter, that kind of stuff. The tins we collected for Harvest this year are, already, going to homes that have needed them more than before. We can ask valid questions about dependency, we can wonder if we are subsidising unhealthy habits, but responding to Jesus’ command to “give to everyone who asks” with a radical generosity is, in the first instance, about meeting urgent needs and not turning hungry people away.

Resilience – it’s a word that’s used in relation to surviving disasters – but perhaps that’s not too far from the truth. How can we move beyond meeting urgent needs in individual households, to developing strong local neighbourly relationships, and strong local community organisations, that can help us survive together, supporting those in most need?

Regeneration – at a time where lots of the usual pots of money are drying up, both for major capital investment and for paying key local practitioners (Neighbourhood Management, for example, is likely to end here next April), how can we keep our eyes beyond the pressing horizon of surviving, to a more hopeful vision of long-term transformation? How can we discover, amidst the demands of ‘simply coping’, the possibility of discovering the best, most flourishing, community we can possibly be? Christians talk about ‘resurrection’ (life coming out of the broken ruins of death) in a way that is qualitatively different to the kind of linear progress that ‘investment’ language suggests. Perhaps resurrection language is needed more than ever?

And then a 4th ‘R’…

Resistance – ‘relief’ and ‘resilience’, simply coping, can allow national politics to get away with its idolatrous mistakes, making the poorest bear the heaviest burdens in the climate of cuts. Even ‘regeneration’ can encourage us to keep our heads down and just get on with ‘making good’ here. There is a ‘No’ to be said, from neighbourhoods like ours, to the assumptions and the decisions of politicians still caught up in the capitalist worldview. Economic growth is not the end to justify any means for ‘recovery’, at the expense of the ones Jesus names as the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. What opportunities can we find to add our voices to those of many others, to do our best to resist what is being presented to us as inevitable? http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/ is one place to start…

Beginnings...

2010-10-25T02:33:00.000-07:00

Well, many of my friends have beaten me to it, but apart from giving in to my self-publicist urges, this also might just turn out to be a place where I can try to piece together some of the fragmented contents of my head, and see if it makes sense to anyone else out there too.

It feels like a good time to start: at the start of a new job with a new church that is discovering its own new sense of identity and direction, living on an estate on the brink of some significant regeneration investment, in a country facing a new and rather scary political and social landscape.

I need to make some connections. We need to make some connections, I think. This little spot might be one point to start making them...