Why did Jesus die? (A rather political answer)

(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?

(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…

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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.
5. 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?!

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

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)

 

(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

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

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