Category: Hmmm

Why not me?

Healing seemed to come quickly in the New Testament

Photo by Johannes Roth on Unsplash

Today (yesterday as you read this), my wife and I listened to the Pray as you go app as we often do, a little daily dose of Ignatian spirituality. The passage was about the person with leprosy who said to Jesus, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’ and Jesus’ reply, ‘I am willing! Be clean.’

My body was still upside down after our very recent and lovely holiday in Singapore. We had arrived back three days earlier. I was extremely breathless, perhaps exacerbated by jet lag. The previous evening it had taken me many minutes and several stops to walk the 200 yards in the dark and cold to our post box and I was frightened.

My first thought on hearing the passage was ‘why not me?’

But this was followed by a second thought: ‘It is you, and has been you.’

This lifted my spirits as I realized it was true. It was true in the larger sense 12 years ago when I recovered from a coma in which I was expected to die after my church held a 36-hour prayer vigil. But it was also true in the lesser senses of other bad times and fears negotiated. It was true in the smallest sense of daily acts of grace and goodness to my life and soul. I am a child of the kingdom! What a thing. I am a beneficiary of the power of Christ! Goodness and mercy has pursued me all my life! The (remaining) light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory to be revealed. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

This time of year we are also putting away the cards and letters received over Christmas, and I see these tendrils of love and faithfulness extending into lives all over the place. So many grateful! So many restored, or maintained, in life and health!

Why not me? It is us. In the midst of the shadows all around, it is us.

Is it 1913?

My own lovely home town, just outside King’s College. Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash. Chris Boland’s beautiful wedding photography site is here.

I sometimes wonder: is this year 1913?

I think of an Edwardian summer, and I think of moustaches, straw hats and stripy blazers. The moustaches played cricket and took girls on boats. They picknicked. Elsewhere, British moustaches quivered over a quarter of the earth, ruling it for good or ill. Seen back through that summer’s haze, the world looked (quite) ordered, prosperous, globalized, heading in a good direction. (At least it probably did from one perspective.) Injustice, was, of course, flowing underneath, undermining this white male imperial old world. But few knew or suspected what was coming.

What was coming was Europe’s own slaughter of the firstborn. Every street lost a son. Every village sprouted a war memorial. This was followed by a pandemic, by a long Depression, by a second spasm of world war. Empires fell; the world changed. I often think my grandad, born 1899, gassed 1918, had a rough 50 years till peace and prosperity started to grow again.

Plenty of parts of the world are suffering their own 1914 already of course: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan just to start with. Theologians who viewed Russia’s early massacres in Ukraine wondered if they had a working theology any more, so senseless and terrible it was.

The Economist newspaper offered a few possibilities for 2025 including:

  • A new global pandemic
  • The seizing up of the North Atlantic Ocean Circulation
  • A solar mass ejection (in this year of solar maximum) destroying satellites and fusing transformers across half the world
  • A volcano or supervolcano

And these come on top of the worries about the world that we might already have, just reading the news.

You possibly know where this is heading. Thank goodness for Mary’s Son. Who both deserves to be world king and actually is; unrolling the scroll of history with a voracious love and desire for the human race. Even if evil and time erases our theology, our sense of good, it doesn’t extinguish his.

The hope of the age and of the ages.

Happy Christmas!

Dethroning anxiety

I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting this wonderful blog from Nadia Bolz-Weber. On the face of it, her circle and mine (hers is much bigger) do not much intersect: ordained, tattooed, a former addict, divorced, remarried and probably further over on some theological spectrum than I, but she writes and thinks so beautifully that I would recommend her corner of the internet to you and anybody. Here’s the link that should enable you to sign up. And here’s something she wrote a couple of weeks ago, about anxiety:

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn’t think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

… worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe … It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week –

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn’t have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

Green old age

Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Last spring we held a party for three 90-year-olds in our church. In the months since, two have died and the third lost his wife of many years.

It was, perhaps, a good shout that we had the party when we did.

I was thinking about them the other day. I liked them very much. The thing that stood out, I think (particularly in the two who have now passed on) was their zest and enthusiasm for life. They gave life to people, rather than sucking it out of them (as an introvert I am sensitive to this). Bits of them were falling off into the grate, as it were, but the flame was still burning bright. I remember joshing with each of them, weeks, as it turned out, before the end.

A life-filled, green old age can’t be easy, and perhaps doesn’t always happen even with God’s saints. The Bible describes old age as ‘the clouds return after the rain’ (Ecclesiastes 12:2): it must be hard not to be depressed at yet another medical appointment, yet more health-related indignity, yet further limitation. Yet their record stands. This life, this life-givingness, is that what healing looks like in old age and decline?

The gospel industrial complex and the big drummer in the sky

Photo by Caleb Toranzo on Unsplash

(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)

You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:

  • A parts list
  • Step-by-step instructions
  • Hazards to avoid
  • Useful techniques for greater efficiency

Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.

It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:

  • Babies
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Societies
  • Economies
  • Medicine
  • Education
  • Business

You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )

Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.

Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.

Dumped women of the Bible

There have been many low points in Christian writing for women. Of books that have crossed my path (and that I have of course not read) were the booklet from the New Frontiers movement in the 1980s, ‘How to be a better leader’ s wife’; and from a parallel school, ‘Queen Take Your Throne, Becoming a Woman of Power and Authority.’ Thank goodness most books, presumably including these, disappear down history’s maw.

One book or Bible study I have never seen is ‘Dumped women of the Bible’. It is a surprise, because it is a ripe and rich area of study. How about Rizpah, descendant of King Saul, who spent one summer keeping the crows off the strung-up and rotting bodies of her two sons? Or the seven concubines of King David with whom Absalom slept and who were kept in secluded isolation for long years after David regained the throne? Or Abishag the Shunamite, carer for King David in his years of enfeeblement, then treated as a pawn in subsequent power struggles? Did these women, and hundreds like them, within and without the pages of scripture, have thoughts, feelings, lives, sufferings, laughter, endurance and perhaps also faith? Not many queens taking thrones here but an awful lot of battered and bruised people having to find a way through.

How refreshing Jesus was, taking delight in lifting women up and doing down the male disciples. Look at some of the things he said to them or to the disciples about them: ‘She has done a beautiful thing for me’; ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go in peace’; and best of all, to the tear-stained Magdalene, the simple, ‘Mary!’

(Compare this with another divine voice in a garden, asking: ‘Adam, where are you? )

History’s motor powers along, leaving battered and bruised women in its tyre-tracks, but Jesus follows, picking up the casualties, and perhaps together Jesus and the women watch history’s motor chug over the horizon, belching smoke.

Or rather, it looks like history’s motor, as men, mostly men, with spanners and oily rags, tune the machine up, squeeze efficiencies out of it, reducing God’s purpose to checklists and the replacement of defective parts.

But in Jesus we see that God moves at the speed of the women and children.

Photo by Random Institute on Unsplash

Why you should vote for me

Since I am away for much of October, I hope you’ll forgive me having a little fun. This does not fit the slow mission brief but in this year of elections, I offer an unbeatable manifesto to win any election anywhere.

1. Abolish January 31st and add a day to June instead. Further, whatever day it actually falls, make that June 31st always a Saturday. So if June 30 is a Tuesday, say, the next day, the 31st, would be a Saturday. Then July 1st would be a Wednesday as normal, and the universe would continue untroubled. There are never enough Saturdays in June, and since most people live in the Northern Hemisphere, a global referendum would lead to a clear majority in favour of my proposal.

2. Make ironing illegal. Too many of us waste too many hours at ironing boards. Criminalize it. If you are found guilty of ironing, you will be fined up to £1000 but this money does not go to public funds, you will be required to spend it on non-iron clothing.

3. Every piece of clothing should be fitted with a ‘girlfriend tag’. Connected to a suitable phone app, the girlfriend tag will tell you if

(a) what you are wearing matches whatever else you are wearing

(b) if it’s suitable for whereever you’re going today (having consulted your calendar)

(c) if it even suits you and

(d)if you should have thrown it out years ago.

Vote for me! Except I’m not standing.

The small is big

It’s striking what is, and isn’t, emphasized when St Paul decides what to write in his short letters to churches. There isn’t much about fame, achievement or celebrity; nothing about goals and milestones. Not much that I can see about strategy, or mobilisation, or changing the world.

Quite a lot about relationships, though, about families, about employers and employees (well, slaves and slave-owners). It reminds me of the story of the founder of a world-wide Christian charity. Apparently there are two biographies about him. There’s the corporate biography, country after country entered, cash-flow problems addressed, new initiatives started, new staff hired, horizons falling away as the ministry soars, as it were, into the sky.

Then there’s the second biography, written by the daughter about a father who was never home.

It’s easy to criticise someone second-hand, and to simplify a complex thing to make a point. Big parts of Christian discipleship are getting our attitudes and our close relationships right. That’s a place to put effort and is a true arena of service. It’s also super-revolutionary, overturning priorities. The big is small; the small is big.

On Waterloo Bridge

Somerset House (part of which is now part of King’s College; and my old friend Waterloo Bridge). Photo by Sam Quek on Unsplash

I’ve been slightly ambushed by the past in the past few months.

We recently had a 40th (actually 41st for complicated reasons) anniversary reunion of my time in college. So all of us who were once fresh young graduates, world at our feet, are now the seasoned and greyed end-of-career types talking about retirement and needing reading glasses–with all our working and adult life placed between these two milestones.

I met a lot of people for the first time, former fellow students. One was a High Court Judge. One had shared a flat with Tim Berners-Lee and thought at the time that his web invention wasn’t all that good. One sold off zombie companies for a living and made hundreds redundant with a single phone call.

It was a lovely day. Wandering around beforehand (King’s College is on the river Thames in London, by Waterloo Bridge, still the most breathtaking location), I thought London was less grimy, all the shops had changed, it was a beautiful city, a wonderful place to be a student. I don’t remember it being quite so difficult to walk along the Strand without getting breathless.

We’ve also lost a close relative through death in recent months and one side effect of that has been sorting through his old things. Someone had bought him an archive of the day’s newspaper (the Daily Telegraph as it happened) that was published on his birthday every day of his life. It showed the newly minted leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher, receiving 51 roses for her 51st birthday from the Young Conservatives in the 1970s. Flip through the pages and you find the 80-something Margaret Thatcher, with her son and his wife. She barely seemed to know what was going on.

Reading the books on his bookshelf I found a history of the Lyons teashop family, its entrepreneurial rise, its dramatic post-war fall. The Strand in London has some relics of it still (the Strand Palace Hotel for example), and back when I was a student, a Wimpy Bar, another Lyons innovation, soon to be eaten in turn by the fast-growing McDonald’s.

Time like an ever-flowing stream bears all its sons away. Waterloo Bridge and the Strand remain for a time. Lyons Teashops and Corner Houses and hotels pass away. We all age and curl and fall. How important to live for things bigger and longer-lasting than our lives.

The ever-widening horizon

The Chicago horizon … one of our summer views

I’ve been enjoying over the summer exploring the brain of former Archbishop. and continuing New Testament scholar, Rowan Williams, not least because I can now read his books for free, ish, on my phone, thanks to the wonderful perlego.com subscription service.

Something he said got me going, though. He described how becoming a Christian made his perspective wider, broadened his view. I really like that idea But how so?

I thought of some examples:

  1. Science is the pursuit of God’s utter ingeniousness. Science is great at ‘how’ and rubbish at ‘why’. But if the ‘why’ is settled, and especially if it’s settled in the idea of a loving God not able to keep his goodness to himself, and creating a universe, then science becomes a rather joyous romp in a playground. Wider, deeper and higher we can go, into the crannies of God’s genius.
  2. Art is for all humanity. Christ is Lord of culture. That is really something. This does not doom us to endlessly paint Biblical scenes, nor only to write theology. So much of the Christian faith is attitudes: set yourself to love God and neighbour, pick up your paintbrush, and see what happens. Wider, deeper, funner, lovelier. And because everyone is in the image of God, everyone is capable of artistry.
  3. The common good. We don’t need to resort to utilitarian arguments to care for the earth or humanity. We have, through the unrolling story of God-with-people, a context of individual, communal, global, and universal thriving. When we set ourselves with that perspective, we can have confidence that we are working with grain of the Universe, whatever our hands find to do. Wider, more imaginative, more creative.
  4. Christ is the Lord of Time. The proper Time-lord. What does this mean? We don’t have to rush. Let’s do stuff well. Let’s not do other stuff. And let’s be OK with failing.
  5. All will be summed up in Christ. So he’s taking the whole ‘completeness’ thing on his own shoulders. That frees us to be partial, incomplete, which frees us to attempt big things, because the final outcome rests just with us following our sense of his leading.

I am free to be my playful self, because I’m standing on somewhere solid and safe. And beause I’m loved. How lovely.