Category: Justice and Righteousness

Thoughts on Election Day: Letting the Bible Get a Word in Edgeways

Recently I have been reflecting on big words. Not multisyllabic latinisms, gnostic jargon, nor bespoke neologisms, but words that are spacious, deep and and wide. Words that can have far reaching effects, whether in their expansiveness out into the world as transformative signals of hope, or in their intense inwardness as words of intellectual and spiritual and moral renewal towards a life more human, hopeful and holy. Indeed these three words would be good examples of what I mean by big words; human, hope, holy. But save them for another time.

This morning I woke up early. Not to my knowledge caused by a guilty conscience, more an honest and difficult to silence anxiety, low grade but persistent, and requiring some thought to accompany that first mug of tea! And as I thought about what was worrying me I went looking for words that might be placed on the other side of the anxiety versus serenity scales. Like most people, I'm weary of the ratcheted, wretched rhetoric of politicians telling us this is the most important General Election in generations. The normalising of exaggerated claims and approval seeking promises, the studied nastiness of personal attack as political tactic, the joyless anger of the power hungry, and the drip drip of dishonest dire predictions if we vote otherwise, have created an inner insomnia for those of us who refuse to allow our consciences to be lulled into sleepy complacency.

So I went looking for some big words to answer those pavlov laced promises, to rebuke the waves of abusive rhetoric, to contradict the urge to fear and anger. One of the benefits of reading the Bible, is knowing where to find the big words. And I mean reading the Bible, not saying we read it; I mean reading the Bible by letting the text get a word in edgeways so that it can speak big words into our small minds and narrow hearts; I mean reading the Bible so that the Word becomes a corrective of all those other words we speak, hear, repeat and throw around in political debate. I knew exactly where to find the big words I needed, to re-align my mind, to reconfigure my conscience, to reorientate my heart.

He has shown you O Man, what is good,

and what does the Lord require of you,

but to act justly,

and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6.8)

Big words those, justice, mercy and humility. They are far reaching out into the world of people and relationships, politics and economics, culture and identity. And they are deeply penetrating into the mind, conscience and heart of those who will hear them and allow them to do their transformative work, first in inner disposition, then in outward action. Because these words are not abstract concepts to be debated, they are commands of God as to what is required of us human beings.

So on the day of the General Election, awake early by a nagging anxiety, I have taken recourse to some of the big words that come with the force of divine command into our world of human affairs. Together they make an interesting grid to take the measure of all those promises and policies; they are criteria of judgement that quality control the claims and counter claims of those who seek our yes to their right to govern; and they are unashamedly moral in their demands and requirement. These are not words that tolerate the tactics of division, the hurting of the vulnerable, the undervaluing of the poor, the manipulation of power to accumulate more at the expense of others. These are big words, words redolent of holiness, replete with judgement, relentless in their requirement. And for those who read the Bible, and I mean those who read it with the intention of obeying it, they come with an authority that relativises every other. They are the words that sustain the common good. They are either every politician's nightmare, scary in their demands, or their night-light showing where the door to life is.

God of goodness, justice and mercy,

We shouldn't need to ask what is required of us.

Is injustice so hard to see, so easy to live with?

Has the absence of mercy become tolerable?

Is humility a step too far for our pride?

Forgive us for tolerating the slippage

from your requirement to our convenience;

the slippage from justice to injustice,

from mercy to couldn't care-lessness,

from humility to self-protective pride.

Show us again what is good,

how to act justly, love mercy,

and walk humbly with our God.

Amen

8 June 2017
Immigration and Friendship: Words that Redescribe the World.

Immigration is a central issue in the UK elections. This is a scandal, a stumbling block to the building of community in with otherness is welcomed. To use our fear of the other, and provoke our selfishness and hostility, as a way to win power is to subvert democracy by the tactics of hate.

The book I was reading outside this morning, has a different, life-affirming and generous perspective, encouraging "the unanxious engagement with the other who is indeed threat, but also gift, possibility and resource." Thank God for Walter Brueggemann, and a Word that redescribes the world!

(Walter Brueggemann, The Word that Redescribes the World. The Bible and Discipleship ( Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) page 186.

21 April 2015
Christian Witness, the Shadow of the Bomb and the Shadow of the Cross

Over on Facebook my friend Stuart Blythe asked for names of well known Christians who are or were known for their Christian witness against the manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons. The capacity of human beings to wage technological warfare to the point of life extinction raises the kind of "issue" you would think Christians would be largely agreed upon; namely, supporting the possession of that capacity, with a credible intent to use them in order to deter an attack, is a position incompatible, incongruent and essentially contradictory of the Christian Gospel. To hold the threat of massive destruction and indiscriminate obliteration of civilian populations over those we consider our potential enemies or those we consider may have, now or in the future, lethal intent towards us, may make unassailable military and political sense, though that itself is hugely debatable.

But I am personally perlexed at the thought that those who stand under the cross of Jesus Christ, who witness to the resurrection of Christ as the turning point of history, who are ambassadors of Christ and ministers of reconciliation, who are peacemakers of the Kingdom of God, and who are followers of the Lamb in the midst of the throne, slain from the foundation of the world – as I say personally perplexed to the point where I find it is impossible to conclude that those who witness to such realities embedded in the God of Hope, should give assent to the deployment of such weapons. The inevitable consequence is that credible threat implies use, if pushed to ultimate conclusions. How much more then, should the Christian conscience oppose the manufacture, possession and maintaining of weapons which are first strike weapons, and therefore combine both deterrence and threat with the logical implication that, given the right circumstances, their use as a first act of war is not ruled out.

I do understand that this is deeply contested territory. But these questions arise in a Scottish Christian context of theological and cultural retrenchment, and where Christian opposition to nuclear weapons is neither co-ordinated nor clear. Christian activism in support of nuclear disarmament seems low on the priority list of churches claiming commitment to the redemptive mission of God in Christ. Church statements, which are representative of a common mind, and which are considered and rooted in the perspectives of a Gospel of mercy, reconciliation, peace and justice, are seldom formulated because there is a lack of agreement of what a Christian position and consensus might sound like, read like and look like at the official levels of denominational life.

At this moment in the history of our world, with unambiguous signals of political ambition, unrest and threat from Russia, this is not a discussion in principle, nor is it a hypothetical scenario deliberately made extreme to highllight what is at stake in an ethical debate. In a world of credible threat, and destabilised economies and geopolitical changes, the Church has no right given its missional mandate, to leave matters of nuclear defence policy to the politicians, comfortably assuming it will never come to this.

No, I am not I hope being alarmist; but I am contending that in our dangerous world the Christian Church has a categorical imperative to witness to the Crucified Lord, the Risen Saviour, and to stand under the cross of its Lord on the side of life, creation, new creation and in the service of the God of Hope. It cannot do this by being silent. And as primary evidence in its discussions, decisions and statements, it will have to hear again the voice of Jesus, and ensure that anything we do say, is stated as those who must always say, "Beneath the Cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand….

2 March 2015
Christians Speaking Truth to UKIP Part 1 Some Semantic Replacement Therapy

More and more I am convinced that Christian witness today requires that followers of Jesus speak with linguistic integrity; and resist by argument and a different rhetoric the lies, half truths, redefinitions, propaganda and semantic erosion of contemporary political and social disourse. A number of key terms, essential for intelligent and constructive political debate have been hijacked by the political far right, and are becoming slogan words of the present Government. Immigrant, increasingly used pejoratively to raise the threat level to 'our way of life', by those we consider 'other'. Welfare, redefined in the now laughably ironic Government pie chart showing the alleged percentage of taxes spent on social care and what used to be called social security. Benefits, a word now heard by many as the first word in the sound bytes benefit cheats and benefit scroungers. Security, often now linked with the word terror, and together providing a rationale for increasing surveillance in our society, intrusion into personal privacy, and suspicion of the stranger, those 'others', who make their homes around us.

Not for a second am I saying that there are no cases of illegal immigration, welfare tourism, benefit fraud, and security threat. It is how these realities are exploited to justify policies and attitudes that, if they continue unchecked, inevitably become deeply corrosive of the common good, toxic for public discourse, and dangerous in creating social attitudes and dispositions which are founded on suspicion not trust, and ruthless regulation rather than responsible discretion. By the way these qwords are being used by politicians, we are educating our society into mistrust of the stranger, resentment of the vulnerable, and fear of social change, cultural newness and human diversity. These three processes are essentials for thebhealth of a humane and open society in which people can flourish.

Of course it may be that there are some sections of our population who think the time for a humane and open society is not now, if ever. Conservatism isn't only a political party As a worldview, often unacknowledged, it can also be a determined protection of the status quo, a holding on to what serves our personal interests, a refusal to move in new directions even if the alternative is standing still. But human flourishing, like much else in this wonderful world, presupposes growth, fruitfulness, new seeds of possibility, the risk of the seed dying and the hope of it propagating and bearing fruit tenfold, and a hundredfold.

Which brings me back to an ethic of language, and the possibility of Christian witness as the redeeming of words, the reclaiming of a vocabulary that implies generosity to the stranger, compassion to the vulnerable, and responsibility towards the poor. Such redemptive language will have to be to the point, in the face of plain-talking nastiness, confronting and denying the discourse of fear, resentment and injustice. What do Christians do about UKIP? At the very least, speak defiance of the propaganda that seeks to persuade us that narrow-minded nastiness is nothing of the sort but is understandable impatience with those who are making mugs of us all. I beg to differ. No, I don't beg! Indeed I insist, loudly and persistently, to differentiate between the discourse of deceit and scapegoat explanations, and the discourse of truthful words and friendly welcome. UKIP stands behind narrow-minded nastiness, the politics of resentment, rejection and division. The popular appeal at the ballot box of its 'plain language' diagnoses of what is wrong with our society and how it can be put right by its policies, is clear evidence that eventually regular irrigation of peoples fears and worries and resentments produces bitter fruit. Water the seeds of malign discontent and don't be surprised at the height or toxicity of giant hogweed.

In the old KJV translation, "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer everyone." The immediacy of communication through social media makes it possible to disseminate and multiply words in ways unprecedented in our history. Not for nothing did Jesus liken his disciples to salt, whose influence for good, in healing, sterilising and fertilising, is out of all proportion to quantity. Jesus also said every word will have to be weighed and accounted for some day.

When that day comes I for one hope that some of the most weighty words I have spoken, have been words of contradiction, spoken in the face of those whose view of the world has no space for redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace….goodness, once you start to list them, an entire lexicon of ethically enhanced words are missing from the UKIP manifesto. Some semantic replacement therapy is needed in the political discourse of our country, and Christians have nothing better to do than start speaking these words. I mean it. These are the words that challenge precisely and prophetically, the attitudes, policies and ideologies of closure, exclusion, alienation and isolation. Redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace, justice, goodness. Speak them. Live them. Be them.

25 November 2014
A World Without Torture and the Genius of the Quakers

The photo in this post was taken with my Iphone at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. The statue and setting are part of a Gold medal winning exhibit at the Royal Horticultural Show 2012. It was called "World Without Torture". It depicts something essential for us all to hear, arising from the Quaker concern for those who are imprisoned, tortured and whose humanity and freedom are taken away.

I have deep and long held respect for the Quaker tradition and that powerful category of thought which they describe as "concern". Not mere unease, anxiety or even compassion; but faithfulness in resistance, imagination and empathy in prayer, and sensitive moral antennae which detect actions and movements and sounds which threaten human flourishing, persistent in finding ways of protest and refusal.

The statue of a woman releasing a dove, and the chain link fence depicting the flight of the dove to freedom, are situated in the corner of the garden at Woodbrooke. Around 7.30am I came across this and was deeply moved. The lovely form of a woman kneeling, eyes fixed on the dove in her hands with the intensity of determined love, contrasts tragically with the brutal functionality of factory made concrete fence posts. Have you ever examined one of those posts? Each one is a work of art, a triumph in design. Made of that so useful mixture of sand, lime and pebbles; shaped to carry razor or barbed wire on the outward facing angled top; drilled at nine inch intervals to thread steel wire, which in turn supports and attaches the chain link fence, a marriage made in Hell for those whom it is fully intended to confine.

And kneeling beside these square, straight-edged concrete prison pillars, a figure shaped in soft curving lines, holding a dove. The silhouette of the dove taking flight, is made visible to the imagination by cutting and re-shaping the chain links, a technique I found to be a startling example of "concern" contradicting, subverting, re-conceiving the worldview implied by concrete and steel fashioned to human misery.

You can read a brief article about this over here

14 November 2014
Luther’s anti-Jewish theology, German Theologians and the Holocaust.

Looking for background reading for something I'm writing on Bonhoeffer I discovered the recently published Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, edited by R. Kolb, I. Dingel and L. Batka, (OUP: 2013). Of the 47 essays a number of them are to do with the reception of Luther's theology, and its legacy in different historical periods. Essay 41 is on the reception in the Nineteenth Century; chapter 42 then jumps forward to Marxist reception. There is no chapter on the reception and use of Luther in Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. There is a chapter on 'Luther's Views of Jews and Turks' (chapter 30).

I did a Google search for Holocaust and there is one occurrence of the term in the entire 688 pages – in chapter 30 on the Jews and Turks. I did a further search for Susannah Heschel whose book on The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany is a watershed in scholarship and research into the role of many Christian theologians and of significant sections of the German Lutheran church in the construction of an anti-Semitic mindset. Her name does not occur once.

It would be very unfair to make a critical judgement of this volume solely on such slight evidence as a Google search. But it's the omission of a chapter that spooked me, that jump of a hundred years missing out mid 20th century central Europe. I came away perturbed at such a lacuna in an authoritative academic Oxford Handbook on the subject of Luther's theology and its reception. There is only an introductory glance in chapter 30 referring to the Holocaust, and that is the one reference found by Google. The catastrophic impact of Luther's anti-Semitic writings and the direct role of a significant number of 1930s German theologians, academic and clerical, in giving such lethal prejudice the oxygen of scholarly credibility, is surely significant enough to have required an essay in its own right?

The same trawl on Amazon led to Before Auschwitz. What Christian Theologians Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism, by Peter Hinlicky. Susannah Heschel's name comes up with 21 hits. The relation between a number of German Christian theologians and the fate of the Jewish people in Europe from 1930 to 1945 is fully explored in this book.

Back to Bonhoeffer. I've been exploring the context of his writing in the 1930's and the increasingly dangerous call to follow Jesus through the minefield of National Socialist anti Semitic policies, and the crossfire between Church politics oscillating between collaboration and compromise, with significant numbers of Christians driven by conscience to stand firm in confession of Christ over and against sworn allegiance to Fuhrer or Fatherland. Bonhoeffer of course was a Lutheran, as was Martin Niemoller and Helmut Thielicke, so while Luther's anti Jewish writings were exploited in the interests of National Socialists by a number of leading academic theologians, there was no inevitable or essential connection between Luther's anti-Jewish writing, Lutheran theology and ideological anti-Semitism as political goal seeking religious justification. Many, many German Christians were not so easily taken in by such religious opportunism collaborating with political cynicism, with vast lethal consequence.

It is this complexity of motive and manoeuvre, the difficulties in establishing blame or innocence, culpability or naivete, and even culpable naivete, that gives rise to the moral perplexity and theological embarrassment evoked for subsequent generations of Christians, by Luther's anti-Jewish writings, and their reception culminating in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. These issues remain far too important, and that period of political and ecclesial history an episode of too recent tragic memory, for it to be subsumed into minor references and a page or two here and there, in what is a recognised academic reference work published by a highly respected University publisher, on the reception, legacy and content of the theology of Martin Luther.

I was so perturbed by this that I wrote a personal email to Professor Robert Kolb, one of the editors, and had a courteous and thoughtful reply, seeking to address my concerns from the standpoint of the editorial team and its decisions. I can see the Editors' point, that the issues of hard editorial choices meant that other important perspectives were also omitted; and that German reception of Luther in 1930's Germany competes with other important areas of interest for inclusion in full essay treatment; but editorial choices are inevitably powerful interpretive tools in the survey of a subject field, defining the relative importance of what is in and what is not.

I am glad too that my concerns are at least alluded to in several other essays in the collection, with pointers to further resources. But I remain perturbed – because the Holocaust is a permanent defining watershed in Jewish-Christian relations, requiring a disposition of Christian openness, repentance, self-critique and continuing reflection. Added to this, the active collaboration of prominent German Christian theologians using Luther's writings, baleful tendentious biblical eisegesis, and a theological overlay of public respectability, to give comfort, distorted credence and ideological validity to the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism, was of critical importance in creating a zeitgeist in which the Holocaust was thinkable and made possible of implementation.

Such vast tragic evil makes an essay on Luther's theology, early 20th Century Germany, and the road to the Holocaust and beyond, self-choosing in the list of essential contents in a volume on Luther's Theology. The absence of such a treatment remains for me, a matter of deep regret, in an otherwise richly resourced compendium of current scholarly perspective on Luther's theology.

9 May 2014
Who do you believe on Welfare reform? And why it matters to Christians.

Archbishop Nichols, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in England and Wales, said the welfare state was becoming "more punitive".

"I think what's happening is two things", he said.

"One is that the basic safety net, that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart. It no longer exists, and that is a real real dramatic crisis.

"And the second is that, in this context, the administration of social assistance – I am told – has become more and more punitive."

"So, if applicants don't get it right then they have to wait and they have to wait for 10 days, for two weeks – with nothing, with nothing. And that's why the role of food banks has become so crucial for so many people in Britain today.

"And for a country of our affluence that quite frankly is a disgrace."

……………………….

A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions replied by saying the previous benefits system was "trapping" the very people it was designed to help.

"Our welfare reforms will transform the lives of some of the poorest families in our communities with universal credit making three million households better off and lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty", the spokesman said.

"It's wrong to talk of removing a safety net when we're spending £94bn a year on working age benefits and the welfare system supports millions of people who are on low incomes or unemployed so they can meet their basic needs."

………………….

RANT WARNING

Well, that's all right then. No worries, no problem, everyone is ok……Not.

The word 'trapping' used by this anonymous spokesman is such a tendentious term it makes it sound as if any change has got to be better. After all, there's nothing worse than being trapped on benefits! Yes there is. Being trapped without benefits. The word trapping is shorthand for a cluster of more negative comments that have to be dressed up to make them palatable, and they range from scrounger, to cheat, to neet. And in this welfare shakeup there are those trapped in houses with an extra bedroom, and compelled to choose between paying extra rent or rent arrears, and for some forced re-housing.There are people whose health assessment for fit to work has been ludicrously unrealistic as the DWP seeks to redefine the term invalidity and disability. Indeed you could be forgiven for wondering if the DWP is trying to invalidate invalidity by a redefinition that is driven more by benefit cuts than the very human predicaments of those who are long term sick.

As for the Archbishop. Why is it that church leaders are constantly rubbished when they speak out on social justice? Where is the Archbishop in error? There are, are there not, (A David Frost rhetorical trope) more foodbanks and more people depending on them? Why is that the socially responsible politician might ask? People are having to wait 10 to 14 days for any benefit payment if they fill in the forms unsatisfactorily? Is this denied? The basic safety net has been removed for some, has it not? And the phrase universal benefit is a strange name for a benefit being increasingly constrained by criteria of entitlement, and whose administration is hardly winning the efficiency plaudits of those who audit and review the performance of Government Departments. And Mr Spokesman from DWP, of course the welfare system supports millions – that is what we pay our taxes and National Insurance for. It isn't those who are in receipt of benefits that the Archbishop was speaking about; but those who are not, or whose benefits have been reduced.

The prophet Amos is another voice to hear to place against what I can only call the comfortable complacency of that response from the DWP – is there no truth whatsoever in what the Archbishop claims? Can no improvements be made in the administration and criteria implementation, and were no mistakes made? Is advice and feedback simply to be contradicted, and in tones that are paternalistic, words that are patronising, and a statement with not a shred of hope for those discenfranchised from the welfare system that the holes in the safety net will be mended.

And the Spokesman in genuine self righteousness asks, "Holes? What holes? A net is made of holes surely?" Aye, but this Government has made the holes bigger, and bigger, the logic of which must be that mopre people will fall through. Here's Amos the Prophet and patron saint of Ranters Against the Idols of Austerity, Deficit Reduction and Finance as its own Reward:

"Establish justice in the gate" (the place where wisdom, justice and compassion are to be dispensed)

"They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the heads of the poor into the dust" – I just want to point out that Amos does not speak of the deserving poor, ever – he does speak quite a lot about the undeserving rich though, with their luxury lifestyles, obscene salaries, voracious business tactics, compassionless extravagance and culpable non awareness of the hardship and exploitation that underpins their way of life.

So Mr Spokesman, don't preach your not so good news, though the word preaching is devalued by the use of cliched feel good words like support, transform, and universal, as if these applied equally and to all. It's because they don't apply equally to all that the Archbishop said what he did.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear, before he opens his mouth as Spokesman for a status quo that is increasingly heartless.

15 February 2014
Abraham Joshua Heschel, “To pray is to become a ladder….”

Prayer is our attachment to the utmost.

Without God in sight,

we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder.

To pray is to become a ladder

on which thoughts mount to God

to join the movement towards Him

which surges unnoticed

throughout the entire universe.

We do not step out of the world when we pray,

we merely see the world in a different setting.

The self is not the hub,

but the spoke of the revolving wheel.

in prayer we shgift the center of living

from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

God is the center to which asll forces tend.

He is the source,

and we are the flowing of His force,

the ebb and flow of His tides.

A J Heschel, Man's Quest for God, (Santa fe: Auroroa Press, 1998 reprint), page 7.

In one paragraph this Jewish genius has said more about prayer, God and the relation of God to each of us, than many a volume of mystical piety, practical devotion or spiritual theology. This volume of Heschel was a recent birthday gift from someone who knows well what makes me tick. Heschel is 'a theologian who speaks the heart's poetry'; in his writings I often recognise my own inarticulate longings articulated, not so as to explain them, but perhaps to explain why longing itself is a blessing.

And just in case anyone thinks Heschel was a Jewish mystic and that we live in a world of hard edged pragmatism impatient of such mystical sorties, this photo tells it different. Marching arm in arm with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, Heschel (second from the right), thoroughly understodd the world of politics, social action and their connectedness to justice, righteousness and obedience to God. The photo is now known as "Praying with their feet". It's a civil rights Icon, and if you look at it long enough and contemplate its meaning, like all good Icons it will draw you into the truth of what God is about.

16 January 2014
Margaret Thatcher, St Francis of Assisi, Money and Social Security.

My family going back several generations were Lanarkshire miners. By the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister most of the deep mines in Scotland were either closed or closing. My children were born into a country in which we struggled with the three day week, power cuts, the oil crisis with prices going beyond what any of us thought would ever be affordable again, inflational spirals, and then the Winter of Discontent. That so apt Shakespearean phrase was filled with all the constrained but difficult to contain energy of resentment, an anger charged lightning that had to find a point of discharge.

The debate surrounding whether Margaret Thatcher ruined the country or saved it was always going to rage after her death. Indeed, rage is perhaps a word that encapsulates the emotional and visceral responses generated by the policies of successive Thatcher Governments. Either the rage and outrage of those who opposed monetarism, privatisation, the forefronting of nuclear threat, the dismantling of heavy and manufacturing industries replaced with financial and service industries, or the rage of those who thought Union power, Nationalised industry, the threat of Russia and Communism, and other social or socialist policies were forcing the country into recession or social regression.

No wonder feelings are once again raw with hatred or admiration, resentment or gratitude. It is interesting that those who speak most volubly and positively of the Thatcher legacy mostly do so from positions of power, wealth and social security – the phrase is deliberate. Note, Social Security is a positive idea, Benefit System is much less affirming and supportive of human need. I mention the point because amongst the most influential changes Margaret Thatcher brought to British politics was not only political divisiveness but a discourse and rhetoric that made a virtue of polarisation rather than negotiation, that edefaulted to compulsion over consensus, and that placed in the political lexicon the threefold No! No! No! as the term of choice when defending self-interest.

The creation and validation of greed as a social virtue, the morally naive claim that creation of wealth is not wrong (The Sermon on the Mound) and that it is the use of wealth that raise the significant ethical questions, lacked, as all political ideologies do, an adequate doctrine of hamartiology. Hamartiology is the area of theology that deals with human sinfulness, fallibility, and the creative genius of the human mind to create and worship our own idols. In recent decades the phrase structural sin has come to refer to our ability to build into social structures of power and policy, those same self-interested drives that underlie greed, dishonesty, matter of fact bottom line thinking that delibedrately leaves out the human cost because that is a subjective skewing of what needs to be an objective assessment in order to get value for money, the cheapest price, the most for the least output, cost or effort.

Successive Governments after Margaret Thatcher's fall in 1990, have built on that legacy, with a financial free for all that became financial freefall, and now an austerity programme justified by blaming others, and fuelled by that same resentment against those who benefit from our ( note, our – not the Government's) Social Security system and our ( note, OUR ) National Health Service.We still lack an Hamartiology adequate to our economic ambitions, mistakes and inhumanity.

All that said – an elderly woman has died and certain humane customs ought rightly to follow. The scale and cost was always going to be problematic, if only because of security, settling of scores, and what she herself called 'the oxygen of publicity', even more important and immediate in a culture used to surveillance, digital technology and the uniquitous hand held camera options. I hope her funeral takes place with dignity, honesty, and the proper summing up of a human life, believing as I do a truer, sterner judgement, and a more generous mercy and justice than mine, will prevail and speak the final words.

At the beginning of her Premiership, Margaret Thatcher quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, including the words "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony". Perhaps instead of taking ideological sides, or insisting that her impact on our personal life story is the decisive factor in the debate about her achievements, the whole of that prayer, in its more familiar text, should be set against her political career, her life, and her legacy.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury,pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

.

14 April 2013
“Give us this day our daily bread”,….but what about Hell – icopter Gunships….

I am preaching at a favourite place this Sunday, on The Lord will provide.

One of the fascinating debates surrounds the meaning of the word translated in the Lord's Prayer as "daily".

Give us today bread sufficient for today

or

Give us today bread sufficient to give us strength to work tomorrow for our daily bread.

In the middle of the Lord's prayer there is this crusty plain loaf, and for me that is the essence of the Lord will provide.

The hallowing of the Name, the coming of the Kingdom, forgiveness and deliverance, and at the centre – daily bread.

So what do I pray for when Syrian helicopter gunships turn their lethal weapons on safe zones and bread lines?

What do I mean when I say the Lord will provide, when news images show hungry people queuing for daily bread being used as target practice by a regime gone rabid?

I deeply believe and trust in the Lord who provides.

But I deeply believe in the Lord of justice, righteousness and mercy – and I see none of that in Syria, and countless other places.

But I believe – and because I believe I hope – but there are times when human behaviour makes me despair.

Kyrie eleison

24 August 2012