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Public libraries cost money. In fact, public libraries are expensive. No surprise then that when it comes to cutting the cost of public services our public libraries and their budgets are also up for grabs. I posted an article on Facebook this morning lamenting the loss of 900 public libraries in England and Wales in the past decade.

I introduced the link by widening the discussion beyond economics, budgets and public fund priorities. Or at least I wanted to suggest that public fund priorities, i any responsible deomcracy, have more criteria than financial savings on what they cost. The return on investment in public libraries can't simply be measured by balancing annual costs with annual footfall. If a library running at a loss provides the books that set a young Stephen Hawking asking questions, or provides internet access so that over the year hundreds of job applications have been filed online and 30 people are now in employment, how is that computed over and against cost? Or if a single parent finds some respite by their child attending story time, or a book group run by older people on a weekly basis provides friendship, human contact, mental stimulus and a few hours warmth and comfort – what price these things?

And we've hardly started talking about the importance of reading, books and ideas as the sub-soil of a healthy culture. Libraries provide resources for self-education, encourage social exchange, create space and resources for cultural stimulus, offer a public service dedicated to helping people learn, problem solve, interact, dream dreams and fund hopes. Public libraries are a recognition that knowledge should not be privatised or priced beyond the poor; they ensure a local supermarket for ideas, enabling and nurturing imagination, and if all that isn't enough, libraries are repositories of civic mutuality and social capital.

The observation that libraries close because of lack of use is, in my view, an argument based on limited data and even more limited criteria for their usefulness, value and necessity as one of our most important public institutions. Even if it is true that library footfall is down, as noted above, that is only one criterion of value, and one quite insufficient to justify widespread closure and removal of a resource vital to a community's social, intellectual and cultural life.

I'd also like to hear the views of librarians about so called 'lack of use'. Public spending priorities are themselves culturally driven, and in turn become cultural drivers. That means politics. Given that public libraries are effectively experiments in literary socialism, it would be easy to find a rationale to close or limit library resources. If a primary driver is saving public expenditure on the assumption that people should provide their own internet access, books, and other social and educational benefits libraries provide. But that is also a political standpoint.

Going back to the question of lack of use. I am aware of various reviews of footfall in libraries here in Scotland, inlcuding Aberdeen city and the Shire. These tend to be about numbers using them, not the socio-economic makeup of the number of people who still use libraries and their facilities, and for whom they are essential resources. Interestingly a couple of broadsheets had column inches devoted to the growing importance of public libraries in a time of austerity, especially for children and young people who cannot afford to buy books, or who don't have internet access.

I wonder if part of the problem is that those making the decisions to keep or close libraries neither use them nor need to use them. I hold as a matter of deep social ethics and therefore justice, the rights of people regardless of economic or social circumstance, to have access to educational resources, basic internet facilities, and sources for ideas, imagination and intellectual development. A library is so much more than premises stuffed with books; and the social importance of a public library is as a net contributor to community health, social wellbeing and intellectual resources for human development.

My own educational journey began and was given decisive impetus through the various public libraries I used and haunted in my growing up years. My love of literature, instinctive curiosity, intellectual taste and interest range are traceable to books borrowed and devoured; to reference books lifted and thumped on the desks under reading lights; to friendly knowledgeable librarians who could spot a reader a mile away. And yes these are now bygone days, and if libraries are to survive they will need to adapt the services they provide, develop the space and resources, be innovative in services and seeking new valued roles in the community. But they will do this as libraries, as repositories of learning and wisdom, as factories for ideas and dreams and hopes and strategies, as spaces where people meet and social exchange becomes part of that deep education which is at its best in the humanising context of shared interest, the pursuit of learning, the joy of reading, and as a reliable source of essential internet access for those we dare not leave behind, and that for our sakes as well as theirs.

This station of the cross is the work of Alexander Stoddart. It's a studio model, a gift to me on my retirement as Principal of the Scottish Baptist College. It now sits alongside Karl Barth's Dogmatics, and those massive volumes in Part 4 on the Doctrine of Reconciliation.

On this Good Friday I'm preaching at the ecumenical joint service in Montrose on the text of John 19.5, "Behold the man!" The image of this station will be the focal point of the various slides, hymn words, and the programme built around John's careful choice of words.

John has five different verbs for the act of seeing. The one used by Pilate is the one that requires more than a glimpse, and much more than a surface scanning. It means to gaze, to look long and hard, it implies moving from sight to insight. This sculpture helps me to do that.

The anguished weariness of Jesus; the tender grief of Mary; that empty space, deliberately void of image and meaning; except for the heap of rubbish and detritus at the foot of the cross; the partial cross-beam from one of the other crosses, reminding the viewer that Jesus was not crucified alone, but in the company of those rejected, despised and disposable. 

Behold the man, the eternal Word made historic flesh, the light and life of all that exists entering the darkness and the finality of death. In such weakness is the power of God; in such a ridiculous spectacle of a crucified king the wisdom of God; in the judicial execution of one of the small people, the exposure of the transience and ultimate failure of empire, violence and power lust. Behold the man. 

Preaching this morning on dealing with difficult people. I wrote this prayer as the conclusion to the sermon. It's based on the fruit of the Spirit.

Lord Jesus, help us to LOVE others as you have loved us.

Lord Jesus, where there is the sadness of hurt, help us to bring the JOY of laughter.

Lord Jesus, when we are provoked, may your PEACE stand guard over our hearts and minds.

Lord Jesus, when others speak hard words that hurt us, give us PATIENCE so that we don’t make things worse by speaking as we have been spoken to.

Lord Jesus, help us to find ways of showing KINDNESS to those we find it hard to love.

Lord Jesus, may our thoughts and actions spring from GOODNESS and not from self-interest.

Lord Jesus, your love never gives up on us, no matter how often we hurt you; make our love for others as FAITHFUL as your love for us.

Lord Jesus, you are gentle and lowly in heart; give us that same GENTLENESS and strength of character when we have to deal with difficult people.

Lord Jesus, by the power of your Spirit, give us SELF-CONTROL, in our words, in our thoughts and in the passions of our heart.

May the fruit of the Holy Spirit blossom, set, and ripen in our lives, through your grace and by the obedience of our faith, Amen.

Like many other Christians I am now wary of the word "Evangelical" as a descriptor. The hijack of this historic word by the Christian Right in the United States has rendered the word problematic. Historically the descriptor Evangelical was a defining term that did not set out to be exclusive. Yes, it is specific, has its own criteria both agreed and contested, but it was always within those critieria a diverse and trans-denominational movement.

The recent events in the United States did not just happen unexplained and unanticipated. They are part of a contiuum of events that began around 70 years ago in post was America, and in a society seeking new purpose, new motivations, and a renewed sense of destiny.  This book traces the history of American Evangelicalism, and the author is very aware that the geographic adjective is a major qualifier. The developments in the United States are culturally conditioned and therefore have a different history, genealogy and social context. The result is a form of Evangelicalism deeply rooted in American culture and drawing nutrition from the American worldview, including exceptionalism, hunger for cultural conquest and economic dominance.

It is a long story, and Molly Worthen is a writer who has done her research, read the history, listened to the witnesses, analysed the data, and argued her central thesis with elegance and eloquence. This is a highly readable, widely sympathetic, and unflinchingly honest account of those 70 years, and without being gratuitously unfair or partisan in her conclusions.

What is impressive about this book is the conscientious use of sources and the application of sound analysis and historical imagination in teasing out the various strands that intertwine in the history of a movement so fluid, diverse and contested. There is no caricature, even of those who might seem targets for such crude and dismissive treatment. Billy Graham and Bob Jones, Carl Henry and Charles Fuller, Cornelius Van Til and R J Rushdoony, Francis Shaeffer and Tim Lahaye, Harold Lindsell and Hal Lindsey, Jim Wallis and Al Mohler are amongst the dramatis personae in a story where the rhetoric was often that of combat and battle, threat and crisis, culture war and battle for the Bible, and polarised in sloganised opposing camps as conservative and liberal. 

The central thesis, the engine that drives this book, and which Worthen believes is the key to understanding the conflicted passions and persuasions of the protagonists, has been the crisis of authority surrounding the nature and status of the Bible. The most contested term has been inerrancy, and the stakes were set so high because the Bible was seen as a bulwark against communism, liberalised ethics, erosion of family values and latterly issues of abortion, pro-life and homosexuality. Once concede the absolute and final authority of the Bible, and the true faith was exposed to fatal compromise, doctrinal dilution and ethical relativism.

All of this Worthen chronicles with informed commentary. In doing so she explores the developments in education, seminary training, and the move towards winning control of the institutions of learning, publicity, denominational policy and mission and establishing public intellectual, ethical and theological values congruent with the political and missional aims of what has come to be known as the Christian Right. The chapter exploring the developments in the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decades of the 20th Century are particularly instructive. While Worthen does not bring her treatment up to the present time, the trajectories she traces, and the narrative flow of the story she tells, sheds considerable light on the motives and political goals of American Evangelicals and their relationship to the centres of power in Washington.

Along the way Worthen shows familiarity and a sure grasp of the implications of eschatology in the worldview and political visions of evangelical premillenial dispensationalism. She is especially sharp in observing the connections between such eschatology and responses to social issues such as poverty, oppression and systemic injustices such as slavery, racism and gender issues.   

The crisis of authority in American Evangelicalism she traces to the long battle to establish the Bible as an authority above and beyond secular reason. She points out the uncomfortable process whereby the methods of achieving this have historically relied on rational categories and the desire to show the Bible as scientifically accurate. All this while at the same time reserving for the Bible a privileged and overriding authority not only in matters of faith, but as an account of sacred history and acts of God which are in theory scientifically explicable. Lurking beneath both the surface tensions and the deep fault lines of conservative evangelicalism is the question of who controls the definition, who defines the content of evangelical belief and who therefore is the gatekeeper as to who is out and who is in.

Worthen does a great service to evangelicals who want to understand what has been going on in the American evangelical cultures of the past 70 years. This book is helpful especially to those who do not buy into the Christian Right worldview but who nevertheless would call themselves evangelicals. Inerrancy is not and has never been the universally accepted or only way of construing the final authority of the Bible. Indeed Worthen's book would have been more valuable still had it included some consideration of the varieties of interpretive approaches used by evangelicals of various hermeneutic hues. But what she has given is an authoritative account, critical but not unsympathetic, nuanced but clearly argued, and leaving her readers better informed as to how on earth in a country proud of the separation of church and state, a self-defining Christian movement has won such influence at the heart of political power.

 

I remember the first time I read the Prologue of John's Gospel, that astonishing poem about the Word. The words immediately fell into rhythms and cadences, with conceptual horizons receding in time and space to the beginning of all time and space. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made…"

A poem is an arrangement of words, each one placed with precision, redolent of meaning, cumulatively a distillation of the writer's thoughts, and feelings, perhaps even unformed intuitions struggling towards the light of meaning. Even the best poems struggle to articulate ultimacy. However, the writer of John's Gospel was after more than ultimacy, at least in earthly, human terms. He was after eternity as it intersects with creation, giving voice, or at least words, to that primordial act of bringing into being by the One whose Being is the source of all that is or ever can be. And that One has now become flesh and dwelt amongst us. No wonder John ransacked the available conceptualities trying to find words, ideas, images, human expressions to express the inexpressible.

John 1.1-14 alternates poem and prose, or at least, changes gear from images evoking wonder, eternity and cosmic drama, to narrative informing and confirming historic statements. That first reading of John's Gospel, and those first verses, remains for me as a living memory of discovering the beauty of language that has the power to transform the way we think, and how we see the world. 

Later at College, and often enough since, I have returned to those 18 verses and prayed and thought my way into and around them. They are inexhaustible yet always rewarding, beyond understanding and yet they make the startling claim that they announce the light that enlightens every single one of us that is born into this world. And glinting in the last line of the first 5 verses a verse over which I have puzzled and prayed, and pondered and persisted in study. One scholar's translation puts it thus: "And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." But I remember it from the old translation which is still the one I know by heart: "The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not".

And there it is, the ambiguity that has puzzled me all my exegetical life. Is the word that describes the failure of darkness saying it could not "overcome" or could not "comprehend", the defiance of this light. Then I find after a trawl through commentaries, and a study of the words in question, it can mean either and / or both. And that satisfies me. Not that it answers all the questions, but that it acknowledges the subtleties and complexities, the limitations and potential, of words used to describe realities beyond the capacities of human expression.

So from Christmas I've been working on a tapestry seeking to give a visual interpretation of that defiant ambiguity, the light shines, and the darkness has not overcome or comprehended it; has not defeated or understood it; the darkness hasn't a clue what to do about that patient, persistent, life-giving Word of light and love and life. Not a clue. 

Yet John's Gospel is precisely about the strategies and protocols of darkness doing its damnedest to extinguish the light of the world. Throughout the Gospel of John those who reject Jesus are rejecting the light, seeking to extinguish it by eliminating him; and throughout the Gospel Jesus is rejected by those who don't understand. To the powers of darkness the truth of a crucified God is incomprehensible; the one reality the engulfing darkness cannot subdue, overcome, comprehend, extinguish or contradict, is light.

All of this I am trying to make visual, with colour and tone, shape and symbol, an exegesis of that defiant ambiguity that is the essence of light – darkness cannot overcome or comprehend it. I hope to finish the tapestry by Easter, that great festival of Light, when the darkness and the light collided in the decisive confrontation to which John's poem bears witness; early in the morning as the sun was rising….and the darkness comprehendeth it not, and has not overcome it.  

 

The following text from Philippians 4.8 is deliberately printed here in the 1611 translation, the King James Version. Read it slowly like a prose poem about how to think and what to think

Finally, brethren,

whatsoever things are true,

   whatsoever things are honest,

      whatsoever things are just,

         whatsoever things are pure,

            whatsoever things are lovely,

               whatsoever things are of good report;

         if there be any virtue,

      and if there be any praise,

   think on these things.

Now ask yourself. What would change in our public discourse, our political exchanges, our preferred vocabularyin discussion and argument, or in our use of language on social media, if these criteria applied to our way of thinking, and our way of viewing the world and seeing and responding to other people?

Here's a fact that may now surprise us all. The Latin form of those words is chiselled into the stone in the entrance hall of the old BBC headquarters. (See photo below) If these were intended as criteria for content and overall policy, they were always going to be an ideal beyond fulfilment, a wish list destined to disappoint. And there are compelling reasons why they would fail. They set standards so high they would be unattainable given the way the world is. We live in a world where bad news dominates the news platforms because bad news has become the actual reality of some people's lives when it goes wrong, and bad news is the virtual reality of the rest of us sucked into the vicarious pain and borrowed brokenness of the people in the stories we consume. Further, that relentless flow of bad news sustains levels of anxiety and uncertainty that have an overall impact on how those of us who consume the news view the world, conceive of threats, and seek security in whatever political and economic structures might seem to offer the more credible protections. So the high ideals of justice, truth, honesty and the rest as the quality controllers of what is aired are already and always under huge cognitive and emotional pressure.

Then add this. The huge diversity of sources for news and comment, perspectives and prejudices, information and misinformation, means that the authority of any one source is questioned and contradicted by other sources. The result is a Babel of voices, a supermarket of opinions and standpoints from which the consumer chooses. The subject matter of the news is selected, edited and scripted from a world of stories, mostly of life gone wrong for others, often far away, and not us. Whether war in Syria, terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other planetary events that destroy and desolate human communities; whether organised crime, economic oppression as slavery, human trafficking, systems of economics that exacerbate poverty in a globalised world; or again, the use and abuse of technology so that breaches in cyber security are now a risk to national security, a threat to democratic processes, are capable of undermining global business integrity, or they adversely affect confidence in financial data and transactions. Any combination of these stories is told from one perspective or another, edited and presented and shaped by the assumptions and presuppositions of those who choose and tell the narratives. Again, what of truth, honesty, justice, loveliness and good report?

To go back to the text. Those words on BBC House are the ideals of an institution formed to report with informed authority on the events of the day. That was Lord Reith's vision. The world of human affairs has been spectacularly unco-operative with words like true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report. And yet. Those words are from an Apostle who knew his Greek moral philosophy, and was steeped in the ethics of the Hebrew Prophets. For millenia human thought, behaviour, values and character has been a central concern in the formation and sustaining of human community and culture, and therefore also values that historically have been held to quality-control rhetoric, discourse and debate. Ask any citizen of the 1st Century Greco-Roman world about the values that are foundational in a civilised culture and they would have naturally spoken of truth, justice, goodness, beauty. These values were expected to govern words and thoughts, actions and social attitudes, and therefore the instilling of such values was a large part of education and learning in the wisdom that sustains the good life. 

What I find interesting about Paul's words, and their permanent inscription on a public broadcasting organisation, is that these words are about mindset. "Think on these things". Whatever words we use are to come from a mind open to truth, committed to honesty, insisting on justice, unembarrassed by purity, admiring of loveliness, and careful of goodness. In the harsh world of news broadcasting, entertainment production, and documentary reflection on the real world, those seem impossible ideals, ludicrous criteria, a strategy for saccharine sweetness and solipsistic sentiment.

All of the above reflections, admittedly pessimistic but I hope not cynical, are prompted by the text I'm preaching on this Sunday; Philippians 4.8-9, as written above. They will be explored with an ordinary congregation of folk whose lives are all entangled in the world as it is, and the world as it's portrayed on TV, online and on social media. And yes, Paul's words are for Christian individuals and Christian communities, and not for massive news organisations, even if one of them hijacks Paul's words as its earliest mission statement. It's a gift of a text if all I want to do is moralise, tell people to be nice, to think good thoughts and aim at a life of undisturbed peaceableness.

On the other hand it is a text that calls in question much that is now normalised in the speech, discourse and rhetoric of 21st Century global politics, economics and the deeper forms of human and cultural exchange. To preach on this text means taking seriously the way we speak and listen to others. It also means interrogating the lenses and filters that colour and may well distort the way we view the world and hear and see the other. Human discourse is the making audible of thought, it is in effect speaking our mind. Aa destabilised Peter was reminded within earshot of the Lord he had denied, "Your speech betrays you!". It's a searching, searing question; what kind of mind is exposed to public view and hearing through the words we speak? As an old preacher once said in one of the first sermons I ever heard, "It's not what you think you are, it's what you think, you are." The comma is of decisive hermeneutical importance.

The sermon isn't finished. Had I been content to moralise it would be done and dusted. But this text is not so easily domesticated. It cannot be confined to the personal and individual as if those 'whatsoevers' were merely about being nice to each other. Yes, to be sure, Paul's whatsoever imperatives have decisive purchase on the Christian mind and conscience. And yes, his words are addressed to you plural, so to Christian communities as witnesses to truth, justice and loveliness. But that witness will require, demand, resistance to all that is untrue, dishonest, unjust, impure, unlovely and disreputable. And that is a political imperative, a requirement that Christian thinking and speaking intentionally invade the polis, patiently pervade the human city, slowly soak into the cultural community. The Gospel of reconciliation, peace, love, truth and justice is to be thought and re-thought, spoken and repeated, lived and performed. And as Paul says at the end of his litany of community health, "…think on these things, and the God of peace will be with you."  

   

 

 

 

I used this poem in the service this morning, exploring "Give us this day our daily bread", and reflecting on the politics of bread and the politics of prayer. There were tears in church.

 

I know what it’s like to use the same teabag twice
To cut the mould from the bread, to rescue a slice
I didn’t ever think I would be in such a mess
While working full-time for a living, while suffering from illness and stress

I choose to work to pay my own way
But have no spare money at the end of the day
The cupboards and fridge are empty what else can I do?
Throwing my three elderly pets on the street?- It just wouldn’t do.

I don’t have a partner for support, the children have grown and left home
No luxuries do I have that I can call my own
I do not have a plasma screen TV
No tumble drier here for me
No plush leather sofa or latest mobile phone, no holiday do I take or house do I own

So swallow my pride I know I must do
So I visited the foodbank who welcomed me within
As I wiped the tears from my face rolling down my chin,
Foodbank volunteers greeted me with a smile, sat me down with a cup of tea

I began to chat and told of my dismay
At finding myself at the foodbank today
Not a penny in my purse that I could offer to pay
“What more could I say?”
“It’s alright”, the lady said as I was handed a tissue
Don’t look at being here as such an issue
So privileged and grateful I felt as I was provided with food- as if heaven sent

To have food on the table this cold winter’s day
Is very much appreciated I’m humbled to say
Foodbank, I thank you for helping me today