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Misty morning above Braemar,
a softer light,
a deeper silence,
a sense of roots at home in peat and soil,
made moist by clouds that touch the earth,
with countless benedictions.

It’s an ancient humane and humanising custom. It’s an art form that takes practice, skill and interpersonal generosity. It’s a way of behaving that makes the world a safer place. It’s a gentle process of dismantling walls and building bridges. It’s an act of trust that engenders more trust, in a widening circle of friendship. It’s called hospitality.

There is a lovely Greek word which translates as hospitality. It is philoxenia. It means to love (philo) the stranger (xenia), and is used about open doors and prepared guest rooms. It is one of the identifiable practices of a Christian community. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Heb. 13.2)

At the University we have just finished a week long Summer School on the theme of “Living Faithfully in a World of Division and Despair.” We looked at Friendship, Belonging, Reconciliation, and Hospitality. These are four of the supporting pillars of a healthy society; and they are under threat in contemporary Britain.

When Theresa May was Home Secretary she boasted that her aim was, and I quote, “to create a hostile environment for migrants.” As Prime Minister she has continued to use such language, and wittingly or unwittingly, has given support and ammunition to tabloid racism and xenophobia. People who have made their homes in this country for years, in some cases decades, are increasingly feeling unwanted, threatened by a Home Office overseeing increasingly complex immigration processes, changing rules, and shifting goalposts.

Christian communities worship one who had nowhere to lay his head; Jesus was a child refugee; his ministry was amongst the dispossessed, vulnerable, marginalised and poor. Christians hold firmly to two central equalising truths; every person is made in the image of God, and has an inherent worth and dignity; and every person is one for whom Christ died, and is our neighbour, to be loved as ourselves.

And yes, I know that the world of politics requires realism, rules and structures that enable peaceful co-existence and just processes. But here’s the thing. This country used to be known for its “philoxenia”, its welcome of the stranger. Now we are becoming known as a country gripped by "xenophobia". Hospitality creates a benevolent environment for the stranger. For the Home Office to embed the notion of "hostile environment" in its policies and public discourse is to institutionalise xenophobia. My prayer for our political leaders of all parties is for a return of philoxenia, hospitality, as our default position towards those who come to us as strangers, seeking friendship.  

My two previous posts about the Nectar Card provide the context for what follows. Very briefly, I previously explored the issues around the linkage of the Nectar Card with promotion of the Daily Mail, especially for those whose values, practices and lifestyle are shaped by a commitment to following Jesus Christ. In the absence of a clear course of action, or effective protest, and recognising that all of our economic relationships are compromised, interconnected, often anonymous and constantly changing, what can a Christian do? We can think Christianly, and pray faithfully and prophetically. We can insist on looking at the world as those whose ultimate loyalty is to God, not the market, not the powers and the powerful, and not the values that endorse the economic disparities and cultural imperatives of the way the world is today.

But is the more? I haven't found the answer to the dilemma of the Nectar Card and the Daily Mail. What started out as an exercise in clarification hasn't delivered the desired security of knowing what to do. But it has compelled me to ask, in the absence of a list of practical actions, what else does Christian faith bring to the way I look on, live in, and care for the world?

The following 8 Considerations are not exhaustive, but they are demanding, and arise out of the theological depths of the Christian gospel. Living as we do in the grey complexities of a culture of flux, fluidity and increasing polarisations, these 8 Considerations act as points of re-orientation, permanent markers for people of The Way. What matters most? What makes our lives count? Where are the resources to help with the journey? Where is hope to be found? Lacking clear answers to troubling questions, is there a wisdom on which we can stand, and that will bear our weight?

So the result of thinking about what makes me uncomfortable and sad about finding myself inadvertently promoting the Daily Mail,is a list of 8 Considerations. I place these over and against the broken complexity of globalised trade and economic inequality. I take them as first principles of a Christian mindset, and as a composite of correctives to the seductions of a culture in which everything is a commodity, everyone is a consumer, and everywhere part of the market. 

So here they are,

Eight Considerations foir Christian Disciples.

Consider the Kingdom of God: when it comes to power, disciples of Jesus believe in a Kingdom where the Lamb is on the throne. In the community of Christ's followers, as signs of the Kingdom of God, bread is broken and shared, wine is poured and sacrifice remembered.

Consider Reconciliation: The God revealed in Jesus reconciled all things to himself, making peace by the blood of the cross. He has given to his followers the ministry of reconciliation. We are therefore ambassadors of Christ in the service of the Cross.

Consider Resurrection: God raised Jesus from the dead and therefore death is defeated by life, hate is overcome by love, violence is outmaneouvred by peace, despair contradicted by hope, oppression conquered by freedom, and the status quo given notice of final transformation.

Consider Grace: The God of grace saves and regenerates human existence into the new creation. Saved by grace we are called to live by the grace of God, as people of the gift, as forgiven forgivers, as reconciled reconcilers, as generous beneficiaries, who love because God first loved us.

Consider the Holy Spirit: God is Light, Truth and Love, actively present in all of creation, in the Church, and in the people of God. The Spirit of Truth leads us into truth, to know Jesus deeply and to live as the Body of Christ faithfully; the Spirit produces the fruit of our renewed humanity in Christ, pouring the love of God into our hearts, gurgling up as living water irrigating the life we live.

Consider Love and Compassion: God is love, therefore those who love God are constrained by the love of Christ to love others. Love is a practice, a habit of the heart, expressed in redemptive gestures, determined in peacemaking patience, imagining just initiatives, and kenotic in spirit and sacrifice. 

Consider Prayer: God is personal, relational, and faithful. Prayer is the environment within which foundational trust grows and is tested. In a broken world prayer is prophetic practice and imaginative hope. Intercession is to join our prayers of longing, and tears of sadness, to the eternal longing love of the Triune God, self-given for the redeeming and renewing of creation.

Consider Worship: To worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is to render all other claims relative, penultimate and provisional. Praise and thanksgiving subdue the urge to possess; confession and penitence are incompatible with power and dominance; intercession places others in the centre and is a voluntary displacing of the ego, the self, me. 

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things. Philippians 4

The previous post outlined the problems Christians face when trying to shop ethically, and bear witness to the love of God in Christ. What is the source of the sadness we feel when faced with a situation we are unhappy about but unsure how to bring about change? Is that sadness a sign of resignation? Or does it signal a mind, conscience and will refusing to shrug the shoulders and just accept it's the way the world is? 

And so we come to the unholy trinity of Sainsbury's, Nectar and the Daily Mail. Nectar is a loyalty points system, in reality a form of low grade bribery aimed at retaining customers and encouraging spending. But what happens when my higher loyalty as a Christian leads me to believe certain things about the world, human beings and how we are to live in a community of neighbours?

The command "Love your neighbour as yourself" is not an add on, a menu option on the "What kind of disciple do you want to be?" choice list. There is only one kind of disciple and there is only one menu choice, "Do I follow Jesus or not?" You answer Yes not by placing your cross, but by picking it up and following Jesus. That ultimate loyalty renders all other future options, choices and loyalties penultimate.

So, what to do about being a Sainsbury customer, a Nectar card holder, and a person committed to a life of loyalty to the God revealed in Jesus, who discovers that my customer loyalty is contributing to the commercial viability of a tabloid newspaper virulently and scathingly dismissive of the very concept of loving our neighbours as ourselves? My friend talks of a grey area, and she is not wrong. Should I just stop shopping at Sanisbury's till they change this promotional link? But then, why penalise local employees of Sainsbury's, who are my near neighbours, at least relative to a globalised world of distances that are geographical, cultural and economic? They didn't choose, weren't consulted, took no part in the decision to make the link with the Daily Mail. Protesting by witholding our custom if it were widespread and effective in reducing footfall and turnover might force a change of mind; or it may not.  But if it did, it might have the unintended consequence of putting at risk the jobs and liveliehoods of the ordinary folk who work for the big guys.

The intricacies and inter-connections of business with business, company with company, combined with multi-faceted corporate combinations, complex financial linkages, and densely concentrated centres of decision-making, creates a problem of identifying just who it is we are unhappy with, and what we can do about it anyway. That convoluted sentence is infant level simple, compared to the fankled spaghetti interweave of a globalised economy run by mazes of corporate alliances.

So what to do with this sadness that the world is sometimes too complicated to fix, and and how to resolve ethical dilemmas too complex for there to be an easy protest, or effective pressure. I can ask to speak with the manager of the local store and try to explain. I could take my Nectar card elsewhere. I could stop using it altogether. But how do I know anyway what morally dubious partnerships lurk behind all the other companies I would then buy from and deal with. I studied Jean Paul Sartre's play Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) at university 45 years ago. Its central premise is the impossibility of ever being sure we act with pure motives, or act with clean hands. Our best actions are inevitably soiled by mixed motive, marred by unintended consequences, distorted by lurking selfishness, infected by unacknowledged jealousies, malice or mere complacency.

In Christian theology such moral complicity in the wrongness of the world requires a robust doctrine of sin. The reality of structural sin, damaging fault lines of ruthless self interest, powerful dehumanising systems and processes built into our institutions and ways of trading; personal sinfulness which we acknowledge every time we feel shame, guilt and remorse, but which is a recurring reality of frustrated intentions and hopes; and in both our social structures and our inner climate, always the pervasive bias in human experience towards the self, the inescapable first person I, me, my and mine, out of which come those tragic choices and harmful decisions that frustrate the intention to love God and neighbour. 

Sounds as if I've argued myself into a corner. If the world is such an intractable mess, we can't help it. Is that it? If sin is a built in component of everything we touch and build and cherish as human beings, how can we ever be sure any of our actions are just and right, and make for peace and are born of love and mercy? Recall the prayer embedded in Fosdick's great hymn:

Save us from weak resignation
To the evils we deplore
Let the search for Thy salvation
Be our glory ever more
Grant us wisdom
Grant us courage
Serving Thee whom we adore

Which brings us back to the deeper reality of Jesus, and his call that we "take up our cross daily". That call, and the grace that enables and empowers it, is much more real than sin, much more vital than all our self-destructive tendencies.So I want to finish these reflections, not with mere practical proposals so that I can feel good about having done something, as if gestures were enough, or all that can be done. Not that gestures, especially redemptive gestures are unimportant.

Instead, in the final part of these reflections I will share several "Considerations" for those of us who are trying to faithfully follow after Jesus. These Considerations are not answers, practical fixes, or even redemptive gestures. They are an alternative way of looking at a world in which as a Christian I believe certain things to be true about God, the world, human life and community, and what funds and resources hope, neighbourliness and human flourishing.

Part One: Living Wittily in an Interconnected World of Grey Areas.

Social media is buzzing, at least amongst ethical shoppers, about the announced linkage between Sainsbury's, Nectar Card and The Daily Mail. Part of the consternation and ethical uneasiness is that many who shop at Sainsbury's, myself included, are happy to do business with them, but very unhappy for that link to be pulled into sponsorship of a tabloid newspaper we oppose for its racism, sexism and blatant pervasive prejudices in its reporting.  

When this was reported one of my Facebook friends posted it on her Facebook page, saying she was horrified not only at this development, but the rationale of Sainsbury's in entertaining such an explicit link at all with the Daily Mail. I commented on her post, offering what I thought might be the rationale. The following string developed between myself and another friend who knows a lot about the inside mechanisms and commercial and ethical complexities of large companies doing business with each other.

The following is a verbatim account of our interaction. Follow it through and I'll then attempt some reflection on the unwelcome moral realities that frustrate our intentional support of just practices and ethical standards in market and media.  

ME   As a marketing ploy it only works if there are a lot of Daily Mail readers, which is also worrying. And an encouragement to non Mail readers to become Mail readers and swallow their toxins in lethal doses. The rationale of greed is almost an oxymoron, as greed is unthinking and rationale presupposes that reason is in gear.

Friend   I'm not a Mail reader… surprised? Lol. Aren't Sainsburys, the Mail, Argos, and many others, not just member companies of the third party loyalty scheme provider Nectar? Oxfam is also a member

ME   You're right – but it disnae help reduce my concern at the linkage between companies I trade with and the Daily Mail. It does however make it harder to protest with any consistency or confidence.

Friend    It's that world of grey that we live in. I have withdrawn support for plenty of other things, but in a world that is not transparent, not black and white, and with so much outsourcing and company mergers, this is becoming increasingly tricky. Almost always it's the people at a local level who suffer through job losses when demand drops, far removed from the disconnected decision-makers. That makes me sad.

ME   Yes, so I wonder what we do with that powerful conscience-funded sadness at an obvious injustice and an elusive perpetrator? That I think is an important theological and ethical question – how to harness sadness at injustice, to pull us towards actions aimed at life improvement for those caught up in unjust machinations.

Where to start from, in seeking a creative conduit for that moral energy we experience as sadness of conscience, an unease of both mind and heart, an inner dissonance caused by our moral values requiring of us some active response? There is an imperative to do something, but what, and to whom. The problem arises every time we encounter the realities of an interconnected world where those we do business with are implicated with other businesses whose stock in trade and very different values we deplore?

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting."

That sense of wonder glowing across the fields, the awareness that in such beauty lies harvest that nourishes, the miracle of seeds that promise the future, bounty that can be shared, and the cherishing of the hallowed grain from which comes the daily bread for which we daily pray; all this and more embedded in those waves of undulating gold that is a harvest field awaiting the blade.

Thomas Traherne is not so well known as other poets of his age, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Herrick. He is, however, one of the genuinely Metaphysical Poets even if his work was discovered only two centuries later; and he also happens to be a devotional poet of considerable lyricism and spiritual passion. The bounty and mercy of the Creator, beauty as a hallmark of Creation, every human made in the image of God, love as the fundamental reality of God and the fundamental requirement for human happiness, felicity, hopefulness and a celebratory disposition, these are only some of the primary supports of Traherne's spirituality.

The above quotation comes from his Centuries of Meditation. It is anthologised and lends itself to those more superficial social media memes in its positivity, quirkiness and appeal to the emotions rather than the mind. But it would be a mistake to think Traherne was an unthinking enthusiast or unreflective impressionist, reducible to such fluffy fridge magnet word bytes. The same Traherne warned, "As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well."

At the same time Traherne would have challenged the cerebral, cognitive, scintific mindset that seeks to reduce nature to human control through knowledge, technology and mechanics. Thinking well may include creative insight, experiment and exploration of the natural world of physics, biology and other sciences. But it is what is done with that thinking, to what ends such knowledge is applied, and for what purpose and profit, that makes such thinking creative, constructive and ultimately for human flourishing. For the strongest purpose and the most enduring profit is to know ourselves gifted with a superabundant world, prolific in gift, fecund with life and possibility, replete with fruitfulness and regularly replenished from that infinite source of love and mercy from which it was first created.

"Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory."

Every time I look at harvest fields I think of Traherne; not just his most anthologised words about orient corn. But the luxuriant imagery and childlike wonder of one who looks on this world and sees the promise of the Kingdom of God, the new creation prefigured in the beauty, fruitfulness, providence and vergant diversity of harvest awaiting its fulfilment in the human blessing of food, enough food. His poems and Meditations are a summons to pay attention, to revel in what is around, above and beneath us.

"The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God."

So whatever we make of Traherne's poetry, and some of it can taste like fortified Muscat, there is significant wisdom in his cajoling and persuading, describing and evoking, on behalf of a world awaiting our attention and our gratitude, our appreciation and our wonder. And then perhaps gratitude and wonder will lead to that deeper response of worship which may be defined in Traherne's terms as wondering thankfulness to the Creator. 

18.2  "The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold."

The Bass Rock dominates the Firth of Forth. When it comes to rocks, there aren't many in Scotland that out rock the Bass Rock.

I happened to be at Pittenweem for the Arts Festival a week ago, and in the evening the sun fell on the rock. Sunday before I had preached on Psalm 18.2, and other Psalms where the rock metaphor is used to say something about God.

Like every poet of substance, the Psalmists knew their metaphors. Our lazy idiomatic question, "What are you like?", used when surprised by what someone says or does, is asked from the same instinct for insight, comparisons that make the truth more accessible because more familiar.

So the Psalmist poets ask "God, what are you like?" And in Scottish idiom they answer, "Like the Bass Rock!"

In the luminous softness of evening sunlight the Bass Rock is there, massively there.

In the grey gloom of a Scottish late winter afternoon, the Bass Rock is there, loomingly there.

In the chilling, marble-black midnights of January, the Bass Rock is there, invisible but there..

When the seas are rippled blue, undulating mirrors reflecting the blue of the sky, the Bass Rock is there.

When the seas are obscured by freezing fog and low clouds of battleship grey, the bass Rock is there.

When the seas surge with storm force fury and pulsating frustration, bent on destruction, the Bass Rock is there.

The Bass rock is there, massively and unmovingly, predictably and protectively, solidly and silently, there. Its thereness does not depend on our sight, is not threatened by climate nor toppled by waves. 

What is God like? The Bass Rock, always there. Whether our inner climate is sunny or gloomy or besieged by storm force waves, there, always there.

Of course metaphors work through imagination, as image is made to live in the mind, pointing to those deeper realities which surround and support the life of faith. So a verse and a photograph do what within their limits they do best; help us to imagine, recover trust and renew hope in that alternative reality in which, whatever life is or is becoming, God is there. Like the Bass Rock, massively, immovably there.

If there existed only a single sense for the words of scripture,

then the first commentator who came along would discover it,

and other hearers would experience neither the labour of searching,

nor the joy of finding. (Ephrem the Syrian)

I came across these wise words and it made me think of how I read the Bible for myself. Which took me back to my first serious encounter with this ancient library of diverse, challenging, comforting, problematic, perplexing and sometimes overwhelming texts. After reading the Bible for myself for fifty years, Ephrem seems to be saying something now entirely obvious to me; reading  the Bible demands the labour of searching and offers the joy of finding.

All my grown up life I have read the Bible; well, since my conversion when I was 16. It was as Karl Barth called one of his best essays, "the strange new world of the Bible". The first Bible I owned was a gift from mum and dad, relieved I'd found a more creative focus for life than my increasingly troubled teenage experiments with the boundaries of law and social responsibility. A black leather Bible with a zip – at the time it went with the black leather jerkin with the zip! I read and marked that bible with a red Bic pen with underlinings, and a quickly developed symbol code for the bits I wanted to remember and find again. Nothing sophisticated, but useful markers to catch the eye. 

Soon the pages were annotated, some chapters memorised, and gradually over a few years an inner language evolved that borrowed heavily from remembered reading. The parts of the Bible I know from memory, and the verses and phrases and vocabulary of my theology, these are still heavily dependent on the investments and capital of those years of reading, marking, thinking and praying. I still quote from memory in the Revised Standard Version, which remains my preferred translation for personal use.

University and College was a time of stretched horizons and deepened reading. Studying closely the text of Deuteronomy, and Galatians, and then the Gospel of John was an initiation into a new kind of reading. The slightly scary word hermeneutics became important. And I discovered that when people read the Bible they come to very different conclusions about what it means, how it is to be understood, and applied as a text intended to transform as well as inform.  This was all part of the labour of searching that Ephrem expected of any serious reader; also, and often there was the joy of finding.

Over the decades since, the Bible has never been off my desk. Theories of hermeneutics have come and gone, each more or less helpful. Exegetical approaches are so numerous, and change with such rapidity, some transient and faddish, some valuable even essential presuppositions in responsible Bible interpretation. The labour of searching goes on, and it would be true to say I interpret many scripture books and passages, chapters and verses differently. The search for the single sense of scripture, the elusive 'real' or 'right' or 'sound' interpretation is as Ephrem hints, an act of imposition, an attempt to control the text, reduce the range and richness of a text that cannot be fixed by our hermeneutical preferences and exegetical limiters. 

In the labour of searching and the joy of finding we are answering the Christian imperative to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest these words of Scripture. They are bread for the journey, light and lamp for the feet, water for the thirsty, testimony that fuels and ignites and sustains our faith.

As a minister I preach scripture, and am a steward of the mysteries of God. Responsible interpretation, thoughtful reflection, careful and compassionate application to life are each required when handling words that are freighted with truth claims that have existential impact on the lives of those who read them, hear them and seek to live with them and within them. But that is neither more nor less than the responsibility of every reader of the Bible, for whom Bible reading is integral to discipleship, crucial for the health of mind and soul as these are presented as a living sacrifice to God. The transforming of the mind, and the shaping of character and way of life, take place in that slow process of laborious search and joyful discovery. Ephrem may have been alluding to Jesus' parable about the man who was ploughing a field when he heard the clunk of a treasure box being struck by the blade. Reading the Bible is an act of cultivation, breaking up fallow ground, creating tilth in which seeds propagate, grow and fruit.

It shouldn't have taken a 4th Century Syrian deacon-theologian to remind me – but I'm glad he did. 

For a few days I have been contemplating some of the verses in the Psalms that use the rock metaphor. What is God like? Ask the Psalmist poet that question and there's a rich cluster of metaphors scattered throughout that remarkable collection of praise and lament, thanksgiving and complaint, exultation and despair, joy and sorrow, trust and fear, peace and terror, prayer and soliloquy, that we call the Book of Psalms.

One of those metaphors "God is my rock" occurs 28 times. Variously translated rock, cliff, crag, it is an image of permanence, of that which has always been present, of solid 'thereness' whatever the weather prevailing in our inner climate. So I preached on that metaphor this morning. And in my reflection and exposition, which was more exploration than explanation, I used one of Denise Levertov's poems, which displays a sure-footedness as impressive as any mountain goat leaping confidently across the rocks, crags and cliff faces. Here's the poem:

"Suspended".
I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted.

For all the confidence inspired by that metaphor, "You are my rock", for many people of faith, life still has periods of vulnerability, times of brokenness, and inner struggle, sometimes prolonged, that comes from not being able to feel, and experience the reality to which the metaphor points. Levertov's own faith journey, and her life experiences of hurt and loss, of illness and anxiety are the human loam out of which poems like this grow. She knows those feelings we often find it hard to acknowledge, and harder still to name.

Just when we need God most it doesn't feel as if God hears the cry of the heart, or comforts our anxiety-driven longings, or changes the circumstances that threaten to overwhelm. The absence, silence and 'not thereness' of God is sometimes a compelling contradiction of our trust and faith and hope. I know of no poem that articulates better this ambiguity touched by trust, or which gives testimony with such honest hopefulness laced with threads of uncertainty. It is a succinct credo of gentle defiance. Those last four words, "I have not plummeted", carry the precious freight of spiritual wisdom borne out of suffering, and survival, and gratitude for both.

And maybe, just maybe, David's use of the image sometimes betrays his own need not only to state his confidence, but to overstate it in cumulative images, as if to persuade his own heart that it is so. Is that what he is doing in Psalm 18.2? "The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold."

There is practical sense and theological wisdom in spitting words of faith and hope into the very wind of adversity. The man who wrote those words, assuming for the moment it was David, had scars of body and psyche, from being hounded and hunted by Saul, and escaping only by accidents of history and coincidences of circumstance; except for the poet psalmist, such accidents and coincidences had their origin not in chance and fortune, but in that mysterious purposefulness that intervenes when we least expect it. And the result is, for all the crisis and threat of life itself, "You are my rock…I have not plummeted."