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Walter Brueggemann – still subverting cosy Christian worldviews

You know how enthusiasts for one author or another say that each publication by their favoured writer is an "event"?

And you know how we all nod sceptically, roll the metaphorical eyes and forgive the enthusiasm but wish for some balanced realism?

Well it wouldn't be true to say every book Walter Brueggemann publishes is an "event". Some are slim, some are derivative of earlier work, and maybe he just publishes too much.

Or maybe not.

In any case this collection of essays and lectures does, at least for enthusiasts of Brueggemann's theological adventurousness, deserve "event" status. It is a hardback at £12.99 which is the least significant reason for buying it. It touches major areas of theological importance for Christian thinkers grappling with the implications for a fixed shape church, of a liquid world, and the cost and consequences of ignoring a culture that is rapidly transforming and transformative of human behaviours, perceptions and life goals. It is written with the usual startling originality of verbal juxtaposition - I use the clumsy term deliberately because there are few writers who so cleverly and persuasively write to undermine familiarity and subvert cosy worldviews long held in the cherished corners of our allegedly Christian pieties.

The book comes at the right time. Lent is nearly upon us – and rather than grovel around in the scary recesses of our own guilty and self-pre-occupied souls, here's a book that will dare us to look out, not in; to think of the other, not me; to listen for the strange voice of God rather than the familiar voice of our favourite devotional writers; to sing new and upsetting songs rather than the songs of our imagined Zion to which we are blithely marching; and to pay attention to the pain and hopes of the oppressed and vulnerable rather than worry about the prospects for the church in a postmodern culture which long ago stopped taking the church seriously as a cultural, intellectual or spiritual rival worth taking on.

And if all that sounds like a rant, it probably is. But I am no longer persuaded by the strident calls to do this and that; nor attracted to emotional, personal, individual apprehensions of spirituality, even when communally pursued and practiced. I am much more persuaded by, attracted to, a spirituality that is astringent, alert to the church's self-concern, critical of the cultural status quo (Brueggemann calls it the capitalist, consuymerist hegemony of empire!), and ready to listen to new ways of serving and following faithfully after Jesus come hell or high water. And the gates of hell shall not prevail – you will notice that I decline to capitalise hell – it has no ultimacy.

The Body of Christ in the world is a subversive community daring to embody a Gospel of reconciliation. We are people gathered beneath the cross but with our faces turned towards the dawn and that displaced stone, discarded shroud and defeated grave, – these are the realities for the church, by which we live, and by which we take on both the hell and the high water. And the last people who should be afraid of high water are baptised Christians, who through immersion declare the resurrection; and the last peopel to fear hell are those who have the nerve to call Jesus Lord, and in doing so hold their nerve in the face of whatever. I've no idea where the church is now going – how and in what shape it will survive in such a messy, mashed up, scintillatingly unpredictable world with its polarities and similarities, its paradoxes and possibilities. But wherever it's going – John 3.16 remains a defining statement of its destiny – it is a God-loved world, and the business of the church is to go on arguing that – by the way we live in faithfully following Jesus.

14 February 2011
Many a truth is told in gaffe

Driving south around 7.45 and listening to radio 4.

Big discussion about the the Big Society idea.

Seems it might be in trouble as a major plank in the social platform.

David Cameron to speak about it today to rescue the credibility of the idea.

Enter Radio 4 Presenter and I quote:

"David Cameron will nail his colours to the mask."

Just a slip – but then……..

14 February 2011
Vincent Van Gogh – painting fragility

Been looking again at this painting by Vincent. I have a magnetic bookmark that I use all the time that has the butterflies detail. One of Van Gogh's final paintings, it shows two beautiful life forms which are transient, fragile and lovely. But I guess it's a sad painting, or at least one that hints at the sadness and poignancy of an artist who could paint life and death, joy and sadness, sunlight and shadow with immense power and humane sympathy. Amongst my life ambitions is a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Someone asked me recently my favourite song – too hard a question, too many songs, and my own knowledge is limited by the usual prejudices, opportunities and interests. But somewhere amongst the ones I've listened to most is Don Maclean's version of Starry Night. The tragedy and the triumph of Vincent are captured in simple lyrics, sung with minimal accompaniment, and a resonant sympathy with this most emotionally complex artist. Oh, and the best episode of Dr Who I've ever watched was the one about Vincent being brought to the present to hear the admiration of the greatest art critics and see the public queue to see his work.

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless head on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.
Like the strangers that you've met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will…

12 February 2011
Tired of giving in – Rosa Parks and a new missiological disposition?

Amongst the most remarkable and inspiring people who show us the ways of righteousness is Rosa Parks. I came across her name again in parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach. The people who matter in a community are those who embody, enact and embrace their convictions, and in the demonstration of a life lived well, wisely and with disturbing courage affirm their identity and integrity. So when she sat in the whites-only section of that bus over 50 years ago, Rosa Parks asserted her humanity, affirmed her identity and confirmed her integrity. Not by words, but by an action that declared "her heart's knowledge of her own humanity". Why on that day did she sit there and refuse to move?

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually wasat the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of meas being old then. I was forty two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in"

Tired of giving in. Weary of wearing the weight of the status quo. Exhausted by the tedium and tyrranny of laws formed by imprisoned minds, intended to imprison the minds and hearts of others. By the simple act of sitting, Rosa Parks defied an entire mindset, challenged a racist worldview, embodied a protest against inhumanity by placing her human body in the way of harm and witnessing to the value, dignity and equality of each human being.

Now it would be easy enough to identify in our time those social practices and political policies, those economic decisions and legal impositions that diminish, devalue and demonise others. But instead of doing that simply the question, what have we too long given in to? Put up with? Culpably tolerated? Too easily accepted? And will we reach the stage where we are tired of giving in to institutional and unchallenged injuistice? What is our equivalent of sitting in the wrong place in the segregated bus? That I think might be a missiological question, and one the churches of Jesus Christ could do worse than address – and then find the place where we are called to sit.

10 February 2011
Intercessions for Egypt and peace in the Middle East

The following prayer was written and offered at worship where I was preaching this morning. Members of the congregation have friends and work colleagues currently living in Cairo.

Prayer for Egypt

Creator God, by whose love everything exists,

Gracious God by whose mercy we live and move and have our being,

God of Israel, Egypt and the nations,

Hear our prayers for our troubled world.

For two weeks we have watched events in Cairo,

Watching thousands of people crying out for change,

Faces anxious, angry, pleading for support;

faces bruised and bleeding,

voices crying out their aspirations for freedom,

their hunger for a more just society,

Some words are too easily take for granted,

living in the relative security of this country –

Justice, freedom, peace, safety;

and there are those experiences that demonstrate

the dangers of their opposites –

injustice, oppression, conflict, violence.

Lord in your world, amongst the nations,

Let justice roll down like waters,

And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Sung Response

From dark despair to hope,

   from fear to trust in God,

from hate to love, from war to peace,

   still lead us on dear Lord.

…

Creator God, Gracious God,

God of Israel and the nations;

We pray for the kind of peace

which is not the capitulation of peoples hopes,

nor the silencing of freedom’s cries.

When the nations are in tumult

our prayers can too easily become our asking you

to bless our amateur political solutions,

as if you act within the tiny parameters of our wisdom.

God of peace who brought again the Lord Jesus from the dead,

into this situation of anger and violence,

move by your Spirit in peace and reconciliation;

restrain the forces of evil,

may military force protect rather than attack the people,

and bring forth peace, justice freedom

and the birth of new hopes,

not only for Egypt but for all the peoples of the Middle East.

Lord in your world, amongst the nations,

Let justice roll down like waters,

And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Sung Response

From dark despair to hope,

   from fear to trust in God,

from hate to love, from war to peace,

   still lead us on dear Lord.

6 February 2011
Forget Sat Nav! It’s Radio Four that helps you get home!

Driving to Aberdeen on Thursday through gales and rain and surface water pounded into opaquely fluid airborne spray by anything travelling on tyres, I was listening to Radio 4. That station is an oasis of sanity, a source of solace, a conservator of culture, an always fulfilled promise of intellectual pleasure, and that without which some of us would find the world of airwaves bereft of one of our life's essentials.

I listened to Afternoon Reading: The Poet's Year, read by the Welsh National Poet Gillian Clarke, and adapted from her wonderful book, At The Source. I've just discovered Gillian Clarke's work. The reading was exquisite – from her Journal of the turn of the year, a description of harvesting honey and observing with closely attendant affection and respect for the livingness of the countryside.

In complete contrast to the darkness of a late winter's night, buffeting gales and trillions of driven rain pellets all homing in on my windscreen, I listened to a poet reading the prose poem account of her summer. The description of honey harvest was contemplative, and quietly, trustfully, reverent of the cost in millions of bee-flights to achieve the 36 lbs of amber honey lovingly potted, sealed and stored. Now where else in all the wide world would I have been lifted from the concentrated misery of such a night drive in appalling weather, to that other place of the imagination, than in a car with Radio Four playing? Just going to listen again on IPlayer to all three episodes.

5 February 2011
Praying for the peace of Cairo

The news and images coming out of Egypt are unmistakably ominous. Political forces are being unleashed that are near impossible to control and are impossible to predict. And when such a powerful player in the Arab world is destabilised the entire region becomes vulnerable. Israel's southern border is less secure, the populations of other autocratic Arab States watch closely, and the world becomes anxious as the major oil source of the Middle East is thrown into unceretainty.

But for me its the people who show us what's at stake. Faces anxious, angry, pleading for support; faces bruised and bleeding, voices crying out their aspirations for freedom, their hunger for a more just society, and whose demand for more influence through democratic processes and structures will not be easily or cheaply silenced. And which have already ended in death.

So today I pray for the kind of peace which is not the capitulation of peoples hopes to violent forces and the manipulative ugliness of a dying regime. When the nations are in tumult prayer can too easily become an asking of God to bless my amateur political solutions and act within the tiny paramaters of any wisdom I might conceivably have. I don't know how this will all end – but the God of peace who brought again the Lord Jesus from the dead is the God I believe is on the side of life, freedom, peace and reconciliation. How that might happen I don't know. So my prayers become an imaginative identification with other human beings' demands for righteousness and justice to flow, instead of tanks rolling. My prayer is that the military presence will remain a barrier to the uncontained violence that might erupt, and that the presence of tanks and guns will provide the kind of restraint that allows a just peacemaking to happen.

Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer.

4 February 2011
Holman Hunt and that picture of Jesus at the Door.

Strange, the things you discover when you're not looking for them. A year or two ago I went to see Holman Hunt's The Light of the World in Manchester Art Gallery. It isn't one on my favourite pictures, and I can understand why it was panned by the reviews and notices on its first appearance. It took a John Ruskin to commend and praise it, and Simmons and Ridgway to engrave it, print it and market it, before it became one of the most popular of all Victorian religious paintings. I suspect my own muted enthusiasm is because it has become a shallow cliche, represents an exegetical misdirection of Revelation 3.20, and tries too hard – using the word the way Jamie Oliver and other TV chefs do, Hunt "literally" tries to portray a metaphor too literally!

That said, Hunt was a remarkable artist for reasons other than his painting. Pursuing the same literalism, he spent a lot of time in the Holy Land observing and painting people, dress and customs, works in which he tried to capture what he saw, literally. Sometimes he was in hostile territory and painted with a shotgun in one hand and a brush in the other! Now here's an interesting observation by Helen De Borchgrave, A Joiurney into Christian Art: "Holman Hunt thought that by painting literally what he read in the Bible, he would be transmitting the message faithfully in paint. But truth is not literal; we see through a glass darkly. If you forget fancy, you fence in freedom and everything frays. Even Jesus, who is truth, was not wholly understood by his closest friends."

Now there's a thought for biblical literalists; and also for those interested in exegesis through artistic representation. It may be that by striving for realism, we miss the Real; that by dictating to truth how truth should represent itself, we falsify that which we most seek to verify; that by devaluing imagination and overvaluing factual observation, we miss the Spirit who leads into all truth, who takes of the things of Jesus and reveals them to the heart, and to the mind, and yes, to the imagination. Interesting that Hunt's imagination became servant to a mind grown secure in realism – Hunt's earlier work was wonderfully imaginative, conceiving fantastic images and beautiful depictions such as his Lady of Shallot. Little of that vibrancy is visible in much of his biblical work. If ever a man was captured by his one popular painting, and that still not judged to be his best, it was Hunt, who painted three versions of the Light of the World. There's probably a Phd written, or waiting to be written on what it was in that painting that touched the late 19th Century so powerfully.

1 February 2011
The King’s Speech and why I’m going to see it again

I have a friend who is a speech therapist. But though helping others speak is her job, she is much more than a speech coach. She sees her work as a vocation that involves befriending, encouraging and accompanying each of those she deals with. Many speech impediments are physiological and are helped by exercises, behaviour modification and various breathing techniques. Some are caused by trauma, psycholohgical barriers and other emotional difficulties that affect the confidence, spontaneity and social freedom to speak. But whatever the causes, the distress and personal cost of being unable to speak clearly or fluently can be all but unbearable.

Last year we were sharing in a meeting and she told the story of a child who was unable at pre-school stage to identify and make the sound of the five vowels, let alone construct and articulate words, phrases, sentences. Five years on the girl now well into primary education was able to say in class, equilateral triangle! There is something profoundly humane about a life's work helping others speak. Speech is a primary form of social exchange, of relational building, of personal expression. And those who enable and empower others to speak contribute a precious gift to people like that child, and equally provide one of the most valuable services within our education and health services.

Last night we went to see The King's Speech. Plenty of reviews are available about how good this film is. Most of them are not overstating the achievement of Colin Firth in his portrayal of a proud, self-conscious but decent man who is the son of a King, and who stammers.The speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush is equally convincing. relying on the experience of helping traumatised soldiers returning home and rendered incapable of speech by what they experienced. There are powerful protective walls in our consciousness that hold back what cannot be spoken. Rush brilliantly portrays a compassionate and good man.

I will go and see it again while it's still in the cinema. As a study in friendship across the chasm of social differences; as an essay on the human voice as an instrument of personal identity and social relations; as a demonstration, through close-up camera, of the human face as the window to that place from which our deepest emotions sustain or wound us; and as a portrayal of that longing to be free of what constrains and limits us that is common to every one of us honest enough to face our imperfections and struggles – as all of these and more, I think the film is a masterpiece. There were moments when it wasn't clear whether my tears were of laughter or sadness, and the truth is there are scenes that are comi-tragic and which encapsulate how hilarity and burden intermingle in the life we all have to live.

30 January 2011
The Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds

Driving along Hutcheon Street in Aberdeen, Sheila looked up and saw a carved crest on a building and we spent the time sitting at the lights trying to decipher it. Eventually we got it between us. The Loyal order of Ancient Shepherds. Never heard of it. So like a good research student I made a note to google it. Here's what I found

"Shepherds Friendly started life as a sickness and benefits society, Ashton Unity, which was formed in Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire on Christmas Day in 1826. It was later renamed as the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds, "loyal" referring to the Crown and "shepherds" to the Nativity of Jesus. Its objects were "to relieve the sick, bury the dead, and assist each other in all cases of unavoidable distress, so far as in our power lies, and for the promotion of peace and goodwill towards the human race".

Now what interests me is the mission statement as expressed with the quotes at the end there. As a description of how a humane society looks out for each other it isn't bad, and it was written prior to the Victorian age. The last couple of clauses would be good filters for current Government policies and cuts and excuses and evasions and all other manner of rationalised inhumanity in the name of economics and the new God on the block who has to be served and to whom sacrifice is to be made, Deo Deficit!

29 January 2011