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Running to do God’s will…..

In his rule St Benedict quotes John 12.35, "Run while you have the light of life…". Then, knowing that obedience is about disposition and performance, he urges those seeking God, "If we wish to dwell in the tent of that kingdom, we must run to it by good deeds or we shall never reach it. In fact Benedict calls the life of faith a marathon in which we "run in the way of God's commandments".

The great Hebrews 12.1-2 text, "Run with persevarance the race that is set before you, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith".

My suggestion. Go listen to the London Marathon theme tune over here. (It comes from the movie "The Trap", conducted by Ron Goodwin). Then listen again but read Hebrews 12.1-2; Philippians 3.12-16 with this music as background. The months of training, the hard slog, the longing to give up, the determination to keep going – following after Jesus isn't a dawdle and it isn't a sprint. Every year I watch the start of this race – not the elite runners – the mass crowds of folk who have trained and looked forward to running the race and finishing it. As an image of the church it works quite well – running for charity, helping each other along, fulfilling a life goal, pushing beyond our comfort zones, "having the same purpose, being of the same mind", the sacrament of water for the thirsty, and the great refusal that every step represents to not give up.

26 April 2009
When grace slaps us on the face to waken us up.

The best reflection I've come across on the phenomenon that is Susan Boyle can be found in The Herald, see here. It is a very fine piece of morally reflective journalism, respectful, compassionate, utterly unpatronising and says many things about human life, humanity and what is important.

I've no idea what lies ahead for Susan. The song she sung was about that great human gift of dreaming, and that less humane gift of wasting other people's dreams. I wish we weren't such a self-centred, celebrity obsessed culture. Susan's gift, talent, courage, performance started a landslide of attention, but what if her voice had been ordinary, and the sniggers graduated to outright ridicule?

If theological reflection means thinking about ordinary people's most human experiences, alert for that pervasive, invasive, inviting presence of God active and subversive in this blessed but ambiguous world, and then taking note when grace slaps us on the face to wake us up, then that performance deserves serious reflection. And those who sniggered then, now face the embarrassment of nearly 50 million viewers (latest hits stats on YouTube) who have witnessed "the laughter of fools". Grace does that. Reverses expectations, brings down the mighty and exalts the humble. Now take time to read that article in The Herald on the link above. If not precisely theological reflection it is nevertheless some of the most telling ethical reflection and cultural critique I've read for a while.

25 April 2009
Moral imagination and the body politic.

I think it was Edmund Burke who said the body politic should be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination. At a time when a whole world faces some of the biggest moral, political and economic challenges for decades, it does look as if we need enhanced ethical imagination and revitalised imaginative morals. Problem is morality is boring. Morality limits our options, constrains our freedoms, disqualifies our preferred choices. And imagination is too busy creating unsustainable fantasies, celebrating the ephemeral, serving up stories, ideas and images relevant to the desires of a culture. Relevance to the culture is the prime directive where the culture in question, and its desires, happen to be consumer fuelled and credit driven.

"Clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination" – is that how to describe Wednesday's budget? Moral imagination, is that a phrase that is any help to a world economy imploding because there wasn't enough imagination to envisage the consequences of economic fantasy? And not enough morality to see that the prime directive reduces human beings and our projects to instituionalised but uncontrolled appetite?

As a reminder of an alternative worldview, where moral imagination critiques the body politic, and where the desires of the culture were so dominant they crushed the poorest, I've been listening to the prophet Amos, (reading his words out loud):

they sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust….
Seek good and not evil, that you may live…
establish justice in the gate…
Let justice roll down like waters
and righteousness like an everflowing stream…

That's the moral bit.

Alas for those who feel at ease in Zion….
for those who feel secure….
the notables of the first of the nations…
This is what the Lord God showed me: he was forming locusts at the time the latter growth began to sprout…This is what he showed me: The lord was standing beside a wall with a plumb-line in his hand…See I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people…

That, and much else, is the imagination bit.

Moral imagination, the capacity to see wrong and name it, and to see it against the history of a world where the rich waste and spoil by their greed, where the poor are cheated and the body politic have lived as if fantasies are made real by systemic denial of reality. The credit crunch has been described as a problem of biblical proportions. The right diagnosis is certainly of biblical proportions – a lack of moral imagination, economics without enough ethics to control greed, and selfishness devoid of imagination enough to measure consequences. No "wardrobe of the moral imagination".

I'll continue to read Amos…..and Micah…..and Isaiah. Because moral imagination, like chronic credit, doesn't grow on trees. It is the fruit of a theology that ascribes justice, mercy, compassion and wisdom to the creator God whom we marginalise at our cost. Maybe the failure of banks once imagined globally secure, was due to the creation of banks no longer ethically sound. The spinners of economic fantasies from financial imagination, are now naked of the virtues that both make money and make making money more just. Or to go back to Burke's image, the body politic and the body economic should once again be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, in garments that should never have gone out of fashion – compassion mercy, justice, wisdom. Attributes of God, each of them, and thus theological concepts which are needed to inform, then form, then transform the moral imagination of our culture.

And I'm left with the disquieting question of where, and when, and how the communities of Jesus Christ we call the Church, bear witness, by the kinds of communities we are, to a different economics, a richer more humane understanding of the body politic, a different dress sense when it comes to the moral values with which, as followers of Jesus, we clothe ourselves. The credit crunch and its consequences for the poor, vulnerable and marginalised people and peoples of the world, isn't just the fault of the bankers and the governments. The Church is at its least attractive, and least "missionally incarnational" (sometimes I like using words I dislike!), when the Church scolds 'them' and we fail to show by our own repentance, that we too took our eye off God. You cannot serve God and money – so either you serve God, – or you make money God and solve the dilemma.

The Lord's Prayer…."Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven".

What would that look like in economic, political and moral terms?

Use your moral imagination!

24 April 2009
George Herbert and the Orchestration of Scripture

Not sure what poem Mike refers to that was cruciform. (See Mike's comment on previous post). One of David Adams' prayers is cross shaped, but it's pushing it to call it poetry, I think.

When it comes to shape poems, the few examples in George Herbert's The Temple are skilled artifices of poetic playfulness. The shape of the poem images its content. In the poem below, the four capitalised words distil the essentials into spiritual concentrate: –

ALTAR -> HEART-> SACRIFICE-> ALTAR.

One of the very best books on Herbert's poetry by Chana Bloch is called Spelling the Word, in which Bloch demonstrates Herbert's virtuosity with biblical text. The instructions for the tabernacle and the altar in the Pentateuch, the worship on the altar of the heart that is Jeremiah's new covenant, and the spiritual worship that is the living sacrifice in Romans 12 are only three of many texts which provide layers of meaning and suggestion throughout this poem. The poems are first written as records of Herbert's personal devotion, their essence drawn from his own scripture-informed contemplative conversations with God. Of course, unlike today, Herbert was able in his time to assume biblical literacy in those readers who came after him. But for those who still hear the scriptural symphonies through the Word orchestrated, this poem remains disconcertingly clever and to the point, and the product of a devotional genius.

The Altar

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

23 April 2009
Arithmetic-free generosity as the default monetary policy of the Christian community!

A conversation the other day about churches, Christians, money – and the relations between the three of them. Well actually, since we were talking of those who confess Christ, and who seek to embody the life of Christ in their living, and through the witness of Christian community, the relation of all three to Christ. The particular issue was the way Christians often want to do things, or have things, on the cheap.

Now for communities of people who believe that grace is undeserved favour, and who 'have no problem' with Paul's theological extravagances in Ephesians 1, all of this puzzles me. For example – "God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing…according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us..and the riches of His glorious inheritance among the saints…". And so on, using words like lavished, immeasurable, incalculable and climaxing in the great Evangelical cry, "For by grace you have been saved…."

So how does it come about that followers of Christ, themselves receivers of the most extravagant, reckless, arithmetic-free generosity, can often sound as if the spending and giving of money, the cost of celebration, the creation of beauty and the investment in human wholeness, joy and friendship, should all be subject to budget considerations, financial reality checks and the communal and personal self-interest that considers money more valuable than giving?

I'm not arguing for financial irresponsibility – but for instinctive generosity, for a recovery of the Christian default response of giving rather than saving, of sharing rather than keeping. I wonder where in the care of our churches, in the support of our ministries, in the setting of priorities for spending, in our love for God's world and the people in it, in the key decisions we all make about what to do with what we've been given, I'm wondering – where is the place of extravagance, generosity, that lavish uncalculating, joy-discovering , grace-driven, Christ-inspired gift of giving. When did Christian stewardship move from generous costly gift to prudent wise planning? Where in all our budgetary balancing, do phrases like those used by Paul feature as primary levers for the kingdom – "abundant joy and extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity…" and this rooted in the key evangelical principle "He was rich yet for our sakes became poor that we through His poverty might become rich".

Anyway. My own heart has its own constraints, its own inner resistances. As a follower of Jesus maybe I need less stewardship and more generosity, less responsibility and more responsiveness, less prudential giving and more prioritised generosity, not saving but giving. What would happen in our lives, communities, neighbourhoods if as followers of Jesus, words like lavish, extravagant, generous, graceful, were amongst the first to be used of how as Christians we live our lives, and bear witness to the One "from whose fullness we all have recieved, grace after grace after grace …" (John 1.16)

Here are some wise words from an unjustly obscure saint:

There are two ways
   of bringing into communion
   the diversity of particular gifts:
      the love of sharing
      and the sharing of love.
Thus the particular gift becomes common
   to him who has it
   and to him who has it not:
      he who has it
         communicates it by sharing,
      he who has it not
         participates by communion.

(Baldwin of Ford, quoted in Esther De Waal, Seeking God, page 125)

22 April 2009
Reduced price ethics!

Just got a customer care promotion email from a bookstore I regularly patronise – in the positive sense of the word, not the talk down sense!

Here's the offer

Save 40% on Ethics

I'm intrigued by the idea that ethics can be made cheaper, that you can have reduced cost ethics, or that it would be an ethically praiseworthy thing to do to save money on your ethics.

Aye, I know. The bookseller didn't mean it the way I'm taking it, and was only trying to find a strap line that would get attention. And obviously succeeded cos here I am, paying attention! But ethics aren't to be had cheap – acts have consequences. Just think of that first choice, that primal moral dilemma, about whether or not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! And where did that happen? Yes, in the garden of Eden!

The email came from Eden.co.uk

Nae kiddin! :)) Go look here.

21 April 2009

Ministry as biography

 Just preached at two services over in the East Neuk 
of Fife. Despite warm comments, and genuine 
appreciation,there is still, and always, the sense 
that words cannot "stretch to the measure of 
eternal things". The last phrase is P T Forsyth's. 
Sometimes I think that other brilliant, infuriating 
genius, the one from Denmark, should be heeded 
more:

"Order the parsons to be silent on Sundays. What is there left? The essential things remain: their lives, the daily life with which the parsons preach. Would you then get the impression by watching them that it was Christianity they were preaching?"
Soren Kierkegaard, Journals, Ed. Alexandre Dru (New YOrk: OUP, 1938), p. 402.


Biography as theology - and as ministry.

20 April 2009

Texts Under Negotiation: Brueggemann and Exegetical Confidence

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
     his understanding is unsearchable.
he gives power to the faint,
     and strengthens the powerless. (Isaiah 40 28-29)

I've read various commentaries on this passage, and learned much. Westermann, Childs, Seitz, Goldingay, and Brueggemann's own commentary. But just to prove that the best comment on Scripture text isn't always found in commentaries, here's Brueggemann in his book with the disconcerting title Text under Negotiation. The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) It is replete with theological insight expressed in pastorally alert terms, and earthed in text, church and world. My copy is split, and the loose pages make it more like a loose-leaf folder – but I don't want to buy another because this one is annotated. But it's still in print and it remains a significant and persuasive example of exegetical confidence in the capacities of biblical text to help us reconceive our world in the light of the Gospel. So here's his comment on that famous Isaiah 40 text, found on pages 35-6.

Creation not only works for the powerful, the mighty, and the knowledgeable. It works as well for the faint, the powerless, the hopeless and the worthless. It works by giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. It works so that strength is renewed. It is creation that precludes wearniness and faintness, and invites walking, running and flying.

Evangelical concern may derivatively raise the issue of our terrible disorderedness that issues in unseemly anxiety and in inescapable fatigue. It is a good question to raise in a local parish; Why so driven, so insatiable, so restless? The answer, in this doxological tradition, is that our lives are driven because we are seriously at variance from God's gracious food-giving program.

And where there is a variance and a refusal to trust:
youth are faint and weary,
     the young are exhausted,
     and there is little liberated flying or exhilarated running. (Isaiah 40.30)

17 April 2009
Violence against women, and why Christians don’t throw stones…..

I've tried to avoid making this blog a place where I just bang on about the things I want to complain about. That way when something does seem important enough to protest, dispute, or confront, it doesn't get lost in the constant drip, drip of low grade disgruntlement.

For the second day in a row, though, I'm both angry and feeling personally implicated by what is happening in our society. Yesterday figures for violence against women in Renfrewshire were released. Nearly 2,000 reports of violence against women were lodged last year. A specialist police task force has been set up to deal with domestic abuse in our surrounding area; you can read more about it here in the local paper. In my summer job as a student a while of years ago, I worked as an assistant social worker in Easterhouse, Glasgow. One of the first families I became involved with lived in fear of a violent partner. The consequences of this sometimes hidden and sometimes not so hidden violence were catastrophic, and the human cost in misery, fear and injury retain a long afterlife.

Then on the news this week, video evidence of a police officer wearing reinforced gloves and body armour backhanding a woman protester on the face, before drawing a baton and lashing out at her legs. We are told that the context, the duress of the officers, the need for independent investigation mean that such actions if described as violence or assault are to be preceded by the word "alleged". That on our streets there are again images of crowd violence, and bloodied faces, police and public, needs little corroboration – bloodied faces and broken limbs are not alleged, they are real.

But in my mind a link was inevitably made. A specialist task force to tackle violence against women – and a woman protester the subject of violence from a specialist police officer. It's part of the bewildering fragmentation of our world into news clips, broadcast images, compromised integrity and ethical erosion – but it signals a society where a deep malaise is settling over our capacity to recognise when the essentials of community life and life-enhancing human values are being threatened.

And the church? What does the church, say and do? That story that floated around in the memory of the early church, but which one way or another had to be included in the Gospels, of Jesus standing with a stone in his hand daring the men to throw it. It remains for me a definitive story about where Jesus chose to stand – somewhere between the stone thrower and the victim. Jesus understood violence – its sources in our fears and prejudices, the ways it feeds on our reductionist views of others who are different, the corrosive effects of violence on both perpetrator and victim so that unless someone absorbs its energy the vicious circle becomes cyclic, chronic, and if unchallenged, legitimated.

The church of Jesus, then, is surely the very place where we understand the significance of violence, recoil at the gratuitously slapped face, resist the use of power to abuse the person. And understanding it, we name it for what it is. To follow Jesus is to stand between violence and the intended victim; it is to call violence to account; it is to remember that Jesus who urged the turning of the other cheek rather than retaliation, was himself slapped about by gauntlet armoured hands. But that stone, hefted in his hand and offered to men bent on violence, is one of the church's key symbols of justice and compassion. Maybe alongside our other sacramental objects, bread, the chalice, the baptistry, the basin and the towel, we also need to find a large, hefty, bone-breaking flesh-bruising stone – and lay it on the table alongside these other objects of service and vulnerable compassion; that stone, itself a sacramental reminder of our call to patient unyielding protest and spiritual resistance of those actions aimed to diminish humanity, wound the body and subdue the conscience and spirit by violence. And beside them the reminder, stones are not for throwing, they are for not throwing

16 April 2009
It’s what comes out of a man that defiles – emails and politics.

Not what goes into a person that defiles, but what comes out of him. The observation was made by Jesus. And it applies to words as much as actions. Words are the codes we use to communicate thought and feeling, to express our inner world to the outer world that hears, sees and knows. Acts of Parliament and poems, novels and tax legislation, commercial straplines and sermons, UN resolutions and Argos catalogues, road signs and nutirition information on my box of walnut whips bought at M&S as an Easter treat – they all use words and communicate something deemed essential. But however words are used, they are open to moral scrutiny and ethical judgement. That holds whether they are any of the above, or are used in emails or conversations, texts or phone calls. And that holds especially amongst those who presume to exercise power in the name of the people who elect and hold accountable those who govern our country.

That Gordon Brown has not apologised for the now notorious email exchanges amongst his Downing St staff is an interesting example of how seriously politicians take words – when it suits them. A letter expressing 'profound regret' is not an apology. To say 'I am sorry' would be to acknowledge some personal responsibility, and hand significant adavantage to one's political opponents. And the debate about whether such an apology would be justified will go on.

I suppose what I find most depressing / disturbing / infuriating – is that highly paid public officials in Downing Street – in the PM's office – can even conceive of, imagine, give mental energy and intellectual living space, to emails so shocking in their content, so scurrilous in their intent, so obviously fabricated and with malice aforethought, that they haven't even been published.

Which brings me back to words, and those words of Jesus, that what comes out of a man is what defiles – words included, emails included. That a mind capable of such culpable ethical deficit should be a close and long term advisor to the Prime Minister is a national embarrassment. Whether or not Gordon Brown apologises or merely expresses regret, such a toxic inner world as displayed in such email exchanges is, to use the older biblical term, defiling. For all of us. I don't mean to sound self-righteous – I confess I feel self-unrighteous, tainted, compromised, embarrassed. And someone needs to apologise.

15 April 2009