Category Archives: Theology

Resurrection as homecoming

Posted on by
Reply

The welcome

Christ is risen, so it’s all OK, hunky dory and we can all get on with being nice to each other as Christians are. No, no, no, Christ having risen is rather a challenge.

Imagine how Judas must have felt when, having agreed to give information to the Romans, he came face to face with what he’d done to his friend by kissing him. Imagine how ashamed Peter must have been to have to look into the face of the man he thought was dead and who he’d denied three times. Imagine how ashamed the disciples must have been to have to look into the face of the master that they’d deserted. Imagine how ashamed Thomas must have been to have to eat humble pie the week after he’d been so definite. Imagine the shame.

Shame is a great motivator. It gives away our guilt by making us protest too much. It makes us think of walking away from awkward situations when we would be better to face the shame. It makes us fill our lives with activity to distract us from facing the shame. Read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and see how shame motivated Pip. Read the biography of Dickens to see how shame motivated all his frenetic activity as social reformer. It’s interesting that Dickens regarded himself as ‘very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy’. Think of how many of Dickens’ books are about small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boys: Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby …

The Easter experience – new life – means that we all must confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our pasts, our behaviour—the people we have hurt intentionally or unintentionally, the things we have done that we wish we hadn’t, and the things we have not done that we wish we had. The Risen Christ forces all our baggage, our guilt and shame, to the surface. The Resurrection means having to confront who we actually are.

When we meet someone else, we put on a façade: bumptious, or aggressive, or submissive or charming, or whatever. When we confront Christ, he sees us as we really are, and when we realize that, we are overawed, even ashamed. It is too much to bear. When we glimpse ourselves as the Lord sees us—or even as others see us—we can get an awful shock. This is not something that is reserved for the after-life, it is something that can hit us here and now. It is part of conscience, though conscience is not a big enough word for it.

We look in the mirror and see not the urbane, charming, well manicured and scrubbed person we present to the world, but instead the ordinary fallible human being. And it is so much easier to love the ordinary fallible human being than the scrubbed up image, because in the ordinary fallible human being we are the real thing rather than the pretentious deception. As your Rector, I would rather deal with the ordinary fallible human being who shouts at me, or loses his temper with me, than with the charmer who says one thing to my face and another behind my back.

Jesus stands before these frightened disciples who had all wronged him in some way. He stands before us, the ordinary fallible human beings, and says ‘peace to you.’ Shalom. Salaam. Salvation. Having been brought up sharp to the reality of shame, the disciples Peter and Thomas, and you and I, are accepted. We are forgiven. The great thing is that the reality of Peter’s denials, and Thomas’s doubt are not in the least condemned by Jesus. Peter is the rock on whom the church is built. Thomas’s need for evidence was affirmed by Jesus.

And that is a homecoming. Like the younger son in the Prodigal Son parable returning when he realized what an idiot he’d been. The door is never shut. This door of this church is never shut. The door of the Rectory is never shut.

In truth, we have God inside us all. That sanctuary of the soul that is hidden within, that we need to let fill us from the inside out. We sometimes choose to keep it locked up and pretend it is not there. That is when we are driven by pride and self-obsessedness. When we open that door, the divine light floods out. It might make us shed tears of joy that melt the heart of ice (O my Saviour lifted). This is forgiveness. We do not have forgiveness because we acknowledge our sins. We have forgiveness therefore we acknowledge our sins, our human frailty.

The younger son saw himself as the Lord saw him. He chose to take the first step. He could have chosen not to. He came home, forgiven. This is resurrection. We can choose to exclude ourselves, or we can choose to be a part of God’s kingdom here and now. The choice is ours as to whether or not we stay in the cold and become bitter and twisted, or we come home acknowledging our imperfections, and enjoy the divine presence and the divine warmth of divine light and love.

Resurrection or wilderness is the choice facing each one of us. A pretty easy decision, you would think, but one demanding openness, honesty and courage.

Resurrection as imagination

Posted on by
Reply

An architect’s imagination

In his novel ‘The Power and the Glory’, Graham Greene has one of his characters say ‘hate was just a failure of imagination’.

The theme of Easter is renewal. The Holy Week and Easter story is about a group of people who were so threatened by new ideas that they put Jesus to death. A failure of imagination that resulted in hatred. Looking at the world today, we see the same forces at work. North Korea might be a long way away, but its threats have the power to destroy the world—and all because the governing clique of old men lacks the ability to admit that new ideas could make things better. A failure of imagination.

If you look at the photos of the installation of the new Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin, you will see pictures of an institution that appears to be ruled by old men, stuck in the past and with little interest in preparing for the future. Is this what our church looks like? Here are some questions for you.

  • How many of our offspring attend church? What is there to attract them? Do they see a group of people who live with hearts and minds fixed on the Gospel?
  • Where will the clergy of the future come from? Some recent clergy appointments in this diocese have been even older than I am. Already, we are in the position where one post is unfilled because of a shortage of trainee clergy.
  • What is your vision of the future for this church? Do you think it can be business as usual, as it has been?

Many people seem to want the church to remain as they think it always was. The thing is, memory plays tricks. They want things to conform to a romantic notion of how they think things used to be. That was not Jesus’ way: there was nothing romantic about flights to Egypt, childhood in Nazareth, stomping around the Judean desert, the blood and gore of torture and crucifixion. Like him, we live in a messy world and we must confront it and get our hands dirty, like Thomas. Like Thomas we need to ask questions and push at boundaries to see how best to put our Lord into action. What will the church be like in 10 years’ time if we don’t do some fresh thinking?  We need the courage to ask questions and seek evidence, Thomas-style, and then act on it, Jesus style. We need, in the message of the epistle, to let light triumph over darkness.

We need renewal. We need to experiment. We need to cooperate. We need imagination. Without imagination we would still be scrabbling about in caves. Our future, as the Acts of the Apostles makes crystal clear, lies in togetherness, in openness, in being willing to try new things. Our churches are dying because of constipation from yesterday’s diet and yesterday’s resentments. Dietary ingredients must remain the same as they always have been—the word of the Lord—but the recipes need the roughage of altering circumstances.

I met a man in hospital, in his 80s, who said to me that the church had lost its way because it had forgotten what love was all about. We need to let God work in us. It’s not so much that we need actively to cooperate with God, but rather that we need to stop resisting God. The divine blueprint is there within us. We let it fill us and squeeze out the evil. This means letting the resurrected Jesus point out to us those assumptions and behaviours that are based on fear and hatred, and get rid of them.

Hatred is a failure of imagination. Love is the blossoming of the imagination. Love is expensive. Love demands a letting go. Love is renewal. Love is resurrection. Love is God. Let imagination and love triumph over hatred.

Thursday in Holy Week: party – come!

Posted on by
Reply

Foot of a Python

The foot party

The last few days have seen us considering unattractive aspects of human nature: lying, deceit, evasion, denial. Today, thanks be to God, we have a party. The ability to have fun, to play, to party, to celebrate—shared with other mammals—is one of our attractive characteristics. And, what is more, it’s a party where the host honours the guests. Just as it should be. Washing feet nowadays might seem a less than appealing activity. Who knows what you might find under the socks and stout brogues? Bunions, nodules, sores, ulcers, fungi …. (Footwear is bad for feet). But think back to sandal wearing, dusty, car-less and bike-less times. Think that for most people on the planet today, unhealthy feet mean no food. Foot care is important. Washing feet was a real act of welcome and charity. An act of service. You might like to consider how our churches welcome visitors and deal with strangers. It may be inappropriate to tell them to shed shoes and socks for a relaxing foot bath, but there are other ways that we can enhance our hospitality and service to others.

Renewal of the cosmos

Curved space-time

Do this in remembrance of me. These words take us back to Jerusalem two thousand years ago. But they work the other way, too: they bring Jerusalem of two thousand years ago here today, to this place. And not just the words, but all the action and the whole occasion: the meal, the togetherness of the disciples, even those who had something to hide. Do this in remembrance of me brings it all into the present. And all the intervening years as well: all the Christians of the past, all the joys and sadnesses of history. The whole of the past concentrated into the words and action of the consecration prayer: we open the door of Dr Who’s Tardis and find ourselves in the vastness of history. This notion of space-time is a bit at odds with western European linear time, but it is inherent in folk-memory, in community-memory, and is very much a living part of middle-Eastern culture, even today. It is Hebrew zikkaron. It has something in common with modern concepts of space-time. Every time the Lord’s supper is celebrated, the past is gathered up and presented to us. And then in the banquet, past and present are launched into the world transformed. Rebirth. The universe compressed into the infinitely dense black hole of the crucifixion, then dispersed with infinite acceleration into the new universe. This is a magnificent vision. All Christian theology and history concentrated into the moment at every Eucharist. No wonder we should celebrate it with all possible splendour and theatre and solemnity and joy.

Come

Each of us has all our past within us. We are the sum of our memories. All our past is included in our genes – genes from the primeval soup at the moment of creation are in every one of our cells. All this past is received and affirmed tonight. We are cleansed. We are fed. We are, and heaven knows I need this, forgiven. We have the meal set out by the gracious father for the prodigal son. We are accepted, and we are launched for future service. Come to the feast. Everyone is invited. No matter what you think of yourself, come and receive grace. You are welcome.

Lancelot Andrewes: a beautiful mind

Listen to the words of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, written in 1620.

In the old Ritual of the Church we find that on the cover of the canister, wherein was the Sacrament of His Body, there was a star engraven, to shew us that now the star leads us thither, to His body there. And what shall I say now, but according as St. John saith, and the star, and the wise men say, ‘Come.’ And He, Whose the star is, and to Whom the wise men came, saith, ‘Come.’ And let them who are disposed, ‘Come.’ And let whosoever will, take of the ‘Bread of Life, which came down from Heaven’ this day into Bethlehem, the house of bread. Of which Bread the Church is this day the house, the true Bethlehem, and all the Bethlehem we have now left to come to for the Bread of life, – of that His life which we hope for in Heaven. And this our nearest coming that here we can come, till we shall by another venite come, unto Him in His Heavenly Kingdom to which He grant we may come, That this day came to us in earth that we thereby might come to Him and remain with Him for ever, ‘Jesus Christ the Righteous.’

Wednesday in Holy Week: betrayals

Posted on by
Reply

Wisdom sage?

‘I’m not coming to church: you’re all a bunch of hypocrites.’ I usually respond: ‘well, there’s always room for one more, so you’d be in good company.’ We hear a lot about Judas in Holy Week, and Judas is, amongst other things, a hypocrite. On Monday we heard him say that money used to buy oil should be given to the poor, whereas in fact he wanted to filch it for himself.

There’s an element of ‘it wasn’t me, guv, honest’ in the Judas story. It puts me in mind of Homer Simpson’s advice to Bart. Homer says:

I want to share something with you: the three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

For all his faults, Homer is a kind of innocent, and he certainly loves his family. But enough of these insights into my depraved televiewing habits. I want to talk tonight about the demons that assailed Judas, and because there’s something of Judas in us all, about our human nature. We left Jesus on Sunday standing at the gates of the city, facing death in the city of wrong. Jesus faces his demons. As we go with him, we must face our demons, our fears. These demons are the enemies within, enemies of spiritual growth, enemies of resurrection. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but we can’t love these demons until we see them, and we can’t see them until we look them full in the face.

What are our demons? Let’s look at the demons in the Passion narratives. There are three obvious headings:

  • Failure to confront reality, that is to say, denials
  • Mob justice
  • Evasion of responsibility

And of course Judas. I don’t think Judas wasn’t a particularly bad man. He was, like many of us, weak. He sold information. His weakness is part of the story, just as Peter’s denials are part of the story. Maybe if Judas hadn’t killed himself he’s be a saint like Peter. Anyway, let’s look at those three.

  • Denials. Peter’s denials saved his skin—but only for that moment. Later, he wept, overcome with remorse. It’s hard to hear today’s news without being confronted by denials that turn out to be lies. Is anyone guilt-free? Who has not tried to get something for nothing, or used work time for personal business?
  • Mob justice. There are so many stories that illustrate this. One from 2007 sticks in my mind. In March of that year, The London Times reported, a young man was surrounded by a gang with wooden sticks. Witnesses say that teenage girls egged on the attack with shouts of “Kill him, kill him.”
  • Evasion of responsibility. Judas said ‘it wasn’t me’. Pilate wriggled out of responsibility and washed his hands. Pilate needed to please his superiors. How often have I felt like that? Look at bankers and politicians evading responsibility. We all make mistakes. We all are greedy. We all want the advantages of investment dividends if we are lucky enough to have money invested, and our pensions depend on them. We are all complicit in the problems that afflict us, and our children and grandchildren will have to bear the burden of the mistakes our generation has made. I accept all that, and I can’t and don’t condemn anyone for faults that also afflict me. However, the arrogance and lack of remorse that we see in public life at the moment is something beyond all this. According to the Gospels, Jesus was censorious about very little, but always, always, always about hypocrisy and complacency. Even Josef Fritzl, who kept his children locked up in a basement for 24 years, seems to have acknowledged, eventually, the enormity of his actions after being confronted by his daughter’s account of their effects on her and her children. But not, it seems, the powerful of today.

Kiss of friendship

We betray others. We betray ourselves. Judas realised that—that’s why he topped himself. Magnus Pym in Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy realized that, and he topped himself too. Greed, avarice, and seeking the approval of people whose approval is not worth having: the three most pernicious demons. Maybe they can be compressed into one: the sin of Adam—trying to be what we are not. The fig leaf has nothing to do with covering up our genitals, but is about covering up our naked selves by putting on a mask, a persona to hide our true faces. We deny the truth because of our need to save face, but it’s not the face that suffers. It is the inner self that I harm when I deny what is evident to others. This inner self that is the Christ within, the Divine within. When we harm others, we wound the Christ within as surely as any nail on the cross.

Here is a poem that tells of this inner kingdom, the holy of holies within that I suggest needs to be allowed to expand  from within so that the brittle shell of self will be shattered. It was written by 20-year old Charles Sorley who died weeks later in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. I marvel at the self knowledge possessed by this young man.

 

C H Sorley 1895-1915

From morn to midnight, all day through,
I laugh and play as others do,
I sin and chatter, just the same
As others with a different name.
 
And all year long upon the stage,
I dance and tumble and do rage
So vehemently, I scarcely see
The inner and eternal me.
 
I have a temple I do not
Visit, a heart I have forgot,
A self that I have never met,
A secret shrine—and yet, and yet
 
This sanctuary of my soul
Unwitting I keep white and whole,
Unlatched and lit, if Thou should’st care
To enter or to tarry there.
 
With parted lips and outstretched hands
And listening ears Thy servant stands,
Call Thou early, call Thou late,
To Thy great service dedicate.
 
 

Monday in Holy Week: confronting death

Posted on by
Reply

Beauty anointing the spirit

Isaiah 42:1-7. John 12:1-11

The events in tonight’s gospel story take place before the Palm Sunday procession we recalled yesterday. I’m going to take both stories together, in the Biblical order. Here are some themes that strike me.

  • Preparing for death: Mary’s anointing Jesus with oil normally reserved for anointing the dead
  • Jesus facing the future squarely: his cheerfulness, and the crowd’s acclamation.

We live in a society that refuses to look death full in the face. People try and pretend it will not happen. They go to great lengths to try and delay it, even when it’s obviously inevitable. We spend money on seeking a cure for this or that disease as if there is some hope that we can live for ever. We forget that one day, even if we are cured of this or that disease, tomorrow we will die of something else.

This always leads to trouble. If you pretend it won’t happen, you can’t set things straight before you go. You are left with unfinished business. If you can’t set things straight, you are left with regret and guilt. You can’t say that you wished you’d not said so-and-so, and you can’t say, before it’s too late, what you should have said years ago. And all that is the overwhelming cause of grief and weeping and family tensions at funerals. It’s in contrast to the death of a friend of mine recently, who knew she was dying, told the world, and wrote her own funeral address, and characteristically witty it was too. For six months of my life I worked in a north Brixton children’s hospital in south London. I saw babies with incurable conditions having operation after operation, and I was required to insert drips into their tiny veins whilst seeing their eyes looking at me. I was gravely distressed at the inhumanity and cruelty of it. I plucked up the courage to suggest that baby Anthony should be allowed to die with dignity. The reaction was swift: I was reprimanded in no uncertain terms. He died the next week after yet another operation. It is not my intention to start a debate tonight on end-of-life issues—that’s for another time maybe—but I’m using this as an illustration of how many of us refuse to confront one of the realities of animal existence on this planet. Our refusal to be straightforward about death results in grief for ourselves and for those that love us.

This sanitisation of death, this refusal to look it full in the face, is partly a consequence of urbanisation. Rural folk have a more robust attitude to death. They see it day by day. Animals are killed so that we might eat. Many of us think nothing of shoving an arm up a cow’s rear end to pull out a dead calf. Now, I acknowledge that my attitude to death may be more peculiar than most: not only was I brought up in a farming village, but for 25 years I was using human cadavers to teach anatomy: cutting them up, examining them and handling them.

However unusual my attitude to death might be, I’m convinced that our attitude to death needs realigning. Tonight’s Gospel and the Palm Sunday procession seem to say likewise. Our Lord faces death full in the face. Face: earlier in the gospel Jesus came down from a mountain with a shining face. Then he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And now acknowledging to Judas—I’ve more to say about him on Wednesday—that he is being anointed for death, just as many priests have anointed people for death. The Easter message is that death leads to new life. If you want to build on a new site, it is wise to clear it of rubble so that good foundations can be laid. This is new life following death of the old. And so, of course, is the resurrection story.

Death of the old prepares for the new

Biologically speaking, death is part of life. The cells of our bodies are dying all the time, and new life replaces them. Skin cells are constantly being shed and replaced. Blood cells past their sell-by date are replaced all the time. There are lots of other examples, but here is a startling example of the necessity of cell death. When a fetus is developing in the uterus, the hands and feet start off as spade-like things, a bit like fists. You might think that fingers and toes grow out from the spades, but you’d be wrong. What happens is that rather than digits growing out, four strips of cells are programmed to die, leaving digits remaining between them. If not enough cells die, we get webbed fingers and toes. If more strips die we get more fingers than usual. Here is another example. When a bone is fractured and reset, the two ends are rarely aligned properly. The body copes with this by killing off bone cells in the wrong place, and laying down new ones where needed.

Biology has no hesitation in killing off the old in order that the new can flourish. We can’t move on if we try to preserve the past. That is why I oppose the conservationist lobby. We must face death when necessary. We can’t engage with the present if we refuse to accept the inevitability of death, because we will be tempted to put off things that need attention before it’s too late.

I am calling for honesty and clarity of vision. And this, I think, is what Our Lord called for throughout his ministry. Yesterday and today, Our Lord stands up to face the future full on. He stands at the gates of the city, the city of wrong. Facing the future mindfully means killing, letting go of, all that holds us back. It can be very painful. We begin to see ourselves as others saw us. We realise that we are not as good as we thought we were. We realise how we deceived ourselves and the truth was not in us. We need to grieve our lost attitudes, our lost expectations, our lost dreams. We need to let go of what we want, or wanted, and accept the grace of God to resurrect us. We must die in order to live, as Christ Jesus died in order to live. Death of our self-obsession enables us to rise:

As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day Thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

As I grow older, I look back on some of the things I used to be passionate about and wonder what it was about them that so obsessed me. Obsession is the right word, because these passions blinkered my vision and limited my action. I once had a huge collection of books: they were my friends. I came to see that they limited me. Not only did they cost a lot of money, they also dictated the type of house we could move to. And after all, when one has sucked the marrow out of a book, one might as well pass it on. These are not evil things in themselves but they limited me, they narrowed my vision. They stole some of me and prevented me from being fully me, in a similar way to that of any addiction. I am still afflicted by such things—I suspect we all are—but now I’m slightly more aware of the symptoms of the addiction. As we get older we find ourselves attached to fewer and fewer things. Our vision becomes less restricted. We are moving into a wide, unfettered place. This notion of being in a wide place is one of the Hebrew images of salvation, and it is one that Jesus teaches. If we die to earthly attachments, we are in this place, and we can focus on what matters: love of God, and love of neighbour. There is much truth in the Buddhist idea that all disease is caused by attachments.

There is a kind of renewal in this, and the key to it is to live in the present. Our Lord’s teaching again and again emphasizes that we need to do just this. Learn from the past certainly, but don’t live in it. Look to the future, but don’t waste time laying up treasures. Live now, in the moment. This, actually, is what eternal means. When we hear ‘everlasting life’ in church services, we often get the wrong idea, and it would be better, and more accurate a translation of the Greek, to use the word eternal rather than everlasting. It’s not quantity or length of time that matters, but quality. Eternal, timeless, out of time, in the present, Divine. Thy kingdom come on earth, here and now. Trust the teaching of Jesus: live in the present moment, and do your best in that moment. We can do no more, and we need do no more. In one sense this is easy to do, and in another it’s extraordinarily difficult when we are surrounded by the petty irritations that life throws up day by day, when we see the injustice that surrounds us, and when we are governed, as we are, by prejudices and faulty behaviour patterns bred into us by our upbringings. But see all these for what they are, and trust and hope.

Faces of the Divine

If we are to attain eternal life, here and now, we must face death and die to worldly trivia. Having divested ourselves of these burdens we walk off lighter. ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light’ – light in both senses, light because of the light of the world, and light because we are less burdened by impedimenta from the past. Jesus’ last hours complete the incarnation. Our Lord gave up a divine dwelling for human frailty, and now he suffers the stripping away of dependence on self to fall into he arms of the selfless, the divine. ‘It is finished’. It is a renunciation that we are called to join in these five days. And the task for us, sisters and brothers, is to accompany the Lord on this journey of death in order to fall into the arms of the divine.

Working things out

Posted on by
Reply

Thinking Rector

Rational thinking is very much part of the Anglican tradition (scripture, tradition, reasoning) and we need to engage brain as we consider the realities of the present and plan for the immediate future. This is as true for individuals as for churches and organisations. It’s tempting to go from one day to the next simply responding to what happens—and a good deal of our lives is exactly that, but I suggest that it can be helpful to have a plan or an aim for the immediate future. Not something that is inflexible, but a rough idea of where we might like to be as individuals and in community. That is one of the things that Lent is traditionally about: looking ahead to where we might like to be, and ditching what might be slowing down the journey. The Biblical readings for Lent have all had this theme in one form or another.

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that Churches require people to remove their brains as they enter a church. Furthermore, it sometimes seems that people forget to pick them up again on the way out. Maybe a lenten discipline would be to think about the traditional doctrines of the church, and ask to what extent they are helpful or unhelpful in dealing with the trials and tribulations of daily life in the 21st century. Is the Trinity an outmoded mediaeval concept? Or does its mystery say something worth saying about what we are discovering about the origins of the universe? It gets more mysterious the more we know. Is God – the divine being (a better term IMHO) – just the laws of the cosmos? Is there anything that is not God? What is not God is nothing, said Sergey Bulgakov. What about evil? Is that part of God too?

Cases of parents found guilty of neglecting and abusing their children remind us that we are all products of genetics and upbringing, and not so far under the surface there lurk temptations and urges to do nasty things should the circumstances be different. If you haven’t done it yet, be glad that you’ve never been in situations that have tested you to go beyond the limit. Maybe that is what it means when we say lead us not into temptation and deliver us from (the) evil (part of ourselves).

Trade and tradition

Posted on by
Reply

Here's to abundant living

Trade implies exchange. This is tradition in its proper sense: adapting the past to plan for the future. To cling to the way things were is not tradition, but rather traditionalism, and the demon of traditionalism is rife. It kills. Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote that tradition ‘is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’ The living faith of the dead gives life as we take it, mould it and adapt it, whereas the dead faith of the living is simply a charade, a sham, of perpetuating the past in a way that has no meaning at all to the present and future.

This is not an easy time to be a Christian. And that is no bad thing. Our version of Christianity needs to be brought down a peg or six. For too long is has hidden behind the trappings of power and the privileges of state. It is tarnished by association with political corruption. That it is being cleansed is a wonderful thing. Yes, the journey is painful and difficult, but we need constantly to ask ourselves why we come to church. Is it only as a badge of tribal identity? or is there some other message that draws us? For me, it is this: Jesus said, I come that all may have life, and have it in abundance.

To waste our lives squabbling in playground battles is as far removed from abundant living as it is possible to get.

Dead and alive

Posted on by
Reply

Dead but won’t lie down

The Dear Leader is dead. Much more interesting than the death was the birth. When Kim Jong-Il was born, North Korean propaganda tells us, a rainbow appeared in the sky and a star appeared over the place where he lay. Remind you of anything?

It’s interesting to look at the ways in which cultures dress up ‘specialness’. For 200 years or so Biblical scholars have debated the significance of virgin births, angels, shepherds, stars and wise men. What does ‘virgin’ mean in that context? People of the Bible knew nothing about egg and sperm at fertilization, so would have a different reaction to the idea of a virgin birth than we do. And so on.

For me, these elements are symbols of the messages of Christmas. Attitudes to a teenage pregnancy reveal the real values of society. The first to hear the good news were young shepherds out in the cold—just as we leave parts of ourselves out in the cold. Wise men follow a star and kneel at childlikeness. They refuse to cooperate with an agent of earthly power who attempts to stifle new growth and creativity. All this is as far removed from the reality of the Kim dynasty as it’s possible to get.

Let earth and heaven combine

But don’t let’s fall into the trap of thinking that the Divine would approve of this regime, or disapprove of that. The kingdom of the Divine is not of this world, but is an inner kingdom—in here, not out there—and there is no chance that out there will be sorted until we’ve attended to in here.

O holy child of Bethlehem, be born in us today.

Our God contracted to a span, Incomprehensibly made Man. And we the life of God shall know, For God is manifest below.

Because of you, O full of grace, all creation rejoices, the ranks of angels and the human race; hallowed temple and spiritual paradise, pride of virgins; From you God was incarnate and he, who is our God before the ages, became a little child. For he made your womb a throne and caused it to become wider than the heavens. Because of you, O full of grace, all creation rejoices; glory to you.