maggi dawn

Female bishops

The Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand, recently announced that Bishop Matthews will be their new Bishop.  The Anglican Church of Australia announced her first female bishop last month.

Meantime, the good old Church of England continues in seemingly endless chicken-licken style discussion. In my more bleak moments it makes me think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Fresh Expressions? A Missional church? All around us there are people hungry and thirsty for the story we have to tell, yet all they can hear is our endless circumventions of an argument that is out of date. 

Will we ever see women in the Episcopate? Probably. A while from now. And then another round of hissy fits and arguments. Now, I have no personal career/ministry agenda in this: do not mistake me for someone who would want to be a Bishop. My gifts and inclinations clearly lie elsewhere. And in any case by the time the discussions are over I shall be on the verge of retirement. But I still feel deeply sorry that the Church I belong to continues to maintain levels of its organisation as a boys' club, wastes the talents of women who would be brilliant Bishops, and by inference misrepresents the gospel to the world around us. 

Bishop Alan is on fine form this morning on the subject. Go read.

Training for Fresh expressions and pioneer ministry

It's an amazing thing to me, and really exciting, to look back 18 years, and see how far pioneer and emerging groups have come in that time.  In early 1990 I was one of half a dozen people who started a group in South London - not knowing really what we were doing except that there were Christians we knew who didn't want to abandon their faith, but really didn't connect any more with traditional church activities or language. We tried to reinvent the form while staying true to the theological and liturgical threads of the tradition. As far as we knew, we were - with an appropriate mix of courage and caution - just making it up as we went along. We stayed connected in various ways to the traditional church (some of us never left the trad. Church as such, in fact) but also gave ourselves plenty of freedom to try new things. Some of them worked so well the trad. Church eventually wanted us to teach them how to do it. Some of them were not so good and we quietly abandoned them.

Anyway, eighteen years later and the Anglican and Methodist Churches have taken more steps forward in their embracing of all this alternative/emerging stuff, and Fresh Expressions is now offering training courses for people involved at all levels. I'll be teaching on the Cambridgeshire course, and looking forward not only to the course, but to thinking about how new ways of Church demand new ways of approaching teaching and training (what a travesty it would be if we started giving lectures and assessments on this now...! ). I am dreaming about how to give away wisdom, knowledge and experience in a way that opens up the way for people, rather than boxing them into an "approved" way of doing it.

Dozens of others are involved, and the courses are springing up all over the country. Go here for more.

After McDonaldization

I am REALLY looking forward to getting hold of John Drane's new book (coming out next week). After McDonaldization is the sequel to The McDonaldization of the Church. The new volume promises some thoughts on theology, ministry and mission in a postmodern culture. I am a long time fan of John's work. Put this one on your wish list right away.

Krister Stendahl dies aged 86

Krister Stendahl, Swedish Bishop and New Testament scholar, has died aged 86. This brilliant man shifted the ground in New Testament Studies (especially re. St Paul), and has been a clear influence on "big" names that followed on, such as J. Dunn and N T Wright.  Give yourself a treat today and read his lovely essay, "Why I love the Bible" in which he describes reading the scriptures as "... an ever-transforming affair of the heart."

Beyond in Hove

Beyond starts up in Hove later this month. Beyond is another "church" that breaks the traditional boundaries, it's being started up by some great people, so if you are down in the Brighton/Hove area, check it out.
27th April 7pm 
Old Market Theatre, Upper Market Street, Hove, BN3 1AS

TV Vicars and on-screen priests

Su notes in the post below that there are some good screen portrayals of priests, to relieve the awful TV-Vicar image. She suggests two films with robust priest depictions:

'The Godfather' trilogy      

Mystic River

To these I would add Gary Lewis's

wonderful portrayal of Palmer,

the Chaplain in the trenches in Joyeux Noel (2005)

Bad on-screen vicars? There is vicar who is a spoof of the TV Vicar caricature in Emma Thompson's romp of a kids' movie, Nanny McPhee. My son has his impression of this simpering Vicar down to a tee - but then he also asks me why they put strange vicars, not "normal" ones, in stories like that (this the child who has grown up amid an assortment of pretty normal people who are also priests).

What are your favourite good and bad on-screen portrayals of priests, ministers etc?

offending people nicely

Another great cartoon from Jon Birch today. Along with Dave Walker, Jon is one of my regular reads in blogland. Jon was really writing about satire, but the context of his site, and the Vicar-like tee-shirt he gave his cartoon character, took me off at another tanget as well... 

There is something inherently "offensive" about the gospel - however much you get to grips with the love and forgiveness and comfort of God, if you are engaging with what it means to live out the gospel, there is still the regular jab in the ribs. The gospel is many good things - exciting, challenging, comforting, fulfilling, forgiving, gracious, merciful... and much more - but one thing it will never be is comfortable, in the sense of being mentally settled down on a sofa never to move again.

As I commented to Jon, there is something about being a minister of the gospel (and this is true in the sense that every Christian is a minister, not just the "professional" thing) that means you should anticipate that you will end up offending people. The TV Vicar is nearly always "nice", to the point of being bland; even the Vicar of Dibley, while not bland, was still "nice" on the whole. A true engagement with faith should certainly make us kind, compassionate and forgiving, and I don't suggest we justify giving unnecessary offence through our own clutziness. But we should never feel obliged to be bland-nice. There's a pressure (perhaps especially on the professional minister?) to be "nice" to everyone, but it can lead you into woeful passive-aggressive behaviour, it's fake, and in any case it doesn't do justice to the fiery, vibrant, exciting character of the Kingdom of God. Goodness and Niceness are not the same thing at all.

lions and tigers and bears, Oh My!

or leopards and seven-headed beasts? The Bishop of Carlisle makes a characteristically colourful contribution to the Synod debate on gays and the church.

throwing hand grenades at jesus : another "quest"?

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, scholars have followed threads in different ways (known as the Quest for the Historical Jesus) trying to establish what we can really know about Jesus from a historical point of view.  The short answer is, not a whole lot.  We know he existed, we know he died by crucifxion, we know he had a following and that he had a huge impact on them.  But the man himself? We don't know what he looked like, what he sounded like, what kind of personality he had, what it would have been like to know him as a living breathing person.  All of this is either unknown or at best only reported to us second, third or fourth hand in documents with other purposes than biographical ones.

One of the questions that follows is what we then make of "Jesus" as the central figure of our faith, and the possible answers are many. I get my students to write essays on this, and their responses are always interesting.

I was intrigued to find that Christy has come up with some of the same questions, not from scholarly study on the Quest, but simply through her own thoughtful approach to her faith. Her own response is outlined in her recent post: Dry Bones Dance: Throwing hand grenades at Jesus. 

For me, one of the most important issues is simply the recognition that most of what we think about the "real" Jesus is actually an interpretation through the eyes of faith.  Tracking the development and shift in ideas about what Jesus was/is like through the history of the the faith easily demonstrates that a great deal of what we think is a projection of our own ideas about God onto him.  For me, this is not a great worry; I think it's valuable - no, perhaps essential - to be aware of the obscurity of the "real" Jesus, and to understand that we are talking about faith response more than hard facts.  The significance of Jesus is vital to understanding God from a Christian perspective, because it is the root of our understanding God's self-revelation through incarnation.  With no Jesus there is no Trinity, and with no Trinity, God is conceptually and experientially utterly different.  For others - Christy included - realising there is a veil over the "real" Jesus seems to make his significance recede.  Go read and see what you think.

Richard Dawkins and the new atheists

Kim Fabricius at his Fab best:

...the word “wars” in The Darwin Wars is (I think) a metaphor. Professor Dawkins himself has a knack for the memorable metaphor. His great book The Selfish Gene is a case in point. People can be literally selfish, but not genes. Indeed Dawkins does not even think that there are genes for selfishness. Okay, he wrote: “The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.” But he didn’t really mean it. Not literally. The author of Genesis said that the universe was created in six days. But who would take that literally except some crazy fundamentalists? Oops – and Dawkins.

Link: Faith and Theology: Ten propositions on Richard Dawkins and the new atheists.

"there are two religions in the Church of England..."

from a Radio feature on the row over Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. To hear for yourself, go here and wind forward to 34 minutes 20 seconds

Am I bovvered?...

Hugh writes about Jesus' teaching on oaths, and on the implied, unsaid things that lurk behind the words we use:

"I had an ex who when we'd argue would reply to my statements with "Whatever". This is probably the most evil phrase to enter the common lexicon. Basically, when used earnestly, it means "I don't care about you".

Say YES. This is what I believe in! Or NO, I can not stand behind that! Jesus perhaps saw "oaths" as a way of avoiding responsibility. I don't think it was just about words. I'd rather think it was a way of having his disciples take control and own their own actions, actions that would include their choices to follow him."

Pierced for our transgressions

It's been pointed out to me several times that the name of a new book on one particular theory of atonement has the same name as one of my songs. I gather the book is a response to some of the arguments that have been going on lately since the Chalke-gate thing happened a  couple of years back. I haven't read this latest book yet; I am almost finished with A.K.M. Adam's rather wonderful Faithful Interpretation (good enough that I am actually reading all of it, carefully, not just giving it a speed-read review) and on the other side of the desk I am also reading Alan Jacobs' absolutely splendid tome, A theology of reading. I hope to blog-review these in more detail ere long, but already I would urge anyone interested in how we go about the interpretation of the Bible to get both of them.

But back to He was pierced...  here are some random lunchtime thoughts on atonement theory and disagreements about doctrine.

Any thorough-going atonement theory (i.e. a theory of how the death of christ "works" to put right a broken relationship between God and humanity) is going to include some close attention to sacrifice and judgement - God's forgiveness is certainly full and free, but it isn't cheap and fluffy, and neither is it blind to the serious ills of the world. All the same, no thorough-going theology should (even unintentionally) present God as mean, judgemental and narrow-minded. I rather suspect that is really what Steve Chalke was trying to get at in his book, even though he left himself open to misunderstanding.

John MacIntyre reckons there are at least 27 different theories. I find something of value in all of them, and I don't think that any of them, in isolation, nor even all of them put toegether, are sufficient to give a full understanding of the consequences of the death of Jesus Christ. There's a lot to be said for holding different theories together - they aren't mutually exclusive, but can balance each other out and offer a richer understanding held together than by choosing one as pre-eminent over all the rest. A thoroughgoing theory of atonement needs to be multi-faceted. It needs to include an understanding of the rightful anger of God against violence, hatred, injustice, the abuse of power - in fact against all that mitigates against love. That's what sin means. An atonement theory also needs to include the idea that the cross is an inspiration and example to us to lay down our lives for our friends. (I'm quoting John quoting Jesus there, I didn't make that up). And further, it also needs a more universal view, something that reflects the idea that atonement is not limited to the sins of an individual, but that the world and everything in it is released not only from human sin, but from the grip of evil and the tendency for things to degenetrate into violence and destruction.  An associated idea that should always be noted, I think, is the warning that anyone (Jesus being the first among equals in this regard) who devotes their life to justice and peace and love is likely to end up paying dearly for it. Finally, any discussion of the atonement needs to aknowledge an element of mystery - because however much sense-making our theology does of the atonement, there's always an added sense that we don't totally know "how it works", although that needn't stop us knowing it does work.

I find it really sad that something as fascinating, as poignant, as ijmportant and life-changing as the atonement is becoming a peg on which to hang arguments between different factions of the Church.  I can't decide whether this spoof of the Old Rugged Cross - Old Argued Cross - is funny or sad. How particularly ironic that it was just as Easter unfolded this year that the latest argument erupted over theories of the atonement. Surely we are not supposed to be fighting about whose theory of the atonement is "the right one". Isn't the point precisely that we are not right; that we don't understand; that all our musings about God are incomplete? That only God can see everything; only God can make things right? Of course it seems unbelievable that God could be quite as generous as some dare to believe; there is this human instinct that comes variously from fear, meanness, or a form of tribal exclusivism, that wants to insist that only if we sign the "right" doctrinal statement or buy into the "right" interpretation, will God's grace work and people be allowed to belong to the Christian Club. I am so tired of liberals slagging off Evangelicals for being narrow; of evangelicals dismissing liberals for being woolly. It's so pointless. I hear the words of the Epistles of John echoing in my head - written, it would appear, by an elderly man who sums up the wisdom of his years by saying, "Children, you know the only thing that really matters in the end? - that you love one another. "

The longer I live, the more I believe that the beauty of the atonement is not that it only works if you believe it in the right way, it's that it works even if you don't understand it at all. I'm not going soft on doctrine - I love doctrine with a passion, and I spend a good slice of my life teaching it - but even I have to admit that we aren't saved by doctrine, and that God can be visibly and awesomely at work in the lives of people whose doctrine is well wide of the mark.  The grace and generosity of God is, I'll grant you, completely outrageous. He seems to insist on including people in the Kingdom of God who are not like me at all. Where does it come from, this need to have doctrinal proof of someone else's salvation? I have to wonder whether that isn't precisely the kind of thing that Jesus died to save us from.

It's been pointed out to me several times that the name of a new book on one particular theory of atonement has the same name as one of my songs. I gather the book is a response to some of the arguments that have been going on lately since the Chalke-gate thing happened a  couple of years back. I haven't read this latest book yet; I am almost finished with A.K.M. Adam's rather wonderful Faithful Interpretation (good enough that I am actually reading all of it, carefully, not just giving it a speed-read review) and on the other side of the desk I am also reading Alan Jacobs' absolutely splendid tome, A theology of reading. I hope to blog-review these in more detail ere long, but already I would urge anyone interested in how we go about the interpretation of the Bible to get both of them.

But back to He was pierced...  here are some random lunchtime thoughts on atonement theory and disagreements about doctrine.

Any thorough-going atonement theory (i.e. a theory of how the death of christ "works" to put right a broken relationship between God and humanity) is going to include some close attention to sacrifice and judgement - God's forgiveness is certainly full and free, but it isn't cheap and fluffy, and neither is it blind to the serious ills of the world. All the same, no thorough-going theology should (even unintentionally) present God as mean, judgemental and narrow-minded. I rather suspect that is really what Steve Chalke was trying to get at in his book, even though he left himself open to misunderstanding.

John MacIntyre reckons there are at least 27 different theories. I find something of value in all of them, and I don't think that any of them, in isolation, nor even all of them put toegether, are sufficient to give a full understanding of the consequences of the death of Jesus Christ. There's a lot to be said for holding different theories together - they aren't mutually exclusive, but can balance each other out and offer a richer understanding held together than by choosing one as pre-eminent over all the rest. A thoroughgoing theory of atonement needs to be multi-faceted. It needs to include an understanding of the rightful anger of God against violence, hatred, injustice, the abuse of power - in fact against all that mitigates against love. That's what sin means. An atonement theory also needs to include the idea that the cross is an inspiration and example to us to lay down our lives for our friends. (I'm quoting John quoting Jesus there, I didn't make that up). And further, it also needs a more universal view, something that reflects the idea that atonement is not limited to the sins of an individual, but that the world and everything in it is released not only from human sin, but from the grip of evil and the tendency for things to degenetrate into violence and destruction.  An associated idea that should always be noted, I think, is the warning that anyone (Jesus being the first among equals in this regard) who devotes their life to justice and peace and love is likely to end up paying dearly for it. Finally, any discussion of the atonement needs to aknowledge an element of mystery - because however much sense-making our theology does of the atonement, there's always an added sense that we don't totally know "how it works", although that needn't stop us knowing it does work.

I find it really sad that something as fascinating, as poignant, as ijmportant and life-changing as the atonement is becoming a peg on which to hang arguments between different factions of the Church.  I can't decide whether this spoof of the Old Rugged Cross - Old Argued Cross - is funny or sad. How particularly ironic that it was just as Easter unfolded this year that the latest argument erupted over theories of the atonement. Surely we are not supposed to be fighting about whose theory of the atonement is "the right one". Isn't the point precisely that we are not right; that we don't understand; that all our musings about God are incomplete? That only God can see everything; only God can make things right? Of course it seems unbelievable that God could be quite as generous as some dare to believe; there is this human instinct that comes variously from fear, meanness, or a form of tribal exclusivism, that wants to insist that only if we sign the "right" doctrinal statement or buy into the "right" interpretation, will God's grace work and people be allowed to belong to the Christian Club. I am so tired of liberals slagging off Evangelicals for being narrow; of evangelicals dismissing liberals for being woolly. It's so pointless. I hear the words of the Epistles of John echoing in my head - written, it would appear, by an elderly man who sums up the wisdom of his years by saying, "Children, you know the only thing that really matters in the end? - that you love one another. "

The longer I live, the more I believe that the beauty of the atonement is not that it only works if you believe it in the right way, it's that it works even if you don't understand it at all. I'm not going soft on doctrine - I love doctrine with a passion, and I spend a good slice of my life teaching it - but even I have to admit that we aren't saved by doctrine, and that God can be visibly and awesomely at work in the lives of people whose doctrine is well wide of the mark.  The grace and generosity of God is, I'll grant you, completely outrageous. He seems to insist on including people in the Kingdom of God who are not like me at all. Where does it come from, this need to have doctrinal proof of someone else's salvation? I have to wonder whether that isn't precisely the kind of thing that Jesus died to save us from.

pierced for our transgressions

This post has been re-published here due to technical problems

churches with websites are more likely to grow...

...so Tim Bednar reports

Hard Questions for Emerging Church

The "Hard Questions" tour is underway, and last Monday I went along to the nearest one to Cambridge. It was in the bit of Lambeth Palace that has been turned into a conference facility, and it was good to meet up with lots of London and Cambridge people I hadn't seen for a while, and a few from further afield as well. I'm glad this tour and conversation is going on. As many have observed, the shape and content of the tour poses as many hard questions as it attempts to answer (where are the women? they young people? the practitioners? etc etc) but at least the conversation is going on. That we must rejoice about.

I was planning to blog it, but time is running away from me this week (I have proofs to read, and essays to mark, and the like...) but happily the wonderful Kathryn of Good in Parts has blogged three posts on it. I can't improve much on her account. Go and read, here first, and then here and  then here.

Aled Jones and Francis Drake

I had the great pleasure this morning of talking to Aled Jones on the Radio. I'm happy to find that he is as charming in real life as he seems in the public eye. We chatted about this and that, and then I got to say a few words about faith. This is (approximately) what I said:

We need certain things to survive - food, shelter, warmth. But we need something more than this to flourish as human beings - we need a dream, a sense of purpose. Of course, our dreams need to shift as we get closer to them - if your dream has already come true, it's time to get a new one!

I think that this is mostly what we mean when we speak of God. To catch a glimpse of God is to know that there is something bigger than ourselves - something, or someone, beyond the horizon.

Sir Francis Drake, the first person to circumnavigate the globe, once prayed for bigger dreams. This is part of his prayer:

Disturb us, Lord,
when we are too well pleased with ourselves;
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;
When we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly -
to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery;
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

Jesus loves me, this I know

Finker has been running a series on his blog called 4+1 - he asks four questions (the same four) of various people, and then when he recieves their reply he asks each of them one follow-up question in response to their answers. He asked me to join in, and Finker's 4+1 interview with me is here. 

In the process, I wrote a lengthy response to his fifth question, which I ended up deleting for the sake of leaving a little space on Finker's blog for someone else. If you're interested, the stuff I eidted out over there is here:

Finker's 2nd question: yes Jesus or no Jesus?
Maggi: Well, mostly yes. There are times when I've wondered whether there is no God, but it's pretty hard to dispute that Jesus was real, historically speaking, and that he had a profound impact on those around him. I think there are plenty of arguments you can have around the edge, and there are times when you feel like saying "no I won't" or "no I can't" to the demands Jesus made. But if he was here, right now, I think he'd be the kind of individual I'd find it very hard to say "no" to... (etc)

Finker's 5th question: "You write with unsurprising articulacy about the historical Jesus.  In what sense is Jesus here today for you and what might he be asking you to which you would "find it very hard to say no"?"
Maggi:  My description of Jesus is only part historical, you know, Finker. It's difficult - nay, almost impossible - to say anything of absolutely dependable accuracy about what the man Jesus of Nazareth was like, as the various "Quests" for the historical Jesus have shown. And this fact gives us both a freedom and a problem. It's a freedom because Jesus, by his spirit, can become the Jesus of here and now for you, and me, and people everywhere. Were time travel possible, it's hard to imagine that a first century male palestinian Jew could relate to an over-educated, 21st century white woman. We would be bewildered by one another's cultures. Yet Jesus is real in my community by his Spirit, and becomes real through the members of that community, as well as in our own souls and imaginations. (I'm using imagination here not to suggest that Jesus is not real, or is a flight of fancy, but to acknowledge that to encounter spiritual realities you need to engage the imagination).

When I desribe Jesus as "A man of total integrity and passionate commitment to his cause" and say that he "loved life... showed deep love to his friends... dined out a lot and hung out with all sorts of people..." etc., it isn't really a historical account, it's how I conceive now of what Jesus is like, and that's the Jesus I hear calling to me; that is the spirit that when I encounter it in my own soul or in other people, I recognise it as the Spirit of Christ that lives in us, yet has a reality beyond any of us - I think that's what incarnation means.

But there's a problem too in the possibility of wide interpretation, because there are ways of interpreting Jesus that fall within the bounds of a broad orthodoxy, yet seem pretty unacceptable to me, Some people, for instance, put so much emphasis on the morally demanding aspect of Jesus that they lose touch with his compassion, making him more judgemental than liberating. Some interpret him as right wing, racist, patriarchal. All interpretations of Jesus (including mine) are a mix of historical truth and the projections of our own views. It's very demanding to see our own projections for what they are and evaluate critically our own idea of Jesus, while at the same time listening huimbly and compassionately to other people's idea of him. All the same, I don't think this means you can't know a "real" Jesus here and now; I think it means that the real Jesus we know is inseparable from our relationship to others. Only if I allow my idea of Jesus to be revised and refined by yours and other people's will I ever encounter anything of the spirit of the real Jesus. Only if you allow readings of Jesus that you find alien and strange will you ever touch the heart of the real Jesus. Often those who "feel" the reality of Jesus most acutely have the most unreal idea of Jesus. The feeling of being all switched on to God can be a comfortable disguise for a religion based on a very unreal Jesus.

So to get back to your question, via a slightly circuitous route, Jesus is "here" for me in that the spirit of the real Jesus does live on in people, in Church, in sacrament. Knowing whether JEsus is real is problematic in that sometimes the way other people present him makes me want nothing to do with him. Question - is that the "real" Jesus, or are they mistaken?  And he is problematic in that I have to consider how much of Jesus is my own invention. Question: Am I just making up a Jesus I like better than someone else's?  But despite all that there is a spirit at the heart of it all, rooted in the accounts of scripture, which are scripture precisely because they bear witness to Him. And thus, despite the complexity of honest faith, I do find a reality about Jesus here today.

All of this, dear Finker, even though it has an important place, is rather verbose and a bit abstract in places. The great 20th century protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was far more verbose and abstract than I shall ever be, and I take heart from him when I think I'm getting too involved in complexities of words and thought. But I take heart even more from this little anecdote. Someone once asked Barth whether he could sum up his whole theology in just a few words. Barth paused for a moment, and then replied, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." When words get too much, I always remember that.

Peace to you, Finker. Yours, Maggi Dawn.

Episcopalian - what's that?

A friend of mine is writing a book that explains what the Episcopalian church is all about. He has long experience in TV and is an engaging preacher. Looks like he can write well too. Go and check it out, and offer your comments on his work in progress.

Love the questions, live the questions

In the midst of uncertainty and unresolved questions, Jen Lemen recommends Rilke, and the kindness of one lit candle beside a freshly drawn bath. Candlelit baths is a haven I discovered this winter when the light fitting in my bathroom broke and it was a week before I managed to get it fixed. Now the light is fixed but the candles remain. So do the unresolved questions, for which Rilke is indeed a guide for the soul:

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —from the letters of Ranier Maria Rilke

hat tip to my lovely friend Jen

lent, simplicity and stuff

Simplifying your life is at the heart of the Lent discipline. The world wants to sell us stuff. More stuff. Stuff we don't need, stuff we can't afford, stuff we won't have time to make the most of.

Traditionally Lent was a time for giving up rich food, and only eating simple food, and in addition, taking the money saved from the household budget and giving it to the poor. Lent was about simplifying your own life, and in the process levelling the playing field just a little.

We do spend a lot of money on food in our culture, but it might capture the Lent tradition better by looking at the stuff we buy - lots and lots and lots of consumer goods, disposable stuff with a limited capacity for bringing joy and benefit to our lives. It's a revelation to stop from time to time, and look at how much stuff is in your house that you have only used once or twice, thought you wanted really badly but actually didn't use that much. Lent is a good moment to re-think your relationship to stuff. Give up buying any unnecessary stuff for Lent. Then carve out a few sessions to recycle, give away, sell, or otherwise dispose of the clutter of unwanted stuff in your house, and in the process ponder what is real treasure and what is just wasted resources. By Easter you will be richer, leaner and wiser. You'll have more space, more time, and a clearer perspective on life framed by a new vision of God.

Fat Tuesday

Mardi Gras (lit. Fat Tuesday), Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, is almost upon us.

Time to party, carnival, eat drink and enjoy before a time of leanness and fasting. A time for relishing freedom and plenty before a time of discipline and self restraint. We will be making our pancakes for supper on Tuesday evening, probably inviting over some of the neighbourhood to eat up with us.

We are good at partying in our culture, good at treating ourselves, good at buying now and paying later. I am old enough to have been brought up pre-credit cards, in an era when you saved up for things before you bought them, and when the thing would still be there to buy six months later. Built in obsolescence and two-weekly changes of merchandise didn't happen back then. Working out how badly you really want something before you get out the plastic is a discipline that I rather enjoy, and not giving in and buying is rarely something I regret later. The pleasure and appreciation is all the greater when you get something you really want, something you have thought about for more than five minutes.

Giving up things for Lent is traditionally associated with giving up food and drink, and we do tend still to think immediately of coffee or chocolate or alcohol or desserts or something, if we are giving up anything. The meaning of Lent gets lost if we focus on the benefits of dieting - living a cycle of (moderate) fasting and feasting is undeniably good for the body as well as the soul, but Lent is lost if it gets subsumed into the quest of body-consciousness.

Daily Service

I'm presenting the Daily Service n Thursday. 9.45 a.m. on Radio 4 LW. To "listen again" on the website go here after the service is over and click the link on the page to my programme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/dailyservice/index.shtml

AUthority under us

Jason misheard the prayers. He writes:

I thought I heard the person leading the prayers of the people pray 'for those in authority under us'. I thought I was sure I misheard (and, asking later, this was verified), but what a neat image. We're so used to authority being 'over' us, as if to keep us down, or keep us in line, put us in our place. What if authority is something 'under' us, to support us, uphold us, lift us? This would be a way of construing what true authority is in the church: service. And the greatest will be called servant of all. This is a service and authority which elevates people and makes possible the fullness which God intends for us, an authority authorised by the very flourishing it gives rise to.

Gower Street: Blessed unclarity?.

The Anglican Communion's 'Via Dolorosa'

Ruth Gledhill compares Anglican relationships to playgroud politics. I think she has a point. Link: Times Online - Ruth Gledhill - WBLG: The Anglican Communion's 'Via Dolorosa'. I shall be praying that grace will prevail.

Nowhere to lay your head?

Homeless people often don't like to go indoors. I discovered this in my early twenties when I worked for a few years in a house that existed to rehabilitate homeless people into "normal" society. Some of our housemates who moved off the streets struggled more than anything just with staying indoors. Some of them were anxious about losing their stuff, or their freedom. They knew that living outdoors (in this country at any rate) was threatening their health and shortening their lives. But the fact was that they felt safer out of doors, with a life that could be contained in big pockets and a couple of bags.

Some years later I went with the local Bishop and a small team of people to do a Christmas Day service in a huge warehouse that was the Christmas shelter for Crisis. A warehouse provided sufficient cover to keep the temperature eight or nine degrees above street temperature, but vast enough not to feel claustrophobic. The guests could bring their "stuff" in with them, and preserve thier little space. Crisis had also organised a massive "wardrobe" of second hand clothes, so that the guests could get a new set of clothes if they needed it. Over in the corner a hundred or so of the guests gathered for the Christmas morning service. We played and sang and prayed and talked, bundled up in large overcoats, hats and gloves, and I can tell you it was not glamorous, not Emerging, not cool and not trendy. The guests wanted the comfort of old-fashioned hymns, King James psalms and the Lord's Prayer. Some talked, but many of them didn't "do" conversation, preferring to have people sit nearby, sharing a cup of coffee in a sort of wordless companionship. Those were the things that connected them to God.

For many who have lived outdoors for any length of time, the reality is that they will not move back indoors to live or eat or sleep, and if we want to share Church with such communities, we need to go outdoors, instead of inviting them in. So I'm pretty moved to read this account in the N Y Times of a Church that has a regular "outdoors" congregation. No Altar, No Pews, Not Even a Roof, but Very Much a Church - New York Times.

women's clerical shirts

further to my post a while back, lamenting the dearth of decent shirts for women, this company has come across my path: WomenSpirit. make really quite feminine looking shirts and - pause for intake of breath at revolutionary moment - MATERNITY clerical shirts. Hooray for WomenSpirit.

edit: Clare is thinking of setting up a Fairtrade company, and asks, how many shirts per year does the average clergywoman buy? Comments anyone?

Three posts on clergy life

"Many non-ordained people struggle to believe that being a priest can be stressful. Some even still believe that we work for one day a week, visit a few people and spend the rest of the time reading theology and collecting butterflies."

Paul Roberts on clergy stress, working hours etc, in three posts, starting here.

SLOW priesthood

MadPriest and RevSam have been having a conversation about work, priorities, working hours and so on. This is MadPriest on being a priest:

I stick to 3 jobs as defined by the Ordinal. Preside, teach, visit. I got rid of all jobs outside of the parish, including at deanery level and never attend meetings or courses unless my people will definitely benefit from my attendance. I got rid of my need to be in charge, even if I thought I could do a better job. There is no reason why the local church leadership should not come from members of the laity. This even includes PCCs. Certainly people can be found to do most of the admin jobs and do it far better than someone trained mainly in the niceties of Biblical hermeneutics and church history. I stopped worrying about the Protestant work ethic. I don't care if I'm not busy. Nobody acknowledges the fact when you work all hours anyway.

All this leaves me with plenty of time to do do my pastoral work properly. Visiting, arranging funerals as if each one is a major society wedding, walking round the parish, talking to people in the street. And you know what Sam, everything still gets done and people believe I am the only priest in the neighbourhood who does his job, even though I am the laziest sod in the priesthood.

I aspire to be lazy but haven't achieved it yet. But like MadPriest I too have re-aligned a lot of what I do over the last year or so. Even in a Chaplaincy (where the popular myth is that we only work in term time) it's entirely possible to take on more and more and more things, not only beyond the call of duty but beyond the limit of human capacity. I chopped out a large number of things that weren't necessary, stopped doing other people's jobs for them, and found that not only did I have enough time left over at work to do the important things, but was less tired when I got home, and managed to write a book in my spare time.

Wait - Books? Writing? - where does that come in the Ordinal? (unless you include it in teaching, I suppose...) But because of that, I also like Rev Sam's response to MadPriest, which includes this:

"...in the end I did come to a resolution and a sense of peace: that a) I was called to parish ministry, but b) I had to work out for myself what it meant for ME to be a parish priest - not what being a parish priest was in general, but what sort of ministry is God specifically calling ME to - and that the model of ministry that I had been trained and formed for was not appropriate; that in fact, if I allowed that model to dominate who I was, that I would simply be repeatedly broken."

I like MadPriest's comment because it takes you back to the starting blocks - why am I in this job? What am I supposed to be doing? And what did I just accidentally get talked into along the way? But I like RevSam's development because it recognises there is more than one way to skin a cat.  MadPriest's conversation with RevSam is serious food for thought for anyone in ministry whose work load has got out of control.

homiletics

last week I preached on the Magnificat and Justice. In the afternoon I rehearsed through the whole script. I always do this several times before I preach, if I'm using a script rather than just crib notes. The first couple of times I adjust the script so that it sounds more spoken than read. There are things you do with language when you're talking that don't work written down, and vice versa. If you write your script without reading it out loud it can often sound like reading from a book.

The final time I rehearsed the script was in the vestry, and one of my Sacristans came in to start organising candles and the like. I was just struggling a little to work out why the last line kind of fell dead. It made perfectly good sense, and it summed up the theme of the sermon perfectly:

"(The Magnificat is.....)    ... a vision of justice that demands an active response. It's as much a call as it is a promise. "

But for some reason the line just felt like it died. I was thinking out loud (literally) about this problem, so my Sacristan joined in.

My thought was this: pro-mise - weak ending, drops away; call - strong word, doesn't get lost.
His thought was - the last word you hear is the one you remember. So we turned the line round:

"It isn't a promise... unless it's also a call."

Worked beautifully.  Easier to say. More impact.

emerging church - is it new?

I posted in a conversation today that raised the question whether there is anything new about the Emerging Church. There are people who see it as a completely new phenomenon, there are others that see it (perhaps with feelings of cynicism) as just another re-invention of Church, the same as the last one and the one before that...

I think neither of these descriptions quite hits the nail on the head. I think it's true in one sense that there is nothing new about it, but that doesn't have to be a cynical response necessarily, just an honest recognition that all the elements of Church, however they are  rediscovered or rearranged, have been explored somewhere sometime before. But at the same time, there has never been a time, a culture, a community, a family, a Church, precisely like yours, ever. Anywhere. Christianity is not just an off-the-shelf system that you buy into, but a relationship between people and god, people and people, people and themselves. Just as human beings are both completely unique and same-old, same-old, so their Churches (emerging or whatever) will be too.

I don't think there has to be an opposition of whether it's new/not new, and neither do I think it matters particularly. I think it does matter that we hold togehter both the history we've inherited (and the graciousness and humility to acknowledge it) and the freedom to live thoroughly in the present. I don't think Church works unless you hold both those two things together in some lively way.

I also am interested to see Bishop Mike musing on how much new things can emerge within existing Institutions. That's a related question to old/new, although not precisely the same. He is beginning to blog his thoughts on the subject - worth watching.

AN ACCEPTABLE SACRIFICE

I have a chapter in An Acceptable Sacrifice (Eds Dormor and Morris), which is now coming out mid-January (earlier than the planned date).  It's a collection of essays from different disciplines, but all responding to the vexed question of the church's traditional doctrine and homosexual relationships. The book opens with my chapter on hermeneutics, and two chapters by an Old Testament and a New Testament scholar, between us looking at how to read the Bible and how to treat the passages that seem specifically to address the issue. There are also sections on the Church and the history of marriage, the Church and sociology, and a very interesting chapter on human sexuality written by a consultant obstetrician.

Get the book at the reduced price of £8.99 from Ekklesia and you will also be contributing to charitable causes: Buy AN ACCEPTABLE SACRIFICE PB from Ekklesia and raise money for christian peace and justice work.

or for the RRP of £10.99 from Amazon UK

ISBN-10: 0281058512        ISBN-13: 978-0281058518

Poems for Christmas: BC:AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U.A. Fanthorpe (born 1929)

more reflections on Advent and Christmas here

Joyeux Noël

Al last I have seen Christian' Carion's imaginative re-telling of the story of Christmas 1914 in the trenches, when French, German and British troops met in no-man's land to sing and play football. Carion adds lots of imaginative development to the historical detaisl fo the story, and certainly the British don't come out particularly well in his telling, although his condemnation is more for the hierarchies, and his most poignantly made point is the profound difference in the experience of this war between those who strategised in offices and headquarters, and those who fought on the ground. I thought a three-language film would be a bit too Brain-stretching, but in fact it's not hard to follow at all, and part of the charm of the movie is the men from 3 nations trying to understand each other.

It was fantastic to see a REALLY positive image of a priest on screen, beautifully played by Gary Lewis (who was also brilliant in Billy Elliot).

French review:       English review:

poems for Christmas: mary's song

My book on Advent and Christmas (Order from Amazon, or from the publisher) includes a good bit of poetry; one of the poems that inspired me concerning Mary's story is this lovely poem by Luci Shaw:

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves' voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

Luci Shaw

more reflections on Advent and Christmas here

poems for Christmas: the journey of the magi

When writing Beginnings and Endings (a book for Advent and Christmas, available from Amazon, or from the publisher ) I drew inspiration from many poets, including T S Eliot. 

This poem was written in 1927, and is believed to reflect Eliot's own journey from agnosticism to faith.

The journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

more reflections on Advent and 
Christmas here

No Love Left in This World

Jen Lemen at her best here: jen lemen: No Love Left in This World.

Stir-up Sunday

The last Sunday of the Church Year is the Sunday before Advent - this year on 25th November. These days it is known as the feast of Christ the King, although at Robinson, as it's the last Sunday before the undergraduates "go down" we'll be having our Advent Carol service a week early.

The last sunday before Advent is traditionally known as Stir-up Sunday. The name is taken from the Collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer:

Stir-up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

But the happy coincidence of the Collect with the timing of Christmas preparations has led to a double meaning here, for this is also the Sunday that traditionally is the day for giving the home-made Christmas pudding a final stir.

The pudding was made with thirteen ingredients, to represent Christ and his disciples, and the stirring was supposed to be done from East to West, in memory of the great journey of the Magi. Every member of the family would take a turn at stirring the pudding, before it was sealed up ready for cooking, and while they stirred they made a wish - and, like most wish-making traditions, the wish had to be kept secret if it was to come true.

Into the pudding would also be stirred a few more wish-making features. A coin was stirred in, either a silver sixpence (about the size of a modern-day 5p piece) or a threepenny bit, a ring, and a thimble. On Christmas day each person would hunt through their serving of pudding to see if they had got one of the good l;uck charms - the coin was supposed to bring wealth, the ring foretold a marriage, and the thimble was the sign of a life of good luck.

You see what you miss if you buy a ready made pudding in a plastic pot?

women priests and the archbishop of canterbury

"So what will you do if the Archbishop of Canterbury stops ordaining women priests?" asked a colleague at work this morning.

Huh? I didn't hear the offending piece on the Radio this morning, but my initial reaction to my colleague was, "if that's really what they said on the Radio, my guess is that it was mis-reported."

Sure enough, if you read a bit more closely, what we appear to have here is the Archbishop affirming that he was, and remains, a supporter of the ordination of women. But (true academic that he is) he can also see all sides of the argument, read the signs of the times, and take seriously points of view that are different from his own. If he was a born politician he wouldn't say thoughtful things out loud in public, he'd say what he thought we needed to hear. But he's a born academic. Frankly, I think I prefer him the way he is.

Update... yup, just as I suspected...

Update 2: Dave Cartoon-Church Walker has produced a cartoon, at my request, to illustrate the days events...

Fauré Requiem

One of the things we do at Robinson, regularly but not often, is to take a classic piece of choral music that's usually heard as a concert piece, and "perform" it as a liturgy. I think we may have been unique in constructing a liturgy around the wonderful Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms. We did Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man about 3 years ago as a Eucharist for Remembrance. Not so unusual, but still a different experience from a concert, was to do Mozart's Requiem last year as a liturgy. This weekend, for Remembrance Day, we are doing the same with Fauré's Requiem. We aren't a professional choir - it's a choir of volunteers, run by two of our students. And 68% of our Choir is new this term, so they've only been singing together for 5 weeks. It's a brave move, but it was sounding nice in rehearsal, and we are looking forward to it.

Fauré said some stuff about his Requiem that may well chime with Emerging Church afficionados - he wanted to do something that was a funeral but not as we know it, church but not as we know it. His own faith and belief were an interesting mix of orthodoxy and complete maverick individualism. But then he was an artist, so that's pretty unsurprising. Creatives are often feared in the Church because they want to reshape things. Odd, perhaps, that displaying creativity - that most God-like of qualities - often sidelines artists within Church circles.  Anyway, here's what Fauré said about his Requiem:

"It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its overinclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist's nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."

If you want to join us for our Choral Requiem for Remembrance, it's at Robinson College Chapel, Grange Road, Sunday 12th November. 6pm.

The God Delusion

Terry Eagleton. replies, in his inimitable style, to Richard Dawkins. Go read.

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins... are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.

UPDATE: more reviews of The God Delusion here and here

Jesus and interesting Heresies

The Way started up again this week. Under the title "Who is Jesus", we talked about the tension between the means we have of knowing about Jesus and the difference between that and knowing God in some connected, spiritual, living sense. It's probably impossible to have the knowing without the knowing about, but it's very easy to get lost in knowing about and lose connection with the knowing. We also thought about reading scripture and the problem of projection; and about what sense we make of the relationship between Jesus in history and the Christ we believe in now.

The Way meets again on October 23rd, and Andrew will be starting off a session on "Decisions, Decisions (or, What would Jesus do?)". This is normally only for Robinson members; anyone else needs to ask me in advance whether we have room for guests. 

Leaving Church

I promised myself that I would blog more of the books I read - so easy just to put them down and read the next one.  Over the summer I've read a pile of books, some for work, some for review, and some just for me! One that I read purely for my own interest was Leaving Church: a memoir of faith - I think I saw it pre-viewed on Prodigal Kiwis blog and ordered it right away. This is the book I quoted from in my Greenbelt talk back in August.

Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor's own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life  of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.

One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with - loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as priveleges.  Taylor puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called for, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won't accept your humanity if you are.  Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".

The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" - it's not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side.  One of the reasons I like the book so much is that - unlike so much other rhetoric among Church leavers that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution - she offers considered insight into the tensions of faith communities and their leaders, and shows how sometimes those communities disallow our calling first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn't claim to have left the Church because she didn't believe in it any more, nor because she didin't believe in what she had done thus far, and she doesn't hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she relates the complex reasons why a clear shift in role and direction became desirable for her, and what she learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It's refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.

I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this - priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities - if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as communities of truly interdependent people? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the path that Barbara Brown Taylor has found essential.