Hebrew context

The pace of this Blog now changes.  I haven’t posted for two weeks, and in two weeks time we go away for thirteen weeks Extended Study Leave (nee Sabbatical) at the Tantur Institute on the edge of Jerusalem. 

Some of my time at the moment is spent arranging things with those who will be living in the house and those who will be looking after the parish, rather than posting here .

I suspect that I’ll then want to use the Blog as a way of saving pictures and ideas for myself, but the Institute warns participants in its courses about missing the sabbatical experience by spending a disproportionate amount of time updating others on social media, so what I post will be unsystematic, and possibly episodic.

With the background reading we’ve been asked to do, I’ve already begun to reinhabit the Hebrew culture of much of the Gospels. 

Last Sunday, I explored new ideas for me as I found part of the Gospel (Luke 12.37-38) identified  by Kenneth E Bailey as Hebrew poetry, with the first and last lines in parallel, then the second and penultimate ones, then the third and antepenultimate ones, pointing to the ‘conclusion’ at the centre.  

Blessed are the slaves

  when the Lord coming he finds them watching:

    amen I tell you he will gird himself 
     and he will make them recline                                                  

    and coming he will serve them;

  whichever watch coming he finds it so  

blessed are they.

We feel we can almost touch the Galilean preacher who habitually identifies the blessed, says ‘amen’, speaks of the God’s Kingdom as a wedding banquet, and turns the idea of servanthood upside down, all features which colour lots of other parts of the Gospel.

Today, I explore old ideas with one of the two set Old Testament readings (the beginning of Isaiah 5) where these fourteen lines

Let me sing for my beloved

    my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;

he expected it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and people of Judah,
judge between me
    and my vineyard.

are clearly  in the minds of the first speaker and hearers of these Gospel lines (placed by Matthew soon  tells us Jesus’ cursed and unproductive fig tree)

There was a landowner

who planted a vineyard,

put a fence around it,

dug a wine press in it,

and built a watch-tower.

Then he leased it to tenants

 and went to another country.

When the harvest time had come,

he sent his slaves to the tenants

to collect his produce.

But the tenants seized his slaves…

Now when the owner of the vineyard comes,

what will he do to those tenants?’.

Meanwhile, bees and butterflies swarm round plants in our garden in a way at which this picture only hints.

A diagram

I keep tinkering with this diagram, which makes a lot of sense to me but may not be much help to you as a causal reader without a more detailed introduction than I can put here.

And I now find that making it bigger (so it can be read) cuts off one edge, so this may not be my most helpful post of all time.

Anyway, fro what it is worth, the further left you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on genuine knowledge of what is going on on the ground.

The further right you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends of stepping back far enough to get the big picture.

The further down you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on clear and definite spelling out.

The further up you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on being open to things you haven’t yet taken into account.

But if you get to an edge (or, worse, into a corner), you are likely to be in a seriously distorted place; the nearer you get to the end of any line, the more likely you are to lose the balance you need.

What else? The bits in square brackets (about Myers Briggs on the edges and about Learning Cycle theory in the middle) are only vague correlations and not substantive parts of the diagram at all.

Normal service will be resumed next week.

Inter-faith hospitality

A reflection written for a Cleethorpes audience (which appeared in the Cleethorpes Chronicle on Thursday):

At the time of the Gulf War, a Cleethorpes man was the Anglican Bishop in the region. John Brown had been a boy in the choir at Old Clee church. He eventually retired back to Cleethorpes and died here a couple of years ago. In between, he first worked in places like Jerusalem and the Sudan where he learnt Arabic, so he was well placed eventually to take on the incredibly sensitive job of an Englishman being a Bishop in the Middle East.

He was always proud of being the subject of a fatwa – a formal ruling by an Islamic leader. The fatwa was issued by the Grand Mufti of the Yemen. It followed much patient work. It allowed Christians to worship in Aden. “It is our duty,” the Grand Mufti’s fatwa said, “to allow members of the Christian community to exercise their religious rites as is the case in our mosques and Islamic centres all over the United Kingdom”. The collection taken at the service in St Peter’s, Cleethorpes in thanksgiving service for John’s life was for the work of the medical clinic at Christ Church, Aden, which continues as a result; it serves those of every faith.

Of course, Christians and Muslims are not always so tolerant of each other. I recently visited one of the largest and most beautiful mosques in the world which is in Cordoba, Spain; it is now used as a Christian church and Moslems have not been allowed to pray in it for centuries. Meanwhile, in some other parts of the world today it is Christians who are the ones who are badly treated – we are not allowed to worship in public in Saudi Arabia and we are often attacked at worship in northern Nigeria.

So which story would be the best story about North East Lincolnshire today? Would we like people to report that we take the same attitude as the Grand Mufti of the Yemen? Or would we like people to tell others that we take the same attitude as the Christians in Cordoba?

Thankfully, there has been one consistent answer for many years. I have been reading about the opening of the Grimsby Synagogue in 1885. The report says there were cheers when a speaker referred to the generous donations made by Christian friends of the new growing Jewish community to help them build their place of worship. Over a century later, it was the Methodist Church (which still has a dozen churches open for Christian worship in North East Lincolnshire) which allowed the Moslem community to take over a former chapel so that it could have an Islamic Centre here.

A reflection with some of the same material and intent written for a Great Coates audience (coming out in the Village Council’s magazine for August and September)

At least one of those buried in St Nicolas’ churchyard in the 1920s was born in Hamburg. Edward Lewis was German, was naturalised as a British citizen in the 1870s, ran the Wellowgate Brewery in the 1890s, and lived for a short time at the Manor in Great Coates.

I hadn’t realised until last month just how many people travelled through Hamburg and Grimsby in the nineteenth century. The two ports sit on estuaries exactly east-west of each other. If you wanted to flee eastern Europe for the United States, it was to Hamburg that you would be likely to go. From there Great Central Railways could sell you a single ticket to take one of its boats to Grimsby and then to transfer to one of its trains to Liverpool. Among the huge numbers who did so were Jews being persecuted on what is now the Polish-Russian border - think ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.

A small fraction of these people travelled no further than Grimsby, and I’ve been learning that this is mainly from where the Grimsby Jewish community sprang (including the Goldberg family in Great Coates). The new community needed a place of worship. The future Lord Heneage (a Christian) gave the site, and, when the foundation stone was laid in the 1880s, there were reports of cheers when Christian donors were among those thanked for their contributions to the costs.

This all puts recent history in a very interesting context. One of those convicted recently for calling for the burning down of Grimsby’s Islamic Centre is reported as saying his blood boiled knowing that it was a former Christian church building. I wonder what support he is giving to his own local church to help keep it open. I wonder whether he realises that the Methodist church (which has a closed Chapel converted into a house in Great Coates as well as the closed Chapel converted into the Islamic Centre in Weelsby Road) keeps as many as a dozen Chapels open for Christian worship in North East Lincolnshire today. But how I wish he knew the story of the foundation of Grimsby’s synagogue.

There are things which should make our blood boil - including the way Christians, Jews and Muslims have often treated each other and sometimes still do - but making space for new communities to worship in our town surely isn’t one of them.

Edward Lewis was the father of the Herbert Lewis who has featured in the last two posts on this Blog; I have just obtained copies of his naturalisation papers which give his original name as Eduard Anton Louis Riemenschneider.

The picture was taken in the St Michael’s tower last week.

Never cease to chant them

Common Worship begins daily prayers with Psalm 51.15 and Psalm 70.1 because Cranmer’s did in 1549.  Cranmer did because mediaeval monks did.  Mediaeval monks did because the Rule of St Benedict  told them to in about 530.  Benedict told them to read John Cassian to find out why.  Cassian wrote in about 400 about the earliest monks in the Egyptian desert from about 270 ceaselessly turning such verses over in their hearts .  Begin ‘Open our lips and fill them with your praise’ in case you are tempted to think that it is you who begin.   Continue ‘Come swiftly to my help’ because, as Cassian says, this verse has been picked from all scripture for this purpose, that the downcast do not despair of saving remedies and the spiritually successful are reminded that they cannot last without God; ‘do not cease to chant them’. 

The pictures of meadow flowers are from Mayflower Wood, Immingham on Saturday.  One of two full-time nature conservation officers who work for industry on the Humber bank showed us round, and it was particularly interesting to find out that such people exist; the wood is provided by the Oil Refinery next door to it.

The text is another of my attempts to provide answers for the Questions column in the Church Times and was published there last week, and draws on material included in this Blog before.

Breathing, bathed in, mercy

The air is not so full of motes, of atoms, as the church is of mercies; and as we can suck in no part of air but we take in those motes, those atoms, so here in the congregation we cannot suck a word from the preacher, we cannot speak, we cannot sigh a prayer to God, but that that whole breath and air is made of mercy.

The two best discoveries of the last week or so have been the spring pictured and the quotation set out above.

The spring is by Laceby Beck which we chanced upon during a recent walk. It is a mile and a half from here although we had not been there before. The circles in the top picture are being made by water welling up from the chalk beneath. The bottom picture is then of the clear pool this creates already flowing strongly into the beck (or into a pipe which runs beneath the path beside the beck).

The quotation is from a 1624 sermon of John Donne which I chanced upon reading round for the two study days on Donne I’m leading this month. Again, it isn’t something I’d come across before, but it seems quite as much worth knowing as his ‘no man is an island’ and ‘into that gate they shall enter’ passages.

I used both discoveries in our services on Sunday for which the provision of scripture began with ‘Ho everyone that thirsts, come to the waters, and you that have no money, come, buy and eat’ and finished with gardener speaking of the fruitless tree ‘let it alone for one more until I dig round it and put manure on it’.

Free at last

The nice gentle Evensong ‘Lord, now lettest thou they servant depart in peace’ turns out to be a liberation chant.

One of my resolutions this year is to try to keep my very limited grasp of New Testament Greek in some repair – although my rate of work is turning out to be about one verse every three weeks, which isn’t quite what I envisaged on New Year’s Day.

This verse from Luke 2 came up in our Sunday Gospel earlier this month and comes up at Evening Prayer each day, and is one of very few I have tackled so far.

There are decent Greek words for ‘Lord’ (kurios – hence ‘the kyries’ as the title for the responses beginning ‘Lord, have mercy’), ‘servant’ (diakonos – a source for our word ‘deacon’), and ‘depart’ (hup-ago – a more intense form of ‘to go’ which is ‘ago’). I do remember all of that from basic Greek lessons over thirty years ago!

But what I had never noticed (or had forgotten) is that none of these Greek words is used in this particular verse.

Here ‘Lord’ translates ‘despotos’ (a source for our word ‘despot’); elsewhere in the New Testament the phrase ‘Lord and Master’ translates both ‘kurios’ and ‘despotos’ side by side.

‘Servant’ translates ‘doulos’, which is actually the word for ‘slave’ (although the household servant-slave distinction might not have been quite as clear cut in that social context as it is today).

‘Depart’ translates ‘apoluo’ (a composite of ‘apo’ which is ‘from’ and ‘luo’ which is ‘loose’).

So ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart’ turns out to be ‘Master, you set your slave free’. Not so much ‘I can rest content now I’ve seen this’ or ‘I can die happy now I know my work is complete’ as ‘My enslavement is finally over’ or ‘Slave master, you set me loose’.

Evensong turns out to be a more ‘happy-clappy’ experience than the hallowed language, devotional music and evening light has trained me to feel and think.

We respond to the first scripture reading with Mary’s song ‘This sparks my praise – the world is being turned upside down’. We respond to the second with this verse - Simeon’s shout ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last’.

And knowing this might affect how we listen to the readings in the first place. Not so much an academic interest or Bible study (‘I wonder what interesting ideas this passage might have?’) as personal longing (‘I wonder what this might unlock in my life?’).

The pictures are from the south door at Fishlake, forty miles along the A180 from here. We went to look in Saturday when I noticed our books on Malmesbury say it appears that some of the same masons were involved in both places.

Forgiveness

We ought to be thinking, talking and exploring much more around the issue of forgiveness. This is my first provisional – possibly premature – conclusion from a listening exercise which we have just begun.

We see in church fleetingly quite a number of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who do not otherwise participate in church life. They bring children to be baptised in large numbers, bring young people to our youth group and to our alternative and family worship in much smaller numbers, and ask us to take their weddings.

We are talking about perhaps eighty such people coming through a church door in February alone.

The possible reason they and their families do not then become regular church attenders in a way they might have done a generation ago are well speculated upon, but we thought we might test some of these out.

We’ve put together a sheet with just seven quick response questions from ‘As far as you can remember, exactly where were you at 11.00 a.m. last Sunday?’ to a request to put ticks or crosses against statements ranging from ‘I pray from time to time’ to ‘I’ve visited a reiki practitioner in the last six months’.

A final question explores whether they think the church is likely to have something helpful or irrelevant to say about issues from euthanasia to sex outside marriage; both the role of women and gay marriage are included in the list because we wanted to see whether recent publicity about them affects people’s attitude to the church.

For the first forty respondents to this final question all but one of the topics score no more than 38%: perhaps one third of the people think the church may have something valuable to say about them, but twice as many are either unsure or are certain that what we would have to say is irrelevant.

But it is unexpectedly clear and striking that this is not the case for one topic which we had included in the list without much thought. This was forgiveness. Here just over two thirds of the respondents put a tick. The perception is that here at least the church might have something worth listening to.

It occurred to me when I noticed this that the only extra question I’d been asked at recent Baptism preparations was from a father who wanted to know whether the Lord’s Prayer ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’ would leave us vulnerable to ‘being walked all over’.

So at the moment I am beginning to think how we might respond to this discovery. Perhaps this simply prompts what I'll say at Baptisms and Weddings this year, and how we handle the confession at alternative and family worship.  Perhaps I need to work with a group on what has been challenging, helpful and naïve in our teaching and our lives, and then find ways to share what we explore.

Meanwhile, a hundred years ago today the then Bishop of Lincoln laid the foundation stone for the major new building of St Michael’s, and yesterday we had the present Bishop of Lincoln with us to celebrate the centenary.

In the picture a more competent cake-cutter is laughing at the Bishop and I as we suddenly face the reality of the anniversary task we had been given.

Wearing crosses

I haven’t quite got my head around why an evangelical Christian would want to establish his, or especially her, right to wear distinctive and visible Christian jewellery at work, especially if the employer had insisted on either a corporate uniform or a limit to potential infection hazards.

The New Testament is quite consistent about this sort of thing. Jesus’ own teaching takes a dim view of those who make any form of show of distinctive religious dress (the over large phylacteries and over long robe fringes of certain scribes and Pharisees at Matthew 23.5) and later writers urge women in particular to adorn themselves with modesty and good works rather than braided hair, gold, jewels or expensive clothes (1 Timothy 2.9,10 and 1 Peter 3.3,4). One strand of the early church tradition also insists on obedience to even to a slave owner because the Lord will see the quality of the work which is done (Ephesians 6.5,6 and Colossians 3.22-24).

Drawing direct parallels between biblical teaching and modern situations is always more difficult than some strands of fundamentalism might indicate, but, nevertheless, it isn’t difficult to see that the early Christians who followed these teachings would find it incomprehensible that in later generations Christians would take their employers to court to establish the right to wear at work jewellery representing the death of the Lord.

It would be consistent for bodies like the Evangelical Alliance to be saying to them that we are not pagans, nor are we members of just one among many religions competing for equal privileges. They would say, let others sue for the right to wear yellow robes, turbans, veils or anything else. They would conclude, let Christians witness by acceptance, diligence and modesty, and not by outward signs.

The photograph was taken on the way back from Matins one day last week.

Not the final word

The thought that we will lose all our ash trees almost breaks my heart. We have seen it before when dutch elm disease robbed us of most of our elms. There have been other recent scares including bleeding canker claiming many of our horse chestnuts. Now it is the threat of ash dieback which hangs over our hedges and woodlands.

At the entrance to St Michael’s, Little Coates we have a particularly magnificent weeping ash. It is a feature people often talk about. It is old and we know that one day it will have to come down, but North East Lincolnshire Council has done quite a bit of tree surgery to keep it alive and safe.

A couple of years ago a couple celebrating their Diamond Wedding gave us a replacement weeping ash which the Council allowed us to plant a little way inside the churchyard. We had thought that it would ‘take over’ when the old one finally has to come down. Perhaps it will. Or perhaps both trees will succumb to this new fungal infection before that.

At St George’s, Bradley it is the conkers from the horse chestnut trees in the churchyard which people have enjoyed for years. Many of these trees were infected with bleeding canker and several have died as a result. A couple of years ago, with the support of villagers, we had to spend thousands making their stumps safe.

But there is hope. There is a spot only a mile or so from either St Michael’s or St George’s. Beside a footpath in the countryside just west of Laceby Acres and Wybers Wood there is a large lone elm tree. Nobody is quite sure how it has survived dutch elm disease. Perhaps it was too far away from other elms to get infected. I always enjoy spotting it when I am anywhere near. It is possible that surviving disease-resistant elms and ashs will one day repopulate our hedgerows and woodlands.

This hope is exactly the same as the one our churches will soon be celebrating in Advent. Many will be reading from the prophet Isaiah. There is huge destruction going on in Chapter 10 until it says that ‘the remnant of the trees of this forest will be so few that a child can write them down’. It seems that all is lost and God has abandoned his people.

But then Chapter 11 says a new shoot will come from one of those stumps. It is ‘the stump of Jesse’, and Jesse was one of ancestor’s of Jesus, which is why we read the passage as we prepare for Christmas. Next time I visit the surviving elm tree I shall remember that. I shall pray for all those who feel that abuse or bereavement or cuts or destruction around them have the final word. They don’t.

This is my piece published in the Cleethorpes Chronicle last week with three grammatical and spelling mistakes (yes, three; I must do better) corrected.

The picture taken at the weekend is of the two weeping ash trees at St Michael’s. Pictures have appeared before of the ash trees, the lone elm, and the stump of one of the horse chestnuts.

The article didn’t have room to mention the way a Jesse Tree became part of religious art, often in a stained glass window. The tree is usually shown as growing out of Jesse, through his son King David (often recognisable by his carrying a harp), and then upward to others; literally a ‘family tree’.

Fair Trade Chocolate

Why did he have to pick on chocolate? I wanted to make a difference. I was ready to put in a lot of time and effort. But the only thing he asked me to do was to make sure the chocolate I buy is Fair Trade chocolate. That would make the most impact, he said.

He was Steve Chalk. Steve is the Baptist Minister who heads up the Oasis charity which sponsors two of the Secondary Schools in North East Lincolnshire. He is also into a remarkable other range of things as a Christian activist. One of them is being a United Nations special advisor for community action against human trafficking.

He had been invited to Grimsby by a church based Justice and Peace Group. This is a group of Christians in North East Lincolnshire who want to think and act seriously about the way they live out their faith responsibly in the world. At the beginning of July, Churches Together in North East Lincolnshire promoted a Week Against Human Trafficking partly around Steve’s visit to this group.

So there I was sitting in St Pius’ Church listening to him. He revealed the extent to which human beings are bought and sold across the world for sexual exploitation and forced labour. It was quite a harrowing account.

I had then been asked to chair a time when people could ask questions. During a short break one person came up to me. ‘I don’t want to speak’, she said, ‘but I do want to know the answer to one question’. It was a profound question, so I began the next session by asking it for her. ‘Is my lifestyle the problem?’ she asked. ‘In what way would living my life differently make a difference?’.

And the example Steve used was chocolate. A huge amount of the raw material for the chocolate on sale in England has been harvested by trafficked labour, he said. He had tackled many of the major firms about this. They had not all responded well. It takes quite a bit of auditing to make sure a firm knows it only uses cocoa which has been harvested responsibly.

But it can be done. The work of people like Steve had meant that we are promised that four fingered (but not two fingered ) Kit Kat are made with fairly traded cocoa.

So, the message I took away was to be much more careful about the chocolate I buy. It is going to be quiet a challenge - although knowing that four fingered Kit Kats are alright is definitely going to be a help.

The article was the 'Pause for Thought' column in last week's Cleethorpes Chronicle.  The picture is a sign we spotted near Novartis when returning from a walk on the Humber bank wall at the weekend; someone must have put in a bit of planning and effort to adapt the speed bump sign.

Signs of the Kingdom?

The Lent gatherings in the parish having produced some creative reflections. We had a Mental Health Chaplain and an Industrial Chaplain to share what they had discovered through their work, and a couple of us from within the parish offered something similar ourselves around the issues of debt (outlined here a few weeks ago) and from involvement in the Heavy Metal scene.

The volunteer who has been developing and hosting a new parish website has put up some of this at http://www.westgrimsbyteam.org/2012lent2.html

from

I have played a small part in helping her remember who she is, what she values, and that she herself is of value. ‘Good news’, although we have not mentioned God’s name once in our conversation... It lies at the heart of my job to remind others that those with mental health conditions are people (people with a bipolar disorder, people with anxiety, and so on). They are a person first who has a mental health condition. The condition does not define them; it is not the total sum of them. Even the most difficult person who spits and shouts and lashes out is still a person. Kindness and care for the individual goes a long way. When Jesus heals the Gerasene demoniac, he does not make his healing a spectacle but takes him aside, asks his name, has him unbound, and sends him back into his community. He deals with the person.

to

Jesus taught about God’s kingdom breaking in around us, and led us to pray for its coming here as much as in heaven. We were reminded of the language of a foretaste - catching something of the flavour of a feast we are not yet at. We were reminded of the language of birth pangs - the labour pains involved as a new life is brought forth. We wondered whether the things we had been exploring for five weeks were telling us about the character of God’s kingdom, about savouring the hints of what it is intended to be, about how the moment it begins among us can be as traumatic as a difficult birth. Those who live among or minister with people with fractured mental health, in situations of debt, in the Heavy Metal scene, and at the work place had been reporting and reflecting on what this had meant to them. What we heard about were signs of God’s kingdom breaking in around us.

Meanwhile, the pheasants in Great Coates churchyard normally squawk away long before I get out a camera, but this pair were so intent on harassing each other that they didn’t bother about the potential threat from a human being very close by.

Debt free

I have just read that a man called Rick Ruzzamenti donated one of his kidneys to a stranger. By doing this Rick made sure someone received the transplant he needed to live. It was a costly thing to do. It involved Rick having to undergo an operation. It means he will have to live the rest of his life with only one kidney. It was an extraordinary act of selflessness. But this is not why the story is so good.

What happened next was the niece of the person who received the kidney was so impressed that she donated one of her kidneys to a stranger as well. Then this second stranger’s ex-boyfriend was so moved that he donated one of his kidneys to a third stranger. And this happened thirty times down a chain. A twenty-ninth stranger received a kidney, and his sister was inspired to donate one of her kidneys to a man called Donald Terry.

Donald is hugely thankful to the women who gave him a kidney. He is also thankful to Rick who set off this cascade of generosity thirty transplants earlier. It is the longest chain of donations like this which has been recorded in the USA.

Most of the time when I give a present I know that in due course I will get a different present in return. When I give something away it is usually something I can afford to do without anyway. But deep down I know that costly giving without expecting anything in return can be what changes the world. Just imagine a society in which the mutual interchange of generosity was a way of life.

There is a link with the Lord’s Prayer. In the language in which the New Testament was written we read Jesus telling us to pray ‘forgive us our debts as we forgive those endebted to us’. If I keep a careful record of exactly what each person owes me back, I am in a trap. When I give and receive with no expectation of return, I am free - which is how God wants it.

It is at least seventeen years since I last wrote a week’s set of six 150 word reflections for the Scunthorpe Telegraph, and now I’ve got back on the treadmill with this my first of 350 words for the Cleethorpes Chronicle. It is the introductory part of the material I used for our parish Lent Group last week, and the sense that God’s purpose is one in which we are free from obligations to him and other people is one to which I wish I paid much more attention.

Meanwhile, something is shoving these piles of earth into the vestry at St George’s, and we can’t work out what and how. New ones arrive as fast as the Churchwarden clears the old ones. It isn’t a mole hill as there is no hole in the concrete beneath the pile of earth. It appears to come through where the floor meets the tower wall at the top of the picture but we assume that the tower wouldn’t still be standing if its foundations didn’t go somewhat deeper than that.

The undeserving poor

Clergy have strikingly more liberal views about the causes of poverty than members of their congregations. And the views of churchgoers don’t differ markedly from those of non-churchgoers.

The national British Social Attitudes Survey gathered information from 3500 people, 500 of whom identified themselves as at least monthly churchgoers. The Church Urban Fund and Church Action on Poverty then asked identical questions of 209 clergy at their periodic deanery ‘chapter’ meetings - and last week they sent out spam to our e-mail addresses to tell us about this.

Three quarters of the clergy (74%) thought poverty was attributable to injustice in society, but only a fifth of churchgoers (22%) did so, not that much different from non-churchgoers (20%). 1% of clergy (that would be two of those at the meetings) agreed that laziness or lack of willpower was a cause, something a quarter of churchgoers (23%) and non-churchgoers (27%) thought it was.

Clergy were half as likely (16%) as either churchgoers or non-churchgoers (both 38%) to say poverty was an inevitable part of modern life. Clergy were twice as likely (78%) to think there was ‘quite a lot of child poverty’ (the Government's own figures suggest four million children) than churchgoers (37%), whose perception is very similar to non-churchgoers (38%).

So what should I type?

This vindicates the policy of having parish priests living in each community and having their antennae out among the most vulnerable around them. But it is pretty damning about the ways in which we share insights with and help the Gospel form the consciences of those in our congregations.

Or
 
This challenges the policy of having stipendiary clergy who don’t have to earn a living and become detached from the objective realities which are self evident to their congregations and parishioners doing business in the real world. And it is good that our naivety washes over most of those to whom we preach.
 
Or
 
I’d better not let me kid myself into being self congratulatory: far from my beliefs, values and behaviour about most things being so much more Gospel-sourced than even those in our congregations, most of what I think and do is almost indistinguishable from the norms in the community around me.
 
Or
 
A sample of 209, especially collected in a context in which peers were present, is a very poor base from which to draw any conclusions.
 
Meanwhile, North East Lincolnshire Council is working along local roads pruning back the trees, as these two pictures at the gateway to St Michael’s (taken two days apart last week) show.

Looking both ways

Pictures of Janus inspired the small group which gathered in St Michael's for the Last Saturday Thing on New Year's Eve to produce our own images of looking both back and forward, and in the dim lighting for our prayers at the end the processional cross appeared to be doing its best to join in.  By then I'd adapted my trite title for the evening ('Old Year Sorrow, New Year Hope') for us to have mixed views and mixed prayers about both past and future.

Caedmon's cross

I’ve been engaging with our Saturday evening alternative worship for the first time.  This monthly event has been the baby in turn of different colleagues until now, but, as they have each moved on, it is something I'd like to try to build up myself. There were just eleven of us there: five adults and six children; six of St Michael’s stalwarts and five people for whom this is their one regular service. It was St Hilda’s Day, so we recreated the memorial to Caedmon (the lay brother in her community who wrote the first surviving hymn in English). This involved climbing round on a nine foot high memorial in the churchyard here to measure it and get the size of our reproduction right before working together at our own version of the Whitby monument. Then we sat around it first to eat and then to pray.

Bethel

Jacob named a place Beth-el (God’s house) because he’d had there his vision of angels moving on a ladder between heaven and earth and then God had spoken to him. ‘This is none other than the house of God,’ he said, ‘and this is the gate of heaven’. Thus many Chapels are called Bethels and many churches (the latest I noticed on our recent holiday in Orkney was St Magnus’ Cathedral, Kirkwall) have this text above their doors or in their porches. But it strikes me yet again reading the story at Matins for St Bartholomew’s Day this morning how wrong headed this is. Jacob is terrified when he wakes to think ‘surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it’, and, most crucially of all, the encounter with God came while sleeping out in the open air in a stony place. Surely the name or the text, if either is used in a church building at all, should be on the inside of the gate or somewhere similar where it can be read on the way out; there is a soemtimes terrifying challenge always to recognise the outside world as God's house. Meanwhile, the easily eroded local red and yellow sandstone with which St Magnus’ is built creates these effects around its main door.

The graveclothes

I’m sure we should pay more attention to the graveclothes left behind in Jesus’ empty tomb.

It may seem strange to post an Easter thought just as Passiontide is about to begin, but we began to read John’s story of Lazarus at Matins this morning, and I’m just writing the notes I need to preach about the same passage when it is read again at the main service on Sunday morning, so the graveclothes are again at the centre of my attention.

John does not waste words or images, so it has to be significant that he says both that Lazarus came out of his tomb (from which the stone needed to be rolled away) still bound by the graveclothes and also that Jesus came out of his tomb (from which the stone had already been rolled away) leaving his graveclothes in a neat pile behind him.

At its most simple, the point must be that Jesus’ resurrection is something totally different to the mere revival of a corpse. Something new is happening here which doesn’t relate to any category of thought or reality we’ve ever encountered before. Mary thinks she sees someone else who’d she might expect to find there but she certainly doesn’t jump in surprise at a naked man walking around; it is the risen Lord she encounters and we are in new territory.

I’ve written before at Eastertide: I’m always puzzled by some plodding sorts of evangelical who think the empty tomb simply shows that Jesus got up and walked again. I’m equally puzzled by some sorts of liberal who aren’t bothered to begin plodding because they think other aspects of the story show it instead to be merely a profound spiritual experience of the disciples. Why should we think that our existing frames of reference (whether physical or spiritual) are going to help us cope with this new thing?

So I’ve gone back to a poem I revisit more often than almost any other. R S Thomas’ poem The Answer is about twilight and about the formidable and intractable nature of intellectual puzzles in which human living is embroiled. It finishes with the same image and resolution, lines I have also quoted here before:

... There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

The hare is at the foot of the Cowper memorial window, the link being the hares he kept.

Hopes and fears

If you go hill walking in certain more remote parts of England today, from time to time you’ll come across a low almost circular wall with a single opening in it. It isn’t an ancient stone circle - it is much more recent than that. It isn’t the remains of a shelter or hovel which has lost its roof - it never had a roof in the first place. It is simply a derelict pen for sheep - an enclosure into which sheep could be gathered - what is called a folding or a sheep fold.

The same simple pattern of wall has been used for thousands of years - and in still exists and is used in different parts of the world. The Spanish word corral is used for similar cattle enclosures both there and in America. The related word kraal is used in South Africa. And so on.

There is actually an even older English word for it - a cote or sheepcote - and it is possible that Great Coates and Little Coates today take their names from Anglo-Saxon enclosures on the edge of the Humber marsh long before Vikings came along and named a nearby port as ‘Grim’s by’.

Such cots or foldings or kraals have existed in the Middle East for centuries, and they still exist today. They are needed particularly where there are dangers - from robbers, or from War Lords, or from wild animals like bears or lions or wolves.

The herdsmen would need to gather their sheep together at dusk. The low stone wall wouldn’t be enough. A sheep steeler or a wolf could easily climb or jump over it. So the walls would need to be tall, and the herdsman is likely to pile thorny bush on top of it as well. A simple gate across the opening at the front wouldn’t be enough either. The herdsmen would be likely to build their fire in front of it, some of them might sleep across it, and at least one would be likely to keep awake and keep watch by night.

It may sound like a remote rural scene. But think of the sheep as valuable trading goods. Think of the stone circle as a steel fence. Think of the thorns on top as razor wire. Think of the fire as floodlighting. Think of the watchman as a security guard. Think of the hillside as looter’s paradise in a war zone. That would give you a better picture of what was needed and what was there.

We have to imagine all that. But an extraordinary thing is that we don’t have to imagine what the herdsmen thought. We actually know what those watchmen hoped for. We know what the security guards wanted. We know - because some of the poems and songs written about them or by them or for them are among the oldest poems and songs which we still read today.

So when someone dies today, and their family brings their body here, it is the words of one of those songs which we most often use to comfort and encourage them. We tell them that God is our herdmen. He isn’t going to leave us huddled and anxious in this kraal. He is going to set us free to roam and flourish on lush ground. Getting there we may walk through ravines made so dark by the bereavements and worse things closing in around us that we feel as if we’ll lose our footing, but his crook and his stave will keep me safe.

And tonight we’ve read another of those poems as the first of our two readings from the Bible.

From torn stumps of the deforestation around us new shoots will come. They’ll come from the family of Jesse from near by Bethlehem. They’ll come through his son the shepherd boy David who became King of Israel. It won’t be like having anarchy and War Lords around any more. There will be reliable justice even for the most vulnerable.

And best of all: the wolf and the lamb will lie down together and a child will lead them. It is not going to be predators and sheep folds and watchmen any longer. It is going to be their young all playing together: wolf and sheep and humans; cubs and lambs and children. We won’t be afraid of each other. We won’t be in danger from each other.

And then - it began to happen. God began to stir like one of their young. Even the sky split open with rejoicing. Close by the only people awake to notice were the night watchmen at a local sheepcote. The story says they were scared witless. It took them a little while to understand what was going on.

The awakening of a new born child was God beginning to live among all the possibilities of abuse, anxiety and attack. The filling of his make shift nappy was God deep in the mess of a world of bereavement, bullying and burglary. His beginning to cry was just God’s first tears which continue in the face of things like cancers and cold and cuts. The visit of some of those shepherds was God’s first human encounter with ordinary people who face death and debt and doubt.

God was beginning to move. His transformation of the world isn’t nearly complete, but he knew their hopes and dreams, and he had begun to get stuck in. We are never again going to be left alone with our fears, and we know we’ll come safe through the dark ravine. Some of the old ways things worked are beginning to break down, and new possibilities of reliable justice and peaceful relating are beginning to open up for any willing to embrace them. It began to dawn on the herdsmen that the hopes and fears of all the years were beginning to be met near by that night.

Cold and judgmental

The temperature dropped to minus 11 degrees at 2.00 a.m. today.

We’ve been to two Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust local branch lectures recently, one a few weeks ago by the resident meteorologist from RAF Coningsby and the other this month by the Ecology Officer of the local Council. We have been grateful, although the experience alerted us to what it must feel like coming to church for the first time - painful seats, over solicitous enquiries about whether we had been before, long notices with frequent references to a range of people by their first names, ugly coffee, and so on. This is where we learnt about the local weather station managed by the Ecology Officer and the way instant information from it is available on the local Council website at http://www.nelincs.gov.uk/environment/weather/.

He told us how low the temperature had fallen the previous night and was contradicted by a member who said she’d recorded a much lower reading. He explained that his weather station used Met Office standard cones over its thermometers so that a genuine air temperature could be recorded without the exaggerating influence of any wind. She wasn’t going to have what she had already decided was true taken away from her and would have none of it, remarking that she had several thermometers on different walls. Again I was reminded of the way in which most religious (and political) arguments make no progress simply because people are fundamentally settled on the way in which they look at things.

It has to be one of the main reasons we are told not to judge, and why the judgmental remarks in the last two paragraphs point back at me and the churches of which I am part. This is the Advent message I’ve been preaching to myself and others in the last two weeks. In Matthew 11 Jesus says both ‘tell John what you see’ and ‘what did you go into the desert to see?’ and the wonderful traffic safety awareness clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4 has helped me drive home the point that we are not as well equipped to give the sort of objective answers to such questions as we would like to think we are.

Harrowing of Hell

The reason the Chilian mine rescue caught more than people’s imagination is that it hooks into one of our archetypes, or so I ventured this morning while displaying a picture of this icon.

The risen Christ has broken into hell (the broken doors are in a cross at his feet, the black abyss below is inhabited by the shadows of demons) and has pulled out Adam and Eve by their wrists; the whole of humanity is no longer subject to the destruction and futility of its fallen condition. Below, others await their rescue while two angels bind Satan. Above, Kings (David and Solomon) are among those who watch and welcome.

So the rescue mission is able to drill down and draw the men one by one from what they had described as ‘hell’ and from the darkness which they had begun to think would be their final reality. Below, the medics have gone down to help those who are yet to be brought up. Above, the President, crowds and media gather and respond.

Only in naming the capsule ‘phoenix’ does this parallel appear to miss a beat, but the Christian faith and reaction of those brought up balances this; this really is our story.

In this icon, says Rowan Williams, “Adam and Eve stand for wherever it is in the human story that fear and refusal of God began - not a moment we can date in ordinary history, any more than we can date in the history of each one of us where we began to forget God. But we are always dealing with the after-effects of that moment, both as a human race and as particular persons. The icon declares that wherever that lost moment is or was, Christ has been there, to implant the possibility, never destroyed, of another turning, another future."

In this icon and this story, at the very least we are literally pulled away from ultimate fear and final abandonment. The icon declares and the story makes graspable this possibility, which is why both capture us.