Crow Hill Bog Burst

On 2^nd September 1824, Patrick Brontë was in the Parsonage when he “heard a deep distant explosion” and “perceived a gentle tremor in the chamber” which was “the busting of a bog or quagmire” with “all the precursors, accompaniments and results of an earthquake” five miles way on the moors.  He saw it as an act of God.

“A rapid torrent of mud and water issued forth, varying from twenty to thirty yards in width and four to five in depth; which, in its course for six or seven miles, entirely threw down or made breaches in several stone and wooden bridges – uprooted trees – laid prostrate walls – and gave many other awful proofs, that, in the hand of Ominpotence, it was an irresistible instrument to execute his justice.”

“Sometimes, God produces earthquakes as awful monitors to turn sinners from the error of their ways, and as solemn forerunners of that last and greatest day, when... the universal frame of nature shall tremble, and break and dissolve.”

“Here and there... I was able to discern one in deep contemplative mood, who saw by faith through nature to nature’s God...  Many, I perceived, on their return home, who in all the giddy frivolity of thoughtless youth, talked and acted as if they dreamed not of heaven or hell, death or judgement.”

“The greater part continue to indulge in their bad passions and practices, utterly regardless of every warning, and not considering the awful reckoning they will be brought to for these things on the last day.  Let us pray earnestly for divine grace, that we may be able to act differently, and to walk by faith in Christ Jesus.”

This is a text (from one of only two published sermons of Patrick Brontë’s – he mainly preached extempore) to which I’m returning quite often at the moment, preaching last Sunday, revising the Brontë related leaflets we leave in the prayer corner in St Michael’s, Haworth, and developing ideas  for the Brontë Society's annual weekend in the summer.

Meanwhile, the picture is from the German Church in Bradford; the art work is simply mounted on cardboard and I wonder whether we could create something like a temporary major hanging cross for one of our churches.

Confessing possibilities

This week, I found myself in the German church in Bradford for the first time, and thus in the steps of Dietrich Bonheoffer.

The area in which the church is set is called Little Germany.  From the 1850s Germans came in good numbers to work in the wool industry, and the building is now called the Delius Centre in honour of one of the most prominent of those families which included the famous composer who was himself born in Bradford in the 1860s and brought up there.

Bonheoffer was working as a German pastor in London in 1933 when Hitler came to power and began to suborn the national Lutheran churches to the Nazi cause.  It was at a gathering in Bradford that a resistance statement was agreed by the German pastors in England at Bonheoffer’s instigation.

It was of no use.  The national church capitulated and became a tool of Jewish exclusion and persecution.  Bonheoffer was to return home in 1939, be a prime mover in a dissident alternative ‘confessing’ church, ran its underground seminary for new pastors, and, in 1945, be taken to a concentration camp and executed.

I wondered about W. Hansen, listed as Pastor 1930-39 and then 1948-52.  He must have been the host of the gathering on 1933.  And, like the J. Collier listed on the incumbents’ board in Haworth as being ejected at the Commonwealth and then reinstated at the Restoration, it is the gap in his ministry dates which is particularly striking.

We were there to hear a remarkable women who we had in fact met in 2013 in the West Bank  and who was in England promoting the work of the Fair Trade Co-operative Women in Hebron which seeks to provide employment through the sale of handmade Palestinian crafts.  Her quiet determination to continue in the face of almost unimaginable consequences of occupation felt as moving as the setting.

In 1994, there was a gun massacre in the mosque in central Hebron near where Women in Hebron’s shop now is – just as there was in Christchurch the day before she spoke to us.  Awareness of the attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh less than a year earlier, on Finsbury Park Mosque less than a year before that, and attacks on a number of Christian churches across northern Nigeria across the whole period, makes us cry out for more Bonheoffers and more Women in Hebron.

Lead us not into temptation

Last year, by far the earliest known evidence of bread-making was uncovered in a part of the Jordanian desert.  It pre-dates the development of agriculture by a substantial period.  Some ash and some wild barley revealed what some hunter-gatherers had been doing.

Speculation has to be built on meagre evidence like this.  Could it be that one of the root causes of initial human settlements was the discovery that weeding around such wild barley to improve access to it resulted in a better crop?

When we find later evidence of any pre-historic settlement and we notice things like a perimeter ditch or postholes for a palisade, we speculate about the family or community’s need to defend itself.

When we find pre-historic burials and we notice the care of the burial, the alignment of the bodies and the presence of grave goods, we speculate about the grief or hopes or longings or belief systems of those involved.

This all came to mind again when preparing to read Luke’s account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness on another first Sunday in Lent tomorrow, and it made the reading surprisingly fresh.

Full of the Spirit, led by the Spirit, considering the attractive, instinctive, human wrong paths – to create bread in the face of hunger, to dominate in the case of assault, to grasp certainty in place of faith.  Weighing these options against the crucial texts of Deuteronomy.

No need to make fire or gather grain.  Simply feed thousands and have baskets full left over.  But he knew God humbled his people, causing them to hunger and then feeding them with manna, which neither they nor their ancestors had known, to teach them that human beings shall not live on bread alone.

No need to dig or raise defensive lines.  Simply command the evil to come out of those under attack.  But he knew the warning: when God brings you into a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of slavery, worship and serve him only.

No need for grief or mourning.  Simply raise the widow’s son.  But he knew to throw himself from the temple’s wall to find out if God would do anything would be no better than those who abandoned faith a short way into the desert saying ‘were we brought here simply to die?’

So instead he will teach people to live.  Blessed are those who hunger; be worried if you are comfortable.  Blessed are those who face hateful attack; be worried if you are highly honoured.  Blessed are those who weep; be worried if you have escaped mourning.

And he will teach people to pray.  Give us bread for each day.  God’s kingdom come.  May the hallowing always be only of God’s name.  

Now he will stay fasting for while in the desert, then go out among people increasingly vulnerable, until, yes, he will let himself be thrown away in Jerusalem.

He will do it alongside the human beings who enter history seeking basic sustenance as others monopolise all the resources, longing for safety as others gain their own dominance over them, looking to make sense of it all as others bandy their political and religious certainties around them.

The pictures are not of the Jordanian or Judean deserts, but around Top Withens in the mist and drizzle a few days ago.

Location of discipleship

Every fifteen years or so, the Church of England publishes roughly the same report on lay discipleship.  I was newly ordained in 1985 when it was All are called, on the General Synod in 1999 when it was Called to new life, and newly here in 2017 when it was Setting God’s People Free.

It is always a call (as I blogged when Setting God’s People Free was published) to value normal people’s everyday life as the primary place for their discipleship and to focus on equipping them for this rather than to identify and value chiefly their contribution to the life of the church.

It is always subverted (as I blogged two years earlier about All are called) by what I think of as the gravitational pull of the financial and organisational needs of the institutional church and its understandable focus on recruitment and conversion; I was remembering the General Synod meeting which following the one at which All are called was received and commended and the way nobody seemed to see anything odd in then receiving and commending a report on raising money for the ministry and mission of the church actually called First to the Lord.

So, ahead of Lent about to begin, almost exactly fifty members of our three congregations, perhaps a third of the adults who we might expect to see at worship on anything like a regular basis, have provided me with a note about where they spend their time in the community, at leisure, at work or volunteering.

I’ve brought the answers together in a leaflet which asks us all to pray through Lent for each other’s working out of Christian discipleship in those places, with the Bible Study opportunities to which a few will come each Lent this year simply promising to pick up something relevant each week. 

Family life is a particularly prominent theme, with the care of grandchildren mentioned even more often than the care of particularly vulnerable parents, spouses or children.  Being a neighbour – whether fostering social relationships or giving time to particular needs – is the next most common category.  After that are issues in workplaces which range from diversity and inclusion to nurturing future skills and managing debt for businesses.

In less prominent categories, there is much creativity. In the least prominent categories, there are levels of political activism.  Charitable involvement, exercise, reading, being trustees of organisations elsewhere, helping run village organisations, and volunteering with the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway each have quite a significant number of individual mentions.   

Then, having finally got the leaflet ready for printing, I went off to Bradford Cathedral on Tuesday, responding to the occasional three-line whip for a Bishop’s Study Day, this one designed to help us think through our own attitudes to money and how we lead our churches in this area. 

The quotation from Setting God’s People Free I’ve used most is How are Christians ... equipped to integrate their... practices of faith with the demands of... finances... and consumerism?  I had preached the previous Sunday in a church celebrating being newly designated a ‘Fair Trade Church’ and explored what lay behind the Archbishop of Canterbury’s call a while ago to put Wonga out of business and the painful lessons we learnt about the ambiguities of ethical living when central church investments in Wonga were then quickly uncovered.  The person preparing to come as Curate here this summer is at present working on projects with Christians Against Poverty around debt support and life skills training.

I knew it wasn’t going quite the way I might have hoped when the diagram we were provided with on areas of ‘intentional discipleship’ (said to be a summary of a recent Anglican Consultative Council report on ‘every aspect of daily life’) had nine boxes, eight of which were about personal faith and church life (Baptism, Bible reading, catechesis, Eucharist, fellowship, giving, prayer, worship) and just one about looking outwards (service of the community).

I should simply have known that thinking through attitudes to money and how we lead our churches in this area was going to focus down on the ‘giving to the church’ box – at one point submission to God was equated to giving to the church without just being concerned with the church’s presenting needs, and I’m not sure austerity, consumerism, ethical investment or fair trade were alluded to at any point in the day.

We will have to see how Lent goes – and whether the focus on our parish on all the places in which discipleship is lived out helps us resist the gravitational pull just a little bit.

The pictures were taken on a Half Term trip to Dublin.

Modern art and drama

We went last week to Bradford to see a gritty modern production of a play about the build up to a teenage suicide.

It began in the context of gang warfare and quickly portrayed the first of several knife crimes.  The girl’s infatuation with and seduction by an older man followed, leading to the portrayal of underage sex.  She actually appeared to come from quite a privileged background, albeit one in which most of the responsibility for child rearing had been left to a nanny who had personality issues of her own.  Her boyfriend was quickly sentenced for a violent offence so was removed from the picture just as her father began to pressurise her into a forced marriage.  The lifestyle guru who had encouraged her to lose her virginity to her boyfriend then pushed drugs on her, which she took saying how unsure she is of what they really contained.  It was her befuddled emergence from this drug fuelled stupor, and the images of suicide she saw as she emerged, that led her to takes her own life in a copycat manner using one of the ubiquitous knives close by.  There were some touching scenes and some beautiful dialogue - but the move from being surrounded by rival gangs to her death was inexorable.

The play was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production of Romeo and Juliet.

The top picture is a version of St James’ East Window with Jesus centrally preaching the Sermon on the Mount to a crowd.  It was produced during the first attempt at an All Age Worship Sunday there two Sundays ago.

The bottom picture is a Fairtrain at St Michael’s, a version of one which appears on the village mural in the Bronte Parsonage Car Park.  It was produced there at All Age Worship last Sunday when we celebrated becoming a Fair Trade Church and anticipates the ‘special’ which will run on the Keighley & Worth Valley railway in Fair Trade Fortnight.

Together burdened

We are not skilled at interdependence.

We seem to be comfortable with both independence (‘I can do what I like’) contrasted with dependence (‘I have to do what I am told’) but uncomfortable finding a way in between (‘we do this because it works best for all of us’).

Because some people seem willing to park wherever they want however much inconvenience or danger this might cause others (a form of total independence), we find other people have developed rules for everything from disabled parking spaces to double yellow lines to keep them in line (a form of total dependence) knowing we cannot rely on individuals making a balanced judgement for the well being of all (a form of interdependence).

I thought of all this in part when reading about the damage done in Joshua Tree National Park in Californian which was left open but unsupervised during the recent American Government shutdown.  Human beings given total freedom destroyed and polluted, ignored the regulations which would have kept them in check, and simply failed to be adept at balancing their own will with wider good.

We seem to see the attractions of degrees of political independence (reclaiming our sovereignty, making our particular nation great).  We might see the attractions of degrees of political dependence (an external jurisdiction on matters of dispute, operation within established agreements).  But we are discouraged from even contemplating what political interdependent would look like (despite people crying out for this perspective all the time in everything from fair trade to climate justice).

There is a poetic  sense (rather than a literal translation) in which the New Testament Greek word sometimes rendered ‘better’ and sometimes ‘more profitable’ is sum-phero which is almost with-carry or together-burdened.  It was 1 Corinthians 6.12 as much as the Joshua Tree National Park which prompted my thinking.  We know Paul wrestles with the contrast between freedom from law subjection to the law.  Here he says that we are free - but not all freedom is ‘helpful’ (sum-phero).

We need a critical mass, sufficient shared-fetching, an instinct for inter-dependence.  We seem programmed as human beings to settle instead for a stale opposition between whether I get my way or get told what to do instead.

Meanwhile, I’ve only just noticed the little hands holding the bottoms of every scroll of foliage around the sanctuary in St Michael’s, Haworth.

In open waggons

We'd noticed many years ago that coaches in Skegness are more likley to come from the East Midland while those in Cleethorpes are smore likley to come from South Yorkshire  - as foreshadowed by the Victorian west-east railway connections.  So, now we notice as well that, while the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway went south of the Humber (taking Sheffield day trippers to Cleethorpes), the Manchester, Leeds and Hull Railway went north of the Humber (taking Leeds day trippers to Hull), and, we guess, coaches on the Yorkshire coast today are more likely to come from West Yorkshire.  One fifth of an average mill worker's wage today would be about £60.