Things change every day

Updating the statement we put out on social media only a few days ago

At the parish churches in Cross Roads, Haworth and Stanbury:

We will all continue to pray for the sick and for carers.    Yes, and for the stir crazy at home and those placed in really difficult financial positions by all this.

We will minimize possibilities of infection at services.    No, we have had to cancel all services altogether, although we are in touch with those exploring whether anything is possible beyond keeping St Michael’s open through the day as usual.

We will seek to be aware of those who usually attend worship and begin to build a system to be in touch by phone.    Working at this: we’ve identified 135 households and a number of people who will keep the contacts, but an initial problem on which we are working is that we have fewer phone numbers than we realised.

Will try to make some prayer and reflection resources available.    Yes, we’ve set up brontevirtualchurch.blogspot.com website, and some YouTube possibilities are now being explored.

We would welcome any information about church members or neighbours who find themselves stuck on their own or upset so that we can try to offer the right practical or spiritual support to anybody.    Yes, and we are grateful to know just how much of this is going on in the three villages already.

We will continue to organise regular and special events.   No, we have had to cancel all events, although we are in touch with those planning possible safe walking possibilities.

Meanwhile, the photo is of the bottom corner of the Bronte Memorial in St Michael’s, and the way the monumental mason’s name is cut indicates the memorial was resized when re-erected in its present position.

I’d not noticed this before – and did so this week only because those of us saying daily Matins together in the Bronte Memorial Chapel were observing ‘physical distancing’ (our Bishop correctly points out that ‘social distancing’ is actually something quite different and more worrying) which meant I sat in a position in which I have not sat before.  

Our local Coronavirus stance

At the parish churches in Cross Roads, Haworth and Stanbury:

we will all continue to pray for the sick and for carers, and will do so whether we are among those happy to be together in church, among those more cautious at home, or among those self isolating;

we will heed national advice to minimize possibilities of infection at services (cleaning surfaces, having paper towels by our basins, washing our hands, not sharing a handshake at the Peace, not passing the collection plate from person to person, not sharing wine at Communion, not sharing refreshments after services);

we will seek to be aware of those who usually attend worship but are not with us, and begin to build a system to be in touch by phone and to try to make some prayer and reflection resources available to them;

we would welcome any information about church members or neighbours who find themselves stuck on their own or upset so that we can try to offer the right practical or spiritual support to anybody;

and, unless national advice changes or people stay away, we will continue to organise regular and special events (from weekly Friday Church to special Holy Week drama), although at the moment we have stopped going into Care Homes.

The photo is from the east window in St James', Cross Roads (and we've used it to accompany a Lent focus on Rembrandt's 'Return of the Prodigal Son'); we see that the village's Facebook page is full of offers to shop for neighbours if needed. 

A sermon for 26th January 2020

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.   1 Corinthians 1.18

Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”   Matthew 4.17

Has the word “woke” crept up on you over the last couple of years?  It is has on me.  It seems quite quickly to have taken on an additional meaning.   Perhaps you are not only fully aware of this, but already bored with it as a new piece of political jargon.  Or perhaps it has passed you by so far. 

When I began to hear people described as “woke” in this new way, I think it was obvious from the context approximately what people were meaning by it.  Not so much waking up from sleep as becoming aware of our blind spots, particularly in areas of discrimination. 

For example, our culture might be quite confident that we deal with people equally, but then someone puts out a set of identical CVs for lots of jobs while quietly changing the applicants’ names on different applications to imply a different sex or a different racial background - and discovers that it is those who appear to be male and white who get short-listed much more often than those who appear to be female and black – which wakes us up to the fact that discrimination is much more embedded in our culture than we might like to think and that we need to take action to tackle this.  

Once I have woken up to something like this it because hard to close my eyes on it. 

In fact, I discover that using the word “woke” in this way has its origins among American black activists becoming aware of how much they needed actively to challenge the culture around them.  So originally not actually so much people like me becoming “woke” but people like me realising that people not like me are newly fully alert and active in challenging the discrimination in which they are caught up.

A strange thing is that almost as soon as I noticed how much the word was being used in this way, I also noticed how it was being used in a negative manner.  I came to a head when I was reading The Sun on Thursday (it had been left out for those like me waiting in the queue to have my hair cut) and a columnist disparagingly used the words “woke propaganda” apparently assuming his readers would know exactly what he meant.

His main beef appeared to be that those who are “woke” seem to be campaigning for those in minorities in our culture and people in different parts of the world, whereas he wanted to champion the values with which he was brought up.

Those who think they are “woke” are simply wrong – our British culture is fine as it is, bending over backwards to accommodate those who campaign for, let us say, transgendered recognition is wrong, and so on. 

Those who think they are “woke” are actually naive – respecting cultural diversity could quickly slip unthinkingly into allowing extremist opinions to become normative.

Those who think they are “woke” are not consistent – adopting radical opinions which are briefly  fashionable rather than doing the hard self-critical analytical work our society really needs if it is to change.

Those who think they are “woke” are just using words – preening themselves as being newly insightful but not actually make the changes in their own life style which should follow from this.

So “woke” as a positive term – newly aware of our own inner biases and the affect they have on minorities.  And “woke” as a negative term – judgmental liberalism which can actually be quite intolerant.

Why do I spend the first third of a sermon this Sunday going over all that?  Because it strikes me very strongly this week that these positive and negative uses of the term “woke” provides a lens which helps me focus freshly on the key text in the middle of today’s Gospel reading.

Jesus finally begins his teaching ministry – we’ve spent almost the whole of the last two months anticipating Jesus’ birth and then telling the stories which lead from then up to this point.  Now Jesus starts to minister.  And what does he do?  ‘He began to proclaim “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”’.

Repent.  In English the word has probably ended up meaning particularly being really sorry.  The roots of the Greek word of the Gospel writer is meta-noia, literally “after-mind”, which can’t be the whole meaning either, but which sounds more like a fundamental change of attitude.  The Aramaic which Jesus spoke might have had a word which meant “turn round”. 

Kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God.  Not a place, but a state of affairs in which God reigns, God’s approach to things, is the reality.  Not the rules assumed in a worldly god-less society.

So, “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”: a fundamental change of understanding and of heart; a reorientation around God’s ways; deep regret for having got it so wrong for so long; a commitment to be different from here onwards.   

And it is just here - in what Jesus will teach and in what Jesus will do.     

Wake up to the fact that the things we value people for – being attractive or celebrated or wealthy – isn’t how God values people.

Wake up to the way in which any tit-for-tat, let alone any serious revenge, isn’t how things should work, in which even paying back isn’t as normative.

Wake up the way focussing on my own needs or the needs of my tribe isn’t the priority – one of the first Christian communities being written to in our first reading has already failed to spot that as its members appear to be jostling for the superiority of the party to which each of them happens to belong.

You know very well that we are going to spend most of the next two months being confronted with much more than this again and again – all leading up to watching Jesus “the servant King” sacrifice himself rather than betray any of it. 

And, strikingly, Jesus is going to say ‘be alert’ and ‘stay awake’ quite a lot as he does so.

But the parallel which strikes me most isn’t just that.  It is the negative reactions which will quickly follow.

Jesus was criticised for spending too much time with outsiders – being critical of the faults of the culture in which he was brought up – partying with collaborators, sinners and prostitutes.

Those who follow this new Christian approach are simply wrong.  It is actually there at the very end of the first reading: the message of the cross, the power of God to us, is foolishness to many.  That is – people looked at the first Christian communities and thought they were simply stupid for thinking or trying any of this.

Those who follow this new Christian approach are naive.  Turning the other cheek and trying out ways of forgiveness and release from debt – it will simply result in us being taken for a ride or, worse, following Jesus’ on a “way of the Cross”.

Those who follow this new Christian approach are not consistent.  It gets a little uncomfortable for me here.  At our worst, being judgemental about some things other’s do while remaining quite relaxed about or even unobservant of where one falls short of what the Gospel demand oneself; certainly not doing the hard self-critical analytical work which is really needed if the changes God wants are to happen to me, to the church, to society around us.

Those who follow this new Christian approach are just using words.  This gets very near the bone.  I say that being radically newly awake to God’s approach to human living and dying is what it is all about – but would any examination of my priorities and lifestyle really bear this out?

Two months ago, we began Advent creating and putting up this banner, and praying as we lit each of our Advent candles “Now it is time to awake out of sleep for the night is far spent and the day is at hand; now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed; let us then cast off the works of darkness; let us put on the armour of light; for now it is time to awake out of sleep”. 

I think we were praying to be “woke” Christians.

Next week, exactly forty days after Christmas, we will complete the church’s seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, and we will finally take down the banner with its Christmas message.  We will only be a few weeks away from the beginning of Lent – and the focus is already changing.  Jesus is beginning to spell things out again.  

As today’s second reading continued it told of four Galilean fishermen hearing and beginning the radical change to which he calls.     

Many people will find them, and every Christian since, mistaken, naive, inconsistent, and self-satisfied.  I have to admit that they will be right often enough. 

Yet, I pray, also always awake to new possibilities, and a totally different way of seeing the world, all opening up in front of us, beyond anything we would have thought.  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The picture is St James’, Cross Roads.

A pure blood line

Matthew’s opening verses state Jesus’ descent from Abraham and David, and set out a line of descent from them until Joseph (Abraham begat Isaac, and so on, in over forty steps).  It is increasingly noticed that four times it includes additionally the name of the mother, and it intrigues some of those who notice this that the circumstances of each conception was, in some way or another, scandalous.  In drawing people’s attention to this last week, I gently offered some parallels from the current news.

Matthew is clear that Joseph has no union with Mary before Jesus' is born, yet the line he traces is that of Joseph.  It may simply be that Matthew does not share our understanding of genetics.  An adopted son, or a child fathered by a younger brother on behalf of a deceased older brother, each might be seen as the real son of the father who had not helped conceive him or her.

Judah fathers Perez by his daughter-in-law Tamar, who had disguised herself as a prostitute to trick him into sex.  The death of his son, her husband, had left her at the mercy of his family.  They had consistently prevented her from then having children by any of his other sons.  Judah was all for having her burnt to death, but comes to see that ‘she is more righteous than I’ (Genesis 38.26).  The newspaper story is of a woman whose punishment for a crime against her in-laws had been mitigated because she had been the subject of coercive control by them.   

Salmon fathers Boaz by Rahab, genuinely a prostitute, who had sheltered the Jewish spies in Jericho and whose family was thus spared when Jericho (literally) fell.  The line of descent thus includes both those who entered the ‘promised land’ and the Canaanites who already lived there.  The newspaper story is of the attempted defence of genocidal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya and Kachin in Myanmar.

Boaz in turn fathers Obed by Ruth, who had also been widowed and who had come to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law who came from there.  She is a Moabitess who has to glean in the fields to have food.  Obed’s son Jesse (often presented in Christian art literally as the root of Jesus’ family tree) thus had one Jewish grandparent, one Canaanite and two Moabite.  The newspaper story is an unbroken continuation of the Windrush story – a young women brought up in this country rendered homeless because her parents could not produce British passports.  It might have been of asylum seekers going to Food Banks or having commitments to them removed from the new version of the EU Withdawal Bill.

David fathers Solomon by ‘the wife of Uriah’.  Bathsheba, who had caught the King’s eye and been summoned to his bedroom, is not named.  The King had actually compassed Uriah’s death when his attempt to conceal Solomon’s older brother’s parentage failed.  The newspaper story is a continuation of the Me Too story – a young actress summoned for an audition which turned out also to be in the Director’s bedroom.

It is impossible to be sure what was in Matthew’s mind.  On the one hand he is clearly setting out Joseph’s and Jesus’ unambiguously ideal male parental line – pure bred, pedigree.  On the other hand he has Joseph descended from both the ethically cleaned and the ethnic cleansers, from Canaanite and Moabite stock, from among the abused and exploited; it weaves everything from genocide to the instinct for honour killing into the story.

Does the following sentence ‘now the birth of Jesus the Christ took place in this way’ (Matthew 1.18) belong not as the introduction to Mary’s story but as the conclusion of this ancestral tale – ‘the circumstances of Jesus’ birth is the next consistent part of this story’?

Does the careful description of Joseph facing his dilemma as a ‘righteous man’ (1.19) actually root him as the descendant of not only righteous Tamar but of a string of foreign and sexually compromised righteous women?

What Matthew himself cannot have intended, but what I valued noticing, is that Joseph is aware of such circumstances being one of ‘disgrace’ (1.19) and one if which he is ‘afraid’ (1.20) - so when John spells this out as ‘full of grace and truth’ (John 1.14) the impact of grace is so much more powerful (poured out on those who know what disgrace means), as is truth when it charts the way for those who are afraid to do what is right.

After preaching some of this on the Sunday before Christmas, my eye lit on the painted list of incumbents – my respectable heritage (Peter Mullins, in line from William Grimshaw and Patrick Brontë).  A closer examination reveals Commonwealth and Restoration expulsions at the top of the board and a single belated female name near the bottom.  I’d guess that there are stories of neglect and perhaps even of abuse not made clear at least somewhere on the board as well – recent news stories would make this seem likely in many parishes - and I am simply an inheritor of it all equally rather than a self-flattered holder of a distinguished office.

The picture (an old Brontë Society postcard reproducing an earlier photo) was part of a Christmas present.  The old decrepit single clock and face removed in 1868 is absent.  The new clock and faces installed in 1870 and the heightening of the tower to accommodate them are also absent.  I wondered whether this indicated an 1869 photo - but local historian Steven Wood tells me that it is actually a doctored photo from the 1870s seeking to recreate what the church would have looked like in the Brontës' time but forgetting to add in the old clock face.

What just happened?

Half a dozen points not (much) noticed in the commentaries we all saw yesterday.

Conservative Party strategists know that they need to garner the support of 25% of the electorate to be able to govern with a majority.  They achieved over 29%.  Two things follow.  One is that their party legitimately forms the Government and can claim authority to deliver the whole of its manifesto.  The other is that it does so without the direct support of 70% of the electorate (which isn’t unusual – something similar was true of the Blair, Brown, Cameron and May Governments).

More people turned out and voted for the potential ‘let us at least have a Second Referendum’ alliance (Labour, Scottish Nationalist, Liberal Democrat and Green) than voted for the ‘get Brexit done’ parties (Conservative and Brexit).  But our electoral system delivered 263 seats to those ‘stop Johnson’ parties and 365 seats to those ‘back him on Brexit’ parties.

This was in part because the potential alliance parties failed to agree to stand aside for whichever one of them was best placed to defeat the Conservatives in key seats, while in sharp contrast the Brexit party did choose to stand aside in Conservative held seats and the majority of its previous electoral supporters clearly voted tactically for the Conservatives in Labour held seats.  It might not be too extreme to conclude that Liberal Democrat votes lost it for Labour (and for themselves) and Brexit party votes won it for the Conservatives.

Although this is generally true, in some particular seats I notice it isn't true at all and in these it could have been worse for Labour if the Brexit party supporters had stood aside - for example, there are two Hull seats where the successful Labour candidate would have been ousted if the Conservative and Brexit party votes had been combined.

If the north of England was a separate country (the three  ‘economic regions’ North, North East and Yorkshire & Humber– roughly everything north of a Chester-Cleethorpes line), it would still have a majority Labour Government despite the spectacular and decisive Conservative inroads: Labour 88 seats and Conservative 68 seats (about half newly taken from Labour) with Liberal Democrat and the Speaker one seat each. 

Government funding for building new hospitals is programmed to deliver a single new hospital in this whole area during the lifetime of this parliament (in Leeds).  Universal Credit will now be fully rolled out across this area during the lifetime of this parliament (without now any effective parliamentary pressure to further modify how the transition is handled for existing benefit claimants).  And, although this is the one supposition in this blog post, manufacturing-related industry in Keighley, fishing-related industry in Great Grimsby and steel-related industry in Scunthorpe (the three constituencies in which I have been an incumbent for most of the last thirty years, each now with a new Conservative MP, two with absolute majorities) will find it tough to weather the economic turbulence of the period of new trading relationship negotiations and are unlikely to find the new trading terms which then emerge transformative.

Which raises one intriguing possibility.  What effect on Government policy might there be if good new constituency MPs consistently feed back the impact things like this are having on their constituents and their own chances of re-election?

Notwithstanding things like Greta Thunberg being labelled Time magazine’s Person of the Year, the average voter doesn’t regard the climate emergency as an issue deceive enough to affect their behaviour.  2.7% voted Green and some others will have switched or retained their vote chiefly because they had weighed the parties’ different environmental policies, but most voting appeared to have been on the basis of Brexit and/or domestic policy issues, there was certainly negligible feed-back from canvassing warning party campaign strategists that it was a significant issue, and there was no genuinely destabilising kick-back on the leaders of the Conservative and Brexit parties for not bothering to prioritise a television debate on the issue.

The picture is one of St Michael’s, Haworth’s redundant eighteenth century font in the churchyard.  I  took the picture this week while beginning to develop some material for a potential William Grimshaw related leaflet; it carries his name, the date 1749, and the text I have indeed baptized you with water but He will baptize you with THE HOLY GHOST.

The two paragraphs in italics were added on 15th December.

Still not reflecting

Well, I am reflecting a bit: apart from anything else we've had an Archdeacon's inspection, election campaign induced nausea, my own annual external Ministerial Development Review process, and a tide of Christmas preparation.  Just nothing yet suitable to resume blogging. 

The top picture is an Advent / Christmas season banner for St Michael's created during All Age Worship there at the beginning of the month: each bauble carries a member of the congregation's hope for something to be transformed (the set reading was about spears being reforged as pruning hooks) and the presents carry the message 'Come let us walk in the light fot he Lord' (the concluding words of that reading). 

The bottom picture was taken when parking ahead of collective worship at Stanbury Primary School a couple of days later when they (the pupils, not the sheep) were treated to a very similar theme. 

And I cannot tell you how much I have appreciated reading Robert Macfarlane's Underland, Robert Powers' Overstory and Jean Sprackland's Green Noise.

Early Christian Ilkley

I would travel a great distance to see the sorts of treasures in All Saints’, Ilkley, so it is beyond absurd that, until now, I haven’t travelled the short distance across the moor to see them.

The church is built within the site of a Roman fort and was founded at the very beginning of local Christian life in the seventh century.  Windows in what may well have been the first stone church were of reused Roman stone.  The first picture shows the pagan carving on a Roman altar.  The second picture shows this and a similar stone with the window shapes cut into them.  The windows would have been at ninety degrees.

And eighth century stone crosses also survive.  The first picture shows one – the head and main body actually come from different crosses.  The bottom two picture show details of the carving on it.

If Ilkley’s church was a seventh century foundation, how much later was Haworth’s less than ten miles away?  We have no idea.  I speculate that ‘there has been worship on this site for at least a thousand years’ and add ‘a site with hill, springs, and a St Michael dedication can indicate Christians taking over a pagan site' and, although there is absolutely no direct evidence to back this speculation, the survivals at Ilkley hint that something like this is indeed possible.