What have I said Now?

This Sunday we were hearing in church about the calling of the first disciples from Matthew's Gospel. I'd never really paused to think much before about what Zebedee [no giggling at the back] thought when his sons James and John got up from their nets and followed Jesus. In terms of the theology of vocation, it may be (as in this case) that the effects of that calling, that conviction, are positive for those who are called, those who come to that conviction, but less so for others around them, family, colleagues etc.
On Sunday morning I preached about calling from this story (Matthew 4, 12-23). In the sermon I uttered words I never expected to say again after I said them last when I was about 7:

I am Zebedee

 (we were playing on a pogo stick ...)

You see I suspect that even if James and John and their father had already heard of or about or even from Jesus before this lakeside encounter, with the best will in the world, there must have been a little bit of a sarcastic "oh, well so long and thanks for all the fish then" from Zebedee. Perhaps he did have an appreciation of the validity of his sons' calling, perhaps not, but the stark fact is he was 2 crew members down. That can't have been easy to swallow.

I am Zebedee

 because the diocese of Chelmsford lost 300 or more people over the weekend. They followed their own convictions, their own calling (the clergy among them would probably go with the latter) into the Ordinariate [?sp] - Pope Benedict's accommodation for Anglicans departing to Roman Catholicism. I am Zebedee even though I don't personally know any of these people, but we are a fair few crew members down as a result of their expression of their calling or conviction. My opinion on it is not relevant to the decision, but it has an effect on me because the family that has been torn apart is my family, the Anglican diocese of Chelmsford. Oh yeah, great timing too - a happy "Week of Prayer for Christian Unity" to you too Holy Father ! [rant over]

They would say I'm sure (as James and John would say) "We have to go". They don't have to go, the Church wants them to stay and the diocese of Chelmsford is working hard to support them and others like them, but they want to go - it is their conviction, based on their opinion of the matter in hand (namely the making of women Bishops among other alleged 'departures from tradition'). I happen to disapgree with them enormously but I think it is a mistake to go.

Which brings me to the whole concept of the power of personal opinion. This weekend on Sky Sports Richard Keys and Andy Grey expressed personal opinons, which were broadcast unknown to them. The opinions (which I wont repeat here but if you live in a vacuum click the link) were widely condemned as unacceptable. Grey and Keys clearly hold convictions about women in sport which are a little old fashioned to put it politely. Had they been savvy enough to realised their mics were live I'm fairly sure they'd have been more discreet, but now we all know what they think, even though they have apologised.

I don't think those opinions are God-given. When it comes to the Ordinariate, that is a harder thing to say, as I do believe, even if I disagree, that many of those 300 or so souls genuinely did seek God's input on their decision to cross the Tiber. whether they found God's answer for anyone beyond their own selves is another question.

In all of this one thing we should remember (as Yoda might put it); forgiveness is not the same as saying it doesn't matter.

And finally, to bring two great films together in one pastiche, since I am married to a woman priest I can say ...

I am Zebedee and so's my wife

When your heart's not open

For Christmas this year I received "The Ballad of John Clare" by Hugh Lupton. It is without doubt the best novel I've read since 1981 (When I read "To Kill a Mockingbird"). It is a fictionalised biography covering a year in the life of the poet John Clare. It is set in 1811, at the time when in the countryside between Peterborough and Northampton where Clare was born, the land was being enclosed, following earlier legislation. At the heart of the story is the enormous feeling of injustice felt by the poor ands the smallholders when their rights to graze stock or grow crops on common fields were taken away. Lupton quotes the 16th century verse that arose from the first protests against enclosure:

"The law locks up the man or woman,


Who steals the goose from off the common.

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from off the goose."

So this year marks 200 years since that part of countryside (along with a lot of the rest of it) was effectively privatised, having previouslyy been either held in common or at least in the hands of a greater number of individual owners and tenant farmers. Those whose livelihoods were removed fell into dire poverty. As the industrial revolution got underway, many moved north to the city to try to find work in mills and factories, leaving their families and their roots behind.  It was a turning point for England.

There has been a lot of talk in the media and the blogosphere this week about another anniversary, the 400th birthday of the King James Bible (KJV) first published in 1611. This date was also a turning point, but for very different reasons.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say I think that 1811 is the more significant anniversary. Much has been made of the importance of the KJV in terms of its contribution to the English language - we all use phrases in our written and spoken language today that arose from the text of the KJV, there's no getting away from that. 1611 also marked a pause in the very turbulent place that was the English religious landscape of the 16th and 17th centuries. The KJV was for centuries a unifying text, to which the Christian Anglophone world looked. The British Empire took it with them in missionary endeavour, and even today the likes of Bono and Melvin Bragg wax lyrical about the beauty of its language.

Which is where the problem starts for me. The Bible wasn't written to sound nice, it wasn't meant to be a preserver of language or culture; it was meant to tell a story, the story of God, and to introduce us to a person - Jesus Christ. Now, no one Bible  translation is perfect, indeed the modern science of translation has a lot to say about the impossibility of actually properly translating anything. The KJV, I feel, was a good tool for its day, but like the ancient farming tools that were overtaken by the seed drill and the subsequent mechanisation of farming, it has been superseded by better, more accurate, more scholarly and more comprehensible Bible translations, and we need to let it go. It may have been a thing of beauty, but the KJV also contains (to our ears) myriad words and expressions that are not only meaningless but also in some cases do not do justice to the original text. Just google "kjv inaccuracies" to get a flavour of this.

Now, I realise 1811 is a bit of a non-specific anniversary, but I still feel that 200 years since the end of widespread smallholder and common land farming is a more important anniversary to mark. The injustice of it  led in some cases to open conflict between the landed gentry and the peasantry - a real live class war. For today's protester this intense and bitter disappointment and feeling of being crushed has come to the surface again. Our class structure and social and economic landscape was formed by the consequences of  enclosure. It contributed at least as much as the Industrial revolution to the breakdown of family ties and rural roots. Never forget, the nuclear family didn't exist in the pre-industrial, unenclosed age. People lived much closer to their relatives in multi-generational groups.

1611 and 1811 do have something in common though. They have both caused us as a nation to idealise - the Bible and the countryside respectively. After enclosure, the corporate mindset of the rural population always looked back fondly upon the pre-industrialised farming villages. This formed the "chocolate box" image of thatched cottages and winding lanes that we still operate on today as an archetypal rural scene. It wasn't really like that though (or at least not for long), even if people have been trying to recreate rural life in that image ever since.( I'm often tempted to suggest middens and no running water should be included in planning permission in villages where the planners want to preserve the chocolate box!)

After its publication the KJV froze in time the religious language of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and froze alongside it a set of religious assumptions (behind the translated text, from the minds of the translators) many of which have long disappeared, especially with regard to gender, to race and to the created order. We haven't changed our theology of these things by abandoning biblical (read: KJV) truth, but by studying the original texts (i.e. Hebrew and Greek) and discovering (sometimes also though science) that ther are other ways of understanding. To look back at the KJV is to idealise language in the face of a snowballing development of newer words and forms of language (innit?) I hesitate to suggest, but I believe it to be true, that those who also look back to the KJV for an idealised "traditional" faith, are holding back the church in mission, strangling us like a dog on a choke chain. It wasn't ever really like that, and can never be again.

The landscape of rural England is changing again in this age. Eco-town, anyone? Maybe not, but something has to give in the quest for more and better housing (but that's another story). Chocolate box villages are only on chocolate boxes; everywhere else has Range Rovers and Sky dishes and youth crime just like anywhere else.

The landscape of religious England is also changing in this age. I don't know how its going to turn out, but it is by trusting a person (Jesus) rather than a book (the KJV) that I intend to ride the storm.

Languages are meant to evolve, not to stay the same. English will still be English even when the KJV is long forgotten (that's "when" not "if") . I'm not sure 'evolve' is the right term for Christianity, but I do believe our faith is meant to adapt to each new culture in which it finds itself. You wouldn't take the KJV to an undiscovered tribe in the Amazon now, so why make the descendants of the disenfranchised farmers of 1811 read it here?

Not properly researched, I know, but there you go!

Christmas Eve Midnight Communion sermon 2010, St Mary's Church, Stebbing

This sermon was preceded by a video of "Nothing But a Child" by Steve Earle . What follows won't really makes much sense unless you click the link or at least google the lyrics.

Readings, though we had them, were fairly irrelevant (OK for purists the gospel was Matthew 1 18-25).


You know, they say Christmas is for the children, but we mustn’t forget that it started with a child too. That’s what that song is all about – and my apologies to the purists who say we shouldn’t involve the wise men until next week.

I love that line “once again we all can be children for a while”. Christmas evokes many childhood memories for us – good, and maybe bad too.

We are all someone’s child, and many of us have children and grandchildren of our own. In this the first Christmas service, just few hours before the earliest little risers will be asking to unwrap presents, let’s spend some time in reflection, thinking about children. As well as that song you’ve just listened to, I’d like to stimulate that reflection by reading you a poem.



This was written by an atheist friend of mine. The poem is called “waiting”, and this is what she told me about it.

“’Waiting’ is about the birth and subsequent illness of my third son. He was in hospital until he was 3 months old."

waiting

always on the stairs,

or in a lift, or on a path or street or hill that is

not there, but on the way, or

going to. where you see

nothing all around you

unread books on dark-shut trains,

silent taxis.

windowless rooms.



at christmas

in the church, uncomprehending

looking at your life

and seeing not the star, but just

the hole where it should be, while you wait for him

and wait,

then wonder,



when he's given, from so far away,

light,

for the one

who can't believe.



To be honest, it’s tempting to just leave it there, but if I do we’ll be singing O come all ye faithful too early, so I’d better continue.



You know there is only one thing about Christmas that I don’t like, and that’s having to sing “Away in a manger”. I know the children love it and are cute when they sing it in the nativity play, but in the middle 2 lines of the second verse that carol drifts into heresy – firstly because it claims Jesus didn’t cry. Now, he was a fully human child born on a cold night in in very rough conditions; he cried alright! Secondly, in saying Lord Jesus look down form the sky, “Away in a manger” perpetuates the myth that God is distant, disconnected from earth, and only interested in making sure we make it through the night. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The heart of the Christmas message is the word made flesh – God coming to live and breathe and speak and work among us. And the great thing is that even though Jesus did depart this earth, his presence is still with us by his Spirit, whom he sent to be our comforter and guide. the Holy Spirit dwells in the hearts of those who believe. He is God, but not distant.



Having said all that – and I hope it didn’t turn into a rant – I perhaps need to give “Away in a Manger” another chance because of the third verse. Remember, we are thinking about childhood tonight.

We’re thinking about a child who was long expected but whose arrival was not as expected. We’re thinking about the difficulty of birth, of the fragility of a new human life and perhaps about the impossibility of parenting sometimes, when they get a little older!

We started with “Nothing but a child could wash those tears away, and guide a weary world into the light of day”. Jesus’ life and death, but supremely his resurrection, are what achieved that- the dawning of a new day, a new life, eternal life for those who believe. He didn’t do it all as a child, but he had to come as a human baby to fully live a human life, to fully redeem human life.

So you see, childhood is truly the heart of Christmas; in Jesus, God came as a child to remind the world that we are all his children. Even the adults are children, and for more than just a while.



If you tonight are in the church, uncomprehending, looking at your life and seeing not the star, but just the hole where it should be, then take a look with me at the last verse of Away in a manger. These words sum it all up really, in terms of how you get all this to work.

Be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay

close by me for ever and love me I pray

bless all the dear children in thy tender care

and fit us for heaven to live with thee there.



The key word is ask – if you ask Jesus to be with you then he will come into your life. You may not feel any different – though some of you will – but a simple invitation is all he is waiting for, to come into your life, your heart and soul, and claim it again for his own. The hole where the star should be is filled by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit. If you still have any doubts about this remember that God wants to be with us, he longs to be with us – the Angel told Joseph that Mary’s baby would be called Emmanuel – that means God with us, and that is what he longs to be. He’s just waiting for us to ask him.

Remembering that we are all someone’s child, the last two lines of Away in a manger can be our prayer too – asking God to bless us, but also to make us ready for eternity.

And if you’re getting cynical and thinking this is just a one off in the spirit of Christmas, let me take you back to another line from that song. Now, the birth of any child is a special occasion, which can inspire us and change our lives. But the birth of the Child we celebrate tonight means that we all can have another chance allowed – forgiveness is what the cross we see there brings. Forgiveness and a new start.

Yet if you are still “the one who can’t believe” let me say I respect that position, but would want to challenge you with a final thought.

The validity of all this, of Christmas, of the gospel, of the church and Christianity, does not hinge on whether or not people believe it. In that sense our faith or lack of it has no impact. God’s amazing plan for the world, to save his children, doesn’t need our permission to be true, but Christ does need our permission to include us in the fruits of that plan



let us pray

'A life on every face

Ekklesia, The Church Mouse, Michael Wenham and Cranmer's Curate are among many people blogging away at the moment around the subject of the Pete Broadbent Facebook debacle and the Bishop of London's subsequent [overre-]action in withdrawing Bishop Pete from public office.

I have emitted many deep sighs about this sorry affair over the last few days, and probably need to write this post just to get stuff out of my system (but I shall be careful not to rant (too much)).

I like Bishop Pete. We met at NEAC, and  we were Facebook friends until I recently culled him along with a number of other "famous" people clogging up my wall  (mostly because he goes on about Spurs all the time).

He has been good for the church and good for Spring Harvest for many years. He is an Open Evangelical like me, and so there have been very few things he has ever said in public that I have disagreed with. Until now.

If you read the church press or read Anglican blogs or news feeds you will be fully aware of the kind of mudslinging that goes on between conservatives and, well, everybody else really, around the topics of Women Bishops, homosexuality, Flying Bishops, and so on and so on. On the Internet in particular feathers can fly. Very rarely does anyone get disciplined for (say) slagging off the Bishop of Chelmsford or Rowan Williams on the Ugley Vicar or slagging off Reform on Fulcrum. People lick their wounds and retreat out of range until things flare up again, or they (like me) get sick of the circular arguments and stop posting.

But Bishop Pete's Facebook discussion has elicited a big can of worms being opened. The comments, which weren't even as public as some stuff one reads,( e.g. the comments on the Guardian's Comment is free every time Christianity gets a word in edgeways, which can make your blood boil) have been splashed around the world, and the chap has been withdrawn from public office - I guess that means he's just doing a desk job.

One one level I'm thinking "you wally, Pete" - I don't think he should have posted what he did. But on another level, I'm bearing in mind cases such as that of the Priest who blessed a homosexual couple - and who received (from the Bishop of London no less) a letter slapping him on the wrist and telling him not to do it again. And that was for doing something that we have all been specifically told no to do; like, not ever. To my mind that applies, under church discipline, even if you disagree with it. Why wasn't he asked to "withdraw from public office"? After all, the daily mail (and yes those lower case letters are deliberate) hardly approved!

OK, breathe now .....

The wider issue I suppose is, do we take seriously what we have to do and say to be a minister in the CofE? All those ordained have to swear an oath of allegiance to their Bishop and to the Queen. Bishop Pete must have done that  - most recently at his consecration as a Bishop. Clearly he didn't mean it, as he is a declared Republican, but what is also clear is that being a Republican is not a bar to ministry in the Anglican church. Do the oaths mean anything then? Or are they just anotherr anachronism clogging up Ministry.

Don't get me wrong, I disagree with Bishop Pete about the Wedding and about the Royal family per se. I am just increasingly frustrated that both liberal and conservative words and actions go unpunished while leaving the church rather bruised and battered, and thus (actually, albeit indirectly) the Monarch under attack.

I can't see a way back for Bishop Pete under the current bishop of London. He was supposed to also be looking after the Stepney episcopal area during the vacancy there so that can't be much fun for them either.

I was going to call this post "Just remember there are two side to every story" from Billy Bragg's "It says here" but in the end went for an intriguingly relevant line from Talk Talk's "Such a shame"

Facebook books meme technical fail

I was tagged in a note on Facebook, but owing to my rubbish computer, I  was unable to comply there so am doing it here.

Instructions: Copy this into your  Facebook NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt and underline the ones you’ve seen the movies of. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!







1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen


2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien


3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte


4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee


6 The Bible


7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte


8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell


9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman


10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens


11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott


12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy


13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller


14 Complete Works of Shakespeare


15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier


16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien


17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger


19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger


20 Middlemarch – George Eliot


21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell


22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald



23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens


24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy


25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh


27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck


29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll


30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy


32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens


33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis


34 Emma – Jane Austen


35 Persuasion – Jane Austen


36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernier

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden


40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne


41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving


45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins


46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery


47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy


48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood


49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding


50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel


52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons


54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen


55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth


56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon


57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens


58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon


60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez


61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck


62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov



63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt


64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold


65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas


66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac


67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy


68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding



69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie


70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville


71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens


72 Dracula – Bram Stoker


73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett


74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson


75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath


77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola


79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray


80 Possession – AS Byatt


81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens


82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell


83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker


84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro


85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert


86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry


87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White


88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom


89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton


91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams


95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute


97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas


98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare


99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl


100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo



My only comment would be that 100% of the classic literature titles here that I have marked as read I read before the age of 18 and probabaly haven't picked up since then - that's English and French S level in the 80's for you! So there should be a way of marking "read for pleasure" over against "read at school/college".
anyway, consider yourelf tagged if you are reading this