So What?

Lent 25: Marcus Borg

I encounter this in my university students.  Every term one or more of them says to me after class, "This is all very interesting, but I have a problem every time you use the word 'God', because, you see" - here there's usually a pause and a deep breath - "I really don't believe in God."  I always respond in the same way: "Tell me about the God you don't believe in."  Invariably, it is the God of supernatural theism.  I then tell them that I don't believe in that God either.  They are surprised, for they know that I believe in God.  They're simply not aware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.  (From: The Heart of Christianity , page 68)

If you want to know what the other option is, you will have to read the book!  As a preacher I spend a lot of time correcting false images of God.  Both Christians and atheists believe in the same unbelievable supernatural God.  I include Borg in this series because he is a well-known radical theologian who does not make the common liberal mistake, where having rubbished the supernatural God, we are left suspended with half a faith and no way of moving anywhere else.

We need to ask ourselves who we are fooling.  Why do we find it so difficult to pass the Christian faith on?  Our educators, preachers, theologians and ministers conspire to set up barriers to God through their insistence in belief or doubt about a God who does not exist and is not believed in by people of faith.

Lent 24: Robert Linthicum

The primary purpose of a community organisation is to create a community - to create out of a victimised, marginalised, destructive conglomerate of people a community whose quality of life is such that people find fulfilment and joy in living there.  It is to enable the people to build their society around their common articulated, intentionally pursued values.  If such a community is not created, then all that we have accomplished through community organising is the replacement of one oppressor by another in the tyranny of the now powerful poor.  The power of the oppressor must be replaced by a quality of corporate life that is of such superiority to either the formerly oppressed or their oppressors that it brings purpose, direction, joy, and fulfillment to all who experience it.  That is the true objective of community organisation.  (From: Building a People of Power , page 243)

Linthicum, with others, picked up Allinski's  organising and made Citizens' Organising the powerful movement it is today in the United States.  It is worth putting Linthicum's approach alongside Lovell's (see yesterday's post).  What they have in common is the commitment to allowing others the space to make their own community or their own ministry.

We see, in the tendency for the oppressed to turn oppressor, the need to understand this flaw in all human relationships.  Traditionally, Christians call this sin.  The struggle to maintain community, in the inner city as much as in religious communities, is a call to live life on the knife edge.  This is why John Wesley  said, there is no holiness apart from social holiness.

Lent 23: George Lovell

But the time and energy to think is strictly limited!  It simply is not possible to think in a thorough-going way about everything all the time.  Doing so would paralyse us.  This does not mean, as some infer, that there is little point in trying to think about anything in depth.  On the contrary, it points us to the vital importance of selecting carefully just what we should be thinking about at any particular time.  Of itself that requires thought.  Life is, in fact, sustained by an ever changing pattern of doing things without thinking, doing and thinking at the same time, and thinking before doing.  Human and spiritual development occurs when the combination of thought and action is creatively integrated.  (From: Analysis and Design , page 16)

I think I first encountered George Lovell in the early 1990s, when he was involved with Avec, at Chelsea Methodist Church.  At that time, I took one of the Avec courses.  (Avec is the French for with.)  Over ten years later, I took part in his post-graduate diploma, Consultancy, Mission and Ministry, which drew on his long experience of non-directive practice for church and community workers.  If Britain has a home grown equivalent to Citizens' Organising in the States, it was Avec and more recently the CMM course, which continues despite George Lovell's retirement.  It is a pity his work is not better known but then non-directive working has never been particularly valued in the UK.

The creative integration of thought and action is sometimes called Praxis.  I believe all the great movements of Christian inspired change have achieved, at least for a period, integration of thought and action.  Sometimes we call it integrity.  This is a theme we should reflect upon, particularly if we value the transformation of human societies.

Lent 22: Terry Pratchett

History finds a way.  The nature of events changed, but the nature of the dead had not.  It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked footnote of history, but they hadn't been mean or shameful men.  They hadn't run, and they could have run with honour.  They'd stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they chose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them - (From: Night Watch , page 461)

Pratchett is a comic writer and a very good comic writer.  I have read most of his books and note the progression from his early Discworld spoofs of fantasy fiction to a deepening of character.  He is brilliant at plot and humour but what is remarkable is the way his characters have developed.  In this paragraph, one of Pratchett's most developed characters, Vimes, reflects on an incident, several decades ago, where his men lost their lives.  (He was there twice of course - it is a fantasy!)  The last seven words summarise Vimes' character - the importance of doing what is in front of you; doing what you have to do.  Everyone in Pratchett's later novels faces this dilemma.  How do I cope with being a vampire, a werewolf or transported to an uncomfortable place?  The shy Banshee pushes a note under the door, reading 'Ooooooooo ...'.

The secret is, there are no heroes.  There are just people who do what they have to do.  The ordinary person who discovers they are a hero, often doesn't feel at all heroic, perhaps embarrassed, fearful, irritated ...  This has infinite comic potential, perhaps because it is so real.

Lent 21: Charles Wesley

Long my imprisoned spirit lay

Fast bound in sin and nature's night;

Thine eye defused a quickening ray -

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light,

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

(From: And can it be, 216 verse 4 in Hymns and Psalms)

About one fifth of the hymns in Hymns and Psalms are by Charles Wesley.  John and Charles understood people would learn their theology through singing; Methodism was born in song.  I've been singing these hymns for over 30 years, and I am probably unaware of how they have formed my beliefs.  Although John Wesley  is thought of as a theologian, it is Charles' theology which is better known because Methodists still sing his hymns most weeks.  As a preacher, I usually find I've included at least one of his hymns in my services, usually without making a particular effort.  This hymn, best sung to Sagina or Abingdon, is probably the best known.  I've chosen this verse because it speaks (or sings) of the experience of liberation the Christian experiences.  We do not go forth to be enslaved to some ideology, particularly any ideology with the label 'Christian'.

Methodism was a movement of the people.  The clergy were not always happy with this idea but the nature of the movement was always a radical opportunity for the most marginalised to build their own faith as a community.  We need to remember liberation is not only from something but to something new.  What does it mean to be one follower amongst others?

Lent 20: Psalm 139

If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night',

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

(New Revised Standard Version, vv 11, 12)

This psalm was one identified on the first Dark Holy Ground  course in Cleveland County during the 1980s.  Here long term unemployed and people in employment met to contemplate their experiences.  A big revelation was when they found the writers of the psalms were experiencing the same as unemployed people on Cleveland's housing estates.  In this psalm, one of their favourites, they observed the psalmist is saying it is still night!

It is the dark places where creativity happens.  Why do we have negative associations for darkness?  The seed germinates in the dark.  The embryo develops in the dark.  Our hearts beat without any light at all.  Spiritually, dark places can lead us to encounters with God.  Sometimes we are able to say our darkest times are the best things that happen to us.  They are no less dark for that.

Lent 19: Sydney Carter

Sing John Ball, and tell it to us all,

Tell of the day that is dawning,

I'll crow like a cock and I'll carol like a lark

For the light that is coming in the morning.

(From: Gentle Angry People, 10)

Sydney Carter was a Quaker and his best known hymn is probably Lord of the Dance.  We used to sing this one, Eve is a Queen and Adam is a King, in the Sheffield Liberation Congregation, about 20 years ago.  It had its origins in the 1981 500 years commemoration of the Peasants Revolt.  John Ball was a priest who is best known for the saying: 'when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'  Gentle Angry People was published by the late lamented Alliance of Radical Methodists in 1987.

'All shall be ruled by the love of one another' has been the cry of radical Christians down the ages.  Reflect upon how readily Christians sacrifice the rule of love for the rule of law.

Lent 18: Ebenezer Elliott

Shall crime bring crime forever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father,

That man shall toil for wrong?

No! say Thy mountains: No! Thy skies;

Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise.

And songs be heard instead of sighs:

God save the people!

(From: Methodist Hymn Book, 909, verse 2)

Some of us discovered this hymn in 1982, when I lived above Grimesthorpe Methodist Centre in Sheffield.  Elliott was known as the corn law rhymer and his statue is in Weston Park in Sheffield.  The house where he lived is marked with a blue plaque in Upperthorpe, Sheffield.  The members of the Grimesthorpe Methodist Centre, who were in their late eighties, told us they were not allowed to sing this when they were young because it's telling God off!  More likely it was frowned upon because it was written in the nineteenth century soon after the National Anthem.  When wilt thou save the people? enjoyed a renaissance in the musical Godspell in 1970.  It is usually sung to Commonwealth.

I still believe this hymn should be sung more often.  It is a miracle it found its way into the hymn book in the first place and it is significant it is not in the current one.  The lyrics might be seen as sexist but I hope this can be excused this one time.  We should ask ourselves why Christians are so reluctant to sing revolutionary songs these days.  We seem to have given up on anything other than anodyne worship songs about nothing real.

Lent 17: Stuart Kauffman

Whether or not I am right that life started with collective autocatalysis, the mere fact that such systems are possible should make us question the dogma of a central directing agency.  The central directing agency is not necessary to life.  Life has, I think, an inalienable wholeness.  And always has.  (From: At home in the universe , page 275)

Kauffman challenges doctrinaire neo-Darwinism by arguing life is inevitable in our universe.  We're not here by chance and against the odds.  His views are not incompatible with natural selection but go much further to explain how selection might work.  I have argued elsewhere  there is no design to which nature adheres but that life develops naturally according to its own rules.  (This book was recommended to me after I'd written this series of posts about evolution.)

God is known through experience.  There is no proof of God in the universe, the universe itself is all the proof we need.  Kauffman does not answer the question: why is there anything at all?  Instead, he deepens the question by showing, in a highly technical way, how creative the universe is.  Such a universe in conversation with God, needs no design.

Lent 16: John Dominic Crossan

We put on our front cover an artist's creative restoration of that frescoed point-counterpoint from the Cave of St Thecla and St Paul.  Paul is in the centre under full spotlight, just as the church's post-Pauline tradition has always placed him.  Thecla is of equal height, with open eyes intact and up-raised hand untouched, but she is on the very edge of the cover.  She is half on and half off.  But here are our questions.  Is Thecla still departing or now returning?  Does a search for Paul push female leadership, authority, and apostolicity off to the side and finally off that cover, or does a search for Paul bring Thecla, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light until female and male stand together side by side in the full light of the centre?  (In Search of Paul , page xiv)

The original frescoes are to be found in the Grotto of St Paul at Ephesus.  Thecla's eyes and raised hand have been obliterated, deliberately.  Crossan and Reed argue that the seven books all scholars agree were written by Paul, reveal to us a radical Paul in contrast to the other, conservative and reactionary, Pauls in the New Testament.  I first read this in 2005 and have over the last five years preached on each chapter in turn.  This book and another featured later have opened up Paul's theology for me. 

Ironically, the church has obliterated Paul almost as effectively as it has obliterated Thecla.  We need to hear what radical Paul was saying and so undo not only centuries of marginalisation of women but also centuries of violent distortion of the Christian faith.  As always we should pray to be able to read Paul with fresh eyes and understand what he was saying.