Why do the innocent suffer?  That is one question running through the book of Job.  Job was a good and prosperous man, who lost his family, property and health in sudden disasters.   Some tried to argue that the good do not suffer, so there must have been something wrong with Job to cause his troubles.  Job does not accept that and complains about a world that is unjust, where the wicked prosper, get bonus after bonus, and are never called to account.  His advisers argue there is justice in the long run – for example, if the wicked man gets away with it, his sons will cop it.  Job is not satisfied with that answer.

Job 21.19  ‘You say, God stores up their iniquity for their sons.  Let him recompense it to themselves that they may know it.’   Job wants the wicked to suffer appropriately, and to have to pay up, so that they have to acknowledge and feel the wrong they have done.

Job has a strong sense of the individual before God.   So he looks for God’s wrath to be directed in justice to the precise places where it is deserved.

But that is not the heart and source of his view.  His prime concern is not that the wicked should be punished.  He is wrestling with his own situation.

He knows he is innocent or better, righteous.  He will maintain that.

But he knows that in his trouble, it is God he is facing.   He cannot stand outside his trouble, so that he is free to ask, ‘Why should God allow this, or do this to me?’   He does not say, ‘I have troubles, God is responsible, how can God justify himself?’

He rather says,  ‘My bodily troubles are bad and depressing in the extreme, but they are not my real problem.   It is rather that troubled as I am, I am before God.  God comes to me in my troubles, so he is the troubler.  In my troubles, I get no peace, no comfort.  They are the form of God to me: he does not let me alone.  Troubled as I am, I cannot say, ‘This is merely an accidental, earthly, animal occurrence, it has no personal or spiritual meaning, so my spirit can serenely rise above the suffering to be with God.’

‘No, God is after me’, says Job, ‘he will not leave me alone’.   ‘In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind’  12.10.   This general truth is emphasised and illustrated extensively in the book of Job.  Job’s trouble is a  particular occurrence of this general truth, the way it works out for him.   There is no escape from God.   You think that is comforting news?  For Joh, it seemed to mean trouble with little hope of light and peace.  Job sometimes says he wants to speak with the Almighty and argue his case with him (13.3) but at other times, Job thinks the only hope is for God to leave him alone, so that he can find a few days of brightening up, before he goes ‘whence he will not return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness’ 10 20-22.    (This is one reason why even many religious people give up on God: they sense that God might come for us, as he came for Job.   We would like to make our case to God, to speak frankly with God and call God to account, but we do not have the freedom to do that.  Before we can speak with God, God must take the pressure off.  So Job sets out the conditions under which he will talk with God: ‘Withdraw your hand from me and let not dread of thee terrify me.  Then call and I will answer…’ 13.20-22.  But sometimes, God does not leave some people alone, to get on with their life without his hand on them in a troubling way.  7.11-21: why does God make so much of human being, visiting him every morning?   ‘Will you never take your eyes off me long enough for me to swallow my spittle?’)

It is on this basis that Job appeals to his friends, who torment him with their words  19.1  They should not do this.  They should understand that even if he has done wrong, his error remains with himself – 19.4.   They should leave him alone with his responsibility and not interfere, as though they can make themselves great by humiliating him  19.5.

This is a form of the argument of Romans 12.19-20, Lev.19.17-18: Leave vengeance to God and do not interfere or try to do God’s work for him Romans 14.4.   A major issue here is knowing how to practise this wisely: for there has to be some sort of judging enacted in society by human beings.   We tend now in our secular society to ignore God altogether, and so to make social, ie state judgment final and complete.  But it is still the same as it always has been:  the human enactment of justice is often incomplete and cannot be counted as final; it leaves the victim unsatisfied, so that they have to find some other help in moving on with their lives; it is often clumsy and mistaken, and does not do redemptive justice to the wrongdoer; and when it escalates its own cruelty in order to match the heinousness of the crime it strays from the service to humanity which is the basis of its authority.

So we need human judging, but it needs to act with humility within limits.  That is what Job asks his friends  to exercise: not to magnify themselves by being haughty assured critics who humiliate him.   Job does not pursue this argument by pointing out the limits of human justice (as I have done in the last paragraph) and asking his friends to limit themselves.  Human beings, especially once they are on their high horse, are not very good at limiting themselves.  Rather Job calls God into the argument.

He does not call God into the argument to defend him against his critics (God at the end of the book 42.7 appears like that) but rather Job asks them to limit their own critical humiliating endeavours  by taking note of God in the situation.  ‘Know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me’  19.6.   They can see Job is in trouble, and so they speak down to him, diagnosing his trouble and advising him – and all the time, they have not noticed or taken the measure of the most significant thing about Job’s trouble: God is there, not indeed as his helper or comfort but as the one who has ‘put him in the wrong’.

We should not think ourselves superior to Job’s friends for most of the time, we are not very good at noticing when God is there putting people in trouble.  Indeed good kind Christians today are as bad as other good people at not being able to imagine or feel that when people are in trouble,  they have been targeted by God and that the trouble is not to be understood except as the manner and the place of God’s coming close.   It is a terrible thing to think;  it is a dangerous way to think about people’s troubles.  Indeed part of the lesson of Job is that we should hesitate to interpret anyone else’s troubles in these terms.  But the other part of the lesson of Job is that as a human being I,  for myself, may, in the course of life, be led into troubles, and that as I live through the trouble, I discover that at its heart or alongside it, God is putting me in the wrong.   Then God becomes my real trouble.

Because Job’s friends could not interpret Job’s troubles in this way without putting themselves in the wrong, it is right that pastoral practice and spiritual direction in church does not work in these terms.   Our pastoral practice assures people that God is with them and for them;  it does not talk of God putting you in the wrong.   But it is one of the limits of the best pastoral practice that there are things it cannot and dare not say.   Job’s friends simply have to keep quiet.  Yet Job in trouble cannot be comforted with the one-sided cheerful pastoring.  Job has been picked out by God and there are dark places he must walk through, because God has  ‘walled up his way’  19.8.   The church that may not pastor in these terms can, at least, read Job, which most churches never do these days.   Without pointing the finger or interfering with other people’s relation with God, reading Job would cause us to be sensitive to strange but pressing dimensions of human living with God.   It would mean that as a community we did not build and promote a culture which blocks out the discoveries the righteous man Job made when God put him in the wrong.   Reading Job might help us to know better what we are given in Jesus Christ, who in his dying, cried out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

Jesus took those words from Psalm 22, a very Job-like Psalm.  What it is to be abandoned, Job describes in 19.13-20.  His family and friends have turned against him – even young children despise him.  All that is the form and measure of his trouble.  Job asks his advisers who magnify themselves and humiliate him to notice his abandonment.   He asks them not to analyse his problem and tell him how to behave, but simply to ‘have pity on me, o you my friends’ 19.21.    Why should they have pity on him?  Because they want to be better than all his other friends, who have left him?  Because they remember they too are sensitive human beings and they would not like this to happen to them – Do as you would be done by?   These good reasons for decent behaviour are not what Job points them to. They should have pity on him, ‘because the hand of God has touched me.’

He brings them back to the key point:  Job’s trouble is with God.  It does not follow that his friends must help him to put right his relation with God.  Job’s relation with God has gone into territory where they have evidently never been.  And in any case, if God is touching Job it is not for them to interfere.   So Job asks. ‘Why do you, like God, pursue me?’  19.22.   Do you think God needs some assistance?   Do you want to get on winning side?’     No:  if you see the hand of God touching someone, know that it is not your business to pursue them.  You will add to their troubles, but you will not be doing the work of God.   Have pity.  Stay with them in silence.  Maybe you will get close to Job in his trouble and find yourself in trouble with God.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in The Guardian  today:

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/riots-return-young-archbishop-canterbury

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/reading-riots-nothing-to-lose

We are also reminded that

In the aftermath of the August riots, the prime minister, David Cameron, was quick to dismiss the idea that poverty was a factor in the disorder. “These riots were not about poverty,” he said. “That insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.”

This is a mistaken interpretation.  It is true that many people who are poor did not riot; many of them would not riot and loot even if the opportunity came near to them.  But that does not mean that poverty did not have a major effect on some people, leading them to riot or steal, at least opportunistically.  

This is where we need more sensitive analyses and descriptions, such as those coming out of the Reading the Riots study (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots) which the Archbishop comments on. 

Different people react to any particular situation in different ways.  

We need to understand why some people respond to difficult circumstances in unhelpful or bad ways, and then out of that understanding, we can see how to help them and how to change the circumstances for the future.  That is the argument and the spirit of the Archbishop’s article. 

The big question….for us, the church

‘The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose.’  

Church is not mentioned  by name, but it belongs here.   The church is a local centre of some visible social energy: people come together to make a sort of community.  And the church claims that the heart of its own heart is the energy of God in Christ by the Spirit.   

So the big question comes home to us, the church: have we ‘the energy to invest what’s needed…to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose’? 

Who have nothing to lose?

When we talk about ‘those who think they have nothing to lose’ we are talking about many more than those who rioted or might riot.  There are

‘people who have vague but strong longings for something like secure employment, and no idea where to look for it; who on the whole want to belong, and live in a climate where they are taken seriously as workers, as citizens – and as needy individuals; and who have got used to being pushed to the margins and told that they are dispensable’.

How many have ‘lives in which anger and depression are almost the default setting, thanks to a range of frustrations and humiliations’?  

There are many, ‘in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead’.  

There are, for example,  a record number of NEETs -  16- to 24-year-olds not in education, work or training in England.    There are now  nearly 1.2 million, 15.6% of this age group.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/24/neets-statistics#data

Do you know what it is like to be a NEET, not by choice, but out of disadvantage, finding no door to life open, applying for jobs and never getting one, having the dreams of childhood stripped of all chance of realisation?   Have you ever got close enough to a NEET to begin to see. 

What happens to a NEET who is older than 24?  They have got used to a life where they count for very little, and now they cease to be counted in this statistic.  They join many other young people, who may have a job of some sort, but see no chance of ever getting their own home, what with the shortage of housing and the cost of mortgages.   They are not all disadvantaged from early years – many have degrees – but,  in their early adulthood, they are together as those who look towards the future and see more than austerity ahead.  It is more like sterility, existing but not living.   

Here is a big question that comes home to us as church.   Do we hear it?   Do we have the love and respect to hear it?  Do we have the energy to invest?   It is a searching question which may find us out uncomfortably.

The Birth of Jesus according to St Matthew: A Nativity Play for all the congregation
This play was written by Haddon Willmer and performed at Moortown Baptist Church at Christmas 2010.
The text is available here for any church or other group to use.
It is offered without charge, subject to its usual acknowledgements. We would be grateful to hear of any use made of it.

The script is provided in HTML format and you can find it here.

Here you will find some photos of the play as it was performed at MBC

Haddon Willmer

It is a rare delight to sing a classic hymn in church these days.  It is bound to be tinged with sadness, since any old hymn reminds us of the richness we have abandoned, like a prodigal in the far country. 

But the nostalgia of the ancients is not an adequate commendation for a hymn today.  What is there about the hymn which might commend it to anyone who has not been prejudiced in its favour by singing it sixty years ago as a child?   Has the hymn in its own right any chance of getting past the now widespread prejudice against it?  

Consider the hymn by Isaac Watts, from 1719.  We sang it in church today,  leaving out a couple of verses in the original  (marked here by square brackets [ ] ). 

Give to our God immortal praise;
Mercy and truth are all His ways:
Wonders of grace to God belong,
Repeat His mercies in your song.

Give to the Lord of lords renown,
The King of kings with glory crown:
His mercies ever shall endure,
When lords and kings are known no more.

He built the earth, He spread the sky,
And fixed the starry lights on high:
Wonders of grace to God belong,
Repeat His mercies in your song.

He fills the sun with morning light;
He bids the moon direct the night:
His mercies ever shall endure,
When suns and moons shall shine no more.

[The Jews He freed from Pharaoh’s hand,
And brought them to the promised land
Wonders of grace to God belong,
Repeat His mercies in your song.

He saw the Gentiles dead in sin,
And felt His pity work within
His mercies ever shall endure,
When death and sin shall reign no more.]

He sent His Son with power to save
From guilt, and darkness, and the grave
Wonders of grace to God belong,
Repeat His mercies in your song.

All through this world [Through this vain world] He guides our feet,
And leads us to His heav’nly seat
His mercies ever shall endure,
When this vain world shall be no more.

This is a hymn that reminds us of God, in creation, in the biblical history of Jews and Gentiles, in Jesus Christ our Saviour and as our guide and goal in this world.

It anchors our attention on some of the essentials in a succinct way. 

Like many hymns, it is not physically noisy, though a congregational can let itself to to enjoy singing it heart and voice; but while it speaks of the most important truths, it is not emotionally noisy and intrusive. 

It provides a spacious framework for reflection and prayer.   It includes us in its story and movement but it does not foreground us, and it makes nothing of the ubiquitous ‘I’ we find in contemporary worship songs.   It invites us to repeat in our songs the mercies of God.   It is a vehicle for the praise and adoration and love of God, but not for parading ourselves as the lovers of God.  

It is an example of poetry in the service of the praise of God and the building up of people of faith.   The poetry means that the author has done some work on the words and the patterning of the words, so that the shape of the poem not only intrigues us, but instructs and illumines.   This is seen in the artful alternation of the second half of each stanza.  

First we have,  

Wonders of grace to God belong, Repeat His mercies in your song,

then in the alternate stanzas, the precise words vary, but the basic form is,

His mercies ever shall endure, When x and y are known no more

What is the meaning of this?  Was it just that Watts did not want to bore his congregation by repetition?  Or does the variation mean more?

I think it reflects two major, different, but complementary ways in which Christian faith gives us to see and respond to God.  

The first way is to be grateful for God’s grace, his generous goodness, and to be amazed at his wonders.   We respond to God’s goodness by ‘repeating’ them in our song, we remind ourselves of them, and so come to appreciate them more fully and to live in them more faithfully.   This way of ending a stanza takes what has been affirmed in the first couplet and says, This is the grace of God which is active, and this is what we can occupy ourselves in building on, playing out and playing over in our lives.  It is as though God starts something off in the first part and it then rolls on carrying us with it.   There is a positive continuous drive through the whole stanza – and that is how it is with God in the world.  And we ‘repeat’.

The second way is different.   God is recognised at the beginning, some particular feature of God is picked out for attention (eg Lord of lords)  and it is affirmed that the mercies of this God will endure.   That unfailing faithfulness of the mercies of God is then contrasted with what we human beings have in this passing world and in our limited selves – we will not only come to an end in time, but we will prove insufficient for the tests that life in the world before God put us under.   So God is the Lord of lords, who rules the world, in contrast to all the other lords and kings who have their day and then are known no more.  What we need, and what the hymn points us to, is what will be there for us when all our best human efforts (like kings) give way.  

For the moment, it is true that we live with so much goodness in the earth as lit by sun and moon, but this earth will not for ever be a home for humanity.

Watts – and this is another reason for singing old hymns – had a strong sense of the passing and vain world.   We find that much harder to believe and express.  Put not your trust in princes.  Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.  So says the Gospel.  Watts,  we may say,  went too far in seeing the world and life in this perspective, and we don’t want to go back to there.  But are we right to swing so far  the other way?   We have little sense of  this world’s being ‘vain’ and we discount the manifold evidence that it is so.   We are compulsive optimists about ourselves and the world and we say it is our faith that compels us.  We do not take seriously that it is in this world, in our human world, that ‘the young prince of glory died’.    I do not think Watts and people in his time got it altogether right, but at least they took the question seriously and dared unpopular language in trying to focus the truth.   They could write,  When I survey the wondrous Cross….

To see this world as vain is not to dismiss it as valueless or lacking in goodness or not being the wondrous gift of God.   It is to see that there is a difference between God and the world,  and that the world cannot take God’s place for us.   The world is not our resting place – it is a place of pilgrimage through which God guides our feet to his heavenly seat  and to his mercies which endure when ‘this vain world shall be no more’.  

So God is celebrated in this hymn in two complementary ways:   as the Giver from whom all good things flow, and in whom we may trust and live in confidence; and as the One who stands when all the good things come to their end and the hopes they inspire need to be vindicated by Someone other than the vain world.   

The hymn is poetry that neatly, memorably, teaches us more than a snippet of systematic theology, and does so in a way which disciplines and shapes Christian spirituality.  

We can get a lot out of it even though it is old and we could never think of writing anything like this ourselves, because we are shaped by a different culture.  

Haddon Willmer

Questions 

Will there be a double dip recession?  And what would that mean for ordinary people? 

Will the Eurozone survive the Greek debt?  Can there be sufficient political and economic change without damaging social and human disturbances?

Is the USA dying as a superpower and what will be the consequences for us all?  Can it solve its political impasse, its economic problems, its culture wars and avoid passing on its pain and problems to the world?

What will come of the Arab Spring?   Will it be more peace and friendship in the world? 

What will happen for Palestine and Israel?  

Will the NHS survive with its core values and practices intact? 

Are we right not to be as worried today about global warming and climate change as we were a few years ago? 

Do all children get education worthy of human beings, God’s servants and children?   

Is it a good thing that rich people and technological powerful nations increasingly  fight wars by remote-controlled drones, with autonomous decision making capacities,  and so they are able to kill their enemies without danger to their own lives?      

These issues, and there are more like them, would seem to matter.

Why then is the church mostly a zone of untroubled silence about them?  

Is the church engrossed with matters even more pressing and important? 

Why is there more prophecy in a few serious newspapers than there is in church? 

In the light of the Gospel of God in Christ, what matters?  

Haddon Willmer

The Anointing at Bethany Mark 14. 3-9 Matt 26.6-13

A reflection on this text in the light of Matthew 18.10:  Do not despise one of these little ones….

The woman is a ‘little one’.   She is unnamed. She is not one of the party, she comes in from outside, and is marginal. 

The party does not bar her immediately. They do not express disgust at her mere presence. She is not despised in that way.

People react only when she acts. She is criticised for what she does. That is when she is despised. The despising is the outcome of a moral assessment of her act. The critics say, No Waste, Turn Treasure into Money, Care for the Poor.  

The moral assessment sees her action in a context of questions like: 

1 how should we treat valuable things?   (They should not be wasted.  Valuable ointment should be used sparingly, not poured out without restraint – the broken jar means nothing can be held back for another time.) 

2  how should we evaluate the claims of an individual in comparison with the many?

3  how should we balance acting in the immediate moment, Now, against any longer term perspectives? 

These are all good questions worth wrestling with.  But there is another issue, which the critics missed.   What is the effect of asking these questions in the way the party was asking them?  The effect was that the woman was troubled and not appreciated positively – that is,  she was despised. And that meant,  reflexively, that notwithstanding all their moral concern, the bystanders come out of it as despisers.  

This is the point Jesus picks up. His defence of the woman is akin to his defence of the children (Matt.19.13-15) and of other poor, despised and excluded people.  Each of these stories of Jesus has distinctive qualities, while they all belong to the same family. They are ‘Jesus stories’  – the one and the same Jesus gives appropriate attention to many different people, and thus there is variation on a theme. 

Jesus does not simply forbid them to despise the woman. He asks them why they are troubling her. 

Do they not see that she has done a good work to him? 

They have not looked precisely at what this little one has done in the moment.  In the perspective of the massive long-term problem of acting against Poverty, it is only a little action.  It is one person to another in an evening, an act which will be forgotten in a few days – if not even the next day.  Jesus – and this is characteristic of the way he worked and of the way his mind operated – focuses on the incident in itself.  He does not ask us to understand or have a theory of the broad context and the long perspective, so that we can say what is really going on in this moment, without attending to the moment to see it in itself. (Preconceptions put us in the know before we look at the facts.)  He asks, What is happening here and now?  What is distinctive about this moment?   What does it give us and what does it ask of us? 
He says, She has done a good work on me. The critics had not given any thought  to its being done to Jesus, yet that is obviously an important characteristic of the event.  She did not go round anointing lots of men randomly. She did it to Jesus.   

But where does this lead us?  How does it help us to see this as a good work?  Sometimes, it is said that the anointing was an expression of her love for Jesus, and being an expression of love it is good.  Mark and Matthew do not tell the story that way at all.  (Luke 7.36-50 tells a story of an anointing, which takes us in that direction, as does John 12.1-8). 

We may say, she anointed Jesus as an act of devotion and worship to one she recognised as Lord and Son of God.  But again the text does not suggest that.  

Jesus received what the woman did to him, as a good work.  He might have valued it as a man values the generous attention of a woman.  There is no need to deny that dimension in the story, for Jesus was genuinely and ordinarily human.  But Jesus did not tell them the action was good on that ground.  The action is not said to be good as an expression of devotion to Jesus the person.  That kind of reason would be too general – ‘the person’ is always a general abstract concept.  It has the truth and usefulness of general abstract concepts, but it cannot do everything.  This act was not good just because it was a person to person event, or that it is done with feeling.  

Jesus sees in what the woman has done something it is quite unlikely she had noticed or intended.  He says she had anointed him beforehand for his burial.  May we imagine that Jesus was in the party with a sense of his death coming nearer?  A violent death, lonely, in the hands of soldiers and strangers, comfortless, despised?  Even those in the party who were friends of Jesus, who honoured him as Teacher and Lord, did not see him as a man getting close to such a death. They did not want to think that – and so they did not respond to him as he really was.

The woman was like the people who crucified Jesus, insofar as she did not know what she was doing. 

The woman does good in the way she knows and that, it turns out, unsurprisingly,  is open to ethical questioning.  She is a little one – and little ones do little deeds. An aspect of littleness is the questionability.  This is the woman Jesus defends: She has done what she could, literally, she has done what she had.  She has acted up to, but also within,  her limits.  She has spent what she held in her hands, and in the light of whatever limited  understanding she had.  We know nothing about her except what she was and what she put into that moment, that action, that vulnerability to being misunderstood by the party – and by Jesus. But he did not misunderstand, and yet he did not merely endorse whatever understanding and feeling she had. He did not explain and defend her motives or attempt to justify her by her psychology, as we do in our contemporary therapies.  Instead, she, with all the party, is confronted with novelty: she hears an appreciation and judgment which sees more in the action than she or her critics knew.  

Jesus does not only disclose that she had anointed him beforehand for his burial, as she took the opportunity of the moment when it was given her, rather than wait for the right but impossible time for anointing the dead.   That is a sad and sombre goodness.  But he sees something more cheerful. What she did has become part of the story of the good news which is to be proclaimed in the whole world. So she is remembered, but not as a person who has become a great one by winning some sort of competition  – we still do not know her name.  It is rather that her action, - a little vulnerable act, typical of the unnumbered actions which make up created human existence,  acts which have their moments and are swept away by the ever rolling stream of time, – was noticed by Jesus in the moment, noticed and noted so that wherever the good news is proclaimed, her deed is recounted and she is thus remembered. Rescued from oblivion. 

We may ask: When we now proclaim the good news of God in Jesus, as the kingdom of God comes upon us, do we ever tell her story?  Or is she,  after all, despised and left out?  Do we have definitions of Gospel which squeeze her back into the margin – and Jesus with her?  Do we tell of Jesus who notices the little ones and the little things,– and who sees more in what they do than they see themselves? Do we in our necessary critical assessment of what is done in the world, near and far, have the eye of Jesus, who finds the good when it is hidden in little questionable actions done by little questionable people?
 
Are we like the woman, who did what she could – and was not intimidated by her littleness? Or do we think we are great bystanders?  

If we do what we can, we may hope that our little action may be judged by God and have a meaning and value beyond what we could build into it, or imagine. That is a key point about this woman. She not only did what good she could but she left open the interpretation and evaluation of what she did to Jesus who brought to the assessment something she and her critics overlooked. This story illumines for us what the judgment of God is like, how it operates in life, and why we should place ourselves within its scope. The judgment of God is where we find ourselves more truly and fully known than we thought, and not all negatively – and we find God as the One who appreciates the good as well as shining inescapable light on the bad.  God in judgment says: Good. This affirmative judgment is not given so that we can think we are big when we are still little, but so that we can be protected from being troubled, being harrassed as we get on with doing the little we can. God in Jesus does not flatter, telling us our mediocrity is really great, so that we can think more of ourselves than we should. God in Jesus judges so that little ones are not troubled, but are free to do what we can – that is, we are not made to stumble in the path of life given to us  (Matthew 18.6).

Recently I have been culling my books.  There are too many in the house, and far too many to leave to whoever has to clear up when I go.  I take loads of boxes to the excellent Oxfam bookshop in Headingley, so if you want them, you can look there, and when you pay their fair price  – they know the value of books – your money will mostly go to people who need it much more than we do. 

So I sort through my books.  A few are rubbish and I am glad to get rid of them – is it ethical to sell them on?  Some are about matters I have long since worn tired of;  they were good for me once, like so many things in an old person’s life, but there’s no point in hanging on to them – or pretending to, for in truth the tide of time has simply swept them out of my reach.  And there are some books I bought years ago with good intentions, but have never read;  I know I do not have time now to read them, but I feel guilt, as though I have let them down:  buying them implied a promise, and the promise has not been fulfilled.  All I can say now is Sorry, and let them go.

Today I found a book I had marked down for dismissal some time ago.  It is huge, 1150 pages.  I read through the first 200 years ago and then gave up.  Really it is a book that should go.  But before I put it in the box, I glance through it again.  I look up a page I had noted.   That is a good bit – perhaps I should have another go at this book.   I wonder, shall I really commit myself to reading the rest?   I do not want to put it back on the shelf only to see it accusing me of neglect day after day.  It must either be read or dead.   Or is there a third way?  (What a blessing – or is it a curse? – is a third way;  it enables the shilly-shally compromiser to believe he is a decisive creative dilemma-breaking pioneer.)   

The third way would be to share the bit I like with you in this blog.  If I then let the book go, I have given it a decent celebratory farewell.   It might even be that one of my readers says, That book I must have.   

Rebecca West travelled in all the countries that made up Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and she published Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in 1941.    On page 65, she describes the Catholic Mass she went to in the village of Shestine, in Croatia.   I give you only snippets, for reasons of space; they are chosen with motives you can easily guess.

‘There was a lavishness…in the singing that poured out of these magnificently clad bodies, which indeed transformed the very  service.  Western church music is almost commonly petitioning and infantile, a sentiment cozening for remedy against sickness or misfortune, combined with a masochistic enjoyment in the malady, but this singing spoke of health and fullness…..

‘…there came a flood of song which asked for absolutely nothing, which did not ape childhood, which did not pretend that sour is sweet and pain wholesome, but which simply adored.   If there be a God who is fount of all goodness, this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there be only goodness, it is still a logical tribute. And again, the worship, like their costume, was made astonishing by their circumstances.  These people, who had neither wealth nor security, nor ever had had them, stood before the Creator, and thought not what they might ask for but what they might give….’

On page 80, she picks up the same thought, this time starting with a visit to a hospital. 

‘These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.  With us, a satisfactory hospital patient is one who, for the time being at least, has been castrated of all adult attributes……One of the doctors raised his glass to me; I raised my glass to him, enjoying the communion of the rich world that added instead of subtracting.  I thought of the service at Shestine and its unfamiliar climate.  The worshippers in Western countries come before the altar with the desire to subtract from the godhead and themselves; to subtract benefits from the godhead by prayer, to subtract their dangerous adult qualities by affecting childishness.  The worshippers at Shestine had come before the altar with a habit of adoration, which made them pour out the gift of their adoration on the godhead, which made them add to themselves  by imaginative realization of the divine qualities which they were contemplating in order to adore.’ 

It makes you think, doesn’t it?   What precisely do we think?  

Books – not the physical volumes on the shelves, but what is in them, the whole host of earth and heaven who inhabit and come to expression there – have been for me, as for many, a ‘communion of the rich world that added instead of subtracting’.  

No wonder, getting rid of books is a sad, thought-provoking affair. 

As a result of re-browsing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I have decided to face the daunting task of reading it.

Is it only You, God, who is free from envy?
You are perfect, need nothing but Your self,
Anxious for nothing, nor wanting nor wasting,
Is it only you, God, who is free from envy?
 
What is your secret, Lord, why are you so free?
Above all competition, immune to temptation? 
Thus You are perfect, Lord,
          but no help to me, 
          Driven by hungers,
          Depressed by comparisons,
          Grasping at what is not mine? 

What is Your secret, Lord, how are you so free?
Perfect in love, but not loving the perfection,
Giving without stint.
Whether You have all or little, You give in love
and leave no room for envy. 

In love, God,
You are one of us in Jesus Christ,
little on earth, 
not grasping at equality with God,
but free for human living
even to death on the cross.

Here is hard help.
You do not tell us, Do not envy,
 - a bare command against the pressing temptation,
a counsel of perfection mocked by practicality.

Instead
You share envy-free living with us
Humble patient generous love,
giving not counting the cost,
powered by the paradox of resurrection joy: 

Envy dies when busy generosity
leaves it no soil to root in.

Haddon Willmer

O perfect Love, all human thought transcending,
lowly we bow in prayer before Your throne,
that ours may be a love which knows no ending:
love from the Holy Spirit, Father, Son.

Such perfect love, God’s gift to those who seek it:
free of all envy, graceful, unconfined.
May our compassion spread to those who need it,
selfless as that of Christ for humankind.

O perfect Life, give us in fullest measure
a tenderness, a sure and stedfast faith;
a patient hope, a grasp of heavenly treasure
with trust to take us calm through pain and death.

Grant us the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,
grant us the peace to ease all earthly strife;
and give us, Lord, who face an unknown morrow,
Your Spirit’s foretaste of eternal life.

David Mowbray, adapted from the text of Dorothy F Gurney

God our Father
You are the love that makes a world,
where there is no need to envy,
no sense of lack,
no perverse desire to be envied

secure in your gift,
set free with Your free love,
we are all together
equal in the peace of Christ

We pray for those who are troubled by envy,
we pray for ourselves troubled by envy,
allergic to the excellence and good fortune of others,
irritated every time they think of them or meet them
Christ have mercy

We pray for those who provoke envy
we pray for ourselves who provoke envy,
who depend on being envied;
for those who seem to have no worth to themselves
if they cannot make others envy them. 
Lord have mercy

By your Spirit, keep us in the love of God,
day by day this week.

If you were to build a grand house,  what would you write above the door? 

Some people put the initials of the builder or owner and the date when it was done. 

In a blog on 17 February 2010 – yes, we have been going a long time – I wrote about an old house in the Austrian mountains which Hilary and I came across years ago. Inscribed on its white wall, in what seems to me somewhat unusual German, it says, translated:

That seems to me to be a very good thing to put on a house.  When a house has stood a long time and had many occupants, it teaches us to speak in this wise, humble and generous way. 

I was sorting out some old photos this morning and came across one taken somewhere in Germany maybe ten years ago.  

Above the door, the text is from Psalm 118. v 7, in Luther’s famous translation:

The Lord is with me to help and I will see my desire (Lust) on my enemies.

Somewhat ambiguous.  It is one thing to let everyone know that the Lord is with me, and will help me, and I value and rely on his help.  That might mean, I can offer a generous welcome to you, because the Lord is with me, the generous Lord who helps me to be more generous than I would be by myself. 

But then the inscription turns out to be quite unwelcoming, threatening, aggressive:  I will see my desire upon my enemies. 

The same sentiment is found in Psalm 54.  Insolent men have risen against me.   Ruthless men seek my life.   Behold, the Lord is my helper…he will requite my enemies with evil:  in your faithfulness put an end to them.    …I will give thanks to the Lord, for he has delivered me from every trouble and my eye has looked in triumph on my enemies.  

The aggression, the lust for revenge, the delight in the destruction of the enemy, are the other side of fear, defensive anxiety. Why was this house built so strong and bold?  Why are gated estates built for the rich today? Because we fear. And fear grows in us, so we are not content to be protected and to live at peace; we want to see our enemy destroyed.  

A strong house with a bold boastful front can hide frightened weak souls.  

Merely boasting that the Lord is my helper does not mean my ambiguity of spirit has been sorted out. 

We can coopt God into our anxiety and ambition and use God for our own purposes

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

A poison tree by William Blake

There is a further irony about the inscriptions on this house.  Above the text about the Lord being my helper, it says (I think – my German is as open to correction as my magpie recognition skills):  ‘Diligence, hard work, brings its own reward with it’.  How much do we need the Lord?  What help does the Lord give?  

It is an irony akin to lurks in the motto, ‘In God we trust’ on dollar coins and bills. What really do we have confidence in? A similar irony is found in  the Prayer Book petition: Give peace in our time, O Lord: for there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O Lord. Why then are we spending so much on excellent armed forces? 

It is irony inescapable in Christian religion. Irony which brings ambiguity, and threatens to discredit our profession of faith. For we are told to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling – in short to be diligent and not be lazy. And then we can end up trusting ourselves, thinking: Hard work brings its own reward – my right hand has done it. We don’t need much help from the Lord.  But any good work we do is not without God.  We work along with what God does: for it is God who is at work in us, to will and to work for his good pleasure (Phil.2.12,13). His good pleasure, not our lust.  

What then do we write up on the house of our lives for all the world to read? It is not a bad thing to write something. It is good to confess our faith, and to say the Lord is my helper.  It is good to let the Lord help us to find the text we will put above our door, so that it speaks clearly about love and peace and welcome.   

But we live in a world of enemies, do we not?  And not only on the day after bin Laden has been killed. There are many reasons for being defensive, and then reacting in a practical way, becoming tough and boastful. It is not easy to find the way.    Pray the Lord of Gethsemane to lead us.

Royal Wedding: the Address of the Bishop of London

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day this is. Marriage is intended to be a way in which man and woman help each other to become what God meant each one to be, their deepest and truest selves.

Many people are fearful for the future of today’s world but the message of the celebrations in this country and far beyond its shores is the right one – this is a joyful day! It is good that people in every continent are able to share in these celebrations because this is, as every wedding day should be, a day of hope.

In a sense every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and groom as king and queen of creation, making a new life together so that life can flow through them into the future.

William and Catherine, you have chosen to be married in the sight of a generous God who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the Spirit of this generous God, husband and wife are to give themselves to each other.

The spiritual life grows as love finds its centre beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this: the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.

It is of course very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centredness. People can dream of such a thing but that hope should not be fulfilled without a solemn decision that, whatever the difficulties, we are committed to the way of generous love.

You have both made your decision today – “I will” – and by making this new relationship, you have aligned yourselves with what we believe is the way in which life is spiritually evolving, and which will lead to a creative future for the human race.

We stand looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril. Human beings are confronting the question of how to use wisely the power that has been given to us through the discoveries of the last century. We shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge, but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence, for life, for the earth and for one another.

Marriage should transform, as husband and wife make one another their work of art. It is possible to transform so long as we do not harbour ambitions to reform our partner. There must be no coercion if the Spirit is to flow; each must give the other space and freedom. Chaucer, the London poet, sums it up in a pithy phrase:

“Whan maistrie [mastery] comth, the God of Love anon,
Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon.”

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive. We need mutual forgiveness in order to thrive.

As we move towards our partner in love, following the example of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light. This leads on to a family life which offers the best conditions in which the next generation can receive and exchange those gifts which can overcome fear and division and incubate the coming world of the Spirit, whose fruits are love and joy and peace.

I pray that all of us present and the many millions watching this ceremony and sharing in your joy today will do everything in their power to support and uphold you in your new life. I pray that God will bless you in the way of life you have chosen. That way which is expressed in the prayer that you have composed together in preparation for this day:

God our Father, we thank you for our families; for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage.
In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.
Strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer.
We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Amen.