Compassion in your guts, mercy on the road

Sermon preached at Duston United Reformed Church, 10th July 2016. Text: Luke 10:25-37.

Have you ever heard of a bad Samaritan? We’re often told that we’re in a post-Christian culture, but we live in a society saturated with biblical imagery. The idea of the Good Samaritan is all around us. There are charities and hospitals named after him, the phrase is universally understood and admired even among people with little interest in faith.  Indeed so good is the Samaritan that even he doesn’t need an adjective – those wonderful folks, The Samaritans, who help people in their direst emotional needs, don’t need any qualifier.

And of course it’s not down to the reputation of the people of Samaria. Because among Jewish people of Jesus’ time, that was shocking. They were heretics, who worshipped God not on Mount Zion but on a different mountain to the north. They were impure, the product of mixing between pure Jews and Assyrian immigrants, a real issue given the racialized culture of 1st century Israel. They were the subject of many historical feuds and grievances, battles between the two cultures. And they were inhospitable – Jews travelling to Jerusalem through Samaria were not welcome to stay in the villages along the way. So the idea of a bad Samaritan wouldn’t be a surprise to Jewish ears. The surprise is that we see them now as something positive, because of this one story.

Now it’s such a well-known story that you’ve probably heard it preached, or read interpretations, or seen re-enactments of it, a hundred times. It’s a story for children to listen and get a good solid moral message – be kind to others, even if nobody else will. And it’s a story that a preacher tackles with care if they want to get any point across except that one. There are many lessons to be taken from the Good Samaritan. But, spoiler alert, to me it gives a message that is at the very heart of the gospel. It gives us a clear message about what we need to do as Christians, and what eternal life feels like. It feels like mercy. It feels like receiving mercy when we least expect it, and from the places we least expect it. And it feels like giving mercy in ways that are costly to ourselves, that put ourselves at risk. That is everlasting life, and that is the heart of the kingdom of God.

We start with that lawyer, and he starts with a question that many asked Jesus and few have had answered to their satisfaction – how do I get eternal life? It’s basically a selfish question, a transactional question. OK JC, I’m important and I’m busy. How do I get this eternal life thing? What rituals do I need to do? How much do I need to pay? Give me the bill so I can get back to work, I’ve got a client coming at 12 o’clock. People in churches are still asking this question in the same self-centred and crass way, and it’s done the church a lot of harm. Because the answer isn’t paying an easy bill. It’s about relationships and it’s about giving yourself.

Of course the lawyer, clearly a good student, knows the proper answer. Love God and love your neighbour – the two-fold commandment. It’s a brilliant answer, which really does sum up the Torah, and it also sums up the Christian life. But the lawyer needs to set boundaries on his love, so he asks the question ‘who is my neighbour?’. As the biblical commentator Amy-Jill Levine puts it:

To ask “Who is my neighbor” is a polite way of asking, “Who is not my neighbor?” or “Who does not deserve my love?” or “Whose lack of food or shelter can I ignore?” or “Whom I can hate?” The answer Jesus gives is, “No one.” Everyone deserves that love— local or alien, Jews or gentile, terrorist or rapist, everyone.

Photo: Berend de Boer

And so Jesus tells that story about the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, down that road which his listeners knew so well, and which was so dangerous. Really it’s the kind of place you’d expect to be set upon and robbed. I’m not going to spend much time on the priest or the Levite today. Their reasons for passing by on the other side have been widely discussed. There’s an argument about them breaching their ritual purity, which doesn’t quite work if you look at it long enough. Perhaps the best explanation is something Martin Luther King said – maybe they were just afraid and didn’t want to be robbed and beaten themselves. Maybe they felt it was some kind of scam. Or maybe they objected to helping individuals. I have myself walked past homeless people with their hands out, and not given them money. I’ve had the chance to complain to my MP about the conditions that lead to food poverty and not done it. I’ve seen pictures of terrible disasters in faraway places and done nothing. I don’t think I’m especially unworthy, I imagine we’ve all walked by at times. Don’t judge the priest or the Levite.


But let’s look at the Samaritan. I’ve said already just how hated were the Samaritans. They were the enemy, the other. The people like us and yet not like us. I watched a funny video from TV series That Mitchell & Webb Look which had Jesus telling the story to a group of liberal Jews who starting telling him off for his prejudice, that they all knew some great Samaritans, took their holiday in Samaria and the people were so nice. I’d have shown it today except it had some swear words that I didn’t want to inflict on you. But if there were such Jews in Jesus’ time, they were few and far between. Samaritans were despised. I’ve been trying all week to think of an analogy, of a group that’s close enough to us that know all their moves but to find them utterly alien. No single group fits the bill for all those in this room, I imagine, to say nothing of those outside. But I bet you have group that count as the enemy for you. Perhaps it’s those of another political persuasion, those who voted for Brexit or those who voted for Remain, or the Tories or UKIP or Labour. Perhaps it’s a different religious group – when I was growing in Glasgow, the divisions were really strong between Protestants and Catholics, and woe betide you if you strayed to the wrong tribe. In many places it’s about race, as we still see so tragically in the United States. For others, it’s around sexuality. Identifying a whole group of people as the enemy, as someone less than human, certainly not capable of good moral acts, is a terrible thing. It’s to deny that they’re made in the image of God, simply because they belong to a particular group. But, bluntly, it’s also a really common human activity, and at some level it’s something we all do.

Image: Jesus Mafa

So when the story took that three-part form that’s common in stories, the listeners would not have expected to hear the word Samaritan as the one who helped the man in danger. It would have come as a real shock, almost as something offensive. Those people, they’re the ones who help someone in danger? They’re the ones who act as a neighbour to the man? Yes, says Jesus, and moreover you need to be like them. Jesus says that the Samaritan felt compassion for the victim (the NIV which we heard says pity but compassion is a more common translation), using a really strong word which relates to your guts or even your bowels. The Samaritan felt so sorry for that man that it made his insides churn up, the way you do when you feel something is so wrong that you feel physically ill before you act. This was not a man with no moral sense. And Jesus says that the Samaritan showed mercy to the victim. Throughout the scriptures, that word mercy is the attribute of God. It’s God who shows mercy. The Muslims say “in the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful” and they have this biblical sense just right. Mercy is an attribute of God. And that is what the Samaritan showed to the beaten man.

So here’s the first message to take from the Good Samaritan. Mercy comes from unexpected places. God’s love comes through all sorts of people and in all sorts of ways. We live in a world that’s so deeply divided. It really feels this year as though things are falling apart. Our country has chosen to divide itself from the European Union. We have racist politicians in this country, throughout Europe, we have Donald Trump in America, all strengthening and exploiting divisions between people. We have horrendous acts of violence across the world carried out because of division. Elsewhere in the scriptures, prophetic voices loudly argue against this kind of division. The parable of the Good Samaritan says the same, more quietly and subtly, but no less clearly. Hear the message of the Samaritan with mercy and compassion: this man was doing God’s work. Division between human beings has no place in the kingdom of God. All human beings are brothers and sisters, and all are capable of goodness.


Let us move on to look at the story from a different perspective. The question is often asked who you identify with in this story, who you think is the key character. In passing, my wife Becky has told this story to children at our church a couple of times using the method called Godly Play, which includes asking which character in the story you most identify with. The answer is often the donkey! For adults the answer varies, but all too seldom is it the injured man. Yet I think there is real insight to be had in seeing yourself in the position of the person who was attacked, of taking what one commentator calls ‘the view from the ditch’. We don’t know anything about him. He’s described in some translations as ‘some man’, which is to say everyman – or everywoman. The injured man could be any one of us.

Because here’s the thing. Many of us are wounded people. Some of us have literally been physically beaten. Others have been emotionally beaten, or spiritually, or in our working lives, or in any of a number of ways. Sometimes that beating happens from strangers. Sometimes it happens from people we’re afraid of. Sometimes it happens from those we thought we could trust. Any of these is a terrible thing. My heart goes out to anyone here who has experienced these things.

But help often comes to us, and sometimes it comes in unexpected forms. The stranger who stops when someone is calling another person by racist names, and they simply say ‘enough’. The older woman who sees a young woman in a vulnerable position and walks her home. The street pastors who at weekend nights roam our town centre, and those of many other towns, helping people in danger. And the people who help those of different races, different religions, different political stances.

When that happens, can we acknowledge the help? Are we prepared for mercy to be shown to us? Later in the service, we will sing the hymn ‘Brother, Sister, let me serve you’ which contains the lines ‘pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too’. Are we prepared to do that? In moments of vulnerability, of hurt, are we able to respond to mercy when it comes from unexpected sources? So that to me is the second message of mercy from the story of the Good Samaritan.


And last comes those closing words of Jesus to the lawyer: ‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ to which the lawyer responds, ‘The one who had mercy on him’ and Jesus says ‘Go and do likewise’. We may receive mercy freely, from the unlikeliest of places, but we are also called to show mercy and compassion to others. We are called to follow the example of this man who felt the pain of his fellow-traveller in his guts, and actually did something about it.

Some of this is the individual response of the kind I have already mentioned – of showing compassion to somebody we encounter in trouble or in need. This response may be easy for us to take, but it may equally well be costly. As I said earlier, the priest and the Levite may well have been putting themselves in danger had they stopped for the injured man. The Samaritan may well have done so also. But he chose to accept that danger.

I know of plenty of Christians who have given up well-paid jobs to work and live among people in great deprivation, in this country or elsewhere, serving their needs in many ways. There is no condescension or patronising behaviour in such acts, they see the people they live among as equals and friends. These are hard paths, but those who follow them report that they are living life to the full. Or consider the Christians who travel to Palestine as ecumenical accompaniers to live alongside people in great hardship and oppression, both Christian and Muslim, in the land of Jesus.

But this kind of individual action can only go so far. Because there are many different people in many different kinds of trouble travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem, and other places beside. And helping them takes more than individual action. Consider food banks, like you have here – it’s great that they exist to help those in immediate need. But it’s a terrible thing that they need to exist, that living in the 5th largest economy in the world as we were constantly told last month, that we have anyone in food poverty who needs food banks. It’s a scandal, a disgrace. Our calling to go and do likewise goes beyond helping those in immediate need, it surely includes helping stopping that sort of need from arising. To quote Martin Luther King again:

We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.

The parable of the Good Samaritan tells us so much about God’s mercy and compassion, shown through others and which we are called to show to others. It speaks to a divided and hurting world, looking up from the ditch by the side of the Jericho road, and it speaks to us now in the commission of Jesus: go and do likewise.

The stars are not out of reach

Tonight I read a bedtime story to my son that made me cry. Tender stories for parents to read to children do that to me sometimes but this touched a nerve. It was called "It's not my fault ... that the stars are out of reach", from a collection It's not my fault by Bel Mooney.

In the story, Kitty (a girl of perhaps eight) has recently lost her Gran to old age and illness. She wished upon a star one night and yet her Gran still died. She tells her mum this, who says:

"Listen, love, I decided a long time ago that the stars are out of reach. It's not their fault and it's not my fault - no more than it's your fault that your wish didn't come true. All it means is you can't help things happening - do you understand?"

But Kitty doesn't accept this as the final word. She spends all her pocket money on glow-in-the-dark stars, puts them into her parents' bedroom and waits for nightfall. They are left speechless with wonder. Kitty explains:

"I wanted to prove something to Mum. She said the stars are out of reach, but I've proved they aren't. You can touch these stars, Mum - and they're all for our gran."

It was then that my tears flowed. Both my parents, and my wife's, are still alive, but they're ageing and showing some signs of poor health, and I know that at some point in the future I'll have conversations with my children like Kitty with her mum.

But there's more, and that leads me to feel as much hopeful as sorrowful. 2016 has been a really rubbish year for the world. We have had a horrible bombing in Brussels, the massacre in the gay nightclub in Orlando, a British MP murdered while serving her constituents. The UK population has been lied to and manipulated for months, served up xenophobic and small-minded propaganda and has taken the irrevocable decision to withdraw from the European Union. We are smaller and poorer for it, morally and economically. The United States refuses to pass gun legislation to curb their many massacres, and has at least a chance of electing a racist demagogue as president. Refugees continue to stream out of Syria and Iraq in a desperate hope of finding safety somewhere in the world, and doors are closed in their face. Programmes of austerity, devised by western governments to appease the bankers who created an economic mess with their greed and incontinent gambling, increasingly cripple our public services and damage so many lives. And climate change gets worse and worse.

It seems that hope is a long way off, that the stars are far out of reach.

But I refuse to believe it. I refuse to believe that the stars are out of reach.

I refuse to believe that terrorists, whether motivated by extremist religion, prejudice, politics or hate, can succeed.

I refuse to believe that murder and violence can triumph over love and justice.

I refuse to believe that those who hate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for who they are will stop those people living out who they are.

I refuse to believe that xenophobia and insularity are the right routes for the British people.

I refuse to believe that demagogues and extremist politicians will win out over the voices of reason and tolerance.

I refuse to believe that refugees don't have a place where they can be welcomed.

I refuse to believe that austerity is the answer to economic troubles.

I refuse to believe that the human spirit will be cast down, or trodden underfoot.

I refuse to believe that the oppressed of the world are lost.

Instead I believe in hope. I believe in love. I believe in tolerance, and justice, and human decency. I believe in a God who has promised to cast down the mighty from their thrones, and send the rich away empty-handed; and who calls us to love the strangers, widows and orphans in our midst.

In the words of the Iona Community, I affirm God's goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

I believe that good will triumph over evil. I believe in a dawn after the darkness.

I believe that the stars are not out of reach.

Seeking and finding God, in the wilderness and in stillness

Sermon preached at Paulerspury URC on 19 June 2016. Texts: 1 Kings 19:1-15a, Galatians 3:23-29.

I'm going to start with the wilderness that Elijah escaped into, fleeing for his life. Not a friendly place. Not a place of hope, or a place you want to settle in. No human settlements, no good land or easy access to food, limited shelter against rain or sun, risk of attack from wild animals. In this country, there’s not a lot of it left, even in the more remote areas. But elsewhere in the world, there are plenty of wilderness places where if want to travel, you’d better take care and go equipped. And if you go back in history to times of less settlement, there’s a lot more wilderness around. So it’s a common theme in the Bible. The Israelites travelling out of Egypt spent forty years in the wilderness. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. John the Baptist lived in the wilderness preaching repentance.

Image: Negev desert (Wikipedia)

This week feels like one of wilderness for our society. This is not a week for a cheerful all-shall-be-well sermon. The murder of Jo Cox MP, a decent person working hard to help people, has hit many of us hard. It comes in the middle of a really bad-natured and divisive referendum campaign about EU membership, which has brought out the worst in so many people. Elsewhere in the world we’ve had the massacre at the gay bar in Orlando, and the constant drum-beat of violence in Syria and Iraq. The world feels dark.

Many of us have our own individual wilderness that we’re struggling through. Some people struggle with their health or that of a loved one, watching someone decline and not knowing whether they’ll ever recover. Others struggle with depression, stuck in the mud of all-consuming unhappiness and not knowing how to get out. Again, others struggle with economic hardship, with uncertainty about their job or no job at all or not enough money or no roof over their heads. I’m struggling with my own wilderness of still another sort, after receiving a recent setback. Where that takes me next, I simply can’t say. This sermon isn’t about that, but it gives me a little taste of the other sorts of wilderness.

But here’s the thing about wilderness, as so many people experience it. It might last forty days, or it might last forty years, or it might end next Wednesday. But most people, most places, simply don’t know how long it’s going to last. It’s a time of wandering, a time of emptiness. It’s a bit like the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Looked at now, we know that Saturday only lasted for one day, but on the day after Jesus died, his disciples didn’t know that. The American preacher John Ortberg called that Saturday:

The day after this but the day before that. The day after a prayer gets prayed but there is no answer on the way. The day after a soul gets crushed way down but there’s no promise of ever getting up off the mat. It’s a strange day, this in-between day. In between despair and joy. In between confusion and clarity. In between bad news and good news. In between darkness and light.

So let’s go back to Elijah wandering in the wilderness. He was in a literal wilderness, but he was also in an emotional wilderness. He’d just had a huge triumph, defeating the prophet of Baal in a contest of gods in a scene on Mount Carmel where he literally called down the fire of God. But then he chose to kill 400 of them, and Queen Jezebel, a follower of the worship of Baal, had threatened his life and he fled for safety. He’d come down from his big victory and now he felt isolated and alone – twice in this passage he says he alone is left of the prophets of Yahweh.

Image: Russian icon

From victory to despair. He wanders alone in the wilderness. He sits alone under a solitary broom tree and wishes for death. It’s a sad and lonely image. But then God comes to his aid. He sends a messenger with fresh food and drink. Elijah drinks and eat and falls asleep. Even then Elijah seems sceptical, as well he might be given the danger. As some commentators observe, the word for the messenger which brings him food, mal’akh, often translated angel, is the same Hebrew word as the messenger who came from Jezebel to threaten his life. But the angel comes to him a second time and reassures him and the food gives him strength to journey for those forty days. Let’s emphasise that point. In the midst of Elijah’s wilderness moment, physically and emotionally at his very lowest, God sends a messenger to him and says: hang on there. I am with you. I will give you strength to carry on. And that’s a key message from this passage, as much as what follows. In the wilderness moments of our lives, God is with us. God comes to us in the wilderness and feeds us as we need to be fed, he gives us the strength to carry on.

So Elijah eventually makes it through the wilderness. He comes to a holy place, a notable place, to Mount Horeb which is also called Mount Sinai. In this place, and very possibly in the same cave where he goes, Moses met with God and was given the Ten Commandments. It’s the place where the covenant with God was established. He hears the voice of God asking why he’s there, and proclaims his aloneness. Given that Elijah has just been calling down fire, it’s not that surprising that he expects to find God’s voice in big signs of natural wonder – the earthquake, and the wind, and the fire.

I talked earlier about the sound that silence makes [and played the song Quiet from Matilda the Musical]. I find the song Quiet very moving because it expresses that feeling of profound and deep silence, of total connection with God, so well. But that’s an attitude of mind. One thing I learnt from my time as a Quaker is that the point isn’t the silence either. The silence is a tool. The point is the stillness inside, an attitude of readiness and openness to God. You can get that stillness in noisy places. I use a daily prayer podcast on my phone, which is designed for use in crowded spaces, and I often listen to it on the train from Northampton to Milton Keynes, standing up a bit uncomfortably with my bike. And it works. God can be found in all sorts of places, in all sorts of ways. God gives us strength in the wilderness places, but God can give us strength in the ordinary places of our lives as well, if we are able to listen for what the King James Version calls the still, small voice.

One more thing to say, and for that we need a verse of the passage from Galatians. There are many sermons to be preached from this passage, about freedom and law, about coming out of being disciplined as children in faith into being mature believers living in Christ. But there’s one verse I want to focus on, which speaks to the rest of what we’ve been thinking about this morning. It’s verse 28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Our society is riven with divisions – like in the text between racial groups, economic groups, or gender; but also between religions, nations, political affiliations, sexualities and others. It’s one of the causes of some of the ways we sit as a society in the wilderness. And people make so many judgements as a result of these divisions. The killings in Orlando seem to have been related to one – the people in the nightclub were killed because they were gay, or because they had friends who were gay, and the guy who did the killing hated them for it. We don’t yet know why Jo Cox was murdered, but it seems to have been hatred for the things she stood for, the people she championed. There are many who hate others because of divisions they see as more important than a common humanity. Paul tells us that they are totally wrong to do so: all are one in Christ Jesus. There is no division between rich and poor, or gay and straight, or black and white, or Brexiter and Remainer, or male and female, or Russian and English, or Catholic and Protestant, or between you and me. All are one in Christ Jesus.

God comes to us in all places, brings us help when we least expect it, and can be found in all kinds of people. We may be in a wilderness place, but if we listen attentive for the still small voice of God, then God will be with us, and will be with us in the wilderness.

Let us pray:
God of all people everywhere,
Help us to find you in the midst of the noise and turbulence of our lives.
Help us to seek for you when we stumble in the wilderness,
Help us to look for you in moments of our greatest despair,
Help us to search beyond noise for the voice you bring us in quiet ways.
For we know you are with us,
And we know you are with all people,
And we thank you and love you for it.
We pray these words in the name of our risen saviour and lord, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

Behind civic nationalism is the uglier sort: why I'm grumpy about the Queen's birthday celebrations

Image: PBS

I've been slightly grumpy for the past few days. There are a number of good reasons why I might be feeling grumpy (the OU for which I work is still in a pickle, I was recently knocked back for something I thought was right for me, and the UK is in the midst of a wholly unnecessary referendum which could have dreadful consequences). But actually that's not why I'm grumpy.

It's because, bizarrely, a woman I've never met is celebrating her 90th birthday. In a sense, good luck to anyone who gets that far in life, but this particular woman is the head of state of the country where I live, and too many people are making too much of a fuss of her birthday.

The media's interest is unsurprising. I know why the BBC would make a fuss - they're establishment to their core, and always milk the royal occasions (plus they want not to be eviscerated by the Tories and just might manage it this time). And much of the rest of the media is solidly rightwing anyway. Plus all of them like good copy.

But it's other civic institutions that bother me and have been making me grumpy. A depressing number of churches, even the supposed non-conformist ones (including my own local church) are holding special Liz-is-90 services complete with flags and national anthems. Even schools are getting into it - my kids' (excellent) school had pupils dressed in red, white & blue this week, and by accounts I read they weren't alone.

So what does this mean, apart from a rise in my grumpy-old-git quota? The Guardian has an incisive article by Dawn Foster which refers to a 'pernicious new patriotism' - she especially refers to street parties of which I've not seen much evidence (and a lot less than the Queen's diamond jubilee) but I think her analysis is quite right.

Perhaps we might call this civic nationalism, a phrase used to good effect by the pro-independence camp in the Scottish referendum. There the phrase referred to a nationalism based on committment to a place of residence rather than to ethnic background. More generally, the phrase is said to refer to a nationalism compatible with liberal values, inclusion and tolerance. But I think it's only a slight stretch to suggest that it also refers to the kind of soft nationalism that we're seeing around the Queen's birthday celebrations.

There's an attempt to be inclusive, to draw the nation together around a supposed shared love for the monarch. We all know the monarchy is politically weak (though their wider influence remains strong and they sit at the top of a pyramid of deference and power), and they have little power to command the people to love them. It's quite a different story from the huge portraits of supposedy-beloved leaders found in undemocratic states in various places. So it has to be voluntary. But it's partial. It excludes republicans. It excludes those who disagree with the current political structures of the UK (such as Scottish, Welsh or Irish nationalists). Despite the civic tag, it risks excluding those born outside these isles.

And that's where the uglier sort of nationalism sits behind this kind. Nobody is forcing anybody to participate. For most people, it's easy enough to exclude yourself from the events celebrating the royal birthday, or to stay silent when the national anthem is sung, or equivalent acts. But you still risk being excluded from the wider group, whether you seek that or not. You risk being called a killjoy or grump. Those who live their lives in edgier sub-cultures within the UK than I do might risk more. Those who want to participate in public life put it at risk, at Jeremy Corbyn discovered when he refused to sing the national anthem last year.

Image: Steve Bell cartoon, The Guardian

Opting out of civic nationalism should be a right for anyone, without being seen as disrespectful, unpatriotic or odd. The same line of argument can be made around the increasingly-hysterical attitudes to wearing red poppies around Remembrance Day, which is seen as quite problematic for some people. In a culture of individualism, tolerant to so many symbolic differences, it's peculiar to be forced so publically to conform to these symbolic acts.

The further risk is of political manipulation. As I write, the country is 12 days from a referendum on leaving the European Union. It's a hugely heightened time for issues of nationalism, of any sort. So far the current events haven't been exploited by the Leave campaign, but it may yet come - or may yet make a difference.

Nationalism is not always evil, but it is often dangerous. We're experiencing at least some form of it with the Queen's birthday celebrations, and it's playing with fire. That's why I'm grumpy.

Narratives, identity and information

I like reading history books from time to time. And I'm interested in the ways in which large-scale systems succeed or fail (I've recently chaired the production of a module on the subject). Systems don't get a lot bigger than whole countries, so a history of the fall of countries appealed to me. And by accident I found one by an author I've liked previously, Norman Davies (author of Europe: A History and The Isles among many books). Davies' book is called Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, and it gave me much to think about in the way we construct narratives of identity, building and rebuilding information about who we are and where we come from.

The book presents fifteen states which once existed and no longer exist, as least as independent states: Tolosa, Alt Clud (the ancient British kingdom later called Strathclyde), Burgundy, Aragon, Litva (Poland-Lithuania), Byzantium, Prussia, Savoy, Galicia, Etruria, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Montenegro, Carpatho-Ukraine, Eire, and the USSR. (Two of these states do once again exist: Montenegro ceased to exist for decades but is now as independent state, and the chapter on Eire is about the progressive retreat of the UK from the island of Ireland.)

Well, all flesh is as grass (one of my favourite bits of Brahms' Requiem), but that's not really the point of the book. The point is that many of the states described in the book were once considered powerful and important, utterly safe, likely to continue for ever. And then they didn't. I've written elsewhere on this blog about the rapidity of changes in states. But the thing that's so fascinating in the book is the ways in which some of these states, once they ended, became forgotten as a marker of identity. Once, to be a Prussian was a significant thing, a way in which people conceived of themselves; few do so now. Once, the kingdom of Savoy-Piedmont-Sardinia was a signficant and important state and its subjects thought well of themselves; this identity doesn't exist now. And as for Alt Clud (my own native region) - well the people of the West of Scotland might just about remember that Dumbarton was once their capital, but only in a very vague way, and its boundaries and histories are very poorly known.

So why does this connect with information? Because our research group is thinking about narratives and rhetoric in the construction of information, and we're well aware that information and identity are deeply tied together. We construct our political identities, our sense of who we are as members of a large group, through the inherited information we receive about ourselves. And that inherited information is created and shaped through narratives of the national past and present.

So it really matters that much of the national identity of Estonia was once deliberately suppressed by the USSR, or that Poland-Lithuania completely ceased to exist for two centuries and had to be rebuilt, or that (not one of Davies' cases) Scotland was unsuccessfully rebranded as North Britain in the mid-18th century. In different ways, each of these was a failed attempt to create a narrative, to shape the identity of a people. Likewise, although Hitler infamously said "who now remembers the Armenians?", the Armenians and their genocide in the last days of the Ottoman Empire have not been forgotten.

But other identities have been lost, narratives shaped deliberately or unconsciously. As I said above, few people now see themselves principally as Prussian, or Savoy-Piedmontese, or natives of Alt Clud. Even the once-great kingdom of Aragon is slightly lost to history - Catalunya may have a thriving independence movement, Aragon rather less so. And the history of Burgundy is even more interesting, comprising areas now considered part of Italy, France and Switzerland, even though the name has lived on solely in France.

Many of my points above, if read by political activists of various stripes, might be disputed. Some might say that my information is lacking! Or perhaps that of Norman Davies (though I may well have misrepresented him in places). And certainly some of what I say about particular identities can be contested. But that emphasises my point: that political identity is not a static or objective thing, but is something that shifts and is created and is the subject of competing narratives. And that makes it a subject deeply bound up with our understanding of the information we hold about ourselves and others.

Rohr's alternative orthodoxy - rich and deep words

Richard Rohr is a fascinating man, a Franciscan spiritual teacher. I've often heard him quoted but haven't read his books. However I was fascinated by listening to him talking with Rob Bell in a recent podcast. Rohr emphasises that Christian 'orthodoxy' is not what we think it might be, that there are richer and older perspectives with just as much right to be called orthodox. He sums up this alternative orthodoxy in seven tenets which are found in his book Yes, And...:

• Methodology: Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.
• Foundation: If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.
• Frame: There is only one Reality. Any distinction between natural and supernatural, sacred and profane is a bogus one.
• Ecumenism: Everything belongs and no one needs to be scapegoated or excluded. Evil and illusion only need to be named and exposed truthfully, and they die in exposure to the light.
• Transformation: The separate self is the problem, whereas most religion and most people make the “shadow self” the problem. This leads to denial, pretending, and projecting instead of real transformation into the Divine.
• Process: The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
• Goal: Reality is paradoxical and complementary. Non-dual thinking is the highest level of consciousness. Divine union, not private perfection, is the goal of all religion. 

Each one of these seven statements contains such rich and deep insights that they could form a whole book in themselves. Much food for thought.

Peace in our hearts, peace in our world

Sermon preached at Abington Avenue United Reformed Church, 13th March 2016. Texts: Micah 4:1-4; James 3:13-18. Recording of sermon available.

Salaam aleikum. Shalom aleikheim. Peace be with you! These phrases all mean the same, and are the common daily greeting for Arabic and Hebrew speakers. And in Jesus’ time, the same was true. Whenever you read the gospels you’ll forever find Jesus saying “peace be with you”. He says it to his disciples, to crowds, to strangers. He says it when he appears to the disciples in the upper room after his resurrection. To our eye it’s a distinctive greeting but it was a common way of talking in Aramaic.

Nonetheless, the theme of peace is one that can be found throughout the whole scriptures. We’ve heard two examples, from the Old Testament prophetic tradition and from the epistle of James. I could have selected very many more. God promises peace to the people of Israel in many different places. The prophecies of the coming Messiah in Isaiah call him the prince of peace and tell us how beautiful are the feet of those who proclaim the gospel of peace. Jesus tells us that blessed are the peacemakers, he tells many different people he has healed to go in peace. In the long series of teachings to the disciples before his crucifixion, he says “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you”. Similarly, throughout the New Testament epistles, we find the blessing of “grace and peace”.

Peace is everywhere in the scriptures. If you’ve been following the services here at Abington Avenue since the start of the year, you may recall that we’ve had a series of sermons on the fruit of the Spirit. Jane [Wade, our minister] reminded us back in January that Paul very clearly uses the singular fruit, not the plural fruits, in the Greek original as well as our English translation. Living in the Spirit brings fruit which has many different aspects, but they’re all joined and connected. Paul lists nine aspects of this fruit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And today we are looking at peace.

But what do we mean by peace? It’s a powerful word. In the all-age talk, Becky has shown us several symbols of peace – the candle over here, the dove, holding up two fingers, the nuclear disarmament symbol and the origami cranes. When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, I was taken on many peace marches and demonstrations. Now these events and symbols and causes are vitally important acts of Christian witness, and they all cluster under the name of peace. Sometimes they actively promote peace. But sometimes they’re mostly about the rejection of war and the weapons of war. And as many people have said, peace is not just about the absence of war, it’s about something active. In the words of Martin Luther King, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice”.

Micah shows us what that active peace looks like. It begins with putting away the things of war and turning them into useful objects, with beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Or in modern terms, turning drones into solar panels, Kalashnikov rifles into water pipes. A couple of years I saw an amazing sculpture from Mozambique at the British Museum, a chair made from old rifles. Uncomfortable to sit on, but a much better use for them.

Micah has nations not learning to fight each other, and instead sitting down in their own places, their own homes, without any fear of attack or persecution.

Imagine that. Imagine if the vast sums spent on the military across the world, more than $1.5 tr. last year, could be redirected to ending poverty, to ending inequality, to ending hunger, to ending disease. Imagine if the brilliant minds across the world who waste their lives inventing more clever ways for people to kill each other, put their skills to better use. Imagine if all the lives destroyed by war, whether of soldiers or civilians, were freed up to live happily. Imagine Syria without war. Imagine Iraq without war, Afghanistan, Somalia, all those places which have been devastated and destroyed.

Micah says: go ahead, imagine it. Because these days will come. Because the Lord has spoken it. And blessed is his name, hallelujah.

Brian Wren, the hymn writer, has a lovely poem about peace and war which sums up these things well. It reads:

Say ‘no’ to peace; if what they mean by peace

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Is the quiet misery of hunger,
the frozen stillness of fear,
The silence of broken spirits,
the unborn hopes of the oppressed.

Tell them that peace is the shouting of children at play
The babble of tongues set free, the thunder of dancing feet,
And a father’s voice singing.

Say ‘no’ to peace if what they mean by peace
Is a rampart of gleaming missiles, the arming of distant wars,
Money at ease in its castle and grateful poor at the gate.

Tell them that peace is the hauling down of flags,
The forging of guns into ploughs; the giving of fields to the landless
And hunger a fading dream.

Because we all know about the other kind of peace. It’s the peace that happened in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, in Nicaragua, in Ukraine, in Palestine. It’s the kind that may well take shape in Syria, because nobody can think of a better kind. The guns fall silent, the killing stops. But the communities remain unreconciled, the conflict goes on, the hatred and bitterness and recriminations are not healed. And acts of injustice continue, small or large. Hopes wither, lives become set in despair. It’s like a dry grassland in the summer, that kind of peace. Eventually – whoosh! – along comes a match and sets it alight again.

That’s not the peace that Micah promised. And it’s not the peace that Jesus promised. Because Jesus told us that the peacemakers are blessed. And he means those who actively seek out the creation of peace. Those who find conflict and anger and hurt and hatred around them and attempt to bring something new into being.

And we have to start small. Jesus tells us that we can’t love God if we don’t love those who are our enemies. And as I’ve said here before, if you think you don’t have enemies because you’re a decent righteous person without hate in your heart, look around the world and you’ll find plenty of people who hate you because you’re a Christian, or because you live in a rich country, or because you’re a liberal or an evangelical, or because you’re a woman, or because you’re gay, or because you’re not white. And if you look inside your heart and ask yourself honestly, do I hate some of these people back, you might just find it’s so. I know that if I’m honest with myself, there are groups that I have hate in my heart towards. You will have your own examples. But we are taught to love these people too.

But in some ways this is still easy. It’s not so hard to imagine learning not to hate Donald Trump. Implausible, but at least conceivable. But peace, true peace, is also about day-to-day living. Last week, Jane talked to us about gentleness, and peace is closely related to gentleness. To love our enemies, we must love our neighbour, and to love our neighbour, we must love those we see every day. Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, put it like this: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least”. We have to learn how to be peaceful within ourselves, within our souls, on a daily basis.

That’s not an easy call. We’re human beings. We fall short of love. I love my children more than words can express. Yet I get cross with them on a regular basis, I shout at them, I get grumpy with them. I’m hardly alone in that – I imagine all the parents here could tell a similar story. We need God’s grace to find that love, to show that love.

And the letter of James gives us some thoughts on how to show that love. The key word throughout the passage we heard from James is wisdom. In the Hebrew Bible, the idea of wisdom is a crucial one. It has little to do with book-learning and a lot to do with inner learning. It’s the feminine aspect of God, the first creation who sat beside the Creator since the start of time. The book of Proverbs says of wisdom: “Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in the human race.” So it’s a deeply Jewish idea, and when it came into Christian thought, it became connected with the Holy Spirit, who came down from heaven in the form of a dove, that symbol of peace.

In the letter of James, we’re presented with two forms of wisdom. There is a false wisdom which is based on envy and ambition, and which James calls earthy, unspiritual, even demonic. This false wisdom leads to disorder and to evil practices. Envy and ambition fester in the soul, they lead us to hate those who we think might have more than us or to be doing better than us. But then there is another wisdom, which leads to peace, and which has something of the same flavour as the fruit of the Spirit described by Paul. This wisdom, this fruit, is about thinking of others. It’s about being merciful. It’s about putting others’ needs before your own. It’s about consistency and integrity.

The last two verses in the passage from James are translated in a really helpful way in The Message bible:

Real wisdom, God’s wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honour.

I love the idea of doing the hard work of getting along with each other. It’s hard work. Let’s name it plainly. Human communities are full of divisions. This church community is full of divisions. There are arguments in this church, disagreements and hurts that have existed for years. That’s normal enough for human communities, but it’s not the way that God intends for us. There’s nothing wrong with disagreement. Conflict is a natural part of human life. The problem is how you respond to conflict – anger and even violence create future problems, but so does leaving conflict to fester unresolved. The way of peace, the way of wisdom, involves seeing conflict and treating each other with dignity and honour.

And if we can find this way of wisdom, if we can recognise that within every other human being there is a spark of divine goodness, much richer and deeper and more important than anything that divides us from them and anything we think they’ve done wrong. If we can see these things, can see that we are all children of God, then truly we can become peacemakers.

And then we will be able to love our neighbour, to love our enemy. We will become peacemakers. And then everyone will sit beneath their vine and their fig-tree, and nobody will make them afraid. Because this is the promise of God, and this is the fruit of the Spirit, this is the path of wisdom. May it be so for each one of us, in our everyday lives and with those around us. And may it be so for our tattered and battered world, full of children of God who cry out for peace. May God grant peace to us all, and may we respond with love and with joy and with peace to all those we meet. Amen.

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