Mosaic

Several friends of mine are in Israel at the moment, visiting various biblical sites. Their photos on Facebook are giving me happy memories of a study trip I made there several years ago. But today I was particularly struck in a fresh way by an image from Sepphoris via my Aussie friend Malcolm Potts (who, as it happens, coined the phrase ‘kairos kisses’).

Sepphoris was a Roman city built in Galilee during Jesus’ lifetime. Thanks to King James’ Authorised Version of the Bible, we have inherited a cultural image of Jesus as a carpenter from Nazareth; but a more accurate translation of ‘tekton’ would be builder. As Sepphoris was a major building project within easy walking distance of Nazareth, we can be almost certain that Joseph and his apprentice would have found work there.

I’ve often found understanding Jesus to have been a builder by trade to be a rich resource. It teases the account of four friends who tear up the flat roof of the house Jesus lived in for a while at Capernaum, in order to lower their paralytic friend down into Jesus’ presence: having forgiven the man’s sins and restored him to health, did Jesus forgive the friends’ trespass, re-constructing the roof? It illuminates his stated intention, on the night he was betrayed, to go to build an extension on his father’s house for his bride – the Church – and then return for us. It adds something to Peter’s metaphor of the Church as living stones being built into a temple. It resonates with the expansion of the local church through the ‘oikos,’ or extended family home.

But though I knew that, in all probability, Jesus had worked on the building of Sepphoris, it had never struck me before that he might have laid some of its famous mosaics. After all, the mosaic was a Roman decoration. But today, this struck me as being deeply significant:

Jesus was a builder, who took the broken little pieces – perhaps even broke some larger pieces himself – and brought them together, side-by-side, to create beautiful pictures...

And after all, isn’t that what he still does today? Isn’t that how he reveals the beauty of his bride?

Ascension

We are currently in the mini-season of Ascension-tide (or a sub-season within Easter, from Jesus’ ascension forty days after his resurrection until his sending the Holy Spirit at Pentecost ten days later). The following are three apparently unconnected observations that have struck me over the past few days:

[1] Reveal/Conceal

Ascension Day. The heavens and the earth simultaneously reveal and conceal the glory of God in Christ Jesus, defying our insistence to delineate, to divide-and-conquer...

This is a mystery, which cannot be explained but only lived: a way of being that recognises that our world is made of the heavens and the earth, bound together in the person of Jesus; a way of living that acknowledges the limit to our understanding, and of our role – not just that there is, at present, a limit, but that there will always be a limit; a way of living that acknowledges the voice within that tells us that (we see enough to recognise that) there is more to life than we can see, and with both joy (in response to revelation) and humility (in response to concealment) comes alongside others who sense the same.

[2] A table, spread

“You prepare a table for me in the presence of those who trouble me.” Psalm 23:5a

We are invited to participate in a meal. But we are not invited alone: those who trouble us – those whom we would describe as our enemies, even – are also invited to the same table; and we are invited, and challenged, to sit in one another’s presence. At this table, neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’ is the host; we are all the guests of honour. And as we learn to listen to one another and to recognise one another as honoured guests at the table, so healing oil is poured over us and rubbed into wounds, some of which they have inflicted on us, some of which we have inflicted on them, and some of which are self-inflicted. This happens as our wounded-ness is first gently exposed – and that is only possible in the company of those who trouble us: whose values and answers to life differ from our own, calling into question our unknown assumptions. This does not happen when we sit at table only with those who do not trouble us, because they are like us; for in such company the wounds we need healed remain hidden.

[3] Perspective

If we view and present people primarily in terms of the categories ‘economic resource,’ ‘economic threat,’ or ‘economic drain,’ then we must also view and present the Slave Trade, the Holocaust and the Killing Fields as virtue we have lost...

When we stop and think about it, this might not be the kind of society we want to nurture.

How might Ascension-tide help to resource an alternative way of viewing and presenting people? As those for whom Jesus intercedes at the right hand of the Father? As those who might be caught up into the heavens with him – hidden in Christ, the One who has accomplished his work and handed on his mission; the King of a kingdom in which there is no meritocracy, where the first shall be last and the last first, and yet where it costs every citizen everything they have; the Ancient of Days and Wounded One?

If there is a common theme among these three thoughts, it is this: that Ascension-tide opens us to the limits of our fear-bound categories; and in so doing prepares us for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh, young and old, male and female, Jew and gentile – to diversity expressed in the unity of love.

Aging

The aging process reveals the heart, and has a beauty of its own that is quite distinct from the much-prized outward beauty of youth.

(Purple tulips on our kitchen table)

Chasing After The Wind (Without A Kite)

Education Minister Michael Gove has called for longer school hours and shorter school holidays. This, he believes, will help working parents; and reverse the disadvantage our children are currently at in the global economic competition with Asian children.

This makes sense, if working parents are what parents are, primarily: homo operarius; and if this is what children are born to become, whether they themselves have children of their own or not. If ‘Arbeit macht frei.’

Jesus asked the question, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”

Jesus asked a lot of questions. He asked more questions than he gave answers. He undermined the assumptions of the self-assured, and opened up space for another way of experiencing the world to be discovered.

What might it mean, to forfeit one’s soul? Might it mean to lose oneself, to surrender the unique gift God has given to you, in you, which he has never given before and will never give again? To be so subsumed in the pursuit of gain external to oneself – money, power, fame – that one is lost to oneself...and, therefore, to the possibility of relationship with another, whether our Creator or our neighbour? To merely exist, when one might have lived?

In his approach – both inquisitive and provocative – Jesus drew on an earlier teacher, identified as the Teacher, whose key discovery and lesson was that anything pursued to excess – study, play, work, advancement in the world, riches – loses its true value as a gift from God to be enjoyed in its time. We are not masters of our own destiny, but in attempting to be so we will find ourselves dissatisfied with the present and disappointed with the future. You can read this view of holistic education for life in the book known as Ecclesiastes in the Christian Old Testament, or Qohelet in the Hebrew Bible.

School is good, and so is work. But neither are the be-all-and-end-all. There is more to life; even – perhaps especially – if you are called upon to be Secretary of State for Education...

St George

Today is the festival of George, martyr, patron of England. The story goes that George was a knight (or at least, a soldier) who fought a dragon (or possibly a crocodile; or may have stood up to a human tyrant, and therefore defeated a work of the devil, that serpent of old: anyway, it’s complicated...). Without question, he had nothing to do with England, but was adopted by English knights on the Crusades.

Patron saints are strange creatures, and the stories we tell about them take on a life of their own, shaping us in turn, long after the stories are lost and the ‘saint’ stands as a hyper-real sign that represents something that does not exist but is presented, and indeed consumed, as real: in this case, ‘Englishness.’

Here are some competing Georges and dragons, some competing Englishnesses, for St George’s Day:

George the ‘immigrant’ who represents the inclusion of other peoples and cultures within Englishness;

George the soldier who sets out on his travels, setting other people free from that which tyrannises them, whatever form it might take;

George the superior military might who inflates crocodiles into dragons and personifies mortal men as evil incarnate in order to perpetuate a status as liberator;

George the dragon;

George the symbol of racism;

George the deeply ironic symbol of racism, exposing the vulnerable belly of the beast and cutting it open with its own sword;

George the...

Hyper-real

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer divides the population into two neat columns, the Strivers (+) and the Shirkers (-), he is indulging in hyper-reality: presenting us with something that looks human, realer-than-real saints and sinners (monsters, even); but a version of citizen that airbrushes out:

the person who finds themselves in a low-wage, low-morale job;

the person who believes there is more to life than overtime;

the person whose work responsibilities stretch far beyond their competence;

the person who would like to work but cannot find work, or is too ill to work;

the person who has worked all their life, whether in paid employment or as a homemaker, and is now elderly;

the person whose life has fallen apart through tragedy;

the person who has good days, and bad days;

productive days (however we might measure that) and unproductive days (however we might measure that);

life-to-the-full days, and oh-just-f***-it-all days;

the person who will go the extra mile for some people, and cross the street to avoid others;

the person who embraces certain responsibilities and shirks others;

the person who has been cheated or conned;

the person who...

I have been several of these people at one time or another – several in one day – and might or indeed will become others at some point: because I am a real human, and a real citizen, not a hyper-real image.

But this indulgence is equally true of those opposed to the Chancellor’s policies as it is of the Chancellor. And in creating a hyper-real George Osborne, the possibility of positive transformation in the real lives of real people in the real world is short-circuited. Not only would the real George Osborne be justified in not recognising the hyper-real Osborne to be himself (after all, it isn’t), but those who paint him as a Villain invariably paint themselves as ‘better’ than they are (enhancing their moral superiority with a tuck here, an enlarged-but-gravity-defying curve there).

We are entirely surrounded by high-definition twenty-four-seven hyper-reality.

We need to learn to see through the hyper-real images. We need to learn to see ourselves, to see one another, inevitably as though reflected in polished brass but nonetheless closer and closer to the true self that God alone, for now, sees fully (1 Corinthians 13). How is God able to see in this way? Because he loves us, for God is love. And to the extent that we allow his love to show us ourselves and our neighbour, to that extent we will be able to opt out of hyper-reality and embrace the real.

It won’t be easy.

Boxes

We love to put people in boxes. To idolise them, or demonise them. The recent death of Margaret Thatcher, whose funeral took place this morning, is a reminder of this. But we don’t only do this with politicians and celebrities. We do it to our neighbours, against whom we hold a grudge or with whom we become infatuated. We do it to ourselves, whenever we claim to be, essentially, a good person – when we refuse to take responsibility for our own complicity in what is wrong about our society; and whenever we tell ourselves that we are, fundamentally, a bad person – when we refuse to take responsibility for our own responsibility to help shape the world for better.

Not only do we put people in boxes; we go over the box again and again, with the result that the image we hold – and project – is distorted a little more each time.

I am reminded of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the Simulacrum, the breakdown of the relationship between representation and reality, between signs and what they refer to. Baudrillard identified four stages in this process:

[1] an image that is a reflection of a reality

[2] an image that is a masking and perversion of that reality

[3] an image that marks the absence of the reality

[4] an image that bears no relation to any reality – where reality is redundant and has been replaced by hyper-reality.

Consider Margaret Thatcher. Here was a living, aging human being. An image that reflects that would require a great deal of information. A photograph contains huge amounts of information; a serious biography, even more so. An honest assessment – a sober judgement – of her life, and yours and mine, cannot be represented simplistically. But even here, we are removed from reality: this is a reflection, and a reflection – like my reflection in the mirror – is already a distortion.

The next stage is a masking and perversion of that reality: in Margaret Thatcher’s case, whether by satirical political cartoonists or her own propagandists. In the case of you and me and our neighbour, the subtle – and not so subtle – ways in which we build up an image that begins to obliterate the Other, or the Self...until that image makes it hard for us to see the reality of a human being created and honoured and loved by God.

The third stage is familiar to us if we consider politicians and other celebrities: people we have never met, and yet believe that we know them and can pass judgement on them, for good or ill. This is easier to live with than reality, which is complex and fragile, and requires something of us; yet it leaves us unsatisfied, holding at arm’s length the inter-dependence we were created for.

As the final stage is reached, images multiply and take on a life of their own. The hyper-real Thatchers – Thatcher the Saviour of Britain and Defender of the Free World; Thatcher the Wicked Witch and Bitch of Grantham – obliterate any possibility of serious evaluation of a real person, or of the complex ways in which relationships with real people shape us and we them.

In the end, we all get put in a box: and that box is lowered into the ground, or pushed into a furnace. And that in itself ought to give us cause to reflect, on how we view ourselves and how we view our neighbour, on our love of boxes and obliteration without hope...and, just perhaps, the possibility that, inevitable though this process may be, it need not have the last word.

Garden

The Garden was a hive of activity yesterday afternoon: running repairs on a section of wall that had been knocked down by a neighbour’s tree; borders that needed redefining; a silted-up water feature; some planting. Spring has arrived, and the garden is returning to good shape.

It isn’t only the garden that goes through seasons: the gardening team had been pruned right back, through various pastoral circumstances; and had experienced a time when those left were unable to do very much; but is now growing vigorously again, with evidence of fruitfulness to come.

Not only is it a great part of the life of the church; it is a great illustration of the life of the church, and of the rhythm of life with its seasons of pruning, abiding, growing and bearing fruit (John 15:1-17).

I’m hoping that we get a better summer this year than last, with scope for quiet days, outdoor services, and a party or two...

Photos here.

Life

I posted these as Facebook statuses on Saturday, but wanted to slightly expand and post them here too, where I can archive them.

[1] “I conducted a wedding this afternoon. It was particularly moving for the groom’s Grandma, as she had been married for 60 years and her husband died last year. She told me that she thinks the first 20 years are the hardest.”

Why did she think the first 20 years are the hardest? Because, she said, it takes time to get used to living with someone else. By which she meant, years. Perhaps 20 years. During those early years (perhaps not the full 20) there had been many times when she thought that she could not continue, but she had, and had not regretted it. Now of course, there are reasons why relationships – whether marriages or friendships or any human relationships – break down, perhaps beyond the point of recovery, and my point is not to judge us against 60 years; but her perspective was fascinating set against our cultural context, and every bit as encouraging as it is challenging. It is perhaps not surprising that our relationships cannot bear the weight we place on them...

[2] “One of the things that I love about being part of the Church is that I have friends - real friends - ten and twenty years older than me, and ten and say fifteen years younger. And one of the things I value most of that is that I have friends whose lives - for all kinds of reasons - have fallen apart, and who, by the grace of God, have rebuilt their life. That gives me hope, in the uncertainties of life. I feel for those who don't have such a breadth and depth of friendship.”

Life is almost unimaginably fragile – and we are, perhaps, also more resilient than we imagine. Just as when we die physically, our smallest component parts are worked into something new, so God would appear to weave life out of death over and over again in our ongoing participation in life: Easter. I am deeply grateful for so many quite unlikely people...

Mischief