Genesis 8

Genesis chapter 8 recalls chapter 1:

‘But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark.’ (8:1)

‘In the beginning [when] God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was [or became] a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep’ (1:1, 2)

‘And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided;’ (8:1)

‘while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.’ (1:2)

‘the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth.’ (8:2, 3)

‘And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters” … God called the dome Sky … And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.’ (1:6-9)

When we hear chapter 8, we are meant to recall chapter 1.

Once again, life is set free from chaos. (And another question won’t go away: did God send the first flood, in order to limit something even more catastrophic?)

And something has survived the flood, outside of the ark, outside of Noah’s obedience: an olive tree. This might be of significance, should we come across an olive tree again later in the story. For now, we record the detail.

Noah’s response to being saved is to build an altar and on it to offer up to God representatives of the clean animals. This act recalls the blood of Abel.

And God’s response is to revoke the curse on the ground, the life-limiting restriction that had been placed on the earth in chapter 3, as part of God’s dealing with the aftermath of the humans’ action. We have already seen that a curse is a particular form of blessing. The ground has been cursed, to protect it from unrestrained action – from its own over-abundance, from human exploitation – after the humans, called to care for the earth’s productivity, instead themselves contributed to a chaos that already threatened the world.

Without taking back from the human beings the call to partner in liberating life from chaos, God gives a personal undertaking to guarantee what the human beings would never be able to guarantee: that as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

God will personally guarantee that these things shall not over-run one another. That boundaries will not be trespassed against.

And with that guarantee in place, the curse has served its purpose, and can be dismissed from service. In its place, in chapter 9 God will extend another blessing (though to us, it might sound like a curse).

Genesis 7

In chapter 7, the flood hits.

This story began in chapter 5 and take until the end of chapter 10 to run its course. It is the first extended plot in our narrative. And it is a classic myth.

By myth, like story, I do not mean a sub-group of the Modern category of fiction. A myth is a story that transcends its original context. Myths are very often built on an historical core, crafted and embellished over generations of retelling. Think King Arthur, or Robin Hood, or even the demi-god heroes of ancient Greece we assume to be completely ahistorical. And if you have difficulty with the idea of stories from the Bible being embellished, think of how we tell this story to children today: Noah the zoo-keeper with his floating collection of giraffes and elephants and kangaroos. If you grew up with this story, and have ever passed it on, you will have embellished it yourself.

Every ancient near eastern culture knew that there had been a flood stretching from horizon to horizon that had brought an end to the world as they knew it. The flood story explains how life survived, to return. At one level, it answers – whether satisfactorily or not is for you to decide – the question, how is it that we are here? And, how is it that we know there was a flood? (given that they did not have geological investigation).

But these are not the motivations that enable a story to break free from its first context and become a myth, a story that resonates with story-tellers and story-listeners across time and place.

This is a story given voice around the campfire of a nomadic couple who have no children to inherit their flocks.

A childhood story perhaps recalled by their grandson when he fled home.

Told to their twelve great-grandsons, and brought to mind by the second-youngest left to die, and then sold into slavery, by his brothers, and later still thrown into house-arrest.

The story is passed from generation to generation. Spoken softly by an initially-welcomed minority group who at a later point found themselves enslaved in Egypt. Whispered by a mother over the baby boy she hides, before building him a tar-proofed cradle – an ark – and setting him on the waters of the Nile.

By the time a story is whispered – needs to be whispered – it has become a myth. A sustaining-story.

Many generations later, this myth is told – and written down – by a people taken into exile in Babylon.

After they return home, it is passed-on in the shadow of the desecration of their most holy place, the Temple in Jerusalem, by the Greeks; and later again, the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.

It is recalled by Christians hiding in the catacombs of Rome.

By Jews shut up in their ghettoes.

In death camps.

This is a story about surviving the end of the world.

About God, who consistently brings life out of death, out through death.

And a story about how to survive the end of the world.

A representative of the set-apart passes through death, bringing his family with him. This involves great risk – even the experience of being forgotten by God. Yet this action is for the ongoing survival of both ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ life: the set-apart, and the set-aside.

Genesis 6

It is the nature of story that God has conversations with human characters, a serpent can speak, and the story-teller does not pause to explain how. Such questions – which we might want to ask – do not concern narrative in the way that they might concern scientific enquiry.

Genesis 6 opens with the ‘sons of God’ marrying the ‘daughters of humans’. Yet again, the story is not concerned with answering questions – who are the ‘sons of God’ as distinct from the human beings? They might be the set-apart, marrying the set-aside. But story keeps possibilities open, drawing us further in, perhaps in hope that we will find out at a later point.

In any case, there is a problem. The human beings are wholly inclined towards evil. Human society has become chaotic. In the imagery of the story so far, the earth-creatures are acting as if they were sea-creatures over the land. That is to say that in its proper place, sea and land are good; and in their proper places, sea- and land-creatures are good; but sea-creatures where there should be land are monsters.

If the earth-creature is living as a sea-creature, then the earth-creature must be returned to the sea.

And so we find ourselves facing a flood. But the flood that is associated with Noah is not the first flood that we have encountered in the story. We have already been overwhelmed by waters in chapter 1. So as we head into a second flood, what happened after the first flood is carried with us.

We also find ourselves facing violent death. We have come across this before, too: the prayer of Abel’s lifeblood.

But this time, it is God who will unleash the flood – was the first flood his action, too? – and God who will take human life, on a far greater scale than did Cain. Yet this God is not presented as capricious. His action is in keeping with what it has been, setting limits on chaos and restoring environments for life to flourish. But now we see with greater clarity that God can even co-opt chaos to its own submission.

Among the earth-creatures there is one whose every inclination of thought of heart is to be a creature of the earth. Noah, the son whose father spoke over him, rooting him in the earth from which human beings had been liberated, in the hope that this rootedness would somehow bring about relief from human toil.

This Noah is the set-apart one of his generation.

Genesis 6 introduces another motif to the story, which will re-appear over and over again: the end of the world as it has been known, and the emergence of a remnant of humanity, by which the set-apart somehow continues to ensure the survival of the set-aside.

Genesis 5

Genesis 5 is a genealogy. There is something approaching a genealogy in chapter 4, but that list empties out into burgeoning civilisation. But genealogies will become a particular literary form within this story-telling tradition. They trace the continuity of the chosen ones in the midst of the wider humanity, drawing-out the set-apart from the set-aside.

The almost-a-genealogy of chapter 4 gives us the set-aside. The genealogy of chapter 5 traces the set-apart, from Adam to Noah.

Along the line, we hear of Enoch, who does not die but is taken away by God, we are not told where. An earthling who does not return to the dust. The pattern revealed to Adam and repeated since Abel is not, apparently, inevitable; God can at least interrupt it, disrupt it.

And towards the end of the list, we hear of the birth of a son whose father names him ‘rest’. He considers the child to be rooted in the earth from which human beings were liberated, and that this rootedness will somehow bring about relief from their toil.

Genesis 4

Adam and Eve have sons, Cain and Abel. The older, Cain, is a tiller of the ground. His work expresses a son walking close alongside his father – God’s words to Adam just a few verses before still ringing in our ears. And his work also expresses the closeness between the human and the soil, however compromised that relationship has become.

Abel is a keeper of sheep. His work expresses that charge to ‘rule over’ creation by setting it free, creating and protecting environments for life to flourish. Leading animals to where they might find food and water.

Each brother brings an offering to God. Cain brings the fruit of the earth, and Abel brings the first lambs. God has not asked for either, or indeed for anything. This is a human response, a recognition of God, perhaps the expression that just as their parents have been friends of God so they too would like to be friends of God. And as the story unfolds, God will take up offerings of vegetable and animal origin to represent different things.

But for now, God has regard for Abel’s offering and not for Cain’s. Why? Why not? We are not given any reason – no explanation that, for example, Abel’s offering was accepted because his heart was pure and Cain’s was rejected because his heart wasn’t. When my sons come to me, each offering me something, I must make a decision: at this moment, do I want to watch Despicable Me 2 or Shrek 2?

God does not choose Abel over Cain. But Cain takes perceived rejection hard. And God comes to him, as a loving parent, and tells him that in this moment of anger, sin desires to consume him, but that he must – and can – master it. That water threatens to overwhelm the land, again; that stirred-up dust clouds threaten to blot out the sun. Cain has the opportunity to respond by opposing the flood, or by succumbing to it. And God is willing for human beings to choose to resist chaos, to master sin.

Genesis 3 is often described as the Fall, from a state of grace. But the story mentions no fall from anything. But here in chapter 4, there is a fall: Cain’s expression falls. He sulks. Very human behaviour. But not something, as far as God is concerned, that Cain can do nothing about. His essential nature is as complex as it has been from chapter 2, not chapter 3. Sin is the trespassing over boundaries – in this instance, the threat of Cain’s boundaries being breached – but the human shares in God’s work as boundary-keeper.

Cain, however, chooses to kill his brother. Abel is received by the earth from where he came, and from the earth his blood cries out to God. From the ground, Abel’s blood curses Cain. That is, it speaks constraint on his life: limitations placed upon misused freedom, just as God had spoken over the serpent. The blood cries out not for revenge, but ‘Lord, have mercy on my brother! Protect him from the unconstrained consequences of his action’ – consequences Cain fears, and God, in response to the cry of Abel’s blood, tells him that he need not fear. A curse is a particular form of blessing. Cain rejects the idea that he is his brother’s keeper; but Abel is shown to be his brother’s keeper, even from beyond death.

This is the first prayer in the Bible. And it is not articulated by the mind and the lips. It is no more and no less than the deepest longing of the human, the creature taken from sea-soaked land in order to maintain the shore.

The fruit of Abel’s curse/blessing is civilisation – which is as complex as the persons who compose it.

As the story continues to unfold, any time we come across bloodshed – liquid bursting its banks; something good in its rightful place becoming bad in a wrong context – we should be reminded of Abel’s prayer [Spoiler: one day this prayer will be articulated by a man nailed to an execution scaffold, his blood running free: Father, forgive them – they don’t know what it is that they are doing’].

As the story continues to unfold, any time we come across a city, we should be reminded of God’s response to Abel’s prayer [Spoiler: the story ends with a city].

The story of Cain and Abel is not a story to tell us that some religious practices are acceptable to God and others are not, or that some people are accepted by God and others are not. It is a story that introduces what it means to be chosen by God; and how not being chosen does not mean not being accepted; and what happens to those God chooses, and doesn’t choose, in the world.

Those who are chosen, are chosen to be keepers, to intercede for their brothers and sisters. In this way, those who are not chosen are kept within God’s mercy. Those who are chosen might expect to live, but can expect to suffer and die. Those who are not chosen might expect to die, but can expect to have their life kept safe.

These plot lines are introduced here because they will be regularly recurring plot lines as the story unfolds and God chooses persons, families, and people, in order to enable all persons, families, and peoples to become more fully human.

Genesis 3

A new character is introduced to the story in Genesis 3. The serpent gives form to a creature ‘more crafty’ than any other of the created things God had given freedom to. A creature lacking in innocence, already enamoured by the knowledge of good and evil which has only been withheld from the human beings.

The serpent entices the woman to eat of its fruit, and she, discovering that a little knowledge is a good thing, shares the new-found discovery with the man.

The immediate consequence is the death of innocence. Knowledge is neither good nor bad per se, but always comes at a cost. They make clothes for themselves, at the cost of being entirely at ease with their self and one another.

The next consequence is that the man and woman hide from God’s approach. A distance is opening up between them. Banks are bursting, and water is rising, swirling at their ankles, knees, waist, as the man points to the woman and the woman points to the serpent.

God asks questions: Where are you? Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? What is this that you have done? These are not the harsh questions of an interrogator, but the loving questions of a parent responding to the sobs of their child: Where are you? Who told you that you should be ashamed, about this or that or the other? Did you do what I told you not to do – did you venture into danger? I am not angry with you, but there are consequences we need to deal with together. And the plaintive cry, What have you done? My son! My daughter!

God addresses the serpent: as a consequence of what you have done, your freedom will be restricted. A curse is a restriction on the fullness of life. Moreover, the human offspring will not listen to the serpent’s voice. A restriction on abused influence.

Next God addresses the woman, telling her three things. She will experience increased pain in childbirth. Yet, she will desire her husband. And he will rule over her.

This sounds to us like a curse. Pain, as a punishment. And the punishment of a wife condemned to be unable to break free, condemned to return again and again to an abusive husband. But there is no mention of a curse in God’s words, and any such interpretation utterly misses the point.

God is not punishing his daughter, but providing for her in her need. She needs to know that the work of bringing forth earth-creatures from primordial amniotic sea is hard labour. To sustain her, God reminds her of the corresponding nature of her relationship with the man – as the two banks of a river flow side-by-side – and strengthens that connection, also reminding the man that their shared role of bringing forth life includes helping the woman to bring forth human life. Here is the first instruction for expectant fathers to be present and a helper at the birth of their children (and to women to allow that).

Of course, this is not just a story about a man and a woman becoming parents, but a story about men helping women to birth life in the world. This, then, is a particular outworking of Genesis 2, where male and female are made for this very partnership.

Then God addresses the man, telling him three things. Because of human action, the ground has been cursed, has had its freedom to bring forth life restricted. They will discover that the work of setting creation free – here expressed in cultivating a harvest – is a never-ending task. And in time, they will return to the ground from which they were taken.

Again, this sounds to us like a curse. But the curse relates to the ground. And the nature of the curse is not that because of what the man has done, a good ground has become bad. Rather, it is that as a result of what the humans have done, the creatures who were commissioned to restore chaos to order have themselves contributed to a chaos that already threatened the world. We’ll return to that idea in a story about Adam and Eve’s sons.

Nonetheless, God does not take away the human commission, and even puts restrictions on what chaos can achieve. Though it will be hard, there will be a harvest.

And by removing the humans from access to the tree of life, God both sets a limit on the length of time they will experience estrangement from the creation, and sends them out into a whole world waiting to be set free.

Genesis 2

Genesis 1 is concerned with the power of words to shape environments (where else could a story, a sense-making collection of words, begin?). In Genesis 2, God rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty. If there is a Creation Story in Genesis, perhaps this is it. Although even this story is not so much concerned with how God created human beings, as with what it means to be human. With the human condition.

But first, God rests – and all creation with him. That is to say, everything is in harmony with everything else – not, nothing is doing anything. Only under such conditions will life flourish – and it does, effortlessly. All is as it should be.

Within this world, a world that has gone through cataclysmic upheaval followed by the release of life that cannot be quenched by destruction, God plants a garden, and within the garden establishes two particular trees. One relates to life, the other to the knowledge of good and evil. These two trees stand in testament to what has happened and to God’s response. According to the story, the fruit of every tree has been given by God to be food for all the animals and birds.

A river flows out from the cradle of life, to water the garden. This river divides to form four new rivers, each of which represents early human ‘civilisations’ or organised societies. The river is more than a geographical observation.

In this context we hear about the origins of the human. According to the story that is unfolding, we are made from the dust of the ground. Earthlings. This is incredibly significant. Already in the stories being told, we have heard about dry land. The land was overwhelmed by water, by chaos, by the different elements of creation breaking-out of their God-allotted place in the order of things. The earth was completely saturated by water. And then it was drawn out again. Restored.

The earthling, then, is made from God’s action to set creation free – the very role the earthling was set free to carry on. Everything necessary to sustain the earthling has been provided. But God instructs this creature not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why would God do that? What is implied is that such knowledge will be too much, at least for now, for the one creature appointed to set creation free to bear. For now it is enough that it is nourished by the tree of life.

Liberals believe that human beings are fundamentally good, but trapped in corrupt systems from which they must be set free. Conservatives believe that human beings are fundamentally bad (at least post events that will take place in the next chapter), and need paternal figures who create good systems to constrain them. Both are partially right; and both miss more than they comprehend.

According to the story that is unfolding, human beings are, of their essential nature, composed of material that has been created, overwhelmed by chaos, and set free again. We are, by our essential nature, liable to be overwhelmed again, and yet we are enlivened by God for the very purpose of continual restoration of whatever may be encroached upon.

That is what it means to be human.

The story goes on to reveal what human relationships are meant to look like. It starts with an earthling – the adam – which is neither male nor female. And God decides that the creature needs a helper as a partner. We think of a helper as subordinate, and we think of adam as male (the male will take the name Adam), and so we assume that the story is telling us that women are subordinate to men. The earliest surviving words used to tell this story at this point don’t allow that possibility. They paint the picture of a corresponding deliverer or warrior. Corresponding – as in the two banks of one river – implies that whatever the new creature is – a deliverer, or warrior; the same term, which we often translate ‘helper’, will be used of God before the story is done – the adam already is.

This earthling is subsequently torn in two by God (don’t think a delicate operation involving the removal of one rib), to make two parts that fit together – just as when I break a Communion wafer in two, I can hold the two halves together and they fit.

Far from a story that places women in subordination to men, the story creates male and female in the same action (as already revealed in chapter 1) and places them side-by-side as warriors who will fight, together. The nature of their fight has already been told us: to fight to set creation free.

Genesis 1

Just about every ancient culture has its Creation Story, explaining how the world came into being.

The one that came to be written down in Genesis is but-a-breath long:

‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’

That’s it. There is no interest in how God created. It is simply a given.

The next story is similarly brief:

‘Now, the earth became a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.’

Something catastrophic has happened to the earth. Again, there are no details. It is another given. From our perspective, we might fill-in the blank with massive meteor impact, seas overwhelming land, the sun obscured by a massive dust cloud. Something physical has taken place. And in the Bible, physical things are very often signs pointing to spiritual things. But, for now, whatever has occurred, and its spiritual significance, is simply a given.

Intriguingly, a wind sent from God sweeps over the waters. We are not told whether the wind is responsible the catastrophe, or not.

Having set the scene with two short stories, the third story is where the story-teller really gets going. The third story – which we assume is the first story, a Creation Story – is the story of God’s response to this thing that has happened to his creation.

God moves, in a series of acts, to restore equilibrium to the world. To re-establish the sky and the sea and the land as distinct environments in which a diversity of life can emerge.

This work culminates with the making of the first human beings. They are made in God’s image, to be like God. They are commissioned and resourced to carry on the work that God has done: not, primarily, of creating – though the human will turn out to be creative – but of setting creation free, of bringing order out of chaos, life out of death.

Bible Stories

Recently I’ve been thinking about ways in which to help people grow in understanding of the stories collected in the Bible, and the Story that unfolds for us there. I can’t imagine a story-by-story telling from beginning to end, but I thought I’d start out in the earliest chapters (1-11) of Genesis, because they are foundational, and see where that takes us. I will file these posts under the heading ‘Bible’ on the side-bar of my blog.

But first, two things to bear in mind:

The Bible is a collection of stories, which together build up a bigger story, or tradition of story-telling. By story, I don’t mean the Modern category of fiction. But I do mean that the Bible is primarily a narrative – and not an instruction manual, for example. I do mean that the words the story-tellers use are carefully chosen, beautifully crafted, that certain details are set aside [there is one point, in the Gospel According to John, where this is made explicit, the story-teller telling us that if he included everything he might have included, the world itself would not be big enough to contain all the words] while others are chosen – or set apart from all the possible words – in order to convey something in particular.

And by story I also mean that words have multiple layers of meaning: that the occurrence of ‘river’ might signify a physical water-feature, but that river – or tree, or land, or sea, or pretty much everything for that matter – also has a symbolic meaning. Story does not simply record events, but attributes meaning to events. Story asks, what is actually going on, when something is going on? And story answers the question by drawing the listener deeper into story, not by resolving itself.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the stories collected in the Bible are stories told by people, located in particular circumstances in particular moments in history. They are human stories, not stories dictated by God, or an angel. And as such, they are concerned with the particular things that the people who told the stories were concerned about. That is to say, there are a great many things that the Bible is not concerned with. It makes a fairly useless medical text book, for example. The Bible is not the be-all-and-end-all of faith-full story-telling. But it does give us a tradition to speak faithful words from. And words – as every story-teller knows – create worlds.

'72nd Birthday

(photos by my daughter, Susannah)

Red And White (Not Black-and-White)

Tomorrow, and on the Eleventh of November, I shall be wearing two poppies:

the red poppy, dating from the early 1920s, symbol of remembrance of and respect for those who died in the First World War and in every conflict since;

and the less well known white poppy, dating from the early 1930s (when it became clear to women who had lost their menfolk in the Great War that Europe was heading into war again, with the prospect of losing their men all over again), symbol of a commitment to find non-violent alternatives to conflict resolution.

These two things go hand-in-hand. While it is right to stand in silence at the loss of life, it is also right to keep quietly insisting that we work towards a global community where we do not keep sacrificing our sons and daughters in order to win our arguments.

The red poppy represents an important principle of remembrance: the act of remembrance has a particular work to achieve, and once that mission is complete, like serving forces personnel, it should be dismissed from duty with thanksgiving.

That is, the red poppy remembers all those who fell in every war since 1914-18. It draws a line: we do not include the countless fallen of the wars we have waged before that war. This is not to say that we have no knowledge of those wars, to learn from (or not). It is not to say that the loss of those lives is inconsequential.

Our forces have just withdrawn from Afghanistan, as they withdrew from Iraq before that. Their role needed a clear and limited objective, and an exit plan. It does not mean that they might not have to go back – is not a war to end all wars – but recognises that we can’t go on and on indefinitely like this.

The work of remembrance is not to keep alive the embers of hatred, so they can be fanned into flame at a moment’s notice. (This is why it is so disturbing to see the red poppy co-opted by extreme nationalists.) It is to work towards reconciliation: opposing enemies were united in death, and veterans are united in respect. Once reconciliation has been achieved, or can be better pursued in other expressions of friendship, active remembrance needs to be discharged. We no longer actively remember a long list of wars.

It is right that we still formally remember the First World War. Remembrance has not yet completed its work. But it is also right that, at some point beyond the centenary commemorations – and, I would suggest, before the 200 anniversary – we should let go. And, in time, each war since.

‘Never forget’ has not held us back from going to war, as was once hoped, and so quickly shown wrong. ‘Forgive, and no longer bring to mind’ is God’s response to our failure to love one another.

As, for now, we look back, let us commit ourselves to peace.

At Sixes And Sevens With You

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then, the justice,
In fair round belly, with a good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare, As You like It, Act II, Scene VII

Men and women move through stages of life. And this is as true of communities as it is of individuals. Think of a neighbourhood, or a city, or a local church. To borrow from Shakespeare’s insight, they start out with the dependency and mess of infants; must learn certain core lessons from those who are further along; consider themselves special, and perhaps misunderstood; go in search of adventure, and reputation; consider themselves one from whom others can learn; shift into decline, becoming a shadow of their former self; lose need of, and use for, reputation.

Some, who care about the church, worry that the church as we know it will have died, in the West, within a generation. Others dispute that idea. I would suggest that both are wrong. The local church progresses through a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It always has, and it always will. The church as we know it, at any moment in time, is playing a part; and if we will commit to one community over a long length of time, we will experience the changing seasons. On a regular basis, in big-picture terms, any local church dies, and a new local church rises from its tomb – and the people who make up that church at that time experience the pain of decline and death and the mess of new life – a new life that might be as unrecognisable as the resurrected Jesus, with only the marks of his suffering to identify him.

It seems to me that the temptation of the missional movement within the Church – a passion with which I identify, and a network within which I participate – is to believe that a healthy Church would always look like youthful energy and confidence, and to see churches that are moving through the sixth and seventh Acts of life – whose energy and capacity is failing – as failures.

And it seems to me that such a view would be more conformed to our wider society, with its obsession with youthful vitality and vigour, and attempts to reverse the aging process at all costs, than it has to do with being conformed to the mind of Christ.

The lesson we need to learn is that the God who is faithful in the mess and vulnerability of infancy; and in the stubbornness of childhood; and in the self-absorption of adolescence; and in the naïve confidence of young adulthood; and in the limited wisdom and far wider folly of maturity; is also faithful in the humbling shrinking of aging, and in the mess and vulnerability of dying.

We are invited to discover God’s faithfulness in every stage of communal life, by responding to the invitation and the challenge to be faithful to God and to one another through every stage of communal life.

Each changing season comes with its difficulties to be faced, requires re-ordering life. But there are things beyond all we could ask or imagine to every stage, things that we can only receive in their rightful Act.

We need to learn our parts in Acts 6 and 7, learn to bring these lines to life with sensitivity.

This, too, is something we might reflect on between All Saints and Advent.

One Year On

Today is the first anniversary of our moving to Sunderland.

A day to pause, to look back, and to look forward.

Not a day to put down many words, but a day that needs to be marked, nonetheless.

Today is the first anniversary of our moving to Sunderland.

Remember, Remember [Recycled Post]

“Remember, remember the fifth of November

The Gunpowder Treason and plot.

I know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.”

So runs the traditional children’s rhyme. Though, as a child, I always got in a terrible muddle between the fifth of November and the ninth of November, the latter being my birthday…

[I first posted these reflections back in 2006, but] Bonfire Night is incredibly relevant to our post 9/11 world, and should indeed never be forgot.

On November 5th 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered in a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament in London. The cellar was filled with barrels of gunpowder, with which Roman Catholic conspirators intended to assassinate King James I and the members of the House of Lords and House of Commons at the formal opening of the 1605 Parliament. The plot had been formed in response to the hard line taken by James I against Roman Catholicism, most likely after it became clear that Catholic Spain was embroiled in too many concerns of its own to come to the aid of England’s Catholics. The plot came to light when a conspirator, uneasy that fellow Catholics would die in the blast, wrote to a member of the House of Lords telling him to stay away that day; but the ringleaders discovered this ‘treason,’ and some historians believe Fawkes was set up, buying time for those more culpable to escape. Traditionally the failed Gunpowder Plot is remembered each year with bonfires, on which an effigy of Fawkes – the Guy – is burnt, and with fireworks, symbolizing the explosion that never happened.

An English population among which there lived a religious minority treated with suspicion and facing discrimination; a cell of militants within that community who saw violent revolution as the only hope for change…the events of 1605 feel all too contemporary. What might we learn, standing outside in the freezing cold November darkness?

Firstly, Bonfire Night reminds us that violent revolution is not the way to go about change – not only because it is morally wrong, but also because it is in fact counter-productive. Bonfire Night deconstructs terrorism as a means to an end; highlights the dilemma of those ‘on your own side’ dying; calls into question the brotherhood of the cell…

…But Bonfire Night does not commemorate a black-and-white victory of right over wrong; a ‘reasonable,’ ‘enlightened,’ ‘fundamentally good’ way of living as society, successfully resisting its opposite. Bonfire Night deconstructs such a naïve view, too. In many ways James I needed challenging – and, ironically, was regularly challenged by the politicians who would have died with him; and the following torture, trial, and high-profile executions of men who certainly weren’t the ring-leaders, draws the justice of retaliation to terror into question. The flames of Guy’s pyre cast light and shadows on our faces that speak of the light and shadows in our hearts; and as we stare upon the effigy of a burning Catholic, we might just feel the uncomfortable heat of our own prejudices, exposed.

I don’t know how history will judge us. There are aspects of my society that I believe are wrong; and, I am sure, aspects of my society that are wrong which I am blind to. Not only because it is still so contemporary, but also because the world is so complex, the four-hundred-year-old tradition of Bonfire Night ought to be celebrated, with a bang.

All Saints : All Souls : Part Three

All Saints’ celebrates the unlikely heroes of the Church. Hand-in-hand with this goes All Souls’, which commemorates those we have known personally and no longer see, because they have gone ahead of us into God’s presence.

The longer you live, the more people you will know personally who have died. As I write, I have never lost a parent, or sibling; a spouse, or parent-in-law; or a child. But I know many people who have lost several of those closest to them. And children and teenagers are not exempt from such experience: death shows no favours.

We need to help our children and teenagers face death, appropriately. Not in the way that a trained grief counsellor will work with a school after the tragic death of a pupil or teacher. I’m not thinking here of immediate aftermath responses, though we need to think through these too, of course. But by creating dependable spaces where people can mark the reality of having lost someone, perhaps by lighting a candle; can share their memories, and be listened to; can ask questions, without any guarantee of answers – and without easy answers – but with the guarantee of being listened to; and by sharing hope (which is not the same thing as answers).

The Church calls this space All Souls.

Around our building there are memorials, in stone and metal and wood, to men and women of previous generations who have worshipped God and served the community faithfully in this place – including the church warden who died in a tragic accident in the belfry, crushed between bell and tower wall; and the man praised for his ‘disinterestedness’, which, in the language of his time, meant that he showed no favouritism to prestige or power but treated everyone with equal concern, and not, as it might suggest today, that he showed no concern for anyone.

They are those who are somewhere along the journey of moving from the living memory of All Souls to the family tree of All Saints. It is a journey we will all make, in time.

Whose stories inspire us, and for what reason? In whose slip-stream do we travel?

And what stories will be told of us, in our wake?