Surprise!

Christmas Eve saw my wordy mind run into overdrive.

In the end this morning’s Christmas sermon at Bradford Cathedral focuses on the need to be surprised once again by the Christmas story. (A bit like I was when driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem past a Palestinian village called Abu Ghosht (which sounds like a curry, but isn’t…) and saw next to an illuminated McDonald’s sign another which read:

Sea of Life – Yes to carrots

No, I still have no idea what that was about.

Comedian Mark Thomas writes in his book Extreme Rambling:

Anyone with any taste knows that predictability is the woodworm of joy.

The surprise of the shepherds bit of the Christmas story is that they appear at all. They are the unwashed who work the hills and are probably surprised to find themselves included in the party. (I still think we might be truer to the gospel narrative if we sang ‘O come, all ye faithless…’.) Strip everything else away and we are left, like the shepherds, with the unimpressive sight of a scruffy baby in a trough – the unimpressive greatness of the small.

Helmuth James von Moltke was imprisoned in Tegel in September 1944 by the Nazis. Founder of the Kreisau Circle (opposition to Hitler), he was 37 and had a family. On Christmas Eve 1944 he wrote to his wife Freya:

My cell is a very suitable place to stay during Christmas because it makes clear that all the magic that surrounds Christmas – the loved ones and the carols, the tree and the presents – are only extras… and that it all comes down in the end to one line in the Gospel of Luke: ‘For to you today is born a Saviour.’

He was executed on 23 January 1945.

In the darkness of a world in which Syria shreds people’s lives and hopes and in which children can be shot with cold impunity in Newtown – in which people live on the streets of a civilised country and children go hungry every day – it is sometimes hard to see the light that (according to John’s Gospel) has mugged the darkness, leaving it helpless and impotent. We cry out for the light – but only agree to see it where we expect or want to see it.

Christmas shows us people who were drawn by curiosity to leave the familiar and look for the surprise. Curiosity is the antidote to joyless predictability.

It is curiosity that needs to be awoken as we encourage people (including me) to live the story in the weeks and months to come – being surprised by the God who smiles at our comforts and shines a different light into our faces.

 

Brief Christmas

It’s almost Christmas. My abject failure to send friendly (as opposed to official) cards can now be forgotten – apologies to all who wonder…

Christmas gets terribly wordy. I am all for sermons and addresses that awaken curiosity and tease the imagination, challenging the prejudices and expectations. Or, as excellent comedian Mark Thomas says in his book Extreme Rambling: “Anyone with any taste knows that predictability is the woodworm of joy.” S, I tweeted earlier some brief accounts of Christmas:

• God among us, God with us, God for us.
• Matter matters: the Word became flesh and lived among us.
• God with us: we have seen his face. Painted in the gospels.
• “Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.” (Bruce Cockburn)
• Only the curious get surprised: outsiders like shepherds and Magi…
• The eternal breaks through into time. Time bleeds into eternity.
• Light mugs the darkness. And there is nothing the darkness can do about it.
• Hope looks despair in the eye… and doesn’t blink first.
• Christmas surprises earth with heaven…
• Oh come, all ye faithless…
• God is. God is as he is in Jesus. So, there is hope. (David Jenkins)

That’s just for starters! Happy Christmas!

Posted with Blogsy

 

Almost there…

One of the sad bits of being a bishop is that, not being part of any particular parish community, you don’t follow the ‘story’ of Christmas (or Easter or anything else) through together. It means you have to create your own consistency and not succumb to a fragmentary ‘living with the story’, picking it up only through various one-off engagements in parishes and institutions.

This year I have heard some great stories from parishes of how they are ‘living the story’, opening up the shape of Christmas in such a way that the familiar becomes refreshed and the mystery deepened. (One church had a stable built around and over the Communion table with the nativity scene built under and into it – and the Eucharist is celebrated from within the stable!)

So, we are now almost there. I am thinking through my sermons for Christmas Eve Midnight Communion at St Barnabas, Heaton, (about fifty metres from my house) and Christmas morning at Bradford Cathedral. Unlike many of my episcopal colleagues (who are clearly more focused than I am ), I find it hard to script something ahead of seeing the congregation. I know where I am going with each sermon and I have done the preparation, but I don’t want to be pinned down to a script that might be not quite right (in terms of language, illustration or content) in the particular circumstances of each service. I prefer to engage people where they are rather than simply deliver something I wrote days ago in a study.

So, I will post something once they are done.

However, my quick thought today is simply that Christmas feels like the end of a journey when, in fact, it is simply the start of another. Mary and Joseph leave home, have a baby, then set out into a threatening unknown (where they eventually become asylum seekers in a place – Egypt – that represents to their people only threat and oppression). Shepherds leave their work, have a surprising encounter in the town, then (presumably) go back to work? Magi set out on the basis of their astrology, find their goal in a surprising place, then find themselves regarded as ‘problems’ as they head away.

All these find that the end of their journey drives them off in a new direction – and not one that is necessarily comfortable.

We are almost there… but will discover that the journey doesn’t end with some sort of ‘fulfilment’ that closes everything down. Drawn by curiosity and a vision for the future (rather than being simply driven by a memory of the past), they go off in new directions, changed by their experience and challenged by being at the centre of God’s activity in and for the wider world.

So, I am for curiosity, adventure and walking into the unknown. It is what we do anyway – as none of us knows what tomorrow might bring. And it compels us once again to opt into all the world can throw at us and not exempt ourselves from it.

Christmas speaks not of escapism, but of willing engagement. Whatever the eventual cost. Or, to look at it through the eyes of a poet, as Bruce Cockburn put it:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river, driving the ripples on for ever, redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.

 

One thing after another

There’s a great line in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys when one character, Rudge, defines history as “just one f…ing thing after another”. This week feels similar to me: women bishops is followed by Leveson which is followed by the Chancellor’s out-of-touch-with-most-people’s-reality Autumn Statement (more welfare cuts) which is followed by speculation about a triple-dip recession which is followed by gay marriage. Elsewhere, Egypt falls apart, Syria explodes, Mandela is ill and Belfast sees violence again.

Out and about this week in various communities and meeting a wide variety of people, most of these issues don’t even hit the radar of immediate concern. Of immediate concern, however, is how to cope with the numbers of broken people falling off society’s radar while churches and charities try to stop them falling even further. And then the charitable sector raises its voice to say that many of them are likely to fold soon. What happens then to the Big Society?

Well, I haven’t had time to put down all I would wish to; I have been out and about and one thing has followed another in quick succession. This coming week will see the House of Bishops meeting in London and on Tuesday the 2011 Census data will be published.

So, I limit myself today to three recommendations aimed at bringing a different perspective to the season.

Jonathan Veira’s Christmas album of a couple of years ago – O Holy Night – is one of the best (and least cheesy) musical celebrations of Christmas. Unbelievably powerful voice and great arrangements of familiar songs and carols. Apart from Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas and a pile of Bach or Mozart, Veira gets the repeat listens from me. (And his book is a good read, too.)

I got into big trouble a couple of years ago when I published a short book about Christmas. I apparently dissed Christmas carols – but I was far more subtle than that. Anyway, the fuss also did for the book! It is still available and offers an approach to Christmas aimed at ordinary people for whom the whole business has lost its power (or plot). I still think it is quite a good little book and an accessible read – it is called Why Wish You a Merry Christmas?

Looking ahead: Ben Quash, Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London (and soon to be Honorary Canon Theologian of Bradford Cathedral), has written the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for 2013. I have only dipped into it, but Abiding looks as excellent as one might expect from an interesting writer and theologian.

Now off to another ‘event’…

 

Wrapping up, moving on

Bradford Cathedral Choir sang Mozart’s Coronation Mass on Christmas Morning and it was brilliant. You can’t hear music like that ‘live’ and not find your soul taken up, shaken around and given a taste of something bigger than ‘here and now’.

Which was an interesting experience, given that I had been saying at various Christmas events that Christmas is all about (a) God coming into the ‘here and now’ (as it is and not as it should be), and (b) setting the ‘here and now’ in the context of ‘eternity’ (as God sees it and wills it to be). As I suggested to the choir afterwards, Mozart is a classic example of someone who was deeply conflicted, morally inconsistent, and yet whom God touched and from whom such sublime music came. Somehow we have to hold together the hope with the reality, the messiness with the vision.

Archbishop Cranmer is always worth reading. Yet, I feel he slightly missed the point in his Christmas post (entitled Christmas concerns: a pope, a queen, and a couple of archbishops). Cranmer was looking for Christmas joy, found it in the Queen’s address, but couldn’t detect it in the words of the Pope, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster. He begins with:

Having trawled through the Christmas messages of leading Church figures, there was only one glimmer of light; only one person used the occasion of the birth of the Son of God to communicate joy to the world. And it wasn’t a cleric in a pulpit.

He concludes (before showing a video of the Queen’s speech) with:

There was only one Church leader who spoke inspirationally of courage and hope; only one who used the occasion to speak of the importance of family, friends and the indomitable human spirit. Only one who spoke of the gospel of forgiveness, the uniqueness of Jesus the Saviour, the love of God through Christ our Lord:…

Funnily enough – and, obviously, before I had read Cranmer’s complaint – I asked in my own Christmas Day sermon whether the Archbishop and the Pope were being miserably negative and should cheer up a bit… or whether Christmas joy actually has to begin with the particular context. After all, hope is not the same as wishful thinking, vision is not the same as fantasy, and joy is not the same as escapist indifference. I contended (I think) that Christmas can be happy precisely because it calls us into the celebration of a God who comes among us, right where we are and as we are, saying, “I am on your side – I am for you as well as with you.” Joy comes from the hope evoked by (even small numbers of) people who are captivated by this understanding of God’s generous surprise and then living together in generous ways that look to the interests of their neighbours – even those neighbours who are complete strangers.

The problem for archbishops and bishops is that our roots are deeply planted in the real lives of real people in real communities in real places. Perhaps we see too much of the fear, the hopelessness and the ‘reality’ of too many people’s lives and cannot dismiss those when trying to articulate a Christmas hope that is not just wishful thinking or disincarnated fantasy. Maybe we find it hard to get the balance of the message quite right. That is for others to judge.

However, I take Cranmer’s point. And, as we now continue to work out how our churches are going to support the increasing numbers of families using food banks, how we shall care for people displaced from their homes because of changes in the benefits system (a reality I am merely noting without comment here), how we shall square a gospel of joyful freedom and abundant life with the reality we encounter every day, how we shall face the challenges by global political, financial, economic, ecological uncertainty, etc., I shall also take seriously Cranmer’s challenge to keep the focus on a gospel of hope.

I hope there was joy at Christmas in Bradford. At least, that’s what I was encouraging. And the sort of joy that then spills over into generosity and incarnational care for people like the shepherds outside Bethlehem who were the utterly surprised first visitors to the newly-born Christ.

(And, having seen the shameful – but not entirely original – footage of ‘rival priests’ (!) fighting in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, I simply offer the following picture – although I have no idea where it came from and cannot attribute it.)

 

Christmas eaves(dropping)

One of the challenges of Christmas is to say something sensible and enlightening that doesn’t descend into unworldly piety or sentimental wishful thinking. After all, we are celebrating Christmas while the little town of Bethlehem is surrounded by a dirty great wall, a bombing in Syria elicits the hurt response from a government minister (who clearly doesn’t ‘do’ irony) that “we wouldn’t hurt our own people”, Baghdad explodes in fear, Egypt ferments, parts of Africa starve, global financial systems totter, and the poorest people in Britain are about to enter a year of fear. It almost seems indecent to light up a tree and sing about ‘peace on earth’.

So, why do we?

In this last week – my first Christmas in Bradford – I was asked to say something at the City Carol Service attended by hundreds of people at Bradford Cathedral. It is pointless hoping that the service will speak for itself as the language both of carols and readings seems quite alien to the regular discourse of most people. So, I tried to pull the ‘now’ into the big picture of God’s presence in the world. Basically, Christmas is about the good news that God has not waited for us to climb our way out of the mess of life towards his unsullied glory… where we might find escape, relief or reward; rather, Christmas should shock us with the almost insane news that God has chosen to come among us, as one of us, thereby whispering into the business of human life that God is on our side – he is for us as well as with us.

I have no idea if this made any sense to the ‘outsiders’ who are unfamiliar with ‘church’ or the language of God. But, I hope it offered a different way of looking at Christmas: that we are not to seek God ‘out there’, keeping himself pure and unaffected by the dirt of the real world, but opting into this world as it is in order to offer newness and hope.

God, it seems, is less worried about his own purity than we often are. Rather than fear contamination, he quietly goes about contaminating the world with love.

Anyway, having done Pause for Thought on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2 on Thursday morning, I came back to Bradford in time to speak at the Carol Service for Bradford City Football Club at the Cathedral. Again the challenge was how to hold the attention and say something comprehensible about Christmas. On the radio earlier I had begun by noting that 22 December was the first step towards summer:

What a relief. Yesterday was the shortest day… so, it’s all up hill to summer from today. Isn’t that brilliant? The days are getting longer, the nights shorter – the darkness lighter and the light brighter. Come on, show a little optimism!

But, before we get too happy, we’ve got to get through Christmas first.

I wanted to find a story that illustrated what Christmas was about and remembered the following story – which I repeated at the Cathedral in the evening:

A little lad was getting worried. He desperately wanted a new bike for Christmas, so he decided to pray about it and wrote his letter to God. “Dear God, I’ve been a really good boy all year and think I deserve the new bike.” Then he thought about it, scrubbed it it and wrote: “Dear God, I’ve not been perfect, but I’ve tried hard and not been too bad. Please can I have the bike?” But he realised this was pushing it. So, he decided to go for a short walk while he thought about it. As he went round the corner of his road he saw a crib scene in a neighbour’s garden. He nipped through the gate, knocked over Joseph, grabbed Mary and stuck him under his coat. When he got home he wrote: “OK, if you wanna see your mother again, gimme the bike!”

And the simple point?

We sometimes think that we can bargain with God. Or that we can earn his favour. Or, even, that we can chalk up credits which he might then reward with good fortune. But, Christmas amounts to a massive rejection of all this. Christmas is about God opting into the mess of the world and neither exempting himself from it, nor waiting until we got the formula right before coming to us. In other words, it isn’t about us coming to him, but, rather, him coming to us.

It’s gift. That’s the surprise. That’s the deal. And that’s why I can wish you a happy Christmas.

Now, I’m not arguing that this is the deepest thought about Christmas – or the best way of telling it – but it does represent one attempt to speak simply, clearly and in language that can be understood by people not terribly familiar with Christian language or concepts. So, in the evening at the football club gig I tried to set the reading from John 1:1-14 in a comprehensible context before reading it. The short address (once I’d recalled Bradford City beating Liverpool on 14 May 2000 – not that it still hurts, you understand) invited us to lift our eyes up from the immediacy of the ‘now’ and the ‘me’ and the ‘my life’ to the cosmic, the God who creates and loves and sustains the universe. Having been grasped by the bigness of this (which is rooted in the human memory), we can then begin to understand the shocking enormity of God coming among us as one of us in a way that we can immediately understand and recognise. (I used easier language on the night…)

Christmas is God’s invitation to us to see where the ‘me’ and the ‘now’ fits into the great sweep of God’s history… and to be caught up in the wonder of being loved infinitely.

Perhaps the obvious words to focus on this Christmas will be the plea of the angels: “Don’t be afraid…” There is plenty to be afraid of in the year to come – just witness the impact already of job losses, housing support reductions (and the numbers of families that will be forced out of their homes, and communities that will be split up), hopelessness. Am I being trendy leftie here? Well, stop reading the blog and go into your city or town and ask homeless people why they are there. Investigate the number of floating shelters, church initiatives to feed, clothe and care for the casualties of our society.

It should come as no surprise that many Christian churches are providing so much costly and imaginative care for the most vulnerable. They will hold together the celebration that re-tells the story of God among us. They have been captured by a God who gets down and dirty in the midst of the real world. They are free to celebrate this way because their eyes have been lifted in order to see the ‘now’ in the context of eternity. And it is rooted in hope.

At Bradford Cathedral on Christmas morning we will recognise that we are a bunch of mortal and messy people who have simply been caught up by a vision and experience of God’s committed love. And it will be a celebration that commits us to living differently in today’s world – because of Jesus. As the great Bruce Cockburn put it:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river / driving the ripples on for ever / redemption rips through the surface of time / in the cry of a tiny babe.

Happy Christmas.

 

Happy Bishop

A couple of years ago I was asked to write a book about the real meaning of Christmas… for people who don’t usually read Christian books. So, I did. The Sunday Telegraph did a piece which caused me enormous grief and an awful lot of media exposure. The headline had me saying that Christmas carols are ‘nonsense’. The rest is history.

After facing a barrage of bile and ridicule from various media and individuals (one email helpfully offered methods by which I might like to take my life as I was now a ‘disgrace to the Church’), I put my case in a post entitled Grumpy Bishop – an accusation levelled at me despite the sheer happiness of the book I had written. Needless to say, none of the journalists or critics had seen the book, let alone read it.

Anyway, we needn’t go over all that ground again – or the debates that raged on this blog about journalistic accuracy. It’s all history. Except that that particular post has had hundreds of new hits in the last couple of weeks. No idea why – perhaps because Christmas is coming again?

But, the book isn’t! You can still order it direct through this blog or from a bookshop or Amazon. It is called Why Wish You a Merry Christmas? and tells the story afresh.

 

The Word became flesh, but then grew up

Christmas Day has moved on into memory. The Boxing Day sales couldn’t be thwarted even by the latest Tube strike. Liverpool’s revenge on Blackpool has been delayed because of a frozen football pitch. The government seems to have decided that helping children to read might be a good idea after all. And I wonder if the first Easter eggs have already started to appear in the shops…

The end of December always feels like getting to the top of a very high ladder – we’ve been heading up it all year. Then the parties of New Year’s Eve give way to the feeling of being at the very bottom of the ladder again, faced with the prospect of doing the whole thing again. It’s a funny psychology, but you can see why some people love the last week of December, but dread the first week of January – especially when the credit card bills come in in the cold light of day.

Nothing ever stands still. I have just re-read the Preface to Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in which he recognises that languages can never remain fixed (despite his own desire to resist corruptions of English by referring only to its use by pre-Restoration writers), but thinks that dialects will die out as written dictionaries fix meanings.

Yet, this is one of the ironies of life. Every time we predict that we have ‘arrived’, something else pops up to thwart our sense of security. Whenever we think technology will homogenise human experience or communication, real life confounds the prophets. Just when we think that globalisation will turn the whole world into plastic, the peculiarities of uncontrollable local cultures arise and assert their place in defiance of ‘inevitabilities’.

Last week it was reported that the Chinese government is to limit non-Chinese words in their media and, thereby, to preserve the purity of the language (and, therefore, cultural identity). They should learn from Johnson, the French Academie Francaise and the failed attempts by Germans to fix their tongue in some state of  ideologically pure suspension. A living language cannot be nailed for ever – especially by controlling governments – and the attempt is futile. (Which is not the same as saying, therefore, that Humpty Dumpty was right all along and words can be made to mean whatever we want them to mean – etymology isn’t redundant and language never develops randomly.)

Yesterday we celebrated that God did not remain an idea ‘logos’, but came among us as one of us in a way any human being can recognise. The ultimate in communication. We can play games with words, but human living and dying is common experience to everyone who has ever breathed.

However, Christmas is the beginning of the story, not the end. The baby grew up – presumably, through childhood (and all the ways children grow and learn), through adolescence (and all the ways young people grow into adulthood and the challenges this brings… not least to parents) and into responsible adulthood. The ‘idea’ did not remain a generality, but became ‘particular’: someone, somehow, somewhere.

The challenge for the churches is how to encourage – creatively, consistently and imaginatively – people who get stuck with the baby in a manger to stay with the story right the way through to Calvary and beyond. Jesus didn’t stand still. The ‘Word’ became flesh and grew, changed and developed.

What that means and what that looks like is the task for the next few months. (After we’ve partied our way through the next week, that is.)

 

Christmas… in brief

So what is Christmas all about? Without giving a lecture or sermon.

Christmas is God opting into the messiness of the world and not exempting himself from it. (Me)

The former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, put it like this:

God is. God is as he is in Jesus. So, there is hope.

And the unsurpassed poet-songwriter-musician Bruce Cockburn writes:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river, driving the ripples on for ever, redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.

Nuff said.

 

Imagine

It’s been a busy week and there hasn’t been much time for hitting the keys.

I even managed to miss the 30th anniversary of the killing of John Lennon. Not that I forgot,  but just didn’t have time to say anything about it or reflect on the ongoing significance of Lennon’s life and music. I was going to ask Chris Evans about it when I stood in at the last minute to do Pause for Thought on his Radio 2 breakfast show yesterday morning (Friday) – he once expressed to me the irony of John Lennon writing ‘Imagine no possessions’ at a massively expensive piano in a massively expensive house on a massively expensive estate. But, he had Rick Astley (who neither gave us up nor let us down) and the very funny Peter Kay in the studio and there wasn’t time.

On the way to the BBC studios I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through the streets around Oxford Circus because of the violence of the previous night’s riots and destruction over education cuts and increased university fees. But, the roads were clear and all evidence of trouble had been cleared away. Anyway, I got there, did the broadcast and then carried on in a cafe with a meeting about interfaith work in Kazakhstan. Weird, I know.

The script I did on Friday was about Advent: Putting the waiting back into wanting. I nicked the phrase from a major credit card advert from some years ago which promised to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’ (while failing to point out that the ensuing unnecessary debt might eventually be bad for you). Advent beckons us to slow down and not rush the story: don’t get to Christmas before you’ve worked through the story that makes sense of it. After all, you can’t get to summer without going through spring.

These are not actually random thoughts about the last week. Each event is connected by at least one idea: imagination.

• John Lennon, for all his absurdities, hypocrisies and contradictions (for which he is not exactly unique…) at least imagined a world that was different from the one he lived in. Yes, some of this was more fantasy than hope, but his restlessness with how things actually are compelled him to imagine a different world.
• It looks like the genuine anger and frustration of students is being hijacked by the usual ‘let’s-spark-a-riot’ suspects. But, it also seems that underneath all this protesting lies a genuine frustration with the way things are and the apparent impotence of ordinary people to do anything about it. Put bluntly, I wonder if the (unarticulated?) root of this anger is that the generation that created – and benefitted from – the disastrous greed culture of the last couple of decades is now compelling the succeeding generations to pay the price for this massive miscalculation. A case of ‘the sins of the fathers (and grandfathers) being visited on succeeding generations of the innocent? Dissatisfaction with the way things are provokes a casting around for what might be.

This longing for a different future seems to be fundamental to human existence. It’s almost as if we are made that way. Augustine recognised it when he said that ‘Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in [God]‘. Maybe it is the same impulse that makes us pursue the scientific, philosophical or anthropological project – the restless search for understanding why the world is the way it is and why it came to be this way.

And this is where Advent comes in. Christmas is meaningless if it is just the pointless (if touching) story of a baby being born out of wedlock. Advent offers four weeks in which we can rehearse the story  – of people’s experience of God, the world and each other – which then make the Christmas events comprehensible and explicable. Four weeks in which we get to put the waiting (for God coming among us as one of us) back into wanting (the light we keep hoping, working and longing for).

We anticipate Christmas. But we won’t rush it. Because we need the time and space to allow our imagination to be re-shaped – beginning to see the way the world could be, the person I could become.

Imagination isn’t fantasy. Imagination is what some of us think God applied when he said, “Let it be” and smiled with pleasure at what emerged.