Jubilee

Having missed most of the Jubilee celebrations in the UK, two scripts have (for me, at least) gone to the heart of the matter.

The first is David Hare’s Guardian comment on the Queen “floating above the stink” of the rest of our disillusioned public life. He concludes:

The Queen is perceived today to be where we might all wish to be – floating some way above the stink. And for that reason the young woman who was phoned on safari in Kenya in 1952 and told to come home immediately is 60 years later overwhelmingly popular. We are grateful that there is one British citizen who is not at the mercy of market forces and shameless profiteering, nor of a government which lacks the philosophy, the intellectual equipment or the will to control them. What was in happier times the Queen’s greatest weakness – that she does not in the circumstances of her life resemble her subjects – has paradoxically, at this point in our history, come to be her greatest strength. Republicans who have recently been cowed into silence – “not a good year for us,” admitted their spokesperson – should take heart. The vestigial idealism which has recently settled on the Queen’s shoulders is a parallel instinct to that which demands television programmes not about rubbish and a publicly funded health service, where the fit pay cheerfully to help the sick. God knows, that public idealism has few enough other places to go.

The second is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral today – which I did not hear, but have just read. He asks for the recovery of a renewed vision of ‘dedicated’ public service – akin to what I posted earlier on the discussions in Brussels last night. He concludes:

This year has already seen a variety of Jubilee creations and projects. But its most lasting memorial would be the rebirth of an energetic, generous spirit of dedication to the common good and the public service, the rebirth of a recognition that we live less than human lives if we think just of our own individual good.

 

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.)

 

The Queen of parts

I am confused.

If you reject the possibility of headship of a church by a woman, how has it been possible for you to swear the Oath of Allegiance without your fingers crossed behind your back? Given that the Queen is the head of the Church of England, this must cause more problems than I have hitherto considered.

Bishop Graham Kings has responded to this matter in relation to FCA and covers some of the concerns I have also raised.

Or can we treat ‘oaths’ lightly, picking the bits we like when we have made them?

I really must get off this and onto things that matter to the world…

 

Three questions in my head

I woke this morning to the news that journalists on a national newspapers have been systematically and repeatedly bugging people’s private phones.

I also am wondering if I should ever go for meetings at Church House, Westminster, again. According to the Bishop of Fulham at last week’s FCA launch, ‘Satan is alive and well and resides at Church House’.

And I am intrigued that the Queen has been dragged into the FCA business.

So, I have three areas of questioning running round my head:

1. Will the News International publish a list of every person whose phone was hacked? And, picking up another theme of recent bloggings, will journalists now push for an independent Press Complaints Commission – having insisted on such scrutiny for MPs?

2. Will the Bishop of Fulham tell us which bit of Church House is home to Satan – and give us names? I want either to avoid the said person or tackle him/her. I think we should be told. (And why did Archbishop Jensen or anybody else not question this bizarre statement at the time?)

3. It is clear, now that Anglican Mainstream has published the correspondence with Buckingham Palace, that the ‘letter from the Queen’ was no such thing and did not offer support to FCA. Why, then, did Chris Sugden (when being interviewed about this specific point on Sunday on BBC Radio 4) not simply deny it rather than leave the question of royal support open – suggesting that this would be revealed at the launch the next day and, therefore, setting off speculation and reaction?

I wonder if any of these questions will get answers? I have to admit, however, that the only one of importance to the real world is the first.