Birthday Poet

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Gaby Roslin.

This might not sound fantastic to anyone else, but I was dead chuffed the other day when I read that a previously unknown poem has been found in the files at Leeds University. It’s not just any poem, though – this one was written by the great CS Lewis (of Narnia fame). Apparently, he wrote it to say thank you to a couple with whom he had stayed in Manchester in 1935.

Can you imagine that? Getting a poem as a ‘thank you’? I’d love it. Words can say more – and more eloquently – than a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, can’t they? Well, I think so.

I’ve been thinking about this because today is my daughter’s birthday. I’m not going to tell you how old she is – that’s her business. I’d love to write something for her that would be special and which she could be proud of. And that’s where I get stuck. I read a lot of poetry, but I’m rubbish at writing it.

So, I turn to the Psalms, looking for inspiration. The Old Testament Psalms are made up of 150 poems – some long, some very short. They cover the whole range of human experience and emotion. “God, why am I in a pit and you seem a million miles away?” “When will the suffering end?” “I’m bursting with gratitude and praise, and the words keep pouring out.” “I look at the stars and my mind is blown by the bigness of the universe and the enormity of God’s love.” Stuff like that … but they say it more beautifully.

In fact, my daughter was the inspiration behind the engraving in my bishop’s ring: “Love that fires the sun keep me burning.” The words of a song by my favourite musician. Just a few words, but they encompass both the huge cosmos and little me.

And that’s how the words should work – opening up the imagination and the passions, not closing everything down to blunt statements.

Anyway, happy birthday to Melanie, my daughter. And how about this from me?

“Roses are red, violets are blue, words full of colour are my gift to you.”

(I told you I was a rubbish poet.)

 

Sacrifice

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“I’m just going outside; I may be some time.” Those were the words spoken by Lawrence Oates – known as Titus – in March 1912 and on his 32^nd birthday as he left the tent and walked to his death. Stuck in worsening snow conditions, andhaving failed in his race to be the first to reach the South Pole, Captain Scott and his companions gradually realised that they could not survive. Titus, crippled by frostbite, thought they might have a better chance without him; so, he removed himself.

I have a photograph of Titus Oates in my current home in Leeds. The house belonged to his family and he is pictured in the garden with a couple of relatives. Every time I look at it, I’m reminded of what self-sacrifice looks like. It also means that if you are leaving our house and want to be clever, you can turn around, hand on the front door, and say: “I’m just going out …”. It was funny the first time.

But, this month sees a second anniversary with a personal connection. In March 2017 I was in the House of Lords and waiting for the Lord Speaker to arrive to start the day’s business when I was told there would be a delay. It was a little while before we knew what was happening and by then we had been locked down. Eventually we were escorted out to Westminster Abbey where we were kept until late at night. In the meantime, forty people had been injured and four killed on Westminster Bridge in a terror attack, and PC Keith Palmer had been murdered while protecting Parliament and attempting to stop the assailant.

This event turned upside down not only the families involved and the life and business of Parliament, but also brought into sharp relief the reality of our mortality. People left their home in the morning assuming they would return in the evening, but didn’t.

What Keith Palmer and Titus Oates did was to sacrifice themselves – not after great philosophical or theological consideration, but when the moment of choice came. In the Greek New Testament this moment is referred to as ‘krisis’. It is the word used for what we call ‘judgment’. It denotes that point when a choice has to be made, a decision that will have consequences that might involve loss.

As this month Christians approach Easter, self-sacrifice raises its head. Not as a means of gaining credit with God, or other people, but as a reflection of the God who sacrifices himself. Most of us won’t be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, but we will face other choices which suggest that self-preservation or fulfilment is not the ultimate goal in life. Such choices – krisis – reveal who we really are.

 

Becoming a Swiftie

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Gaby Roslin (Zoe Ball away for the day).

I really don’t know how to break this to you, but I think I’m becoming a Swiftie.

Until recently I didn’t know what a Swiftie was. Then my granddaughter got going. She was eleven a couple of weeks ago and we went over to Liverpool to celebrate. I think every present she got was Taylor Swift related. She even then went out and bought a couple of vinyl albums – very pink!

So, there’s no alternative. If I want to be able to hold a conversation with her, I need to know something about Taylor Swift – something other than who her boyfriend is and how much cash she has in the bank.

I’ve now listened to three albums, starting with the new version of her original album, 1989 – ‘Taylor’s Version’. Now, I’m a Bruce Springsteen man with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Bruce Cockburn on repeat. So, I have to make a shift when listening to Taylor and not listen through a filter shaped like one of the Bruces. I consciously have to opt out of comparing and listen to Taylor on her own terms.

Now, I think this has something to say about how people relate to and communicate with each other. I often have to listen to people argue their point in such a way as to miss the point. Getting my view across is not the same as genuinely listening to the other person, hearing them on their own terms, and understanding why they might be saying what they are saying in the way they are saying it.

Key to this is learning to pay attention and listen carefully. Only then can I know how to respond and what language to use … that has a chance of being heard. Just like listening to Taylor Swift on her own terms compels me to not jump to judgment. There is good Christian precedent for this: Jesus often declined to answer the question put to him … but responded to the deeper issue that he saw behind the words.

So, I want to be fearless in listening and speak now, careless of reputation. I’m not a Swiftie yet, but you never know…

 

Russian Elections

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

This coming weekend millions of Russians will elect their next President. I’m sure the world is on tenterhooks as to who might win this time around.

For me there’s a sense of deja-vu as I watch developments. My early career as a linguist at GCHQ meant that I read a lot of Soviet presidential speeches, observed propaganda at its worst, and sought to understand why people went along with what was so obviously corrupt. (Of course, it’s now well known that loo paper shortages were mitigated by copious Pravda newssheets bearing the golden words and photographs of the President – one way of showing political defiance.)

But, what about this week? We still occasionally hear that Vladimir Putin wants to re-create the Soviet Union. I don’t think he does. He has always had a bigger ambition than that: to re-create the Holy Rus – an empire with a single identity and a common faith. Every time Putin leaves the Kremlin he passes a statue of Vladimir the Great, who violently created Holy Russia at the end of the tenth century, following his conversion to Christianity.

But, it also seems that Putin is happy to use similar methods to Vladimir in order to consolidate power: the squashing of opposition, violence and murder of human beings who don’t agree with him, for example. Which begs questions about which parts of Christian faith are doing the driving here.

This week’s elections throw up many questions for those outside Russia – including why the West’s response to Russian aggression in Georgia and South Ossetia, then Ukraine in 2014 and the Crimea was so mild? Pragmatism or principle?

More shockingly, what theological sense can be made of the unwavering support given to Putin by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church?

These phenomena are not new. Look at the way Christians and others accommodated Hitler in the 1920s and ‘30s – hoping that violence would diminish once he got into power. His attempt to corrall the church into a Nazi mindset and theology. Today is the anniversary of the Anschluss – when many Austrians welcomed the Nazi incorporation of their country into the powerful Reich. And we know how that ended, even if we haven’t always learned the lessons from it.

Russians will take responsibility for their vote this weekend, even if they are constrained by limited access to information and free media. But, like the American presidential election late this year, the whole world will live with the consequences. And Christians everywhere must look seriously at what can be learned by churches in their own contexts as they seek to reflect the Jesus of the Gospels amid the realpolitik of international power struggles.

 

Budget

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Most people understand what a budget is. It’s a mechanism whereby we work out how much money is coming in and, therefore, how much can go out. Setting a budget tells us whether we can afford what we want or how to afford what we need. Wants and needs are, of course, different things.

What we do in our household is not very different from what happens in a business or a country. Tomorrow the Chancellor will unveil his response to these hard questions about how we pay for what we want or what we think we need as a society.

But, I think a budget is more than a simple transaction with numbers. In fact, a budget has been described – wisely, I think – as “theology by numbers”. A bit like “painting by numbers,” but with more powerful consequences.

If you don’t like the word ‘theology’, then substitute ‘worldview’ or ‘values’. Whichever words you choose, the point remains the same. A budget tells us what we really think about society (its businesses, industry, cultures, and so on) and what we really think matters. In other words, it demonstrates our real values and doesn’t just serve as a political ball to be kicked around.

When I think about a budget I go back to two powerful traditions. In the Hebrew scriptures it is very clear that God’s judgment about societies rests on how citizens treat one another and how they protect their weakest people. The prophet Amos, writing three thousand years ago, condemns the people for ordering their society in such a way as to celebrate religious revival whilst institutionalizing corruption. You could sing hymns of praise at the same time as buying off the judges and “trampling on the heads of the poor”.

This valuing of social justice wasn’t invented by the prophets, though. The earliest settlements in the Promised Land had instructions to leave ten per cent of the field’s harvest so that sojourners and homeless people could always find something to eat. A just society meant enshrining in money and produce an obligation to mutuality.

Jesus put it more starkly: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

This is difficult and challenging stuff for individuals as well as for a country. The process of constructing a budget compels us to at least try to articulate what we think matters and why. Who benefits from a budget and who loses from it tells us something about where our heart really is … and what or whom we really love. Facing that exposure takes courage.

 

Hobbies

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. James May is the guest editor and one of his chosen themes was hobbies.

I love going into primary schools and taking the questions of young children. It doesn’t matter what the theme is, but the seemingly random and often very funny interrogation follows. “What do you do for fun?” I was asked recently. As if the day job must simply be a laborious burden. “Do you have any hobbies?” is normally the supplementary.

And this is where, for me at least, the problems start.

Is a hobby some sort of a sideline from real life? Is it, as the dictionary definitions seem to suggest, something you do that brings pleasure and is not work? Of course, this provokes a challenge for someone like me who has a vocation. It reminds me of that famous David Beckham quote. He apparently said during his playing days: “I don’t have time for hobbies. At the end of the day, I treat my job as a hobby. It’s something I love doing.” I know what he means.

I think this opens up two trains of thought for me. First, can my life be separated out into bits that somehow join together, or am I a whole person who is more than the sum of the parts? In the same way that the biblical writers insist on a human being holding together a unity of body, mind and spirit, so we cannot easily divide a life up into isolated parts. According to this way of thinking, a hobby is not a distraction from ‘real’ life, but, rather, as vital an element to a single life as work or anything else.

My second thought might sound a bit odd, so I’ll explain the background. I once knew a very elderly man who seemed to be interested in everything. His name was Ralph and his curiosity ranged from the origins of the universe right through to the origins of law firms in Leicestershire. Whatever subject we talked about, Ralph had something to say or ask. I once suggested he was a reflection of God – insofar as both he and God seemed to be (what he laughingly called) ‘over-hobbied’. What do I mean by this?

Well, take a quick look at the creation stories in Genesis. God doesn’t just zap the universe into being with a click of his jobbing fingers. For example, he gives responsibility to human beings to name theanimals in text that exudes playfulness. You’ve just got the giraffe sorted when along comes a centipede or a mongoose. This work of creation suggests fun and not fear, imagination rather than received diktat, creativity instead of boredom.

Anyway, back to David Beckham who in his retirement has taken up beekeeping and approaches it with the same discipline and rigour he once applied to football. He gets my philosopher of the day award and is more theologically adept than he probably imagined.

 

Christmas 2023

This is the basic text of sermons preached at Bradford Cathedral on Christmas Eve at midnight and at Ripon Cathedral on Christmas morning.

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” (John 1:14)

Like a stone on the surface of a still river,
Driving the ripples on forever,
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.

That is Bruce Cockburn’s answer to the question that presses in on me every time I stand in a pulpit like this in one of our three cathedrals at Christmas: While our planet gasps for breath and millions of innocent people struggle for life – or yearn for a quick death – under the whoosh of missiles and the deliberate, systematic brutality of war, what are we doing as we sing our carols and muse on events in Bethlehem two thousand years ago?

This was a question brought home to me acutely as I sat here a couple of weeks ago and listened to the Ukrainian Choir, working with the Royal Opera House, and looked at the faces of exiled, bereft and, yet, hopeful people – mainly women.

In his song Cry of a Tiny Babe (from his 1990 album ‘Nothing But a Burning Light’) Cockburn tries to get behind the familiarity or cliché of Christmas language or imagery and surprise us by using words to shine a fresh light on the significance of this holy night.

Just as a weary couple from Nazareth in Galilee collapse with fatigue into the animals’ refuge of a house in Bethlehem on the West Bank; just as shepherds watch their flocks on the fields beyond the walls, seeing the same sky, telling the same stories, hearing the familiar sounds of a Palestinian night; just as powerful and corrupt politicians begin to think about protecting their own power by slaughtering the most vulnerable – babies; just as the world continues to pretend that tomorrow will be just the same as today and yesterday before it; just then – in what the Irish poet WB Yeats called “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” – redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.

For many people the night time is the locus of unavoidable solitude. The time when the questions of the daytime cannot be hidden from; when conversation and distraction can no longer fill the space; when the nakedness of hope and regret are exposed before they might reappear in dreams or nightmares; when we are alone in the darkness and wondering what it is all about, or why we matter; when we know our need of redemption; then, in this darkness, amid this solitude, there is the possibility of an irruption of defiant light.

For the story of God in the Scriptures is simply this: that God has an almost playful – possibly childish – habit of surprising earth with heaven … when heaven seems further away than even our imagination might allow.

Surprise.

I have only ever experienced total darkness once. It was March 1987 and I was on the island of Iona, struggling with whether to continue in training and be ordained a few months later or leave and, possibly, return to being a linguist for the government. I remember slipping out of the Abbey one night, closing the heavy door, and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness outside. They didn’t. Aiming for the road, I found myself in the graveyard. We didn’t have mobile phone torches in those days and there were no sources of external artificial light on the island. But, even there, I discovered (when I eventually found the place) a party going on in the pub – which was actually also the post office and the local shop.

Light had a habit of creeping in, subverting the pompous defences of night, blowing the pretentious cover of gloom and obscurity.

And here lies the powerful mystery of Christmas. As the carol puts it with regard to the little town of Bethlehem, going about its normal business: “The hopes and fears of all the years are found in thee tonight.” Really? As a sort of fantasy? A mere religious sentiment for people who need a bit of moral support or emotional encouragement? An escape from the reality of life in a contested and conflicting world? “The hopes and fears of all the years are found in thee tonight?”

No. much more subversively than that: the hopes and fears do not blast their way through the pretensions of power and violence and uncontrollable uncertainty; rather, they find themselves surprised by the unexpected – not the invasion of a mighty army, but the cry of a tiny babe. As Rowan Williams put it in a sermon at Christmas 2003:

“When God comes among us, he doesn’t first of all clear humanity out of the way so that he can take over; he becomes a human being. He doesn’t force his way in to dominate and crush; he announces his arrival in the sharp, hungry cry of a newborn baby. He changes the world not by law and threat but by death and resurrection.” He then goes on to quote the poet Robert Southwell’s beautiful undermining of human fears and apprehensions: “His batt’ring shots are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes.”

Isn’t this, on the surface, just ridiculous? A world of nuclear threat and climate crisis? A world of military conflict and the slaughter of innocents? A world which, having survived a century of world wars and a very Cold War, now seems willing to embrace another Hot War? A world which, to quote Christopher Clark’s brilliant history of the origins of the First World War, seems to ‘sleepwalk’ towards disaster? A world in which ordinary people struggle with staying alive or making ends meet? A world in which refugees find no refuge, and the streets of England are peppered with sleeping bags and cardboard boxes – the closed inns of a contemporary Bethlehem?

Well, yes, it is ridiculous. But, only if you have been seduced by the sort of pathetic fatalism that insists on business as usual. This is the way of the world, so just suck it up. Yet, it is precisely this apparent absurdity that Christmas exposes and celebrates. The world does not have to be this way! Death, violence and destruction do not have to have the final word!

What if … just imagine … what if it is this way of seeing the world that is a sad and feeble sham? What if there is another – a radically different – way of seeing and being in this world? Because Christmas is about God opting into this world with all its complexities and cruelties and beauties and immense joys – not exempting himself from it. This is the gift of Christmas: that “God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas Day” (as John Bell put it).

The Word became flesh and lived among us. The gift God gives is his word. And his word – enfleshed in someone like you and me – is not the empty, self-serving promise of political powermongers or ego-merchants; it is the promise that will now be lived out, in this real world, in material terms and on this physical earth. God among us as one of us. God for us and not here to condemn us. Or, as the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, famously put it in his formulation of the Christian creed: “God is. God is as he is in Jesus. So, there is hope.”

We will see God not in an idea or an ideology, but in a person who lives and grows and speaks and listens and brings light into the lives of people who have come to accept, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

No, in Jesus of Nazareth we are offered a brighter, more controversial, vision: God gives his word that the light has come into the world, and the darkness of this world can never extinguish it. And people who are caught up by – grasped by – this vision of a God who makes himself at home in the world we all know … become a people who, however falteringly and feebly, are riddled with an inescapable hope. Hope that spots the light that will not be snuffed out by the pretensions of darkness. Hope that, fired by the joy of a God who shockingly enters this world as a baby, cannot be supressed by the latest horrors.

This is why Christians continue to spot the signs of God’s presence in those things and people whom the world often seems to discard or despise. Christians – that is, people whose worldview is shaped by this subversive Christmas story – see themselves as a company of people who, like the God they serve and the Jesus they follow, defy those visions of the world and expectations of ideology … and dare to look for and see God present and attentive amid the turmoil, being drawn to think differently about God, the world and us in order that we might live differently in the world with God and one another, refusing to give the darkness the power it so greedily craves.

The Christmas story tells us that we don’t need to bargain with God. We can’t do deals (as, one day, even Donald Trump will find out). Like the young boy who, with some trepidation, went to his bedroom to draw up his Christmas list. He started to write: “Dear Jesus, I’ve been really good this last year, so please can I have a bike for Christmas?” He knew this was being ‘economical with the actualité’, so he screwed it up and threw it into the bin. He tried again: “Dear Jesus, I know I’ve messed it up from time to time, but I’ve tried hard and …” But he knew this wasn’t right either. So, a third time he started: “Dear Jesus, you know and I know that it hasn’t been a great year…”. He gave up, threw it in the bin and decided to go out for a quick walk to clear his head. He walked round the block and then, looking through a neighbour’s gate, saw a nativity crib scene set up in the garden. He looked around to check no one was watching, then ran in, grabbed Mary, stuffed her under his coat and ran back to his house and up to his room. Then he took his pen and wrote: “Jesus, if you wanna see your mother again, gimme da bike!”

No bargains. No deals. No competitions for goodness. No virtue signalling. No tired calculations. Just an open-handed, open-minded, and open-hearted willingness to receive a gift that is beyond price – almost beyond our imagining – and is spelled G-R-A-C-E.

When I wish you a happy Christmas, I am not simply passing on a sentiment. I am not offering a fantasy or a placebo. I am not asking you to believe something you suspect isn’t true. Rather, I am urging you to open up to a bigger vision, a wider horizon, a deeper discovery – that Christmas means we can be drawn by hope (the hope that comes to us and does not wait for us to pursue it), not driven by fear. And then, having been grasped – surprised, even – by this hope, rooted in a baby, to commit yourself – body, mind and spirit – to what you now see in the manger in Bethlehem.

For, as Bruce Cockburn put it:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river,
Driving the ripples on forever,
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.

Amen.

Rt Revd Nicholas Baines

Bishop of Leeds

 

Time and faithfulness

This is the text of the Presidential Address delivered to the Leeds Diocesan Synod yesterday (14 October 2023).

When Bob Dylan wrote ‘The times, they are a-changing’ way back in 1964, he was merely stating a universal truth. Times always change. The problem and the challenge is that, in whatever era we live, we always seem to assume that ‘now’ is ultimate. But, as with the term ‘post-modernism’, we know what it is ‘post’, but we don’t know what it is ‘pre’. That’s the nature of things. Time never stands still, and today’s opportunities and challenges simply give way to – or generate – the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow and beyond.

This has been driven home to me recently by a number of things. I wrote this address immediately after emerging from an online webinar on UK Defence with the Head of Strategy for the British Army and a chaplain who addressed some of the theological and ethical lenses through which we need to look at military policy and activity. The UK’s Integrated Review of 2021 had to be refreshed in 2023 because the world had changed again – war in Europe changed the complexion of our engagement in the so-called Indo-Pacific tilt. (Boris Johnson famously laughed off the notion that “tanks would roll across the soil of Europe” … only a couple of months before tanks actually did roll into Ukraine.)

But, I have also been reading John Kampfner’s new book ‘In Search of Berlin’ – an overview that constantly makes you wonder why no one thought to stop what was evidently coming as the Kaiser gave way to Weimar, Weimar led into Nazism, Nazism collapsed into the GDR, and then western democracy assumed that the world had changed for the better and for ever. But, the rise of the Far Right in Germany now fuels fears of what might happen in the 2030s and 2040s, despite memories of what happened in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Now, I know you haven’t come this morning for a history lesson. But, I cite these examples in order to stress the need for some perspective when ‘events’ happen. Now is never the ultimate; the last word has never been spoken. The end of one thing gives way to the beginning of another. We can learn from the past, but the past can never be repeated … any more than a river can pass the same point twice. What is key is simply this: how do we remain faithful to what we believe to be our core vocation when the world around us keeps revolving away from any sense of control?

And here is the nub of the matter. Human beings like to be in control and start to fear when control is felt to have been lost, or uncertainty colours our perceptions of our own agency. But, as I noted many times during the Covid lockdowns, uncertainty is the norm in this world – it is not an aberration. And learning to navigate uncertainty with confidence and faith is key to effective leadership and living.

By now you will have figured out why I have started this address in this way. Since we last met as a synod the world has changed. A week ago, international news was still dominated by Ukraine – Russia’s behaviour in prosecuting its war and challenges to international support of Ukraine, particularly in the United States (now paralysed by the absence of a Speaker of the House). Then Hamas, rooted in the tradition and mindset of Islamic State, committed unspeakable atrocities in Israel, and everything changed. The news focus shifted to Gaza. And we now, as the shock and horror become accommodated, await Israel’s next steps in securing its territory, defending its people and responding to the outrageous terrorism that has struck at its heart. And we know that whatever happens next won’t be the end of the chapter, let alone the end of the book, and that what happens in the next few days and weeks will change again the possibilities facing the world. However justified Israel’s response might be, we also know that the children of violence will harbour their own grievances and feed them into the next generation of violence. And so it will go on.

Which is why words of hope cannot and must not be empty. They must be rooted in realism, but not bound by the ‘ultimate now’. As Dr Alan Garrow brilliantly opened up at the Diocesan Clergy Study Day in Wakefield Cathedral on Thursday this week, the Lord’s Prayer – at the heart of our Christian and Anglican liturgy – actually has us asking for “tomorrow’s bread today”: “Give us today the bread of the future kingdom.” We long for the fulness of peace rooted in grace and mercy, the eschatological feast of heaven, whilst committing ourselves to the world as it is now. I have phrased this theology in the past as: “Christians are not driven by fear, but drawn by hope”. This hope, whatever is happening in the world and however uncertain we feel about control of events, comes to us from the future – tomorrow’s bread – and looks like resurrection. This is the vision that draws us.

This is why our diocese has lived for most of its nearly ten years with a simple set of values (all beginning with ‘L’ for Leeds…): Loving Living Learning. We love God, the cosmos of his creating, and our neighbour as ourself. We live in the world as it is, but are drawn by a vision of how it might be – the kingdom of God. And we are having to learn as we go … because a changing world compels us to look differently and afresh and learn from our experience and the perspectives we gain from history.

In today’s synod we will look at matters that have as their backdrop the uncertainties of the world at the moment. But, that does not diminish the importance of the local or the immediate. Underlying much of what we discuss today is a fundamental question for which we as a synod must take active responsibility: what sort of a church do we need to be in order to serve the world we are called to live in at this point in history? And, if we have an idea of what that church ought to look like – if it is to be faithful to its particular vocation in the world – then what role do I play in helping to shape it accordingly?

Now, that sounds fairly straightforward … until other people, other Anglican Christians, begin to put in their perspective. This week the House of Bishops came to some conclusions about ‘Living in Love and Faith’ (LLF) and the next steps. I was not present – a combination of ill-health and the very short notice of the House meeting. I also did not know that eleven bishops would issue a dissenting statement on Thursday. I will reserve my views on this behaviour, but note that not a single newspaper thought it worth reporting on. In other words, we are now talking to ourselves because no one out there is interested. This says something.

However, as I said at the beginning, the last word has not been uttered in these matters … and never will be. Circumcision might not be a burning issue for today’s western church, but the factors that led to schism in the early church around the issue – theological and cultural – still colour our debates about sexuality today. Again, Dr Eeva John’s address to the Clergy Study Day on Thursday invited us to be honest and ‘real’ about ourselves (what we actually think about our handling of the Bible rather than our aspirations), about the real world (the varying experience of other Christians/Anglicans), the reality of others (rather than wishing they could just see things the way I do), and the real God who, as revealed in Scripture, cannot be controlled, appropriated or bent to my particular biblical preferences. I have long been haunted by John 5:39 where Jesus confronts the biblical authorities of his time with this: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

Just think about that. Where do we place ourselves in that context? Standing with Jesus over against the Jewish leaders? On the sidelines looking on as entertained observers? Or with those whom Jesus is addressing? As a church leader who has been reading the Bible for sixty years, I place myself with those who need to hear Jesus’s words: you search the scriptures and miss the point completely, even though he is standing in front of you. Some humility about our readings of scripture, of the world, of ourselves and of other Christians will not go amiss.

Let’s briefly put this in a different perspective. This morning we will look at a review of our partnership links with other dioceses around the world. Nearly ten years in to the partnerships we inherited form the historic dioceses of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds and Wakefield, it is right to review and, consequently, refresh, revive, conclude or re-envision. As we do this, what is unavoidable (I hope) is the conviction that having links around the world and the Anglican Communion is vital to our own life here. Looking through the eyes and listening through the ears of Anglicans whose life experience, cultures, norms and expectations are different confronts us – sometimes uncomfortably – with how we are seen, understood and experienced by them.

This is why LLF – and being faithful to challenges to our vocation as the Church of England – has to be seen in the context of our unity with other Christians. And what is immediately obvious is that Christians do not agree on certain vexed matters. It is unlikely many will change their mind in order to pursue unity (which would be a fantasy if based on a utilitarian desire for peace at all costs); so, we have to do two things: first, accept the reality of disagreement; and, second, to accept that this very living with difference might be what God calls us to and has designed his church for. Maybe, just maybe, our vocation is to show the world what it can look like for people of difference to live in unity … despite, or even because of, their differences. I haven’t the time to illustrate this from the scriptures themselves, but the Bible is riddled with this stuff.

Now, to go back to the point: if we are to be a church that makes a difference in a conflicted world – less concerned or preoccupied with our internal purity and more committed to showing the world what redemption and grace look like – then we need to take seriously who we are as Anglicans in Yorkshire and what should guide our priorities. Today we look at the budget … which is not a set of numbers to be agreed with, but is (what the Archbishop of Canterbury once described as) ‘theology in numbers”. Our budget tells us whether we think it is worth coughing up sacrificially to resource a church or diocese that believes it can and must make a difference in and to the world. That is what our parish share is about. Not funding a bureaucracy – which it doesn’t – but enabling a mission that is transformative: building confident Christians who grow churches that help transform their communities.

That is why elections to deanery and diocesan synods matter. Conviction has to be earthed in mundane structure and attention to process and people. I hope we will note the creation of the Hunslet Gathering – a new initiative in church planting. Promulging Amending Canon 42 doesn’t sound exhilarating, but it is the structural prioritising of safeguarding in the church, but for the sake of the world around us.

I have said enough. Thank you for your patience. Today let’s listen and speak with grace, asking God for wisdom as we navigate contested territory and seek a common mind as God’s church here in the Diocese of Leeds. Bob Dylan is still going strong; so can we as the times change and we seek to be faithful to God’s call at this time and in this part of God’s world.

 

Hope

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

So says Portia in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice – a line that stood out for me in the production I saw at Stratford a couple of days ago. It’s a dark play about even darker forces – particularly antisemitism and the limits of justice. But, it’s also defiant in the face of impending doom.

Perhaps Portia’s words stood out because a word being bandied around a lot at the moment is ‘hope’. A couple of decades of turmoil, austerity, decline and uncertainty have left us in no doubt about the scale of the problems we face as a country and a planet; but, there is a growing appeal for less diagnosis of the problem and a greater articulation of vision. Just listen to the language of party political conferencing.

Now, I find this not only understandable, but also intriguing. Because hope is not the same thing as optimism – telling people it will all get better … somehow. And neither is hope something that is primarily evoked by the repetition of propositions or promises. Propositions are debatable and promises get dropped once deemed inconvenient. Then both hope and optimism give way to tired disillusionment.

It seems to me that hope is awakened when our hearts are stirred – and our hearts get stirred by language and story and image that set the imagination alight. Truth itself doesn’t necessarily move us. This is why one Old Testament theologian, in the title of one of his books, described the Hebrew prophetic writings as “words that linger, texts that explode”. It’s why Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn writes “2000 years and half a world away, dying trees still grow greener when you pray.” Words and associations take root and sometimes only burst into flame later.

Portia doesn’t tell people to behave well, but evokes an image that suggests simply that a little flame can lighten a large room. Don’t play down the small or the apparently insignificant. Do your bit today to change the world and that is something in itself.

And what might a Christian vision of hope look like? Well, I put it like this: we are not driven by fear or the pressures of today, but are drawn by hope – hope that comes from the future and is called resurrection. This hope says that death, violence, destruction and dismay do not have the last word, despite their real power. God does. But, the evidence of this hope will be seen in people lighting their little candles in a naughty world.

 

Technoethics

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Tom Cruise once said of himself: “I feel the need, the need for speed”. So, I’m sure he’ll have noticed that this week sees fifty years since the uniquely beautiful Concorde crossed the Atlantic in 3 hours 32 minutes, setting a new record and halving the time between Britain and America. But, a bit like the debates around HS2, getting there faster doesn’t address the question of what you do when you get there.

It’s at least a little curious that at a time when we want everything to speed up there is a burgeoning industry in retreats to slow people down. And I think this tension exposes a deeper question that we human beings don’t seem able to resolve. Technology makes everything happen faster, but the question is: who or what is it for? Who is being served?

I’m involved in a parliamentary inquiry at the moment into Artificial Intelligence – AI – and my mind is blown by the science of it all. Getting my limited brain around the sheer volume and complexity of the tech means that it becomes easy to miss the deeper issue at stake – which is: what is a human being and who is being served by the speed of what we can do?

Spotify has announced that it won’t ban AI-generated music, unless it impersonates artists without their consent. Amazon is to invest billions of dollars into AI. Technology and AI are the big deal of our time.

So, I have two thoughts about this.

First, technology drives progress, but races ahead of ethics – the time we need to think seriously about what we should do, rather than what we can do. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should or must do it. But, progress draws ethics in its wake and this can be dangerous.

Secondly, how do we resist the need for speed when we know that the technology changes our habits, identities and self-understandings? An Asian theologian called Kosuke Koyama faced this question in a meditation on the ‘3mph God’. When people enter a desert we slow down … eventually to 3mph … and that’s when we discover that this is the pace, walking pace, that God is moving at. So, things that keep us racing ahead can actually work against what it means to be a person, a human being, made in the image of God.

Now, many of us don’t have a choice in this. Life is fast. Technology races. But, who is in control of what? Do I exist for the technology, or does it exist for me?