The Eve of the Queen’s Funeral

This is the basic text of a sermon at Ripon Cathedral on the eve of the Queen’s funeral.

The Death of Queen Elizabeth II

Ripon Cathedral

Sunday 18 September 2022

While emptying my office in Bradford before moving to Leeds in 2014 I found two brown file boxes marked simply ‘1936’. So, while my colleagues carried on shifting boxes and furniture, I opened the boxes and found in one the speeches of the then Bishop of Bradford, Dr Alfred Blunt, and in the other the correspondence that followed one such speech.

On 1 December 1936 at (what we would now call a Diocesan Synod) the Bishop of Bradford reflected on the nature of King Edward VIII’s imminent coronation and the nature of what this would mean for the new king. Expressing some concern about the King’s Christian commitment (as expressed in his attendance at worship), he famously said this:

“The benefit of the King’s coronation depends upon… the faith, prayer and self-dedication of the King himself; and on that it would be improper of me to say anything except to commend him to God’s grace, which he will so abundantly need, as we all need it – for the King is a man like ourselves – if he is to do his duty faithfully. We hope that he is aware of his need. Some of us wish that he gave more positive signs of such awareness.”

That observation ignited the abdication crisis and provoked the green-ink correspondence that then came the bishop’s way. (Plus ça change!)

But, the subsequent decision by Edward to abdicate the throne set in course the events that led eventually to Queen Elizabeth II ascending the throne in 1952 following the death of her father, King George VI.

Now, this might seem an odd way to begin a sermon on the eve of our late Queen’s funeral. But, it sets in context what I think is key to understanding her understanding of her role and responsibilities, her example and her commitment. In a world in which the autonomous self is king, the late Queen was a counter-cultural icon of different virtues.

It is against this backdrop that we hear the broadcast she made on her twenty first birthday in 1947 when she said this: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

The world has changed beyond recognition since then and, among other things, there is no longer an ‘imperial’ anything (let alone ‘family’). But, her commitment wasn’t to being ‘relevant’ to whatever cultures would emerge in the aftermath of the Second World War, the nuclear age, the bipolar global hegemony, and so on. No, rather she was held firmly to a set of virtues and commitments that rooted her securely while everything else moved around her – in the wider world as well as in her personal and family ambit. Only so could the then young Princess Elizabeth’s commitment be made in ignorance of what might lie ahead.

At the heart of her commitment was, I believe, one word: grace. Before flying to Kazakhstan last Monday (I got back yesterday afternoon), I attended the House of Lords for the second day of parliamentary tributes (and to swear allegiance to the new King). Many speeches were long and anecdotal; mine was very short and about Her late Majesty, not me. I simply observed what I want to repeat here today: she could reign with grace because she first knew her need of grace. She did not need to be persuaded of the need for confession in Anglican liturgy; she didn’t need to be argued into some sort of religious role-playing; she didn’t need to be preached into submission to a religious demand. At the root of her convictions and conduct lay a fundamental awareness of her need of God’s grace.

Now, as I observed in the Lords, this is what enabled her to fulfil her obligations as a constitutional monarch with such grace and wisdom: being unashamed of one’s own need of grace opens the door to an unashamed inhabiting of accountability.

When the monarch sits on the throne in the House of Lords to deliver the ‘Speech’ at the commencement of a new session of Parliament, she (and now he) looks out at the assembled three legs of a parliamentary democracy: the executive (behind the bar), the legislature and the judiciary. All their work is done in the name of ‘Her Majesty’ – Her Majesty’s Government, Her Majesty’s Courts, and so on. But, she read the Speech (which sets out the government’s proposed legislative programme) in the name of God. And, as she did so, she would look up she sees the statues of the barons of Magna Carta between the windows around the chamber.

When in the chamber I always feel I am physically inhabiting the British Constitution. And you get the point: the monarch saw herself as not the ultimate authority. Accountability beyond oneself or one’s powerbrokers, beyond the immediate fashions of political or social shaping, beyond the satisfying of political egos or passions: it is this accountability that keeps a monarch honest and rooted in more than expediency or self-fulfilment.

And it is this accountability, rooted in and born out of a conviction of need – of grace – that enables us to understand why the seventy-year reign of Queen Elizabeth matters so much. Whether we were conscious of it or not, her commitment to this humility of understanding and praxis has shaped and coloured our culture, our language and the assumptions underlying our gratitude for an honourable and peaceful polity.

Politicians might be driven by different factors and even Prime Ministers might be able to get away with poor behaviour, but our late Queen quietly and confidently held herself – and, therefore, the country – to a different standard of accountability. We all benefitted from this, whether we recognised it or not – whether we acknowledge the Christian roots of it or not.

The Apostle Paul, in our reading from Romans 14, puts it like this: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. … For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

This sense of grace and accountability – which I think goes to the heart of who the late Queen was and permeates the stories that have been replayed on loop since her death – must, as part of her legacy, speak to us in our own lives as we navigate ever-changing circumstances and pressures. Through the Covid pandemic we have learned – rather rudely in some cases – that we are not in control of everything; that life can change in an instant; that “anything can happen”; that we need to sort out what holds, roots and steers us through whatever the particular circumstances of our world and our lives.

The Queen was explicit about what this meant for her. This is what she said in a broadcast following her coronation on 2 June 1953:

“When I spoke to you last, at Christmas, I asked you all, whatever your religion, to pray for me on the day of my Coronation – to pray that God would give me wisdom and strength to carry out the promises that I should then be making. Throughout this memorable day I have been uplifted and sustained by the knowledge that your thoughts and prayers were with me. I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.”

Humility is strength.

And it is this faith that sustained her during the seven decades that she reigned in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.

Again, in 1992 in the wake of her children’s marital breakdowns and various scandals, she spoke openly of her ‘Annus Horribilis’, commenting that it was “not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.” But, she thanked those who had prayed for her and her family, referring to those “whose prayers – fervent, I hope, but not too frequent – have sustained me through all these years.”

At Christmas 2014 she boldly stated that “For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, whose birth we celebrate today, is an inspiration and an anchor in my life. A role model of reconciliation and forgiveness, he stretched out his hands in love, acceptance and healing. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people of whatever faith or none.”

In her Christmas address of 2016 she was even more explicit about her personal faith: “Billions of people now follow Christ’s teaching and find in him the guiding light for their lives. I am one of them because Christ’s example helps me to see the value of doing small things with great love, whoever does them and whatever they themselves believe.”

At the last covid-restricted inauguration of the General Synod for the next five years, the Queen was represented by Prince Edward who read her address. Commenting on the more than fifty years since she and her husband had attended the very first General Synod, she said this: “None of us can slow the passage of time; and while we often focus on all that has changed in the intervening years, much remains unchanged, including the Gospel of Christ and his teachings. The list of tasks facing that first General Synod may sound familiar to many of you — Christian education, Christian unity, the better distribution of the ordained ministry. … But one stands out supreme: ‘To bring the people of this country to the knowledge and the love of God.’“

Which brings us back to the point. Today, before her funeral tomorrow, we rightly give thanks for her faith and witness, for her commitment to democracy and the rule of law, for her discipline and selfless service, for her resilience and humour, for her love of God and his world.

As we watch events unfolding on the TV loop – even in Kazakhstan this week – we see played out the truth of Shakespeare’s observation in Henry V: “Let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children, and our sins, lay on the King.” Millions of people might project their hopes and fears, their fantasies and failures, their griefs and joys onto a monarch; but, we then need to go through these experiences to examine who we are and what fires our own commitments. That is a legacy worth honouring.

May our late Queen rest in peace and rise in glory.

God bless and save the King.

Amen.

 

Death of the Queen

This is the text of a brief article in yesterday’s Yorkshire Post.

The death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II changes the world. Not just the world of politics, people and the business of life as we know it, but the world inside us in which she has been a constant presence for (in my case) the whole of my life.

Having served for more than seventy years on the throne, we have clearly come to the end of an era. And this will have an impact – in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend or anticipate – not only on the United Kingdom, but also on the Commonwealth and the wider world beyond it. The response of countries and national leaders around the globe has been remarkable: honour, generosity, friendship and compassion. The late Queen has rightly been admired, respected, revered and loved.

At the heart of this love is her total commitment to duty and service. The world has changed radically since she ascended the throne, but by her constancy and commitment she has helped people navigate the complexity of change with confidence.

However, her own confidence and constancy did not emerge from some vague notion of public service as an end in itself. She was deeply rooted in the Christian faith, not because she had to be (it goes with the job), but because she believed and openly spoke about her discipleship of Jesus Christ. She was unafraid of mortality and trusted in the God who creates, sustains and loves us. She was not immune from personal suffering, but she was drawn by Christian hope rather than driven by fear.

So, we pray for the repose of her soul. We also pray for her family – especially her eldest son King Charles III as he, like she seventy years ago, ascends the throne in circumstances of personal grief. For her family she was not only the monarch, but also a mother, grandmother, friend.

We pray also for the world she impacted so powerfully (and will continue to do as we build her memory and inherit her legacy) – a world of fragility, conflict, uncertainty and fear. Further potential change looms on the horizon of the Commonwealth whose glue has been the Queen. The qualities she exemplified in life are needed more now in her absence than ever before: wisdom, historical perspective, constancy, faithfulness, clear commitment to values rooted in something deeper than mere expediency.

Every time the late Queen read her Speech in the House of Lords at the beginning of a new session of Parliament, she sat faced by the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. All their work is done in the name of the monarch. But, the monarch reads the speech in the name of God while looking up to see statues of the barons of Magna Carta between the windows of the chamber. In other words, even the Queen was fully aware of her own accountability in the exercise of her own power and responsibility. It is this sense of accountability, not to an idea but to the person of God, that underpinned the late Queen’s commitment of body, mind and spirit to service.

We will hear much in coming days about legacy. The most powerful response to this, if we take it seriously, is to ask ourselves how we might learn from the witness and example of the the late Queen. We need then to understand why and how her faith drove her commitments and priorities. It was this commitment that allowed her to create wide space for everyone – of all faiths and none – to be free and to thrive.

As we reflect in the past, we now say: Long live the King. God save the King.

 

Deep wells?

Lockdown is a challenge. But, for me it also allows space for some conversations that might usually get squeezed between meetings and then forgotten.

Yesterday I had two. Both ran around how the current situation impacts us now and might do in the future. My question (or one of them, at least) is this: when life and its routines are disrupted or taken away, which wells do we draw from to sustain life and meaning? While everything changes above the surface and the shape of the future is uncertain, can we locate the underground streams that keep flowing anyway?

There is probably a better way of putting this. But, in a really stimulating conversation with a BBC friend yesterday morning we were wondering if this crisis has revealed the shallowness of many of our cultural or personal wells. It’s a question, not a statement.

For me, as a Christian, the wells – the underground streams – go back a very long way. The creation narratives in Genesis speak of order being brought out of chaos. The Exodus has a people’s settled world being ruptured and them being driven out of the familiar into the strangeness of a desert where they had to lose before they could gain – to lament the loss of a world before being in a position to reorientate towards a different future in a different place. (It took forty years.) Later the people get exiled from the land of promise (twice, in fact – in the eighth and sixth centuries BC) and take time to live with their loss … before settling in the strange land … and then, generations later, having to leave again. They return ‘home’, but discover that home is no longer what they remembered.

I could go on. The Christian tradition lives and feeds from these narratives of leaving and moving and settling only to be disrupted and moved again. And this experience is rooted in an acceptance of mortality and contingency and what goes with the freedom of living in a material world.

But, we don’t usually transition straight from one world to another. We have to stay with the loss, lamenting what has been lost, grieving for a world (or way of life) now gone. People will take a shorter or longer time to live with this. There will be anger, powerlessness and disorientation. And while this is going on some people will accept the new reality and start orientating towards creating a new world.

So, what are the narratives or assumptions that keep us nourished while all this goes on around and above us?

Christian faith does not assume a life (or world)of continuous security and familiarity. It is fed by scriptures that speak of transience, mortality, provisionality, interruption and leavings. But, they also whisper that the endings are always beginnings – the leavings open a door to arrivals that could not have been experienced otherwise. In other words, the loss can be seen as a gift – what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘newness after loss’.

So, as I have suggested to clergy in the Diocese of Leeds, we might be helped in articulating this by asking four questions: (a) what have I/we lost that we need to regain in the weeks and months ahead? (b) what have we lost that needs to remain lost – left behind in another country? (c) what have I/we gained that we need to retain in the future? (d) what have we gained recently that was useful for this season but needs to be lost if we are to move forward?

We might feel sometimes that we don’t have much to go on. The photo below is one I took on a visit to a farm in Gweru, Zimbabwe, back in 2007. During a drought and amid economic collapse, someone had planted a rose in arid ground and watered it each day. It was a prophetic challenge to the desert; it was an act of hope, of prophetic imagination. Today is not the end.

 

The journey continues …

Easter Monday. All sorted, then. We’ve had the glorious light of new life and the future is all bright.

Well, not quite. Like everything in life, the end is always just a new beginning. And the beginning will demand of us not some sort of relaxation into spiritual satisfaction, but a new engagement. The journey continues.

The text I always go to today is Luke’s account of the two friends of Jesus walking back from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus. They are still trying to work out what the whole Jesus experience was about. He wasn’t supposed to die – that doesn’t fit the theological or political template for ‘messiah’. Now, you can come to terms with the finitude of death – after all, it is an incontrovertibly factual phenomenon. But, how are we supposed to make sense of the reports that the dead man is now appearing to his friends again – the same, but different; recognisable, but strange. And those wound marks …

How to make sense of this? How to fit experience into a fixed theology or re-shape theology in order to account for real experience?

So, as they walk together – possibly a married couple – they try to work it out and get nowhere. Then a stranger comes from behind and joins them on their walk through the hills. But, instead of simply telling them how to make sense of it all (which would have saved a bit of time and proved his credentials), he asks them what they are talking about. They tell him: the weird stuff that has been going on in Jerusalem. “What stuff?” he asks. “Are you the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?” they ask. Jesus willing to sound ignorant, irrelevant, out of touch?

Jesus lets them tell their story in their terms. Only when they have framed it in their way – noting that it doesn’t compute – does Jesus offer to re-tell the story of God and his people in a way that re-describes both experience and theology.

Yet, it is only when they get to the couple’s home that they eventually recognise who their accompanier was. Yes, the penny dropped while they were breaking bread together; but, what they noted was that their hearts had been burning within them while they were listening to him ‘re-describe reality’ (in Brueggemann’s phrase) and frame the Scriptures afresh.

And us?

Today we are invited to walk – maybe for the first time – in the company of others who don’t quite ‘get it’, asking the real and powerful questions and trying together to work it all out. No just saying “This is the word of the Lord” as we so readily do in church, but, rather, a wrestling with the meaning of this stuff as if our life depended on it. Taking it (and Jesus) seriously by arguing with him and listening to him. Not just passing on as if he is theologically interesting so long as he demands no shaking up of me or my thinking.

The Church’s calendar takes from Easter on a journey of re-discovering this Jesus – rehearsing the story and trying to hear it afresh. It invites us to find someone else, read the story again together, argue the toss about what it all means, and see where it leads. (Which might be back to Jerusalem, but changed by what happened on the way to our Emmaus.)

That is the point of the church in the days to come.And we can do this on the phone, on Zoom, on FaceTime, or in any other medium. We can do it over the garden fence or across the balconies. We can do it any way we like.

We just need to take it seriously enough to do it. The journey starts with a single step.

 

Facing Jerusalem (Palm Sunday)

Palm Sunday. Normally Christians would be walking through the streets with a bemused donkey before beginning Holy Week in church. Not this year. This year we have the unwelcome and uninvited gift of stepping back and re-focusing on what Christian faith – rooted in this Jesus who enters Jerusalem with us friends – says to us while the church is being the church differently.

When Jesus turned his face towards Jerusalem he knew what might await him there. You don’t challenge religious authority or the military powers of the Roman Empire without considering the likely cost. Messiahs were popping up all over the place (see ‘The Life of Brian’) – all offering ultimate solutions to those who ‘believe’, but all ending up on crosses. Jesus was, like the Old Testament prophets, open-eyed about power and resistance and cost.

The trouble is that his friends don’t get it. They have invested their hopes in the Galilean carpenter being the best chance of messianic liberation. When the crowds come out and cheer, they think they are on to a winner. Jesus suspects differently. This always makes me recall Cromwell’s remark to Fairfax when riding through cheering crowds, that they would equally have shown up to see him hanged. Crowds are fickle; affections and convictions can be turned over in seconds; people who think acclaim has the final word are usually shortsighted.

I can only imagine the loneliness of Jesus – accompanied by friends who just don’t get what is going on here … in the words of the great Crowded House song, ‘Together Alone’. It is often harder to be lonely in a crowd when you see what no one else sees.

So, Jesus is alone in company. His friends don’t spot this aloneness and read the ‘now’ as the end. And the crowds will soon turn when the wind blows in a different direction.

Jesus is going to challenge power – social, political, military, religious – right at its heart. But, he is not going to do it in the way anyone might suppose. He will look feeble and ridiculous. He will look like he has lost the argument. The crowds – even some of his friends – will suspect he’ll has been a fraud all along. And Jesus knows they won’t even begin to understand all this until much, much later.

I think Palm Sunday opens up the space to re-think who Jesus is and what he is about. If I think he really is the messiah, then is this because he simply confirms to an image (an assumption?) of what messiahship looks like? Is it because I find it convenient to my theological preferences? Or am I as open as his friends ultimately needed to be to re-think, re-imagine, re-conceive what hope, freedom and commitment look like through the eyes of this Jesus?

Am I with the crowd – Jesus to offer quick entertainment and easy solutions; with his friends – hopeful, but stuck with a prejudice of what Jesus ought to be, do and say; or with Jesus himself – prepared to stare even my own convictions in the eye and examine them afresh under the silent gaze of the man heading toward a cross?

 

Fear and faith

This is the text of an article published in the excellent and impressive Yorkshire Post today.

There are some memories I try to forget. Anything involving Liverpool losing to a Manchester club, for example. But, there are others.

Years ago, when our children were young, we used to lead summer venture holidays for teenagers. We did this for years at a variety of locations in England. The final three years we took over a school near Alton Towers in the Midlands. Inevitably, we spent a day each time at the famous entertainment park, trying not to get too wet too early on the water rides. Then there was Oblivion. You got in a carriage and it very slowly climbed a very steep rail until it levelled out at the top. Then it stopped. You waited, trying not to look down several hundred feet. Then, it shunted forward and sent you plummeting almost vertically towards the ground.

I wouldn’t dare do it now.

It feels a bit like that in England in these strange times. Outside my window everything is quiet: no planes in the sky, no cars on the road, no children playing in the park. It feels like we are waiting for something to happen – for the promised escalation in deaths and casualties from the invisible virus that is sweeping the globe. It feels very uncomfortable. Waiting always does, especially when we know we have no control over what might happen next.

Well, this experience might seem strange to us; but, it is how most of the world’s population live every day. The difference is that we in the West have taken a rare sense of continuity and security for granted, and have been seduced into thinking that we can control our lives and destiny.

There are many reasons for this, but they are for another time and another medium. For now, we can simply recognise that what we are currently enduring will, if we’ll let it, strip away some of the false securities and illusions we have grown to assume. The current lockdown has removed some of our freedoms – of movement and association, for example – but it might also remove some of our fantasies of individual self-sufficiency. Enforced isolation will prove extremely challenging for many people as we seek to use technology and other creative measures for maintaining – indeed, building – social connection at a time of threat and fear.

For Christians this dual experience of both waiting and self-examining is (or ought to be) normal. We are now heading towards the end of Lent, a period of withdrawal, contemplation, fasting and prayer. At this time each year we strip back the ‘stuff’ that fills our life. We re-read the story of Jesus as he walks with his friends towards what turned out to be a cross. We try to live in the moment, not jumping ahead to Easter’s resurrection before we have lived with the uncertainty and not-knowing of the journey itself. We place ourselves alongside these people-like-us as they struggle with not knowing where they were headed. And, as we go, we dig beneath the veneers of our own self-sufficiency, rediscovering what is too quickly forgotten: that we are mortal; that we are interdependent; that we are not masters of the universe; that an acceptance of our mortality is the beginning of freedom.

Now, this might sound a bit ‘niche’. But, the forgotten disciplines of the Christian Church through more than two thousand years might actually offer us a perspective and a resource as we navigate our current uncharted waters. Identifying our propensity for selfishness might push us towards greater patience and generosity with others. Learning to wait for whatever is to come … might just help people gain some acceptance of not being in control of life. Learning to create order where the daily routine feels a bit loose … might just offer a better form of self-control.

This isn’t about mere piety for the sake of it. What I am suggesting is that the space in which we now find ourselves – unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome – is where we are. We either embrace and explore it, or we just hunker down resentfully and hope it passes.

Someone once said: when you are in the desert, don’t look for the flowers that grow in the fertile areas; look for the flowers that grow only in the desert. For, if you spend your energies looking for roses, you will be very upset and frustrated. There are some flowers that grow only in the desert – try re-focusing and look for them.

On a similar theme is a meditation by an Asian theologian called Kosuke Koyama who once wrote a book called ‘Three Mile-an-Hour God’. When we enter a desert, says Koyama, our first instinct is to get out as quickly as we can. But, we need to resist the temptation, learning instead how to live in the present moment and face the slowed-down truth about ourselves and the world. That is what Lent invites us to do.

It is clearly a truism to say that we live in strange times. We face an unprecedented challenge. Yet, we also have unprecedented means of building our communities and strengthening our bonds. Social media, foodbanks and support of NHS staff. Constant connection with isolated and vulnerable people – even those down our own street or in our own block whom we would normally pass in the street and hardly recognise. Our antennae can now be raised, our sensitivities sharpened.

Now is the time to turn fear into faith and hope into action.

 

A longer view

One of the challenges of Lent for Christians is to avoid confusing process with event.

That is a shorthand way of saying that the stories we read in the scriptures cover a period of time, and we need to try to live with the narrative, not conflate it.

So, for example, the people to whom Isaiah addressed his writings three thousand years ago did not know the middle or end of their story. Those who were warned that exile might well be coming (Isaiah 1-39) didn’t know what that exile would mean in reality. Which is probably why they went into denial and didn’t take the threat seriously. Those who went into exile in Babylon experienced existential (as well as physical and material) loss, but they would soon have to come to terms with a new reality. Nostalgia wouldn’t help, nor would wishful thinking.

But, they also had no idea how long exile would last. There was no template for how to live in the strange land, with its different routines, languages, expectations, limitations, and so on. Even the immediate future was uncharted territory. We know what happened over the following decades, but they didn’t. So, they had to work it out as they went along, never sure they were reading the times right or not.

Sounds familiar?

We need to use our imagination to dig beneath the text. If you were born at the beginning of exile, you might have some memory of ‘home’. But, if you had grown up into your mid-adulthood in exile, exile is normal. What then of the memory of a home you didn’t know? So, how do you live, but also how do you think about how you live?

The point is that we can read these texts today in our search for wisdom, and even be surprised by how contemporary the recorded experience is. Basically, human beings face the same questions in every age. Yes, we have to navigate the particular channels of today’s phenomena; but, we should not be so arrogant as to suppose we are unique or even original.

A reading of the ancient texts tells us that we always need to expand our concept of time. The exiles were in for the long haul. Generations might be born, live and die in exile. Their grandchildren and their grandchildren might know no other reality.

So, the question remains: does our confidence – our faith – lie in a set of personally positive circumstances or some equation for securing a future? Or does it lie in a conviction that transcends the immediate good or ill that being human necessarily brings us? In Christian terms, does my faith lie in a formula … or in the person of the God who takes a longer view and, as we will re-live at Easter,  defies death itself?

 

Hard times

The silence outside the house is a little unnerving. The birds clearly haven’t spotted the problem yet – they just keep tweeting. But, otherwise, here in Headingley, the skies are empty, the roads still and the stillness remarkable.

This morning I called a number of people to see how they are doing. All are in good spirits. But, we are only at the start of this mass experiment in dispersed togetherness. All the signs are that the lockdown will soon get tighter, but this means that we will all need to get more creative with how we relate and communicate.

Already there are some brilliant examples of how to do this – and the ability of people to find (or make) the funnies amid the misery is simply stunning. Twitter has come into its own.

The challenge for many people unused to limited company and social restriction will be how to establish some shape to each day – a routine that offers some order to an indeterminate future. For me this forced purdah means I shall spend longer in Morning and Evening Prayer each day. I will walk for exercise each day (without touching anyone out there, of course). I will study more, read more, and watch more films. I’ll also be on the phone and social media more, checking that vulnerable people and colleagues are OK.

I also intend to resume more regular posting on this blog than has been possible for several years. Radio scripts and journalism will still go up, but I’ll be offering more – possibly daily. We will be streaming some action/reflection stuff in Holy Week and Easter and I will also write. Provided there is something worth hearing, that is.

Christians read the Bible every day and some of us try to dig under the words to work out how these would have been heard by those to whom they were addressed. One of the themes that emerges time and again, but is easily missed when things are calm, is that of time. We cannot always control – and are never exempted from – what the world can throw at us; but we can learn to live faithfully through it all. Deserts, exiles, strangeness, loss, disorder and chaos: they are the experiences that gave rise to our scriptures as people tried to work out who God is, what life is for, and why we matter.

So, I guess we now enter an uninvited and unwelcome time of exile in which we have an opportunity to dig deep into ourselves and ask hard questions about life, the universe and everything. It might become a time of reorientation – like a hard retreat that compels is to face ourselves and the society we shape. As so many people suffer loss of loved ones, we will ask into which activities or relationships we invest our time and money; as so many lose jobs, homes or livelihood, we can decide if the economy exists for people or people for the economy.

Hard times, maybe; but, possibly times for renewal, too.

 

Book published

Today my new book is published by SPCK. Titled Freedom is Coming, it offers readings for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany based on Isaiah 40-55.

It is intended to make further sense of what Christmas is about and where Christian hope actually lies in a complex world.

 

Deal or no deal?

This is the text of a commissioned article published in the excellent Yorkshire Post yesterday:

A quick story.

A little boy sat in his room trying to write his Christmas letter. He wrote: “Dear Jesus, I have been a really good boy this last year, so please can I have a bike for Christmas?” He knew this was a bit of a fib, so, he threw it in the bin and tried again: “Dear Jesus, I have tried really hard this year and have mostly been a good boy; so, please can I have a bike for Christmas?” Again, he knew this was pushing it a bit; so, in the bin it went, and then he wrote: “OK, Jesus, I haven’t been great this year, but I can try harder next year, … if you give me a bike for Christmas.” Then he threw it in the bin and gave up. “I need some fresh air,” he thought, and went out for a short walk before trying again. As he went around the corner, he glanced inside a garden and saw a large Nativity set near a neighbour’s front door. He checked no one was watching, nipped in, grabbed Mary, and hid her under his coat. Then he ran home, went up to his room, got out his pencil and paper and wrote: “If you wanna see your mother again, gimme the bike!”

At a time in our nation’s history when all the talk is of ‘deals’, it might be salutary to realise that deals are not everything. Christmas tells us that we can’t bargain with God and there are no deals to be done.

Does this sound a bit odd? Well, it should do. We now seem to live in a culture that values economics, money and trade above all else. Each time I ask (in the House of Lords, for instance) for whom the economy exists, I get blank looks. That the economy exists for the sake of people – and not vice versa – seems counter-cultural these days. Not everybody welcomes the question: what is the vision that Brexit is supposed to fulfil, and how do we quantify ‘the national interest’?

Christmas has something powerful to say to us as individuals – yes; but, it also challenges our social assumptions and rhetoric. Christmas says that people matter more than money, generosity more than the grasping of rights, love more than competition for advantage. Christmas whispers to an unsuspecting world that God comes into the ordinary and makes it extraordinary – not waiting until the world and our lives are all sorted, but coming among us as one of us and not open to bargaining, deal-making or competing.

This is why Christmas creeps up on us once a year, inviting us to put aside the truth claims of politicians, the power claims of those who have lost sight of dignity and social order, the pompous pretensions of those for whom status is everything. The baby of Bethlehem is born to parents whose relationship is socially questionable; born in obscurity in territory occupied by a military power; born to be hunted by a king and sent into exile for his own protection. A refugee as a toddler, he will lose his father by the age of 12, leave his family by 30, and be dead within two or three years.

And this is where the no-deals come in. The people who would respond to Jesus were those who knew they had no pretensions to uphold – that God comes to them anyway. And to those who assume that God is distant, standing remote from the muckiness of the world and keeping himself clean, Christmas says that God plunges into the heart of the real world – right into the places where the pain is most acute and life most bewildering or challenging. When I pray, this is a God who knows where I am and we are.

So, I will sing the carols of God’s free offering of himself in love to a complicated and sometimes brutal world. And I will still feel a little unease when the organ strikes up with Adeste Fideles and its glorious descants: I still think we should be singing “O come, all ye faithless”. For Christmas is the opening of God’s arms – and, therefore, of the arms of those who bear his name and claim faith in him – to a world that hasn’t asked for him, but longs for liberation and healing and redemption. No deals. No bargains. No competition. Just grace, mercy, generosity and the possibility of a new start and a different way.

Fantasy? Nonsense? Or a message that dares us to think again about who we want to be and how we want our society to be shaped?

Christmas can be sidelined into some religious compartment that we drag out once a year but keep tamed and away from real life. We can keep it as a remote and other-worldly fairy story … or we can dig deeper into the familiar story and ask what the God behind this story offers to people everywhere. For myself, I will consider again the response that Christmas – God surprising earth with heaven – invites from me: to follow the Jesus of the gospels, wherever this leads, whatever it costs, and however it challenges my assumptions about the way the world is.