Something for Sunday

Just imagine! You are in that special place set apart for prayer, for thought, for the hearing of God’s word and for teaching. A reassuring place? Yes indeed. But perhaps at the same time frustrating. Could anything really new happen here? Couldn’t we hear a new teaching?

So the congregation in the synagogue at Capernaum might have felt. But on this day they are in for a surprise. Without warning a new preacher enters the gathering and begins to teach. And the teaching has a freshness and authority about it instead of the platitudes and rehash of commentaries they have been used to. They may well have been astonished and excited. What will he say next? What will he do next? But others will have been fearful notably the scribes and other established preachers on the plan who find a voice in the demon possessed man.

What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are the holy one of God. 

This is a moment to savour. Yes this is indeed the Holy one of God. He will turn the world upside down.

Jesus of Nazareth is a radical indeed a revolutionary figure. Christianity is a revolution in the world’s affairs and the revolution begins here! Pagan religions had worshipped power –Christians worship love personified, pagan religions had affirmed the self – Christianity points to a love that will transcend the self. To worship the God of love is to go with the grain of the universe as God has made it. This is indeed a new teaching.

A revolution. Is it though? Perhaps not so much as one might imagine. For our engagement with Judaism shows us how much Jesus stands within a tradition passed down to him and to us. Nevertheless to the congregation in Capernaum it felt like a new teaching-a radical new moment. And that’s how it needs to feel to us – new teaching – a new departure. 

What then is all this to us in our time and place? Just recently I have been watching episodes of the Crown on Netflix. The deadweight of tradition and custom seems to crush the characters especially the Queen, her advisors and the Bishops of the Church of England. The personality of the former King Edward VIII is presented to us as everything that should be avoided. One of the worst things that is said of him is that he stopped going to Church. Shock! Horror! As I have said Christianity is a revolutionary factor in the world’s affairs but the revolution is still incomplete. There is always a tendency for the practice of the faith to slide back into a kind of ritual practice of traditional practices and the affirmation of socially conservative habits.

One of the few good things about the pandemic is that it has forced us to confront and change our church going habits. A re-set or a re-boot is often a good thing. Or as St John’s gospel reminds us; we must be born again.

Now on the matter of demons let me tell you a story. When I was a minister in the North east I got to know and befriend my Anglican colleague in the village. Among his various gifts and graces he exercised the role of Diocesan exorcist. He was called in to exorcise both people and dwellings. People were grateful for his ministry and the devils would fear and fly at his approach. Even Methodist demons were overcome so you can see how gifted he was. I liked him and I admired his pastoral ministry. One day in a confessional mode he admitted that he didn’t believe in demons or unclean spirits but he offered his ministry of exorcism because he felt he was good at it and people seemed to like it.

This set me thinking-about the nature of belief and what integrity in ministry amounts to. And of course the question as to how we read passages like to-days gospel.

My friend thought he knew better than Jesus, the possessed man, the congregation in Capernaum and the author of St Mark’s gospel. To him the whole thing was obvious. The man in the synagogue was mentally ill, deluded shall we say and so what was needed was a therapeutic intervention, counselling, medication the ministry of the diocesan exorcist- one of those. (This is to judge the faith by the standards of the world whereas I believe that the world is under the judgement of the faith). The difficulty for me is that my friend’s view doesn’t take faith in Jesus seriously enough nor does it acknowledge the reality of evil in the world nor the existence of powers antagonistic to the gospel. So yes I believe in the demons. And what’s more in the name of Jesus I want to give them names and call them out.

Jesus came full of grace and truth that all who believe in him might have life in all its fullness, follow the way of love and know joy and peace. This is the promise but against this promise there are the powers that set out to kill him and silence him forever. These powers, OK let’s call them demons, are still at work beguiling us with promises of power and affluence and encouraging us to live only for ourselves scorning the environmental degradation of the world and the exploitation of the weak. These demons are all around us. You know their names.

Here are some pictures showing their works and the signs of their power.

In our reading of St Mark this year we will follow Jesus as he passes among the oppressed and exploited people of Palestine exorcizing their demons and scourging their oppressors. Mark’s gospel is a story of conflict and struggle against the powers of darkness, for the powers of light. Those who follow Jesus will have tribulation indeed as the cultural critic Terry Eagleton reminds us: if you claim to follow Jesus and don’t end up dead you’ve got some explaining to do! Great line that!! But be of good cheer the dominant theme of the New Testament is victory. Thanks be to God writes St Paul who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Press the Button

One of the most valuable resources I have found on my computer has been the reset button! When everything freezes on the screen and nothing appears to work, I hit reset and all is well. If only we could do that with life.

It is possible that the consequences of this global pandemic will have lifelong implications. We are witnessing perhaps the dawning of a new age, in which the psychological, economic and spiritual aftermath has yet to be comprehended. The likelihood is we will continue to live with a Covid season each year, as we have learned to lived with the flu season.

While much of this is speculation, what is certain is that we find ourselves in a digital age. The Digital Age is simply the time period starting in the 1970s when the personal computer became available. In the 1980s, greater computer access combined with the internet in the 1990s facilitated the dramatic proliferation of digital devices. In the 2010s, the smartphone revolution essentially placed a supercomputer into the pockets of billions of human beings, creating a new social web and hyper-connected mobile technology. It’s also called the Information Age because the emerging computer technologies introduced the ability to collect and transfer information freely and rapidly.

I find it ironic that at he beginning of my ministry I was talking at a circuit event about the church needing to move from a community model to a network model, and here we are still having the same conversation. The big difference is that 25 years ago most people could ignore me. Now thanks to a pandemic and an ageing church membership profile, the emergence of a ‘Network Church’ is much harder to ignore. To be honest all that is happening is the move for one model to a new model of Church is just accelerating. In many ways we have been becoming a Network Church for a number of years. How many church members reading this will on a normal Sunday drive past a Methodist Church to attend the church they chose. We have expanded the geographical space of our churches and now in the digital age, we must consider a new kind of space.

This “cyberspace” is an expression of the nodes, hubs and flows of the network. In other words, the digital space of bits and bytes is the result of the machinic infrastructure of servers and routers, boxes and wires, cables and satellites, of the network society. 

So, in the same way that cities provided opportunity for encounter in physical space, the digital ecosystem facilitates distanced contact in the space of flows. A city is a built environment that both facilitates and limits the movement of people through a space. The web is similar to a city — it is a digitally built environment that facilitates and limits the movement of people through a virtual ecosystem. Connections, passions and relationships are formed in the built environment of a city and are equally facilitated with others in cyberscape.

This has given us an appreciation for technological advances and personal connections. For instance, how many grandparents have experienced their grandchildren’s “firsts” through Zoom? How many of us have celebrated a friend’s birthday party via Skype? Even if you claim to have never done this how many people us a bank card rather than cash to pay for your shopping?

“Virtual reality” is not virtual as in not real, it is real virtuality. Just ask any church that had to survive 2020 by going digital if their online worship, sermons, prayers and donations were real or not. In some way we are all citizens of this new age, but COVID-19 made us more aware of this truth. 

In the Fresh Expressions movement, we have prayerfully sought to discover ways to form church with people who don’t go to church in this emerging social milieu. 

Many of us are rushing to put 2020 behind us and venture optimistically into 2021, but what have we learned that might help us thrive? The saddest tragedy of all could be that we waste this moment of reset. 

We had all hoped things would go “back to normal” but find ourselves in a new normal. 

Both digital natives and digital immigrants alike are familiar with video games. Many of us have experienced a time when our system froze up or got stuck in a loop. Whenever that anxiety inducing moment occurred — whether we grew up on Pong, Super Mario Brothers or Fortnite — when all else failed… we hit the reset button! 

This is also an approach we employ frequently with the plethora of our digital tools. When our laptop overheats, our PC crashes, or our phone is glitching… we turn it off and turn it back on. When our devices become bogged down with cookies, are maxed with data, or contract viruses the manual reset is a built-in mechanism to optimize and make the system work again.

The church has become bogged down, loaded with unnecessary clutter and infected with many viruses. The virus of imperialism, racism, classism, consumerism, sexism, homophobia and so on. The British church has been in a state of plummeting decline for over 50 years. We have needed a reset for a long time. 

The future of the church in the West is not analog, nor is it digital, it is hybridity… a blended ecology of analog, digital and hybrid expressions of church for a post-Christendom world. 

A central but radical idea for the future church is that –

Any Christian with internet access and a device can be a missionary in the Digital Age. 

Furthermore, evangelism, discipleship and church planting should not be programs, departments or the expertise of specialists. They are a single move of the Spirit that flows through the life of every Jesus follower. When we do this in community with others, we are the fullness of the “priesthood of all believers” (1 Peter 2:5-9). On the digital frontier, the playing field has been leveled. Every believer can play a part in God’s ever-expanding kingdom.

God bless,

Alan.

Epiphany: Love casts out fear!

As a season Epiphany doesn’t get much of a “look in” in Methodist Churches because it tends to be pushed aside to make way for Covenant Services. I have many more sermons in my files for Covenant Sunday than I do for Epiphany. This is a pity so I was pleased in one of my churches to be able to move Covenant Sunday to September to mark the beginning of the Methodist year and what used to be called the “winters work.”

Just this week I read an American article by a University theologian who set out to link Epiphany with the Covid -19 pandemic in a most imaginative way. Allow me to share with you some of his reflections.

The magicians or astrologers in Matthew’s story had a vocation. It was to gain control over the human and celestial worlds in order to assure a blessed destiny for human beings through wrestling control from the hostile evil powers. To control the elemental spirits of the universe and the laws of matter which ultimately they thought governed the world was their craft. They were the scientists of their age and they worked alongside the pagan priests of the time to bend reality to the will of humanity.

In the story the magi or the wise men follow the star that puts an end to astrology and magic. They encounter Jesus and they fall down and worship him. They have discovered that life is not simply a product of impersonal laws and the random movements of matter because at the heart of everything there is a personal will, a good Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as love. Love it is, as the great Italian poet Dante wrote, which moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.

In the loving purposes of God magic, astrology and the techno-scientific apparatus we engage with so as to control the universe are unnecessary. Through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things. In him all things came into being and in him all things hold together and it is in him that we live and move and have our being.  

During the past year we have seen a desperate search for magic bullets: the NHS app: remember that!, the find, test, trace, isolate and support system which never seemed to work, the lockdowns and now the jabs that will set us free!!. Now I will be glad to receive the jab and I have tried to observe the rules as closely as possible. But a route back to the world as it was before may not be open to us and perhaps that is a good thing for we need to build back better.

The Church has a very special vocation here. It is to proclaim that it is love rather than magic or science that is ultimately the key to life and that the universe is the work of a loving God. We should remember that as Isaiah wrote: Truly the Lord has born our infirmities, and he has carried our sorrows.

Covid-19 is a scary thing but we should remember that perfect love casts out fear. God loves us and he is not angry with us nor has he sent the virus to punish us. What he has done is enter our life. He has become as we are that we might become as he is. He is love and he calls us to embrace the love that is at the heart of the universe. That will involve repentance for we have used and abused his love and our actions have wasted much of his creation and now we are facing the price of our prodigality.

And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:

Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.

And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Sisters and brothers that’s our vocation too!

Church and Crown

One of the big hits for Netflix, the television streaming service, has been ‘The Crown’. It is beautiful, compelling and emotional programming — drama well crafted, stories well told, and above all, it is a visual feast.

The disorienting quality of the series is that it is no documentary. While creator Peter Morgan says that the show has been thoroughly researched and is true in spirit, each episode so seamlessly intermingles what is known with what is imagined that any viewer may have difficulty deciding what is fact and what is fiction.

Did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher say that to Her Majesty the queen in their weekly audience? Did Princess Diana really roller-skate around the palace because she was lonely and bored? Is Prince Philip always in such a foul mood?

The vision for ‘The Crown’ is of an institution that leads almost exclusively by looking backward. Royal duty is portrayed as synonymous with preserving inviolate continuity with the past. Decisions in the Buckingham Palace of the series are framed by cautions like, “Remember your great-grandmother Queen Mary” or, “What would your father have done?” In the series we see Prince Philip trying to modernise the way the palace works , constantly battling with courtiers from King George VI’ s day whom he refers to as ‘the moustaches’. Watching this I am reminded of every church committee that has ever protested, “But we have never done it that way before.”

The Christian commentator Gregory L Jones once wrote “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living,”. Not on religious matters alone but in almost everything. Yet, despite the portrayal of the battles within the British court, Queen Elizabeth has done much to advance the monarchy from a medieval institution to a more modern one while simultaneously preserving what is at its heart. History with adaptation. Tradition with responsible innovation. This pattern of change and development should be true for the church. Church leadership inevitably involves the stewardship of tradition as well as enabling the church to change and respond to situations our forbears could have never conceived of.

Our churches are not ahistorical organisations, we must find our place in a polyphonic tradition that reaches back in history before there were royals in England, before England was England, (and Scotland was Scotland, and Wales was Wales, before somebody comments!)

That past informs our future, but what matters is how we allow it to do so. We cannot lament what lies ahead of us in hopes of returning to the past or perpetuating it perfectly; this is the Christian problem with nostalgia. Instead, we must reckon with the past, retrieving from it the best and lamenting in it the worst, all for the sake of God’s future.

2021 has started with as many challenges as 2020 gave us our response is vital for the future life of the church how do we adapt and innovate whilst maintaining the heart of our Methodist tradition? (And there are two more series of ‘The Crown’ still to come!)

God bless and stay safe,

Alan

Insights from my Aunt

During our various lockdowns I have been enjoying Family Zoom sessions with relatives in New Zealand. These meetings require some prior negotiation because of the time difference but we manage it. It has become evident to us that New Zealand has managed things well. They locked down hard at first and they imposed strict quarantine measures. Consequently they have had only 25 deaths and only this week I was able to admire my cousin’s holiday photos following her week long trip to the Mount Cook national park.

There has been a tendency in my own thinking, to offer seasons for New Zealand’s success. Namely that it’s a long way away, that there are only a few ports of entry and that the population is quite low whereas the UK is densely populated. But they did rise to the challenge, they locked down hard and early and imposed strict quarantine controls at the borders. The New Zealand Government inspired confidence led by the beautiful and charismatic Jacinda Ardern and so on and so forth. If only etc., etc. Yes New Zealand has done well. I have even bought masks from a New Zealand supplier.

But there’s another consideration which I hadn’t thought about until my Aunt offered a reflection about recent events and compared this pandemic with that of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918/19. This hit New Zealand hard and according to my Aunt decimated the population. That I think is probably an exaggeration but there’s no doubt that it was a serious crisis for New Zealand. There was a response in the form of a Royal Commission and new public health legislation. What however my Aunt’s comments reveal is that it created a powerful folk memory and a resolve to address such crises more effectively next time. That is to say this time.

In our country there is no similar folk memory of the Spanish flu pandemic. Our folk memories of 1918 are associated with the armistice of November 11^th 1918 and victory over Germany. Nevertheless the pandemic cost many more lives than the world war. When we see pictures of rejoicing crowds on November 11^th we do not think as perhaps we should that these people are failing to observe a proper social distance.

Among the fatalities of the flu were the following:

Max Weber German sociologist

Frederick Trump (Donald Trump’s grandfather)

Gustav Klimt Austrian painter

Alfred Hindmarsh New Zealand Labour Party leader

Among the sufferers and survivors were the following:

Walt Disney

Mahatma Gandhi

Franklin D Roosevelt

Woodrow Wilson

David Lloyd George

Franz Kafka

Raymond Chandler

I have a book on my personal shelves entitled “1918”. Although this is a military history of the year there is no reference to the flu pandemic in over 500 pages despite the fact that it is believed to have begun in an American Army camp.

These reflections are important for they raise questions about what we chose to remember and what we chose to forget, what occasions are to be remembered with thanksgiving and what other occasions are to be remembered with repentance. There is a great deal in our past as Churches, nations and individuals that we should remember with repentance.

When the pandemic crisis is over we should come together once again with joy and give thanks for our deliverance. At the same time however we need to repent and repair our relationship with God and His creation. This pandemic occurred because of “spillover” by viruses into the human population occasioned by our careless abuse of the environment that God has gifted. We must acknowledge all that has been amiss, resolve to build back better and not simply return to normal.  

Collective guilt is not something we find easy to accept since we regard sin as a personal and individual failure. This is a mistake on our part and is contrary to the witness of scripture. Coming to terms with collective guilt is a valuable therapy for nations and leads to renewed healing and wholeness-just ask the Germans!

Plagues Past and Present

One of the best things about reading history is that it lifts you above what others have called the narcissism of the present. This is the foolish idea that our times are completely unprecedented and that we have nothing to learn from the wisdom and the follies of the past.

Two books in the past year have offered a corrective to this point of view. The first is “Epidemics and Society” by Frank Snowden. Written before the present pandemic which is nevertheless referred to in in a revised introduction it describes the history of humankind’s relationship with infectious disease and gives an account of the pandemics of the past. How lucky we were to escape a pandemic for so long! We had this one coming our way for some time and pandemics can be much more serious than this one. Think smallpox, Ebola virus and bubonic plague.

The other is “The Fate of Rome” by Kyle Harper. Harper is a professor of classics and ancient history in the USA. Most of us are dimly aware that the Roman Empire can be said to have fallen. Some of us know that pandemic disease gave the Empire a series of shocks. There seem to have been three main ones: the Antonine Plague of 165-6, the plague of St Cyprian in 264-6 so called because Cyprian Bishop of Carthage wrote a detailed description of it and the plague of Justinian which raged across the Mediterranean world in the sixth century and of which there are many reports. These diseases had a devastating effect on population numbers. In addition the Empire had to face the effects of climate change-not anthropogenic climate change to be sure- but none the less devastating for the strength and welfare of the Empire and its inhabitants. These findings have been resourced by a new science: bio-archaeology. The Roman Empire was not a blessing for the health of its inhabitants. To the question: What have the Romans ever done for us?-the answer might well have been: got us sick.

From my perspective particular interest attaches to the response of the Church in worship teaching and service. In the case of the plague of the third century Christians were initially blamed and persecution intensified. But the response of Christians in caring for one another and for strangers strengthened the Church and showed up the uselessness of the pagan gods. Preaching both at this time and later became darker with an especial emphasis on judgement and the end times. By the time of the plague of Justinian Christianity was the official faith of the Empire.

Against this plague the Church mobilised all its resources. There was special preaching, new Biblical commentaries were written and prayer walks across the city of Rome were held led by the Bishop-Gregory-known to history as St Gregory the Great. Gregory’s writings on pastoral ministry can still be read with profit today. An important theme of Gregory’s preaching was judgement and a belief in impending judgement is an impetus to action. So Gregory was inspired to initiate a mission to the savage Anglo-Saxons a mission which sadly remains incomplete to this day.  Special days of prayer were decreed for the Christian calendar by the Emperor’s command.

One of the most famous icons which led the processions –an icon of Mary devoted to the health of the Roman people can still be seen in in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. It would be interesting to know whether it’s been brought out as an aid to intercessory prayer during the present pandemic.

So far during this pandemic the Churches response has been disappointing. The leadership seems unable to speak prophetically and their prayers are sometimes half hearted. The theme of judgement and repentance is scarcely ever mentioned and yet the scientists know that behind the pandemic and the climate crisis lies environmental degradation driven by greed. The later Romans were taught by their Church to repent of their greed, inequality and waste. Why is our Church so timid and so silent?