And much cattle . . . In memoriam John Davies.

The main subject of this address, which I shall get to in a moment, is the fulfillment of a long overdue promise. It is, alas, as you will hear, now eternally overdue.

Three weeks ago my Old Testament and Hebrew tutor at Oxford, Father John Davies, died and two weeks ago I read from Ecclesiastes at his Requiem Mass in Oxford - the primary text through which he taught me Hebrew. He instilled in me both a great love and respect for the Old Testament and his way of tying in its stories and lessons to life, real life, made us friends too. Not surprisingly his death and the unexpected honour of reading a lesson at his funeral has led me to think about the years he was my tutor.

Although I was at Harris Manchester College my first year of lectures and seminars in Biblical studies was held at the Anglo-Catholic seminary St Stephen's House - popularly known as Staggers. I went there for the following two years my New Testament Studies and Christian Ethics. They were, in their own way, sublimely and, occasionally, dysfunctionally mad but in my continuing study of the OT with Father John my second and third years took on an genuinely eccentric and old-fashioned Oxford flavour. I used to walk to from college, down St Aldates by Tom Tower at Christ's and then on to the Abingdon Road and out to New Hinksey where, next to the parish church of St John the Evangelist was Father John's rectory. There, at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday in the main dining room at the back of the house we would sit down at the table with a Hebrew Bible, the enormous, but utterly indispensable, Hebrew lexicon by Brown, Driver and Briggs and St John the cat who liked to curl up on the table by us. There we would read through the text and, every once in a while, glance through the window over the lake in the old quarry to the fields and ridge beyond. This view was the scene of Arnold's famous poem 'The Scholar Gypsy' (of c. 1854). At my first lesson, Father John pointed to the ridge and recited from memory:


'And once, in winter, on the causeway chill 
Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,
Have I not passed thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,
Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou hast climbed the hill
And gained the white brow of the Cumnor range,
Turned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall - 
Then sought thy home in some sequestered grange.' 

Later that Michaelmas term as I walked to New Hinksey for my lesson it began to snow and, ahead of me, I saw the ridge with its wintry face - perfect.

At mid-day, the lesson always ended with what became part of my weekly liturgy. Father John would close the Hebrew bible, rise creakily from his chair and say to me 'A gin and aspirin dear boy?' I only ever replied 'yes' and after a little more conversation would, at 12.30, would begin to make my way contentedly, but rather unsteadily, back to college for lunch.

During one lesson - for what reason I cannot now remember, Father John decided we would take a look at the end of the book of Jonah. You will, I'm sure, remember that at the very end of the story God decides not to destroy Nineveh - the city Jonah had been asked by God to warn to change their ways or face destruction. The city heeded Jonah's warning. Good n'est pas? Well not for Jonah because such a turn about is bad news for a prophet - you predict armageddon and God chooses instead mercy and compassion; man, it just makes you look like a rubbish prophet. So Jonah goes off to the east of the city in the mother of all huffs and builds there a little shelter to sulk. Seeing this tantrum God at first helps Jonah by causing a gourd bush to grow up beside him offering him additional shade from the burning sun. Jonah was very happy about this. But, next morning, God put a worm into the gourd and, when the sun came up, the bush withered. At the same time God prepared 'a vehement east wind' and this, along with the burning sun, caused Jonah to faint. On regaining consciousness for a moment Jonah expresses a wish to die saying '[It is] better for me to die than to live.' Then God said to Jonah:


Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, [even] unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and [also] much cattle? (Jonah 4:9-11)

It's a wonderful conclusion to a wonderful book and Father John excitedly turned to me and said, "Now what do you think is meant by those last words UBEHEMAH RABBAH" ("and much cattle")? Before I got a chance to answer, Father John closed the Bible, rose from his chair, uttered the magic words, 'A gin and aspirin dear boy?' and disappeared into the kitchen. When he came back with the appropriate aqua vitae he said, 'Dear boy, why not write a little sermonette someday on the text when you're out there in the sticks?' I promised him I would. I never did, until now that is.

-o0o-

Many of us can, today, no longer believe in the reality of a certain kind of God; the literal reality, that is, of an actually existing supernatural being who transcends us utterly and who intervenes providentially in our world - saving cities and destroying gourds though, mostly, vice versa. The God of whom Jonah speaks is simply no longer our God. As James C. Edwards notes, as a culture we have inexorably traveled a journey of faith that has moved us from such a literal conception of a providential God through to a Platonic idealism in which ultimate reality became that of the ideal forms, Plato's great contribution to western thought. From there we moved, again inexorably, on to the skeptical thought of Descartes who replaced the ideal forms as the basis of reality with 'cogito ergo sum' - i.e. the only reality we could know for sure was, not God, not the ideal forms but only ourselves as 'thinking things'. The gods and the Forms 'pass[ed] into being mere representations upon the ground of ego-consciousness' . Then, after Nietzsche, we (in western Europe and North America at least) entered a time in which we came to see that our own views of the world as an individual 'thinking thing' was not some accurate, ultimately trustworthy mirror-image (impression) of reality itself but, instead, a creation of our own will (to power). Consequently we have been left, not with 'indubitably true beliefs' but values. What is often more disturbing is that our values can be seen to be in competition with other values that contradict our own (cf. James C. Edwards in chapter one of his 'The Plain Sense of Things').

Charles Taylor (the Canadian philosopher and practicing Roman Catholic) in his recent book 'A Secular Age' (Harvard University Press 2007) tells us what he thinks is 'typical of the modern condition':

'We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and anxiety' (p. 11).

Both Father John and I, in our own ways, often talked to each other about this condition of doubt and anxiety because it was - and is - a condition that seems to preclude saying anything usefully definitive about what on earth UBEHEMAH RABBAH means.

But, putting this problem aside for a moment today's sermonette could be unfolded in a dozen directions. Here are just the headlines of two of them - those I might write if I were merely in my default sermon writing mode:

Given my own thought through philosophical position on this matter, I would first make it clear that I interpret what the word 'God' means in a Spinozistic way and would go on to point out that we can, therefore, take UBEHEMAH RABBAH to be an insight into how such a God includes in 'his' purview all creatures, not just humans. Given this view of God I might also preach an associated sermonette which argues that the words UBEHEMAH RABBAH begin to point away from a human-centric view of the world to a more wholistic view which includes and intrinsically values all things. I would use the text to promote a generally pan(en)theistic interpretation of Christianity that owes more to the thought of Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietszche and Wittgenstein than it does to any 'proper' orthodox Christian theology. It is, of course, what I always do and, since many of you attend regularly, presumably you continue to come because this more or less resonates with your own views about the world. In doing this I am explicit in claiming that this way of understanding Christianity is at least as equally and, in many cases actually more, fruitful than other ways of interpreting the Christian tradition.

But - and this is what I REALLY want to say today - what I might have said in any of these imagined sermonettes on UBEHEMAH RABBAH can no longer, and perhaps for us never can again, have the status of 'indubitably true beliefs' - they can only be expressions of my and I hope our values which have been shaped by the spiritual and intellectual journey I outlined earlier.

This is a vital point to understand.

It turns out that Father John's question to me "Now what do you think is meant by those last words UBEHEMAH RABBAH?" cannot be answered in the way he and I, and our respective traditions, once thought it could. To pretend otherwise is to retreat into utter delusion. Today I have not pulled or disguised this in any way and this is because I want to point clearly to our generation's hardest religious challenge - and therefore this church's hardest challenge - namely, how to be meaningfully religious (and in my/our case Christian) in an age, to quote James C. Edwards again, in which the traditional 'claims to truth [have] slacken[ed] their grip.' My whole work as you minister week by week is to try and figure out a workable answer to that challenge.

I'm not sure if this sermonette is precisely what Father John had in mind when he asked me to preach on 'and much cattle' - it may have sent him off in search of an early gin and tonic - but it is the only one I could muster today.

I shall miss him as I shall miss his critique of these words. Requiescat in pace.

Living stones or dead stones - Remembrance Sunday

The address was preceded with a story I have used many times before and is taken from 'Life is a Miracle' by Wendell Berry (2000, Washington DC, Counterpoint Press pp. 151-152)

My grandson, who is four years old, is now following his father and me over some of the same countryside that I followed my father and grandfather over. When his time comes, my grandson will choose as he must, but so far all of us have been farmers. I know from my grandfather that when he was a child he too followed his father in this way, hearing and seeing, not knowing yet that the most essential part of his education had begun. And so in this familiar spectacle of a small boy tagging along behind his father across the fields, we are part of a long procession, five generations of which I have seen, issuing out of generations lost to memory, going back, for all I now, across previous landscapes and the whole history of farming. Who knows the meaning, the cultural significance, and the practical value of this rural family’s generational procession across its native landscape? The answer is not so simple as the question: No one person ever will know all the answer. My grandson certainly does not know it. And my son does not, though he has positioned himself to learn some of it, should he be so blessed. I am the one who (to some extent) knows, though I know also that I cannot tell it to anyone living. I am in the middle now between my grandfather and my father, who are alive in my memory, and my son and my grandson, who are alive in my sight. If my son, after thirty more years have passed, has the good pleasure of seeing his own child and grandchild in that procession, then he will know something like what I now know. This living procession through time and place is the record by which such knowledge survives and is conveyed. When the procession ends, so does the knowledge 

-o0o-

In his sixty-fifth sonnet Shakespeare asks what possible chance of survival has beauty 'whose action is no stronger than a flower' when even rocks and steel are, by time, decayed. His answer is none unless 'in black ink my love may still shine bright' - in other words for him it survives in poetry.


Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

David West - in his wonderful but, alas, now out of print book on 'The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius' - saw that poetry, monuments and flowers also come together in Lucretius' refutation of the idea that there were great wars before the Trojan war and that brave men lived before Agamemnon:


'. . . if there has been no first birth-time for earth and heaven, and they have been always everlasting, why have the poets not also sung other things beyond the Theban War and the ruin of Troy? Into what place have so many deeds of men so often fallen, and nowhere flower implanted in eternal monuments of fame? But, as I think, the world is young and new, and it is not long since its beginning. (De Rerum Natura 5.324ff, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. by Martin Ferguson Smith, Harvard University Press, 1992)

West points to this text because he wants to draw our attention a particular word in the underlying latin text whose meaning, in translation, is often obscured. The word is 'insita' - which means grafted and West goes on to say:


'When men erect monuments they are grafting their deeds on to a durable stock, the eternal monuments of fame, in this case poetry. This is full of poetry, including the juxtaposition of stone and flower, the fragility of fame and flower, the seeming durability of monuments, the immortality of poetry, and man's elaborate operations to procure immortality for himself. All these pathetic [in the sense of evoking or expressing pity, sympathy] sensations and meditations are floating through the Shakespeare and the Lucretius, and in the Lucretius the literal force of the word 'insita' is essential to it all. It is because they were never grafted that the prepoetic achievements of man are not in flower but have fallen to the ground. The translators offer 'enshrined in glory', 'set glorious', 'gravées', and 'blühn sie nich fort'. This is murder' (pp. 2-3).

Drawing on West's insight my point today is simple - the things we, as individuals and as a culture wish (or need?) to remember will be always come to be forgotten when we try to enshrine them only in terms of external glory by, for instance, carving them in stone upon memorials. The only true and lasting memorials - the ones that have a real affect upon our culture are those which are engrafted in us as living people. True memory is a living thing and, like all living things it must be nurtured if it is to produce abundant fruits and flowers - fruits and flowers which in the case of Remembrance Sunday must surely be a deeper understanding of the human condition and the creation of a lasting, creative and perpetual peace.

As you know, I continually worry about the failure of contempoirary liberal democracies to get engaged, down and dirty in the world in the way more conservative religious and political ideologies seem to be able to do. I find that this is also often true with regard to remembering in the liberal democracies. It is simply not sufficient to devolve our remembrances to stone memorials that we visit once a year (if that). If our memory of the horrific wars is to become a truly transformative experience and so to bear real healthy and creative fruit we must endeavour to graft the memories onto our very being and the way by which human kind has best done this is through the remembered and oft rehearesed story or poem.

The phrase that 'in back ink my love may shine' is liable to be misunderstood unless you realise that the black ink in which Shakespeare wrote his poem is a poetic image itself and only an epiphenomenon of his actual composition of the poem out of the very stuff of his life - the beauty that he saw in another became in this transformative process his beauty and by extension - in so far as we make the poem part of us - we too can come to share that beauty. Memory is a living procession and, as the poet and theologian Wendell Berry noted, when the procession ends so too does the knowledge.

Although the language might, at first, be puzzling and off-putting (especially if you have been confused and hurt by overly literlistic and conservative forms of Christianity) what you are about to read (hear) is an early Christian author expressing this realisation and trying to encourage in his readers (hearers) an understanding of the importance of maintaining a community of memory and hope. Remember that here, like us today, they are remembering a particular human beauty (in this case Jesus), a violent death (his crucifixion) and the possibility that through this remembering they may share in a transformative process which can bring them all to a more abundant life (1 Peter 2:1-5):

'Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation - if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.'

Belonging to such a living procession of people is what counts - and we need to realise that our remembering will not work if the attempt to remember is made only through external things such as carved stone. That will wear away with time, However, as living stones belonging to such a living procession we truly remember and are, thereby, helped to learn and become transformed as a people. That is why our being here today together is so important. Here and now, the beauty (the best) that was in the hearts of all who have died in conflict can truly flower again amongst us - a people dedicated to cessation of war.

It is only insofar as this procession remains alive in us as living stones that we can ever truly say:


They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

ADDENDUM (Monday 9th November 2009)


Reviewing this address I realize that it could be thought I am, in truth, saying no more than that memory can only last as long as the human procession that nourished it. It is possible that such processions - even the longest lasting - will eventually come to an end. Indeed we may hazard a (reasonable) guess that what humankind has forgotten may infinitely 'outweigh' what has been remembered; in some respects (though not all) that this is so might be seen as a good thing.

Anyway, I certainly acknowledge that from a purely human perspective even the longest procession may be easily be conceived of as having an end.

However, at the back of my claim in this address is an intuition that when we talk about God in a Spinozistic way we find a way to articulate a rational conception of immortality, in other words, we can show the possibility of there being a truly immortal procession to which EVERYTHING belongs. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana summed up Spinoza's thought on this matter beautifully and I offer it to you again (for you'll find the ideas in this passage, in whole and in part, scattered throughout my writings):


To see things under the form of eternity is to see them in their historic and moral truth, not as they seemed when they passed, but as they remain when they are over. When a man’s life is over, it remains true that he has lived; it remains true that he has been one sort of man and not another. In the infinite mosaic of history that bit has its unfading and its perpetual function and effect. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him. And knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would; for when the moment of his life is over, the truth of his life remains. The fact of him is part forever in the infinite context of [existence.]

Anabaptist Prayer Books

Some readers of this blog will be aware that I wrote a liberal Christian prayer book with an American Unitarian minister called John Morgan. It is called Daybreak and Eventide (you can also get this book direct from the Unitarian Christian Association) and was influenced by prayer patterns developed by the Anabaptists. (You can download a section of it here). The early Unitarians (the Polish Brethren) being a unique mix of late Renaissance Italian humanism and ideas shared with many Anabaptists. In the Polish Brethren's case this mix resulted in the development of a sort of rational mysticism.

Anyway, in a recent search for prayer resources I stumbled across two recent Anabaptist volumes available in pdf form: Take Our Moments and Our Days: An Anabaptist Prayer Book, designed for Ordinary Time and a second volume entitled Advent through Pentecost which includes services for Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost.

I think they are both very good and worth looking at. A bound copy of the first volume can be obtained through Amazon. The second volume is, as yet, unpublished.

Another useful source of prayers and readings people might find helpful can be accessed by signing up to an email distribution list of Daily Texts from the Moravian Church.

Bowls not Pitchers: Limitation and True Human Freedom - a sermon based on George Kimmich Beech’s essay "The Covenant of Spiritual Freedom"

(All the quotes from George Kimmich Beach are taken from Walter P. Hertz, 'Redeeming Time', Skinner House Books, Boston, 1999, pp. 99-105)


The picture is of a pot made by one of my friends Jane Perryman who is married to my friend and colleague the jazz saxophonist and composer, Kevin Flanagan. 

-o0o-

INTRODUCTION

Over the past few weeks a number of people have asked me to offer again the following address - or at least the central substance of it - because it outlines in what is, for a modern liberal Christian minister (especially me!), a surprisingly straightforward and simple expression of what I think we are as a faith community. It is appropriate to give it today because today is Reformation Sunday. In churches from the Lutheran tradition and also the Reformed tradition (which is our own) it is celebrated on this Sunday because it is the one nearest to the 31 October, the date in 1517 upon which Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenburg thus sparking the Reformation. A Reformation in which, of course, our own Unitarian forebears played a major role. But, firstly, I think this address benefits from a brief introduction putting it into the context of the last three years. 


Some of my more complex and philosophically inclined addresses given during this time, particularly those relating to how I think we should be using religious language here i.e. a la Wittgenstein, have been designed to face up squarely to the many legitimate intellectual concerns thrown up by our modern very skeptical and secular age. Concerns that, again and again, I see stop many people from committing to any religious tradition - let alone our particular form of liberal Christianity.


Now I realise that some of you reading this don't have, and never have had, such concerns and objections, but my long enagement in the area of religion and its role in the public place has shown me that the kinds of people who might otherwise be attracted to the liberal religious project we are undertaking here do hold such objections. If we are going to grow and develop and have a chance of flourishing in the future as a contemporary and relevant expression of the Christian tradtion we have to make it clear at every opportunity what we are doing when we use Christian language. 


In a nutshell, as your minister, I'm trying to use it to 'show' something about how we might be fully alive and engaged in the world - I do not, I repeat, I do not use Christian language in a quasi-scientific way to promote a particular doctrinal theory about the world. I hope that the end result will be that we increasingly become a church that knows metaphorical religious language is exceptionally helpful and can show more clearly how to live than the quasi-scientific religious language used by conservative religious groups. This task is, alas, very hard to do but I make no apologies for attempting it. However, today I am in a simpler but, inevitably, more assertive mode. So, off we go. 

BOWLS NOT PITCHERS

One of the great truths of life is that true human freedom is not located in the freedom to do anything we want but, instead, in the ability to work and live fully and creatively within the necessary limitations of existence. We are only truly free when we come to understand that we are what we are who we are because of, and not in spite of, our limitations. Knowledge of this is genuinely liberating. I could point you to a central concern of Spinoza's, namely, his "intellectual love of God." But, today I'll refrain from that . . .

This insight applies, of course, not only to individuals but also to religious communities and it means that I can challenge a popular and dangerous myth that a liberal church such as this is a place where you can believe whatever you want.

Despite what many people think, to be in this liberal church is not to be free to believe whatever you like. No! there are certain clear and distinct limits to our confession. These limits exist because our Unitarian and Free Christian tradition has been in the making for just over four-hundred and fifty years and, over that time, it has developed a particular shape and purpose – a shape and purpose which, whilst it necessarily limits us in certain ways, also gives to those who adopt it a framework by which they may work towards true freedom. This doesn't rule out other ways of gaining freedom (whether Chritian or otherwise) but it is to say that we do have a basic religious shape that can help an individual develop a genuinely free and full life. It is that which we seek to offer week by week.

What it is that we offer is best introduced via a parable told by George Kimmich Beach, a contemporary Unitarian Christian theologian:

'. . . as a potter you form a lump of clay, you make many decisions, exercising your freedom both consciously and instinctively, to one end, a finished ceramic. [. . .] The original decision in pottery making is not unlike the original decision in faith: once a direction is set, soon it will be too late to change your mind. Choosing a bowl excludes a pitcher. Now choices are being made within an ever narrowing range; necessity is closing in on the maker. But this is the miracle of creation: a reversal is also in progress, for the embrace of necessity gives birth to a greater freedom. With each new choice, new, more refined choices arise; creative freedom I growing exponentially. [. . .] The perfect end to the exercise of freedom is perfect necessity. We think: This bowl, or this life, can only be what it must be!'

Key decisions were made by our forebears which were followed by those who came later and who made ever more refined choices and so, today, we are what we are, a particular Unitarian and Free Christian community. That is to be one kind of religious community and not another – in the language of the parable it is to be a bowl not a pitcher. In our four-and-a-half centuries long shaping certain key dimensions have defined our particular shape and they were drawn, primarily but not exclusively, from our normative text the Bible.

The first is a commitment to an insight and feeling that what we call 'God' somehow holds everything together - is, even, somehow meaningfully the whole of creation. As one of our eighteenth-century forebears, George de Benneville, said: 'The inner spirit makes us feel that behind every appearance of diversity there is an interdependent unity of all things.' It is this basic insight that caused us to be dubbed with the name of Unitarians. (In passing, but importantly, this doesn't definitively rule out a person holding Trinitarian understandings of God belong to our number because there are ways of understanding the Trinity that say something very similar to this).

The second is our continued commitment to the values of the prophets of ancient Israel, namely, justice faithfulness, steadfast love, mercy, truthfulness, goodwill and peace. This was summed up in the book attributed to the 6th century BCE prophet Micah (6:6,8):


'With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?'

The third is our continued commitment to and love of the person and teachings of Jesus as our central paradigm of how to respond as a human being to these prophetic values. A response which Jesus summed up in his call to love God and our to love neighbour like ourselves.

The fourth is our commitment to the use of reason in matters of religion. This we also found in the Biblical texts (mostly via St Paul) but it was amplified and clarified for us in our rediscovery during the Renaissance of the great thinkers of Greek and Roman antiquity and which was further developed and refined by us during the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Now I argure - very strongly - that everything else we do with our tradition – with this thing that is Unitarian and Free Christian tradition and not something else, which is a bowl and not a pitcher – THIS constitutes our freedom. But what we are NOT free to do is to abandon them. These commitments are what have constituted us as a distinct people and which have given us a coherent and practical framework to encourage in ourselves and others (even when they believe differently from us) the fullest possible human flourishing. Thesefour basic commitments are, of course, what drove all our social, political and inter-faith work and enabled us to say collectively that "we need to not think alike to love alike".

Reconnecting with these shaping forces and therefore our community's particular shape (as a bowl and not a pitcher) reminds us, a George Kimmich Beach notes, that we are 'heirs of a noble tradition of liberal concern for civic values, social justice, and peace'. Now the cry is often made by modern secularists and members of our own communities that this heritage is (now) wholly secular but, in truth, our tradition bears witness to the fact that this heritage is rooted in a theological affirmation, namely, 'the dignity and sanctity of every person as a bearer of the image of God.'

George Kimmich Beach goes on to say that:


'We must understand ourselves as engaged in [this] historic mission. We must believe that history is the story of freedom, agonized by the global struggle for justice. Or else our salt has lost its savour and may as well be cast out.'

Too many modern liberal churches are failing to understand this and are betraying the tradition by reducing 'freedom' to 'personal preference' and to a 'do your own thing' attitude. They are confusing 'liberal' with 'lax' and are adopting an ideology of freedom from shared obligations. Such a view is in danger of turning the liberal church into something that is no more than a refuge from 'orthodoxy' and no more than a club for 'our kind of people, a mono-culture of the like-minded.'

My task as your minister is to encourage us strongly to resist this kind of sloppy, ill-disciplined and lax religion. It is to encourage in us a desire continually to be affirming the profound values which makes us one kind of religious community and not another.

So, to conclude. If we find ourselves called (in any way) by the liberal tradition expressed here we are no longer be free to believe whatever we want. We are only free to believe 'what we must and to do what we must in order to fulfil our human vocation' - a vocation which is nothing less than a calling to help create a larger and more flourishing humanity.

To lightly paraphrase the great early nineteenth-century American Universalist Christian, John Murray, we must once again:

'Go out into the highways and byways of our world and give the people, blanketed with decaying and crumbling faiths and philosophies, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.'

The liberal sin of omission par excellence

A prolegomena 

I apologise but this will be a longish post because I need to preface Sunday's address - posted below - with something that came out of the conversation that follows immediately after I have given it and, then, in the hall over coffee and tea.

It was pointed out to me (correctly I think) that the reason right wing ideas (particularly as expressed by Nick Griffin and the British National Party - the BNP) seem to be gaining a foothold in the UK is because of the huge imbalance that now exists between the very powerful rich and the increasingly powerless poor. It's a growing group of people and one that, in the face of a lack of moral conviction and leadership from New Labour and the other mainstream parties, is inevitably leading people to consider the 'merits' of a group like the BNP.

The dreadful spectacle of someone like Fred Goodwin walking away from the mess that was RBS with a pension of £342,500pa (reduced from an initial £555,000pa) and an estimated £2.7m tax-free lump sum whilst regular workers are loosing their pensions to left and right and experiencing, if not pay freezes, then actual reductions in their wages, stuns one to silence and then begins to make one's blood boil. The continuing fact that those in financial industries (now supported by billions and billions of pounds of public money) are still claiming huge bonuses while the rest of the public continue to be squeezed financially in all kinds of ways beggars belief.

Am I angry - you bet your life.

But there is a problem. How do you get the (still) moderately comfortable middle classes to understand that there MUST be a radical shake up in our tax system to start re-balancing this situation whilst at the same time realising that this rebalancing is necessarily going to hit the pockets of many of them personally and that they have to take that hit? Very few are able to realise this must happen if we are going to secure the well-being of us all. So it should come as no surprise to see that most middle class folk prefer simply to hunker down and do nothing because they are not too badly affected at present and, anyway, maybe the bad times will eventually just pass away and we'll be back to 'normal' (a 'normal' which was about as abnormal and dysfunctional as you can imagine, but that's another story . . .). And so, in the meantime, the right slowly build their support amongst the disaffected, they win a seat here and there on a local council, they win a seat or two at the European elections, then they appear on television, then . . .. All the while the comfortable middle classes still do nothing, still hoping it will all pass.

My critical interlocutor - completely fairly - noted that THIS financial disparity between the rich and the poor is a major cause of the current mess we are in. It has to be dealt with. The criticism was that, in what follows, I was addressing a symptom rather than a cause. I partly agree but I also partly disagree because I am beginning to think that a tipping point has been reached and I still do not see the mainstream political parties acting on this need for fiscal and financial fairness in our society - the truth is that they are still in the pockets of the super-wealthy and are continuing to find ways to keep them that way whilst, at the same time, they are now looking to make cuts in the public sector, in both direct funding and wages.

If I am right and the mainstream political classes of this country are not going to act effectively on this matter then we can be assured that right-wing rhetoric will continue to persuade people to give its 'solutions' a go. Once those solutions start to gain ground and are begun to be implemented (even in minor ways) the people involved in them are no longer amenable to rational argument and those of us who want to challenge them cannot afford to think that our liberal rational counter arguments are going to be sufficient unto the day - the truth is that powerful cultural and socio-political forces will have come into play that can sweep unchecked across a society like a tsunami.

My address below - pessimistically - is predicated on thinking that we have in fact just inched into the arena of unreason - an arena liberals have traditionally failed to act well in. If we have moved into this realm then God help us. If we haven't, then maybe my 'false alarm' will at least have the practical consequence of giving those who read it an unpleasant foretaste of what might still happen if they don't get off their backsides and into the public sphere as activists committed to justice and fairness and the importance of genuine, reasoned public debate.

So, this is what I actually said on Sunday from the pulpit . . .

-o0o-

The liberal sin of omission par excellence

Early in the morning [Jesus] came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?" This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again." 
(John 8:2-11)

-o0o-

In this story, a free-floating fragment traditionally placed in the gospel of John at chapter 8, we see an outcome arrived through the collective use of reason. A group of people are gathered together all of whom in general terms value the 'Jewish law'. Importantly this could easily include 'the woman taken in the act of adultery' herself. Despite this common enabling stance, there are on display different interpretations of how this law should best be enacted. On the one hand, there is a view that it should be read at a rather literalistic level and that the woman should be stoned. On the other, we see a more wholistic approach which brings one part of the law to come into dialogue with another in order to allow what Jesus thinks is the combined overall weight of the law's intention to come into play - namely forgiveness.

As we look at the story we must not miss the fact that the 'scribes and Pharisees' desire to test Jesus but, again importantly, the test relates to how well and (therefore) how reasonably Jesus can interpret that same law. The test is not merely ad hoc and arbitrary and so, once again, we may note that the broad features (rules) of the game are agreed upon by the protagonists in this story. Jesus' human reasoning is what wins the day NOT Jesus' personality or presumed divine status.

Turning to the woman - it may be that she held a rather literalistic view of the law and so was doubly surprised by the outcome - a surprise which helped deepen her own desire to sin again no more. It may be that she believed, along with Jesus, that the law should not be followed literally and her desire not to sin again was simply deepened by the hope that Jesus could bring to the fore a more compassionate way of being Jewish than that showed by the scribes and Pharisees; she encountered a way of being Jewish that she could affirm. Of course, she may not have given a damn either way and gone off chuckling at the foolishness of the whole event. We don't know but that  doesn't matter for here we are not concerned with who is 'objectively' right or wrong - apart from the fact that I'm not sure this is an achievable aim, and anyway we simply don't have enough information about the proximate causes of this event; instead I simply wish to reiterate that we DO know that the proximate causes of this event were brought together within a group of people committed to working through the matter reasonably.

Also, unusually, we see a process illustrated that is vitally important to any reasoned debate, namely, thinking. In one of the most touching and human moments in the whole of the gospels we see him pause twice, once to give himself a chance to reflect on the matter in hand, once to allow his interlocutors to do likewise.

Now none of this means that any one of the protagonists cannot choose to kick over this particular board game and go rogue and start playing another game. In fact, because we know how the gospel story proceeds we can see that this is precisely what happens. In the gospel of John the dialogue about Barabbas is very long so I choose here to offer you the story as we have it in the gospel according to Luke:

-o0o-

Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, "You brought me this man as one who was perverting the people; and after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him; neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise him and release him." But they all cried out together, "Away with this man, and release to us Barab'bas" a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city, and for murder. Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus; but they shouted out, "Crucify, crucify him!" A third time he said to them, "Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no crime deserving death; I will therefore chastise him and release him." But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. 
(Luke 23:13-22)

Here we see an outcome arrived at through a process that does not rely so much upon the use of reason. Even so reason has its place and we see it displayed by Pilate in his interrogation of Jesus. This time two games are clearly in play, namely Jewish and Roman law. We don't see fully worked through arguments but Pilate finds Jesus not guilty under both laws and his reasoned arguments leads him to the reasonable conclusion: "Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise him and release him."

But as this story unfolds here there is no space given for reflection upon the arguments and the story's frenetic pace at this point is driven by a previously decided outcome expressed immediately by the crowd who cry "Crucify him!". Pilate continues (it seems) to apply reason but fails again and, as we know, the loud cries that Jesus should be crucified eventually prevailed. Reason no longer has anything like the upper hand.

If the Pilate of the story can be accused of anything it is of simply failing to see that the game had changed from a genuine process of legal reasoning to a head to head fight in which the loudest/most powerful physical position is going to win. However, it is not at all clear that Pilate did not see this was the case. Pilate may have also decided - along with the protagonists in the crowd - that Jesus needed to be executed and that decision may have been arrived at reasonably - i.e. it could reasonably be claimed that if Jesus was not executed then an uprising of some sort would ensue. If this were the case then Pilate's continued use of legal reasoning is merely a rhetorical device to allow him to claim a certain kind of innocence. The point being that although in this particular story there is a veneer of reason its use IN THIS SITUATION is clearly futile and redundant. The mob and the previously made political decision to execute Jesus has definitively trumped the further use of reason.

Now why am I rehearsing these two stories with you? Well, because this week we saw the extremely unpleasant spectacle of seeing a British fascist given prime-time TV space on the argument that his ideas must be brought into reasoned debate within mainstream politics and culture.

I would, perhaps (but only perhaps) - I would, perhaps, think this might be a good idea if our current mainstream political culture were strong and functioning well, i.e. reasonably. But this is highly questionable at the moment. We can all see that the levels of spin and straightforward misinformation are very high and many of us have begun to distrust our political culture. I'll spare you my own list at this point . . .

Now, into this already rather dysfunctional mêlée we at great risk are starting to invite smart operators like the BNP into the mainstream - smart, that is, only with regard to their proven ability to tap into the increasingly powerful forces of unreason and frustration that are present in our contemporary society. (Also, that the programme was clearly structured to be a ganging up on Nick Griffen played into Griffin's hands and revealed to me that we are have entered an arena of unreason.)

But, because we have been taught to value so highly rational thought, we can easily be duped into thinking it always works in all situations and that our public debates will always proceed a la the woman caught in the act of adultery. But that thought is itself unreasonable. History reveals only too clearly that there have been many moments that resemble Pilate's attempt at placating the mob.

I am extremely concerned that we on the liberal, centre and left end of the political spectrum don't suddenly find ourselves in the position of Pilate who might genuinely, but utterly misguidedly, continue to try to apply reason in the face of an unreasonable and violent ideology and then, when he inevitably looses the argument, decides that his naive and politically stupid avoidance of the real issue at hand allows him, at least in Matthew's account, to wash his hands and claim "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves" (Matthew 27:24).

There are times when even we have to stop relying 100% on reasoned debate and, on the basis of defending the long term future of the public use of reason, we have to intervene to stop something. Fascism is utterly unreasonable and it can only lead to violence for violence is built into it in a high level way that is not the case with almost every other political viewpoint - and it must be stopped.

I'm going to conclude with a call to arms but, before I do that, I'm going to preface it with one comment. As modern liberals we are aware that we cannot ever know absolutely that our analysis of the situation is correct - whether my fears are justified or merely delusional (I refer you back to my little prolegomena) but it is worth remembering that sometimes it is permissible (even rational) at times to act 'as if it were true'. Now I recommend we must act as if what I am about to say is true because if we do nothing by the time we do find out for sure it will be too late.

So, make no mistake if we do not begin to take a clear public stand against Griffin and the BNP then be assured there will be violence and death and in its wake we will not be entitled to wash our hands and claim innocence. So let us, like the woman taken in adultery, leave here passionately committed to sinning no more - not sins of commission (such as adultery) but the sin most often committed by liberals - the chief sin of omission, namely that of failing to act early enough. The brutalities in Europe during the twentieth-century bears witness enough to the truth of this.

Think Global, Act Local - another look

While [Jesus] was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and besought him, 'Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.' And he stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, 'I will; be clean.' And immediately the leprosy left him. And he charged him to tell no one; but 'go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to the people.' (Luke 5:12-14)


-o0o-

The phrase, "Think Global, Act Local", has been attributed to Sir Patrick Geddes (October 2, 1854 - 1932). Geddes was a Scottish biologist who was also known for some innovative work in both urban planning and education. Although the exact phrase never appears in his works in his 1915 book, "Cities in Evolution," we find the following:


'Local character' is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned. Each place has a true personality; and with this shows some unique elements - a personality too much asleep it may be, but which it is the task of a planner, as master artist to awaken. And only he can do this who is in love and at home with his subject - truly in love and fully at home - the love in which high intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest intensity of expression (p. 397).  

Since then, of course, this phrase has gone on to become a well-known slogan amongst environmentalists. But it has also become a slogan amongst those who would describe themselves as being 'liberal' in their spirituality. I deliberately use the word spirituality because it has come to signal their dislike of traditional forms of religion. But I think the slogan, fully thought through, actually undermines some of the key assumptions of certain kinds of liberal spirituality. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek makes a very powerful point about this:


'. . .when today's New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organised religion), they (often not so) silently impose a 'pure' procedure of Zen-like spiritual meditation as the "whiteness" of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only "pure" forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, by-passing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today's global capitalism' (The Monstrosity of Christ pp-27-28).

I think he is right and that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, much modern western so-called 'liberal' spirituality is far from being liberal and in fact silently colludes (although it is true this is often unknowingly) with some of the worst aspects of global capitalism.

To show why this is the case I'll begin by noting Geddes' point about 'local character' being intimately related to the whole and that, to understand the 'local' one must have some 'adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment'. But notice that Geddes doesn't say anything about the 'local' being superseded by the 'whole'; rather for him the local and the whole are related in 'active sympathy.' He seems to be saying that local character is not an accidental feature of reality but a necessary one and, therefore, also a necessary aspect of the whole. In other words if you strip away the local you do not thereby reveal the "true" world in its pristine "white" form - you are left with nothing.

Now, for Geddes, the task of the master planner/artist is to awaken in people an awareness of the 'personality of place' - a personality that is born out of this active sympathy between the local and the whole.

OK, but why have I chosen the reading from Luke we heard a moment ago? Well it has to do with how the story has often been interpreted in 'liberal' religious circles. Forget the truth or otherwise of the miracle performed in the story and concentrate on the fact that Jesus asks the leper to go and show himself to the priest, and make an offering for his cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to the people. Now why might Jesus, who is so concerned to reveal to his hearers a way of being religious in the world that is not wholly dependent upon human institutions, law and priestly mediation, say this?

Well, in a very recent modern Christian scholarly commentary (Oxford Bible Commentary) the authors write that we should understand Jesus as pointing "the leper into a way of observing the law but from a position of one who already transcends it."

Here we see the commentator make a move so typical of 'liberal' spirituality which is to claim that behind the distorted and flawed laws and practices of our extant local/regional religions - in this case Judaism - there lies a superior, purer, "true", globally relevant, transcendent religion and, more to the point, one which we can, thanks to Jesus, now see. Once you buy into this view it quickly becomes possible to believe that the leper and those like him who go to the temple (or synagogue, church, mosque whatever), although they are not doing something wholly wrong, you implicitly come to understand them as being benighted in comparison to yourself, you who can see the whole.

Holding such a view also has the pleasant side-effect (although it is only pleasant for holders of this view) of seeming to offer a way of keeping you out of the contingent muck and dirt of local religious life by pointing to a spirituality that is beyond nasty particularities realities such as law and other local practices. How wonderful, n'est pas, a spirituality that allows us to stay clean nice, white, untainted, pure and utterly uncommitted to the contingent realities of our world. Many modern spiritualities play on this and use the colour white and a loaded 'plainness' to sell their products.

But, if I am right, why is this particular form of universalism so hard to challenge in liberal circles? Well, I think that the lure of there being some pure transcendent "white" spirituality lies in the hope it seems to give that everything can be understood to be bound together in a meaningful, transcendent whole. Such a thought remains attractive to us at this time because we know the world needs to develop a sense of wholeness, a sense of being an interdependent unity. We also now know that we must develop not only a sense of our interdependence with other humans but the whole of creation for the world (as a whole) is not human centred. The ecological disaster we seem to be facing makes this desire for some sense of underlying wholeness even stronger in us.

But, if we are going to promulgate a feeling that such a underlying wholeness is real (or at least a meaningfully useful creative fiction) then we have to ensure that we keep this feeling absolutely rooted in local particularities with all the problems and messiness that this brings. The trick I think we have to pull off as a community that is trying to revise and reform what we mean by the word 'liberal' is that which I think Jesus managed to pull of in his own time and place and which was explored by Patrick Geddes in the apparently quite different context of town planning.

Jesus was a master planner and artist who had an adequate grasp and treatment (and note that an adequate grasp and treatment is not necessarily a complete grasp and treatment) of the whole environment and one who also knew that this was only meaningful insofar he could encourage in himself and others an 'active sympathy' with the essential and characteristic life of place and time - namely his own region and its cities, towns and villages and religion. His genius was to be able, through his life and teaching, to help awaken the personality of his own place and time and to help individuals to experience the whole just where they were - through that local 'personality'. As Geddes beautifully notes, this kind of thing is only possible to someone who 'is in love and at home with his subject - truly in love and fully at home - the love in which high intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest intensity of expression' and the available evidence suggests that Jesus was just such a man in love and fully at home in this world: the kingdom of heaven being within or amongst us. (That Christianity later tried to make Jesus' home a transcendent place is besides the point).

Anyway Jesus was one of those teachers who could see that there are always local ways of affirming the reality of the whole and that it is through the local that we act on this vision and give thanks. The leper's Jewish faith was the only language he had in which to say thank-you and it was and will forever be a perfectly adequate way of doing this. If you are English, you say 'thank-you' if you are German it is 'Danke schön', 'Merci' if you are French. The point is that there is no ur-word for 'thank-you.' You have to say thank-you in the only way you can. That doesn't mean one cannot crticise or modify the local - Jesus was certainly critical and desirous of change - but it is to say the local cannot be replaced by the universal.

So, contrary to the modern commentary I cited earlier, I don't think that Jesus sent the leper into the temple and encouraged him into fulfilling the requirements of the Jewish law of the time just because the poor chap was incapable of seeing the bigger universal picture but because Jesus knew that it is only through a proper love of the local can any of us touch, sense and commingle with the universal - the whole - God.

It seems to me that in this passage from Luke we see Jesus giving us a perfect example of thinking globally (of God the Father - ultimate reality) and acting locally (going to the Jewish Temple to give thanks) within his own time and age. I recommend we go and do likewise. We have to fall in love again with the local and learn to be at home in the particularities of our own time and place. This is especially so within churches that like to see themselves as liberal and it is why I encourage, in this congregation at least, a living relationship with its local historic Unitarian Christian faith. The promise is that whenever we take time to woo and court the local the active sympathy (love) that begins to grow is nothing less than the very door to the kingdom of Heaven.

Love is the Answer

It's been one of those days - a good gig last night with Rebop but it was a late, late night and so today I've been very tired as I've ground my way through dozens of emails, taught some bass and theology. About hour ago I realised that I had got a bit low (and cold). So I made a cup of tea and decided to check out the new Barbara Streisand album 'Love is the Answer' on Spotify. O yes, O yes - do check it out. It quite lifted my mood. A great jazz quartet accompanies her (incl. Diana Krall) and the string arrangements are sublime (mostly by Johnny Mandel). And Babs? Well, wonderful.

It will be too romantic for some but it's what I needed this afternoon. And now? Back to work I guess . . .

Here's the BBC Music Review