I went to church this morning and met Michael Jackson! O.K. it was Rt Revd Michael Jackson Bishop of the Diocese of Clogher in the Church of Ireland. He was leading a party of pilgrims in the Holy Land and had been invited to preach at the Advent Sunday joint Eucharist in St George’s Cathedral just next to the college. The Bishop of Jerusalem Rt Revd Suheil Dawani celebrated and it was a very encouraging occasion.
From left: Bishop Michael Jackson, Bishop Suheil Dawani, Canon Robert Edmunds, Revd Dr Stephen Need (Dean of St George's College) and Canon Bill Broughton.
The service was in Arabic apart from one reading and the sermon but the English speakers had been given translations of the liturgy. Highlights included the hymns being sung in Arabic and English at the same time as well as the Lord’s Prayer and Sanctus – it felt more like Pentecost than Advent. The sermon was quite uncomfortable as the bishop began with three illustrations; the packed garage in need of a good clearout; the cluttered desk needing to be tidied and the pile of washing needing to be ironed. I felt as if he’d had a word of knowledge about me, though I had ironed some of my cloths before coming away. However, he had a good message of encouragement and challenge, the most memorable phrase being: ‘Advent doesn’t challenge us to be perfect but to be prepared.’
Coffee and macaroons in the Cathedral grounds
After the service I enjoyed a refreshing cup of coffee and macaroon in the cathedral grounds amongst the lemon, lime and grapefruit trees. I also had a chat with Bishop Michael about how we use the Old Testament which he had mentioned in his sermon and this tied in with an ongoing discussion Jonathan Evens and I have been conducting on how we engage with scripture.
Mike's Place: purveyor of cold Guinness, hot pizza & Man Utd victories.
Another wander round the Old City for a couple of hours in the early afternoon before heading to Mike’s Place to watch the Manchester derby. Bit of a shock to discover the bar was in the middle of a building site with walls being demolished around it but the pizza was good and I enjoyed a Guinness as Utd destroyed City (well Utd won anyway and Ronaldo should never have been sent off). The only other customer was a Man City fan who was very chatty until the end of the game when he stormed off without a word. He was from Manchester and in Jerusalem to study Hebrew, though I'm pretty sure some of the Hebrew he uttered won't be found in the scriptures.
It was dark by the time the match had finished so I had a brief wander back through one of the markets and took a couple of night shots of the ramparts before returning to post this blog. Shalom.
Arrived in Jerusalem yesterday at about 4:30pm local time after a smooth flight thanks to El Al and a reasonable journey from Tel Aviv. It was dusk when I made it to St. George’s College so I had little time to look round but that wasn’t a problem as the college was hosting an art exhibition by Dr ‘Ali Qleibo which included wine and various Spanish hors d’oeurves. The paintings covered two themes: ‘Jerusalem stays in the Heart’ is a series of paintings in Qleibo’s more familiar style featuring the domes and alley ways of the old city. The other paintings represent a new departure with abstracts entitled ‘Another Autumn’. Dr Qleibo is something a polymath and it was interesting to hear him speak about his painting. The rest of the evening was taken up with a meal at the Christmas Hotel with some of the other people staying at the college.
This morning I took a walk into the old city. After a brief saunter through the bazaar starting from the Damascus Gate (above) I headed for the ramparts which gave me some great views of the area. I was caught out when I descended from the walls at the Lion’s Gate so that I could go and have a look at the Dome of the Rock.
Unfortunately, when I tried to follow some people into the area I was greeted by a couple of policemen who informed me that the site was closed to non Moslems because it was Saturday. I wandered across the old city only to discover, thanks to several salesmen trying to sell me various religious artefacts, that I was actually on the Via Dolorosa (right) . Just a few moments later and I found myself being searched by a couple of soldiers as I approached what turned out to be the area of the Western/Wailing Wall. I guess by now I should have realised that a map might have been useful! As it was the Sabbath I wasn’t allowed to take any photos near the wall but I managed a couple of pictures from further away (below). Back up onto the ramparts for the last part of the walk finishing back at the Jaffa Gate and then I headed for the Jerusalem Hotel for some spag bol and a very refreshing glass of freshly squeezed lemons.
Now the thing that struck me as I tried to avoid spilling bolognaise sauce down my shirt was just how many famous sites I’d visited (or at least been close to) in such a brief period of time and I had also seen others, like the Mount of Olives and Garden of Gethsemane, from a distance. I’d heard about these places since I was very young and seen them plenty of times in film, on t.v. and in books but seeing them all in such close proximity was actually quite startling. Anyway, I look forward to visiting some of these places again and spending more time at them as part of my course ‘The Palestine of Jesus’which begins on Monday evening.
One final bit of good news, I’ve discovered a bar called Mike’s Place quite nearby which will be showing Man Utd v Man City tomorrow afternoon. Oh and the bishop is also preaching in the cathedral tomorrow morning. Shalom.
I’ve been reading Ben Elton’s books on and off since the 1980’s and his first book Stark. His latest Blind Faith is written in the typical Elton style with lots of quick fire observations similar to his verbal delivery, not much characterisation but more of a graphic novel without the pictures. Blind Faith is based in a near future world where a great flood has wiped out half the world and the story centres on one individual living in a sub tropical London half submerged under water. It’s an updated 1984 which takes a swipe at many of the features of contemporary popular culture. A world where there is virtually no privacy with everybody living their lives on line and on screen, people wear few clothes and expose their emotions as well as their flesh. In this world Elton has a dig at ‘cause’ Wembley concerts; you tubing; blogging; obesity; junk food; cosmetic surgery; the MMR crisis; bizarre children’s names; the cult of celebrity and the desire to be famous. There is one superb moment when a law is passed by plebiscite at a faith concert declaring that from now on everyone will be famous.
London is a dystopian city, overcrowded, with poor housing, the public utilities breaking down, disease rampant and people forced to be happy and engage with all sorts of communal activities, from the work ‘group hug’ to watching each other having sex on line. Privacy and secrets are seen as anti-social and everyone has the right to celebrate and be celebrated for who they are. Public emoting is encouraged as is public grieving. Some of the descriptions are pretty graphic but effectively highlight the way in which pornography dehumanises and abuses. However, the key focus of Elton’s venom is religion. The country is ruled by the Temple and the ministers of God who is called the Love. Everyone believes in the Love and life is dictated by activities demonstrating love for the Love. It’s actually a rather medieval and distorted portrayal of Christianity and not unlike Pullman’s Magisterium; there are confessors, bishops and inquisitors and heretics are burned. The flood is seen as God’s judgement on the sinfulness of the world and much of the scientific world is dismissed as belonging to the dark ages before the flood. As a consequence vaccinations are seen as evil and the child mortality rate is about one in two.
Against this background the central character, Trafford, gradually rebels. He wants to keep secrets and retain a measure of privacy. He is drawn into a secret humanist society where he is introduced to the world of books, most of which have been banned. Trafford finds joy in the novel and the use of his imagination but above all he discovers Darwin and evolutionary theory and this is his salvation. The pivotal moment for Trafford is when he has his child vaccinated in direct contravention of the laws of the Temple. Throughout the book religion is presented as irrational, contradictory, hypocritical, corrupt, self serving and destructive. Science and reason are the only things worth believing in and hold the only answer for a society heading for destruction.
And this is the problem. I don’t dispute that there are aspects of religion and faith that deserve to be critiqued and satirised and these are a legitimate target. But for Elton faith has no redeeming qualities, there is no nuance, no subtlety, just a shotgun blast that misses most of its targets. His religion is so disgusting, so bizarre, so lacking in connection with reality that any legitimate critique is lost in the gross simplicities and over blown descriptions. In short he highlights the failing of many of his humanist chums – so repelled by the thought of religion and so caught up in the attack and fearful of the enemy that he completely undermines his case. Blind Faith ends up being little more than The God Delusion for Dummies.
I’ve been enjoying some dialogue with Jonathan Evens on the subject of how we understand and approach the Bible. If you want background to this post have a look at Jonathan’s posts here , here , here and here.
One of the key questions raised is whether the Bible has a meta-narrative. During my sabbatical I have been reading through The Acts of the Apostles and the only conclusion I can draw from my reading so far is that the Bible does have a meta-narrative which we are invited to share in and live in the light of. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a shock revelation but the simple truth is that one can get so caught up in the detail and close reading of scripture, particularly in sermon preparation, that one misses or forgets the big story.
Just to clarify my hermeneutical approach here; I am taking a canonical approach – looking at the text as we have received it. I am not trying to get behind the text to the historical Jesus as represented by the approaches of the Quest, New Quest and the Third Quest. Nor am I following the form critical approach attempting to look through the text to the early churches or the redaction critics looking through the text to the communities for which the text may have been written. I am not rejecting the insights of these various approaches but I think it is important to engage with the primary text handed down to us and allow it to speak to us. I also think we need to remember that many of these approaches give us working theories with their own strengths and weaknesses and often with massive historical/cultural/philosophical presuppositions. (Don’t get me started on Crossan and the Jesus Seminar).
Anyway, when I sit down and read Acts I have been particularly struck by the speeches and what has struck me is the core meta-narrative they contain. Take for example Peter’s speech in the Temple following the healing of the lame beggar at The Beautiful Gate in Acts 3. This is how Tom Wright comments on what Peter says: Peter, you see, is claiming much more than simply a few random proof-texts which, if you shut one eye and just concentrate hard, can be made to sound a bit like things that had happened to Jesus. He is understanding the Old Testament as a single great story which was constantly pointing forwards to something that God was going to do through Abraham and his family, something that Moses, Samuel, Isaiah and the rest were pointing on towards as well. This great Something was the restoration of all things, the time when everything would be put right at last. And now, he says, it’s happened! It’s happened in Jesus! And you can be part of it.Acts for Everyone - Part 1: Tom Wright p.59.
Now if that is not a meta-narrative I don’t know what is. Here is scripture (New Testament) presenting a meta-narrative, a way of understanding the scriptures (Old Testament) as part of one great story finding its fulfilment in Jesus and inviting any who will respond to become part of the story. This does not mean that the scriptures are to be read simplistically, nor are we to try and smooth out or ignore all the difficult questions they raise. It doesn’t mean that we should ignore the richness and diversity of scripture reflected for example in the variety of genre. But it does mean that we are to engage with the Bible and the questions and challenges it brings to us in the light of the meta-narrative. I have yet to read a convincing argument that suggests that any part of the New Testament does not share in presenting this meta-narrative or at least assuming it.
This meta-narrative is closed in the sense that it is not open for debate, you either accept it or reject it; we are presented with Jesus as Lord and Messiah. However, this meta-narrative is also open. Open in the sense that as we are invited to share in this big story so we are invited to explore what it means to live as part of the story. This means engaging with the implications of living in the light of the story; struggling with how it applies to the everyday world we inhabit and in which we are called to be salt and light; confronting the difficult and painful issues raised by scripture and recognising that the story both affirms and challenges.
So my answer to the question ‘does the Bible have a meta-narrative?’ is yes!
There are a few clips from film, television and radio which come to my mind when thinking about war and its toll on human beings. The opening scenes from Saving Private Ryan portraying the Battle for Omaha Beach during the D-Day Landings; the final scene from the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth as Blackadder and his troops go over the top of their trench and bleed into a field of poppies; Fergal Keane’s description of bodies being tossed across the Rusomo Falls, victims of the horrors of Rwanda, broadcast in A Letter From Africa.
However, one of the most powerful descriptions I have encountered is from Siegfried Sasoon’s Out In No-Man’s-Land taken from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. I first read this piece of prose in 1982 as the Falklands War was getting under way.
Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such insights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.
This extraordinary photo was taken on 29th October in Wall Street. It features a goup of people praying for the stock market as they lay hands on the Wall Street golden bull (OK it's really bronze). Now I'm sure I read somewhere in the Old Testament that people praying around such objects was not a good idea (Exodus 32). You can find an explanation for this extraordinary activity here.
My sabbatical began on Saturday 18th October, though I have only just finished tidying up a couple of pieces of outstanding work. The last few weeks have been fairly exhausting for a variety of reasons; getting everything sorted in the office; visiting school open days in preparation for my daughter’s applications to secondary schools; engaging in a demanding process which had been hanging around for a few months and which has raised various questions for me, not least about my leadership style. Then just as the sabbatical started the whole family went down with a nasty stomach bug which left us all drained and grateful for half term so we could all relax and recover.
Anyway, the main focus of the first week (apart from dealing with family sickness and dihorrea) was participation in a course called The Undefended Leader. I had been aware of this course for some time and a colleague at work who had participated in the course recommended it. The opportunity came up to participate and I thought it would be a good way in to the sabbatical and I was not disappointed.
The Undefended Leader has been developed by Simon Walker and explores our understanding and practice of formation for leadership in ministry, though the same principles have also been used with leaders from a whole range of professions. I’ll try and explain something of the philosophy / theology undergirding the approach and the process as I experienced it. As participation on the course depended on trust and confidentiality I will only refer directly to what happened to me on the course and will try and reflect on some of my own experience and response.
The basic premise of the course is drawn from Genesis 3 and argues that as a consequence of the fracturing of relationships with God, the world around us, our relationships with others and self we each experience the environment around us as unsafe. In this context we develop responses and strategies, leadership egos, which help us to process and make sense of the world around us and try to make it safe. Much of this goes on subconsciously and has an impact on our personality and on our leadership styles. By exploring our personality profile and leadership styles and strategies we can begin to identify strengths, weaknesses and areas where we might respond more effectively and appropriately. An underlying question raised by the course is what is the most important area of development for me as a person and as a leader at this time?
The approach to personality types is different from some others that I have come across as it assumes that our personality types are not given or fixed but can change and develop over time with careful and prayerful attention. This resonated with me because it suggests a need to take responsibility for development and ongoing formation while also emphasising that change is possible by the grace of God.
The course consisted of four days spread out over a week and used a variety of processes and approaches. Before the course began I was invited to complete a landscaping exercise on line and from this a Personal Ecology Profile was drawn up. I’ve done several of these type of profiles before, though the landscaping approach was new to me, and my approach tends to be to just do it and not try and analyse / guess what is being asked of me and why.
During the course aspects of the PEP profile were explored in the light of input about the approach. The course included plenary sessions with teaching about aspects of The Undefended Leader; one to one sessions with a facilitator considering aspects of my personal profile; smaller group discussions; and a sculpting exercise with others in the smaller group.
The first day explored some general principles about leadership formation and the public and private character of leadership. The central image is that each of us has a front (public) stage and a back (private) stage; what we present to others and what we reserve to ourselves. The shape and size of these stages will be different for each of us and some will feel more comfortable on one stage than the other. I found this language particularly helpful and a useful way of talking about and exploring the public and private aspects of my personality traits and leadership style.
The second day developed exploration of the profile and focused on how we see ourselves in relation to others and the established patterns of behaviour we tend towards related to our circumstances. I found this to be the most challenging aspect of the process as it tended to conflict with other feedback I had received about my personality and leadership style. Towards the end of the day I felt I had two choices; either to question the process or to go with it and see what it threw up. However, the choice was taken out of my hands because the next evening I caught what the rest of the family had been suffering from and spent the night being violently sick. As a consequence I spent the next day in bed sleeping and giving no thought to the course or my profile. The rest did me a lot of good and I think a great deal of processing of information and reaction to the course had been going on in the background.
After the two day break the third day was what I took to be the core of the course. In the smaller group we spent the day with Simon Walker learning more about The Undefended Leader and how it came about. The main focus of the day was an exercise where each member of the group was asked in turn to create a sculpture or tableaux of how we saw our ministry and leadership. I had half an hour to create the sculpture using both objects in the room and the other members of the group and then to explore what I had created and to reflect on where I saw God in the sculpture and where I felt He might be asking me to be. The half hour session finished with a time of prayer which I found both affirming and encouraging. This technique, which I believe comes from metaphor therapy, was a fascinating approach which I had not come across before. One of the most interesting personal insights was the way in which I had become much more comfortable exploring aspects of my profile that previously I had wanted to question.
The final day was fairly light and wrapped up the work done during the rest of the week and briefly introduced some material on leadership and power – how we exercise our leadership in the light of our personality profile and what strategies we employ. This is where the meat is to be found for me and I will need to think about how I can explore and develop my understanding of this in the future.
Overall, the course lived up to my hopes and expectations. It confirmed some insights I already had regarding my leadership style but also brought to the surface some things I had not realised were there or had chosen not to examine in detail. I would be interested to see how this approach plays out in secular contexts given that I felt prayer was an indispensible part of the process.
Anne Rice is perhaps best known as the author of The Vampire Chronicles including Interview with the Vampire, made into a film by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. So I was surprised to discover Rice had written the first book in a trilogy about the life of Christ. The book is called Christ The Lord – Out Of Egypt and it is a fictional account of the life of Christ between leaving EgyptMatthew 2:19 and the incident in the Temple recorded in Luke 2:41-51.
Rice writes in the first person and so the reader experiences the narrative through the eyes of the child Jesus. This enables the author to explore the incarnation and the emerging sense of both Jesus’ humanity and divinity as well as his unfolding awareness of vocation. The story leads us towards the incident in the Temple where Jesus is separated from his parents. The climax of the story is the disclosure to the boy Jesus of the events surrounding his birth, including the slaughter of the innocents, and the revelation by his mother Mary that he is ‘the begotten of God’.
The story is fictional but Rice has sought to be as faithful to the Gospels and accompanying traditions as possible. It is clear from the book and her author’s notes that Rice has been meticulous in her research and has clear explanations for the choices she has made in the material she includes and the way she presents it. I found the recreation of first century Jerusalem and Temple, Nazareth and the surrounding landscape convincing both in geographical and cultural description. The book reminded me of Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilean. However, I felt with Theissen that the theology and research got in the way of the narrative, it was theology trying to be literature. In Out of Egypt the research undergirds the narrative but doesn’t inhibit its flow; exploring important doctrinal themes without sacrificing pace and drama.
An uncomfortable but interesting aspect of the book is that it draws on the legend material, including the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which Rice justifies by commenting:
‘Ultimately I chose to embrace this material, to enclose it within the canonical framework as best I could. I felt there was a deep truth in it and I wanted to preserve that truth as it spoke to me. Of course this is an assumption. But I made it. And perhaps in assuming that Jesus did manifest supernatural powers at an early age I am somehow being true to the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon, that Jesus was God and Man at all times.’
‘In using some of these legends, I sought not to attack orthodox beliefs in any way, but to include legends that Christians for the most part have shared. For me the legends helped to imagine a concrete world in which our Lord lived and breathed as God and Man; I did not respond to any docetism in them whatsoever.’
What I have found most fascinating is Rice’s account of her own journey of faith.
In her notes Rice describes her study of the New Testament, between 2002 to 2005, as she researched and began to write the book. This was a particularly painful period in her life as her husband, Stan, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died within four months.
Rice began with the sceptical critics of N.T. studies expecting their arguments to be ‘frighteningly strong’ and that they would reveal that Christianity was ‘a kind of fraud’. Surely, she surmised, she would find a Jesus who was liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual ….. . Rice looked at the Jewish scholars who presented Jesus as an observant Jew or a Hasid who ended up on a cross. Behind her studies lay the urge to know who Jesus was.
Gradually the conclusion Rice reached was that the arguments of the sceptics lacked coherence, were full of conjecture, piled assumption on assumption and drew absurd conclusions based on little or no data. She comments:
‘In sum, the whole case for the non divine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it – that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years – that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.’
‘And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.’
A key turning point for Rice was reading John A. T. Robinson’s The Priority of John and his arguments for an early dating of the Gospels. Also John Wenham’s Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke. Rice is very suspicious of those arguing for a late dating based on the Fall of Jerusalem. Her argument is that if the fall had taken place before the Gospels were written then the events surrounding the fall would have had a greater impact on and in the texts. She finds the late dating based on a rejection of prophetic utterances about the fall unconvincing. In her notes Rice cites a host of other Biblical scholars and it is clear that her appetite for reading on the subject is voracious. The scholar she particularly credits is N.T. Wright.
‘N.T. Wright is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read, and his generosity in embracing sceptics and commenting on their arguments is an inspiration. His faith is immense, and his knowledge vast.’
Rice sums up her approach to the book as follows:
‘The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell – to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and to try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.’
But for me the most interesting comments come in Rice’s note to the paperback edition in which she details her personal return to faith.
‘I returned to faith in Christ and to the Roman Catholic Church on December 6, 1998. It was after a long struggle of many years during which time I went from being a committed atheist, grieving for a lost faith which I thought was gone forever, to realising that I not only believed in Jesus Christ with my whole heart, but that I felt an overwhelming love for Him, and wanted to be united with Him both in private and in public through attendance at church.’
In one of the most powerful testimonies I have recently read, the author goes on to explain her wrestling with deep personal and theological questions:
‘How could I join with fellow believers who thought my gay son was going to Hell? How could I become connected with Christians who held there is no evidence for Darwinian evolution, or that women should have no control over their own bodies? How could I affirm my belief in a faith that was itself so characterised by argument and strife?’
And then Rice recounts her response:
‘Well what happened to me on that Sunday I returned to faith was this: I received a glimpse into what I can only call the Infinite Mercy of God. It worked something like this. I realised that none of my theological or social questions really made any difference. I didn’t have to know the answers to these questions precisely because God did…… What came over me then was an infinite trust, trust in His power and His love. I didn’t have to worry about the ultimate fate of my good atheistic friends, gay or straight, because he knew all about them, and he was holding them in His hands. I didn’t have to quake alone in terror at the thought of those who die untimely deaths from illness, or the countless million
s destroyed in the horrors of war. He knew all about them. He had always been holding them in his hands. He and only He knew the full story of every person who’d ever lived or ever would live; He and He alone knew what person was given what choice, what chance, what opportunity, what amount of time, to come to him and by what path.’
‘Did this mean that I thought doctrine and principles didn’t matter? No. Did it mean I thought everything was relative? Certainly not. Did it mean I did not continue to ponder a multitude of ideas?
God forbid. What it did mean was that I put myself in the hands of God entirely and that my faith would light the pages I read in the Book of Life from then on.’
Living in Essex with a very understanding family (understanding of my mood swings relative to Man Utd's fortunes), a dog named Branoc, rabbits and chickens (when the fox doesn't eat them). Mission and Ministry Adviser for the Colchester Episcopal Area in the Diocese of Chelmsford. I'm also a non-residentiary Canon of Chelmsford Cathedral and I enjoy hitting and kicking things, which I call drumming.
From left: Bishop Michael Jackson, Bishop Suheil Dawani, Canon Robert Edmunds, Revd Dr Stephen Need (Dean of St George's College) and Canon Bill Broughton.
