Putting up with Slavery

January 27, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong at Septuagesima, 27th January 2013
1 Corinthians 7:17-24 – Putting up with Slavery

This Sunday, the third Sunday before Lent, has historically been known in the church as Septuagesima Sunday. It’s from the Latin for 70, septuaginta, and it means a Sunday about 70 days before Easter. It also begins the three weeks before Lent starts, for which an old name was Shrovetide. The idea is that we begin to move away from the jollifications of Christmas towards the self-denial of Lent.

But really I don’t want to talk much about that pre-Lent season tonight. I want to say a few words instead about what might seem to be a rather challenging part of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he talks about putting up with your lot in life, and specifically, putting up with being a slave.

If afterwards you have a look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7, you will see that, each side of the passage which was our lesson tonight, there are some tough things which St Paul also said about love, sex, marriage – and on remaining unmarried, or perhaps on being a ‘perpetual bachelor’.

So you’ll see that I’m quite grateful, as a preacher, to have navigated my way through this tricky channel into relatively calm waters where the church is not currently engaged in huge internal battles. Nevertheless even though I am going to give you a break from talking endlessly about gay marriage and stuff like that, there is still something which we ought to say, about slavery. A slave is defined by Aristotle as someone who does not belong to himself, but to someone else. (Aristotle, Politics, 1.1254a14).

If you read tonight’s lesson again afterwards, it makes some difference which translation you read. Tonight we read from the NRSV, and that makes St Paul sound remarkably complacent about slavery. Verse 21 says,

‘Were you a slave when you were called? Do not be concerned about it. Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever.’

The King James, on the other hand, says, ‘Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.’

Former Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, (‘N.T. Wright’) translates that verse as,
‘Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t worry about it. (But if you get the chance of freedom, seize it!) [Wright, N.T., 2003, Paul for Everyone – 1 Corinthians, London, SPCK, p.88]

Having looked at the Greek, they’re all possible translations, but I think I prefer Tom Wright’s version, which expresses what the King James says, in modern English. ‘…if thou mayest be made free, use it rather’ means, ‘seize the opportunity’.

People refer to this passage and say that St Paul supported the idea of slavery, or at least didn’t seem to be particularly worried about it. But just as in so many other passages, the Bible reflects the social mores of the time. And at that time, in the Roman Empire, slavery was a big fact of life. It’s generally reckoned that one third of the population were slaves.

The other place in St Paul’s letters where slavery comes up is in the letter to Philemon where St Paul writes about Onesimus, who may have been Philemon’s slave. Paul pleads that Philemon should take Onesimus back ‘for ever, no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave, a beloved brother.'(Philemon v16)

The context of all this, not only St Paul’s discussion about slavery, but also what he says about whether people should be circumcised or not, earlier on in our lesson, together with his teaching about whether people ought to get married if they’re single, is that these passages were all written in the light of Paul’s belief that the end of the world was just round the corner. All the early Christians believed that. What’s the point in getting married if everything is going to come to an end next week?

However, whatever the truth about the end of the world, St Paul says in his letter to the Galatians that he believes that the coming of Jesus has changed all the previous relationships, so that things which used to make a difference are no longer significant. So there’s no distinction between men and women, Jew and Greek, slave and free. (Galatians 3:28). All these distinctions have become trivial in the light of the coming of Christ, in the light of God showing his hand on earth, showing that he definitely cares for us. So St Paul takes the line that none of these things are particularly important. You should just make the best of things, from whatever position you find yourself in when you first come to Christ.

We now realise that the early Christians were mistaken. The Apocalypse has not yet happened. So in fact human life has carried on, people have married and had children and got on with their lives, for the last 2,000 years. But we have changed our attitude to slavery. Perhaps it’s a natural consequence of the basic situation that Paul was pointing out, namely that none of the distinctions, that people used to set such store by, now mean anything at all.

So ultimately, there is no distinction between slave and free, in anything that matters. People have come round to the view, in civilised society at least, that it is no longer right for one person to own another person, to buy and sell them as though they were things rather than people.

But I just want to stop there. Because, I’m not sure how true it is for us all happily to say that slavery has been abolished. If you remember the terrible case of the maid who was beheaded recently in Saudi Arabia: that poor woman, and apparently thousands like her, are, in real terms, slaves. They have no passports, they have no money of their own, they’re not paid, they’re simply put up in their masters’ and mistresses’ houses: they have no meaningful life of their own. Indeed, effectively, their masters and mistresses have the power of life or death over them.

That’s in Saudi Arabia. There are also dreadful cases much nearer home, again involving people from poor countries coming to work, sometimes even in this country. You will remember the terrible case of the Chinese people employed as cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay who were drowned by a swiftly incoming tide, because nobody could communicate with them to tell them to come back to safety. Then there was a recent case involving scrap dealers who had kept a family in subjection in conditions amounting to slavery here in England for many years.

We do have laws against this kind of thing, and the fact that it still happens is not a criticism of the law, but just simply an illustration of how evil some people are. I also want to suggest to you that these most dramatic types of slavery may finally be being eradicated, but that there is another kind of slavery, which is very prevalent in this country, and which as Christians I think we ought to consider.

That is what used to be referred to as ‘wage slavery’. We are now in a situation where I expect a number of us here in this congregation have seen our children – and others here are those children – growing up, going through university and getting jobs in the professions or in banking or in major companies. And we give thanks and congratulate them, and say how well they have done. But then the reality is that in return for what are often very generous salaries, our children have no life, at least until their mid-30s.

They’re required to work seemingly endless hours. Typically one of the things that happens when they join is that they are required to sign a waiver, consenting to their employer not being bound by the Working Time Directive, and they work 15- 16-hour days, 6, sometimes 7 days a week. Admittedly they do this for what are often enormous salaries.

But they have no time to spend it. You can see the results of this in the latest statistics which were reported in the newspapers. Many, many more parents are having their first children when they are in their 30s. They have no time before then. They are so controlled, by what is really wage slavery. They are no longer their own people, but they belong to the major law firm, or to the bank, or to the consulting company, or to the major industrial concern that they work for.

They’re so defined by their occupation that they will accept this almost complete loss of their own rights to live as a human being, in return for the status that comes with being an employee of that respected employer, and receiving very generous rewards. Not only is this bad for the individuals concerned – it can’t be right to go from age 25, say, to age 35, simply going to work, as some kind of highly-skilled automaton – but also it perpetuates divisions in society.

These wage slaves are like the slaves who belonged to the highest echelons of society in the Roman Empire. They are themselves highly educated, comfortably housed, very secure in material terms, just as some of the slaves in Ancient Rome were, when they were owned by the leading members of the Senate and the aristocracy.

But the fact that the law allows employers to exploit these brilliant young people so brutally means that others, who are perhaps not quite so brilliant, don’t have a look-in. There are fewer jobs and fewer chances than there would be if, instead of campaigning to water down employment protection even more, the government looked at ways of spreading out the work which these companies do, for very high rewards, so that more people are employed and more people have chances in life. Then the wage slaves might be able to go home at a reasonable hour and discover that they had families, and beautiful places to live, and talents, which could be used not only for making money.

As Paul says, the only sense in which one ought to be a slave is in the sense that one belongs to God. Jesus paid the price for us, the highest price. We belong to him. As St. Paul says, ‘You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of human masters.’

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Christians in a Plain Brown Wrapper

By publicsquare

January 20, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the Third Day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 20th January 2013
1 Corinthians 12:1-11 – ‘There are varieties of services, but the same Lord’ : Christians in a Plain Brown Wrapper

On Thursday we had the launch event for our Alpha Course (http://www.standrewscobham.org.uk/ see under ‘Alpha’). I can’t tell you very much about it, although I’m sure that it was a very good start. The reason is that the usual suspects in the church, like me, were not supposed to go. You might think that was rather odd, given that, as convinced Christians, we should have been very keen to spread the good news of Christ and to help to make other people into good Christians too.

I think that one reason why we usual suspects were supposed to stay away from Alpha is because of all the baggage, all the complications, that we might bring about our worship and about the way we follow Christ. We don’t want to confuse people.

You see for instance, I am an Anglican: but until 1996 I was a Methodist. Both my grandfathers and one great-grandfather were Methodist ministers. In the congregation here at St Andrew’s, I know that there are people who started out as Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Orthodox, Pentecostals, Pioneer People. There are lots and lots of different types of Christians. All worshipping God and proclaiming the good news of Christ in different ways. And in different churches.

We’re in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which Churches Together in Britain and Ireland organises each year, and which is part of a worldwide movement for Christian unity.

I suspect that most of us are a little bit worried about being insincere about this. I’m quite happy being an Anglican. I know that my friends Rhys and Rhonda down the road are very happy to be Methodists. My friends Craig and Clare are very happy to be Catholics. I don’t think that any of us, when we say our prayers for Christian Unity, actually want our churches to be abolished and for us to go into one great amorphous mass of Christians with a plain brown wrapper, as it were.

But in the case of the Alpha Course, although it is definitely being run by us here at St Andrew’s, an Anglican parish church, nevertheless there is absolutely no pressure on the people who come to ‘explore the meaning of life’, as the publicity puts it, to attend any particular church if they decide to take things further. There’s certainly pressure to attend some church; but it doesn’t have to be St Andrew’s. It could be the Catholics, or the Methodists, or the URCs or Baptists or the Orthodox. The important thing is to become Christian, to join the Body of Christ, which certainly does mean joining a church – but not any particular church.

Why we are Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists or whatever, is an interesting question. I suspect that between us, we could give all sorts of different answers. Probably the most common answer would be that the church we attend is the one that our parents went to, and that we were brought up in, the one that we’re most familiar with.

But that’s not necessarily the only answer. Perhaps the person you married went to a particular church, and you went along too. Perhaps you moved into a new area; you went round and road-tested all the local churches and picked one because you felt most at home there.

Certainly now, here in Cobham, it’s a very friendly world among all the churches, with no sinister undertones between them. But of course, in some parts of the world, and indeed nearer to home in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, what kind of Christian you are, and specifically whether you are a Protestant or a Catholic, is a question which has caused the most dreadful violence and bloodshed over the years.

Going back to the time of the Reformation, some very sharp divisions appeared. Catholics saw the Pope as the ‘Vicar’ of Christ, the person who stands in place of Christ. ‘Vicar’ comes from the Latin ‘vice’ – the same word as in vice versa: in place of. The Protestants didn’t like the thought that anyone was claiming to stand in for or represent Christ; so they called the Pope the ‘Antichrist’. Diametrically opposed views, additionally complicated in England by the thought that, once upon a time, if you were a Catholic, because of the allegiance which you owed to the Pope, this was in some sense treasonable, because you were acknowledging the authority of someone who is not the King or Queen.

In modern-day Palestine, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there are unseemly squabbles between the priests and monks of the various denominations who are all jointly responsible for keeping up the church and maintaining the holy places.

You can readily imagine how these sort of squabbles can come about. There’s nothing more important in a Christian’s life than their Christian belief. Therefore we can tend to think it’s vitally important that every detail of that belief should be absolutely authentic, absolutely correct. We might well think that somebody else has got some of it wrong, has misunderstood something important. I don’t particularly want to get into specifics, but I think we can all imagine the sort of things that Christians in different denominations might well debate about.

Even within the same church, there is scope for disagreement, for example about the best form of worship. There is a huge variety of worship that you can take part in, just within the Church of England. You can go to a so-called ‘high church’, where the priests and the choir wear the most beautiful vestments and robes: there may be incense, wonderful liturgy, beautiful words; very formal, great ceremony. There will be an emphasis on Holy Communion as being the most important form of worship.

Or you could go to an evangelical church where the minister doesn’t even wear a dog-collar: the choir don’t wear robes: there isn’t an organ – they play guitars and sing ‘worship songs’ instead of hymns. The heart of the service is not Holy Communion necessarily, but the word of God, in the Bible, and then in the explanation of it, the teaching on it, in a sermon.

Some services, again, haven’t changed since the mid-16th century. If you go to our sister church, St Mary’s, for Evensong or Mattins, that’s what you’ll find: a service which hasn’t changed since 1549 (http://tinyurl.com/akmehxw). Or alternatively you could come to our Family Service here at St Andrew’s, and we’ll be using a pattern of worship which our wonderful liturgist, Jan Brind, may have compiled in the last few weeks.

‘There are varieties of services – and there are varieties of spiritual gifts,’ to paraphrase what St Paul says in our lesson today. So how does all that bear on the question of Christian Unity? Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld, and his ‘unknown unknowns’? Well, in the context of Christian Unity, I want to say that there is another rather Rumsfeld-sounding concept – ‘indifferent things’, in theology the Greek word αδιάφορα, [adiaphora] which means things which don’t make much of a difference. The make-no-differences are an old idea in Christianity, and a very useful one. At the time of the Reformation, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the time of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, one of the points of difference between the reformers and the Catholic Church was all about what was happening in the Holy Communion service.

Did the bread and wine somehow, sacramentally, become Jesus’ body and blood? Was there what was called the Real Presence, or transubstantiation of the elements, or was it just bread and wine? The reformers couldn’t agree. They all had slightly different understandings of it. Luther thought that there was transubstantiation, that there was Real Presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine. He didn’t disagree with the Catholics on that point. Calvin and Zwingli did disagree. They thought that the bread and the wine are just symbols, symbols to remind the people taking communion what the sacraments stand for. But they all, Reformers and Catholics, could agree on the basic, core doctrines within Christianity, all the things that we say in the Creed.

A great early theologian of the Church of England, Richard Hooker, used the idea of αδιάφορα, indifferent things, to great effect. The question, whether or not the bread and the wine somehow changes in the Communion service, was one of those things, he said, which actually made no difference – it was an ‘indifferent’ thing, so different sorts of Christians, Protestant, Puritan, Church of England and Catholic, could agree together on more than they disagreed about. This idea of ‘things that don’t matter’ is a very useful concept in the context of Christian Unity. It stops us from having sterile disputes, for example about what’s going on in the communion service, and we certainly don’t regard the Pope as the Antichrist any more. (MacCulloch, D., 2003, Reformation, London, Allen Lane, p.502f)

I want to suggest that whether you are a Catholic, or a Methodist, or an evangelical type, or a straight up-and-down middle-of-the-road Anglican, whatever, your Christianity is perfectly all right. I don’t think we should beat ourselves up over being in different denominations. St Paul said, ‘There are varieties of services – and varieties of service’. In his letters to the Galatians and the Romans, he deals with whether the new Christians should be circumcised, or whether they should observe any other distinctive Jewish customs like keeping the Sabbath, for example. He says, No, it’s not necessary any more.

The good news of Jesus is available to everyone, not just to Jewish people, nor indeed to any other kind of religious denomination in particular. St Paul’s great work was to spread the good news of Jesus Christ beyond the original Jewish Christians to the non-Jewish, so-called Gentiles – which is what we are, after all. All sorts and conditions of people. As St Paul says, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, in the kingdom of God (Galatians 3:28). All these distinctions are unimportant: they are ‘indifferent’, they make no difference.

So when we pray for Christian Unity, let’s pray not to become one great amorphous mass, but rather that we should make room for each other as Christians, to acknowledge that we are all one in Christ, we all believe in the same good news. But let us give thanks that there are many spiritual gifts and many varieties of service.

Further reading: http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Diocesan_Address_May_2010.htm

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Newness of Life

By publicsquare

January 13, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after Epiphany (The Baptism of Christ), 13th January 2013
Isaiah 55:1-11, Romans 6:1-11

You might be rather surprised to learn that I like cycling. When you look at my sylph-like figure, you might be excused if you showed a certain degree of scepticism about this! But really, I do enjoy riding my bike on a nice fine day. You are right, though: I’m not one of these chaps clad in Lycra trying to emulate Sir Bradley Wiggins up and down the Fairmile or even climbing up Box Hill – let alone doing it nine times!

My bike benefits from electrical assistance. Going uphill, the harder I have to pedal, the more assistance I get. It doesn’t do all the work for me, it gives me just as much assistance as I call for. On the way down into the village I hardly use any assistance, but on the way back up, I switch the boost to maximum!

This is the sort of mechanism that St Paul has in mind when he starts chapter 6 of his letter to the Romans by saying, ‘What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?’ In other words, pressing down on the ‘sin’ pedal brings counter-acting force, of grace, to outweigh the sin. Is that how salvation works? No, St Paul says, no, definitely it isn’t. Just because we have received God’s grace, God’s free gift in Jesus, because we have been put right with God, justified, by our faith, it doesn’t give us the green light to pursue immorality and sin.

It’s no good thinking that, because we have received grace, because we are numbered among the elect, the saved, then whatever we do, we’ll get whatever grace we need in order to put things right, however awful we are.

St Paul goes on to talk about the effect of baptism. In baptism there is a symbolic, sacramental death, drowning the old self in the water and then rising to new life as one emerges from the water. Today, the first Sunday after Epiphany, is the time in the church’s year when we celebrate the most special baptism of all, the baptism of Christ.

Why did Christ need to be baptised at all? As the son of God, he had no sin in him. The reason was, that Christ was entering into our human life. As humans, we are capable of sin; so Jesus as a human, as incarnate in our life, was baptised, washed free of any possibility of sin. St Paul develops this idea in this passage from Romans. He talks about dying and rising ‘with Christ’. A big theme in St Paul’s letters is the idea of our being ‘in Christ’. Sometimes he talks almost as though Christ was a suit of clothes. In his letter to the Galatians he says, ‘As many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ …’ (Galatians 3:28) In this passage in the sixth chapter of his letter to the Romans, he says that Christians through their baptism are ‘dead to sin and alive to God’ (v.11), or raised to new life in Christ.

I’m not really sure what that means. It’s very comforting to hear, in our lesson from Isaiah chapter 55, ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.’ (v.8) I don’t know whether anyone can fully understand all the nuances of meaning, for somebody to be ‘in Christ’. A traditional explanation is that, for us to be ‘in Christ’ means that Christ is in us. But If Christ is in us, how does it work? In particular, how does it work for us to be ‘crucified with’ Christ, and then to rise again with him, in the way St Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans?

If we are united with Jesus in death, then, indeed, St Paul says we will be united with him in his resurrection too. But, thank goodness, none of us has been crucified: instead, St Paul makes it all depend on baptism. He says we were ‘baptised into’ Jesus’ death.

Baptism is a sacrament: an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. The Catechism, which little boys and girls used to have to learn by heart in the latter half of the C16, says this.

‘What is the outward sign or form in baptism?
Water: wherein the person is baptized, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
What is the inward and spiritual grace?
A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness, for being by nature born in sin, and the children of wrath, we are hereby made the children of grace.’

And the Catechism goes on, ‘What is required of persons to be baptized? Repentance, whereby they forsake sin: and faith, whereby they stedfastly believe the promises of God, made to them in that sacrament.’ (BCP, A Catechism, p.295) Repentance and faith. These stand for death and resurrection, in the sacrament of baptism.

As St Paul says, we are justified by faith (Romans 4:13-5:1). The word ‘justified’ in St Paul’s letters, δίκαιωθεις in Greek, is often explained as meaning ‘put right with’, not exactly ‘excused’ or ‘acquitted’, but put into a right relationship with God. ‘Justified by faith’: there’s almost a circularity in it. If we have faith, we have a right relationship with God. If we lose our faith, we are separated from that right relationship and we are ‘in sin’. Sin is separation from God.

You might object that this is a very heavy theological burden for a baby who is being christened, and that it is a bit far-fetched to imagine that any baby is going to understand that he or she has been baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ. But, the idea of babies being baptised is a very old one. In the Book of Common Prayer you will find the next question and answer in the Catechism asks why infants, who cannot ‘perform’ the required repentance and faith, are baptised, and the answer is that their parents and godparents make the promises for them, and when they reach a suitable age, in confirmation, they take over responsibility for repentance and faith; they are, in effect, still bound by that promise.

This is all very beautiful, and it sounds great. You would expect therefore that Christians would live perfect lives. But of course, we don’t. Indeed St Paul himself goes on to say, in the next chapter of Romans, chapter 7, ‘I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.’ (Rom. 7:15,17) That doesn’t seem to square very well with the idea of having died to sin, and therefore no longer being affected by it.

I came across a picturesque way of understanding this apparent contradiction. Imagine a bus driver who has to follow the bus route when he’s driving the bus. As he drives along, he sees all sorts of interesting by-ways and detours that he’d quite like to take. But because he is a bus driver, under orders, he can’t deviate, he has to keep to the prescribed route.

But suppose that the same bus driver on his day off follows the same route in his own car. In those circumstances, he’s perfectly able to go exploring, and leave the bus route. Once, like the bus driver, we were constrained to follow the route of sin. Now, in Christ, we have been set free. We can still choose to follow the old route if we really want to. But we’re also able to choose something new, ‘newness of life.’

So we still have free will; and indeed, sometimes it gets on top of us, as St Paul was complaining. But we are now driving our own car: we ought to be a good driver. If we have faith, then we are ‘in Christ’, and Christ is in us. We are free from the compulsion to follow the path of sin. (Stone, D., 1998, The Baptism Service, London, Hodder and Stoughton: p.91)

Nevertheless, being ‘in Christ’, being ‘dead to sin and alive in Christ’, may also be rather like waiting for the Second Coming. There is a tension between the here-and-now and the not-yet. St Augustine’s prayer, ‘Please God, make me good – but not yet’, is another way of expressing this. Are we ready to ‘put on Christ’? Are we ready to ‘die with him to sin’? That is the question which we need to think about, on this first Sunday after Epiphany.

Let us pray that in this new year, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.

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Margaret Thatcher and her Successors have changed the British Way of Life for the worse

By publicsquare

January 5, 2013 //

There are several key features of Thatcherism. They include the following.

Doctrinaire adherence to monetarist economic theory:
A belief that ‘public’ is bad, and ‘private’ is good:
A belief that ‘there is no such thing as society’:
Military adventurism.

Monetarism

When the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, it followed a time of economic crisis – a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, devaluation of the pound and interest rates around 15%. The ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978/9 saw the worst industrial unrest in Britain since the General Strike of 1926.

Thatcher decided that a particular economic theory, ‘monetarism’, propounded by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Alan Walters, was the only possible solution. It was ‘supply side’ regulation. If the amount of money was reduced, prices (and inflation) would drop. She said that ‘There is no alternative’ (‘TINA’). The economy was regulated according to various ‘money supply’ figures ‘M1, M2,’ etc.

The effect of this policy was to reduce the size of the economy, and in particular to destroy much of Britain’s manufacturing industry. Margaret Thatcher was willing to see thousands put out of work rather than modify her application of monetarist theory. Unemployment reached 3 million in 1980.

Just as Edward Heath, the previous Conservative prime minister, had inflicted huge economic damage through his imposition of a ‘3 day week’ in 1973 in the face of a miners’ strike, saying that ‘there was no alternative’ because there were ‘insufficient coal stocks to fuel the power stations’ – a claim which turned out not to be true – so Margaret Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no alternative’ to monetarism was open to challenge, but she was still willing to sacrifice many people’s livelihoods for the sake of her economic dogma.

In fact, far from its being beyond doubt that her theory was right, in March 1981 The Times published a letter from 364 economists saying ‘there is no basis in economic theory …. for the government’s present [monetarist] policies’. For many ordinary people, whose livelihoods had been ruined by these policies, it created lasting distrust in politicians that a government could ignore the fact that there was principled disagreement among those best qualified to judge the wisdom or otherwise of what the government was dogmatically insisting on doing – and that the government preferred to stick to its questionable dogma rather than to maintain stable employment for the majority of the population.

Thatcherist economic policies, for example the abolition on restrictions affecting share dealings (the ‘Big Bang’, or deregulation of the stock market in 1986), harmed manufacturing industry and benefitted services such as banking, insurance and other ‘City’ businesses. This meant that for those without the necessary professional qualifications to work in the service sector, i.e. the vast majority, who worked in factories, employment became much more uncertain and the expectation of a single career for life disappeared. Of a working population only a tiny minority work in the favoured service sector. Apprenticeships have drastically reduced in number. All this has militated against social cohesion, and resulted in serious riots in Liverpool in 1981. People no longer had the ‘wartime spirit’ of working together for the good of the country as a whole.

It is noteworthy that David Cameron is again pursuing classically Thatcherist deflationary economic policies and justifying them by asserting that ‘there is no alternative’. Just as in the early 1980s, public spending of all types is being sharply reduced, and a recession made worse thereby. However, to the contrary, public investment, for example in major infrastructure projects, has been a powerful instrument in reviving economies in recession, for example under President Roosevelt in the USA in the 1930s, when a major road-building programme was undertaken, which created jobs and built useful assets conducive to economic growth – i.e. better roads. By eschewing such public investment, Thatcherist economic policies are still damaging the British economy, and putting many people out of work. There have again been riots.

Margaret Thatcher had never studied economics (she studied Chemistry at Oxford, and subsequently read for the Bar), and she failed to perceive some very important differences between British business practice and, for example business practice in Germany and Japan, with the result that British manufacturing has become less competitive. Industrial loans in Britain typically mature, i.e. have to be repaid or re-financed, over a much shorter period than loans in Germany or Japan, where the repayment period is much longer – typically seven years as against three. British manufacturers are rarely led by managing directors who are engineers, whereas German or Japanese manufacturers usually are. In consequence there is more emphasis on developing and perfecting better products than in the UK, where accountants rule. It is not accidental that most cars bought in the UK are produced by German or Japanese companies, and that although British car factories are producing large numbers of cars, they are not designed here, and the manufacturers are not British companies. Thatcherism has fatally weakened British manufacturing companies.

Public bad – private good

Margaret Thatcher, as a child of a successful shopkeeper, became successful, in the sense that she became prime minister rather than the successor in title to her father’s business, through hard work and application, she believed. She never acknowledged that she had received any public benefit. Her father sent her to a fee-paying, private school, and she did not win a scholarship at Oxford. Although in reality she owed a very considerable debt to her father for the privileged start in life which she received, she developed a strong belief that a person’s success or failure depends above all on their own efforts – every person is the author or their own success or failure, according to her.

This led to her despising public investment. She is reported to have said that, if one is on a bus after the age of 26, it is a sign of failure! (Interview on Thames TV in 1976). She despised universities, because she believed that they fostered belief in socialism (irrespective which subject one studied). Similarly she saw no merit in museums or theatres, and she almost never used trains.

Monetarism involved a belief in markets as measures of value. Things were only worth what someone was willing to pay for them. If something could not be bought, it had – according to Margaret Thatcher – no value. This reinforced her antagonism towards the arts, pure academic activity and research.

Her private good/public bad analysis was nowhere more clearly shown than in her policy to sell off council houses. She restricted funding to local councils so severely that they had to raise money by selling off their assets – of which the biggest was their stock of council houses. She forced councils, by various means, to sell their stock of houses at an undervalue, and offered subsidised loans to tenants in order to facilitate their purchases.

She believed that it was ‘better’ for people to own their own houses rather than to rent them. Houses were ‘better’ under private ownership. Of course in turning former council tenants into property owners, she had a gerrymandering objective, to manufacture Conservative voters. She was never censured for this although her close friend and supporter, Dame Shirley Porter, was ‘surcharged’ (in effect, fined) £27 million for a similar gerrymandering policy in the London Borough of Westminster in 2004. The sell-off of council houses, coupled with a policy which forbade councils from reinvesting the proceeds in replacement new houses, was to change the economic outlook for working-class people radically.

When council housing was readily available, people could undertake relatively menial jobs, and accept relatively low pay, and still enjoy a decent standard of living. Council houses were well built according to the so-called Parker-Morris standards, which laid down, for example, minimum sizes for rooms. By contrast, private developments were not subject to the same requirements. By being a council tenant, a worker was to some extent protected from the vagaries of the economic market, whereas once the same person had bought their council house, they were exposed to market forces such as interest rate rises. In order to enjoy the same standard of living, they needed bigger salaries – which employers were not willing or able to pay. The result was ever more unemployment.

The idea that only markets are reliable indicators of value was – and is – central to Thatcherism. Although she herself shied away from introducing marketisation into the National Health Service, her successors, such as Andrew Lansley in the Cameron government, have embraced the ideas of competition between hospitals and other ‘suppliers’ of medical ‘services’ for ‘customers’. This completely contradicts the founders’ idea that the NHS should be a source of treatment and healing for sick people irrespective of cost – and that the cost should be met out of taxation.

The likely outcome of this is to make the NHS more like the American health system – available, and very good, provided that the patient has private resources, in wealth or insurance coverage (itself often prohibitively expensive), to pay for the treatment. In the USA, poor people suffer and die, simply because they are too poor to pay for medical treatment. This is the likely outcome of Thatcherist policy in relation to the NHS.

‘No such thing as Society’

Margaret Thatcher used this phrase in an interview with a journalist from the magazine ‘Woman’s Own’ in 1987, following her third election victory. She believed that individuals could determine their own success or failure, perhaps by working hard. In 1981, her follower Norman Tebbit told unemployed people that his father had tackled being unemployed by ‘getting on his bike’ and seeking out employment. She had no understanding that the majority of working people have very little economic autonomy: far from being able to get on their bikes, metaphorically speaking, they have no bikes to ride, and little of the knowledge or mental ability to do so. They do not have the cushion of capital savings to fall back on which her policy calls for. Tebbit’s saying was, in effect, a cruel taunt.

Thatcher and her followers believed that, if someone was out of work, it was their own fault – they had lost their job because they had not worked hard enough, or they had gone on strike for better conditions. It was not understood that many places of work closed as a direct result of Thatcher’s economic dogma, the policy of restricting money supply, and through that, of restricting investment. The employees were thrown out of work without regard for their diligence or abilities. Although Margaret Thatcher may have thought that her policies were designed to promote self-reliance, in many people they produced only despair and cynicism.

Thatcher saw the protection which trades unions gave to their members, in the ultimate by striking, simply as an impediment to economic growth. She did not value job security for the mass of people, and therefore she passed a number of laws which restricted the ability of the trades unions to take industrial action in order to protect their members’ employment rights. The most damaging of these, the Employment Act 1980, outlawed ‘secondary action’; in other words, a union could strike only in furtherance of a trade dispute in which it (its members) were directly involved.

The result has been a decline in union membership and the perception among employers that the UK offers workers the least protection against loss of employment of any European country. Recently the Cameron government commissioned a report from Adrian Beecroft, an entrepreneur and Conservative Party donor, which recommended that employment protection regulation should be watered down so that the UK would emulate the USA, where employers can hire and fire at will. There is no evidence that reducing job security even further would in any way promote economic growth. In the strongest European economy, Germany, unions are represented on the supervising boards of companies and employment is strongly protected.

Where, as a result of their being able to exercise leverage despite the removal of much of their power, unions can maintain a credible threat of industrial action, as the RMT Union under Bob Crow does, its members enjoy much better rates of pay and job security than similarly-qualified people in industries where there is no powerful union to protect them. Thatcherists forget that there are many more potential victims – workers – than employers. Union power benefits society rather than the other way round, as Thatcherists would have us believe.

Thatcher’s nostrum that ‘There is no such thing as society’ has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In removing statutory protections and emasculating collective organisations who could stand up to those who threatened the security of ordinary workers, Thatcherism has further weakened the bonds of society. The emphasis is on individual success: there is no real concern for the weak, the poor, the ill and the old. Again, the change from the caring society enjoyed during the 1939-45 war and its aftermath is striking, and disastrous.

Military Adventurism

Margaret Thatcher’s electoral fortunes were waning badly in 1982. She embraced the Falklands campaign despite the following:

British foreign policy over the Falklands towards Argentina had for several years been directed towards negotiating handing over sovereignty, but leasing back the islands in a similar way to what had happened between Britain and China over the New Territories in Hong Kong in 1898. The ‘polar research’ ship (effectively, a warship) HMS ENDURANCE was to be scrapped under Thatcher’s cuts in public expenditure. The Argentine government could be excused for misreading the signs, and drawing the conclusion that Britain cared little for the Falklands.

Having decided that it was a matter of principle that the Argentine invasion was to to be contested, just as in other spheres Thatcher was willing to risk people’s livelihoods for the sake of a dogma, here she was willing even to risk lives. Every ship which went to the Falklands was hit by Argentine bombs. By luck, all passed through the hulls of the target ships and, their fuses having been set incorrectly, exploded harmlessly on the sea bed. The BELGRANO was effectively a sitting duck which was turning away from the Royal Navy – but Margaret Thatcher personally ordered her to be sunk, with the loss of hundreds of lives. Thatcher relied on the bravery and military expertise of the British forces to draw the public’s attention away from the disastrous effects of her economic policies, and give her a war leader’s halo.

This has had a terrible effect. Thatcher’s successors, Blair and Brown, and now Cameron, believe in military might as an instrument of policy. Countless Iraqis were slaughtered through Blair’s willingness to adopt GW Bush’s doctrine of a ‘war on terror’, even despite the lack of any UN mandate. Britain went to war against Iraq in breach of international law – but in the mind of the Thatcherists, this did not matter, so long as the war was ‘successful’.

Similar bloody logic has applied in Afghanistan. Originally our forces were committed as peacekeepers, and the mission was sanctioned by a vote in the UN. We were assured by a government minister that there would be no need for bloodshed and that our troops would be home soon. That was in 2002, and hundreds of British troops have been killed and maimed since. The government puts out the line that our military activity is allowing the development of settled government and education for women – that, in the face of hundreds of years of history, Afghans can be persuaded to change their beliefs by the use of force.

The war in Afghanistan is useful for the Cameron, Thatcherist, government, in distracting attention from the dire economic situation at home, which their dogma is making worse. There are parallels with Thatcher in 1982. The sight of the British Paralympians, missing limbs as a result of being hurt in Afghanistan, was appalling. These brave people had been maimed in a completely futile cause – but the Thatcherists do not care, preferring to stick to spurious dogma about ‘achievement’ in Afghanistan.

Now as our troops are finally being pulled out, the US Ambassador to NATO, Mr Daalder, has argued that the money saved should not be put towards relieving the hardship caused by economic failure, but to more spending on arms. Thatcherist orthodoxy is that ‘might is right’.

Conclusion

Thatcher and her successors destroyed the post-war consensus between the haves and the have-nots. She destroyed the idea that the strong had a duty to protect the weak in society. Her analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that the Samaritan was only able to be charitable because he was rich. The obscenity of this is breathtaking, but the damage goes very deep. Uncritical acceptance of Thatcher’s TINA has become so ingrained that few perceive how repellent her morality was. As a result, our society has no stable basis any more. The guiding principle, set by the market, is dog-eat-dog.

Tags 3 Day Week, Cameron, Coalition, Conservative Party, Falklands, Heath Government, Margaret Thatcher, politics

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Sunset in the earthly paradise

By publicsquare | Image

December 31, 2012 //

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Father Christmas and the Son of God

By publicsquare

December 30, 2012 //

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday of Christmas, 30th December 2012
Isaiah 61, Luke 2:15-21.

I’ve never done better than when our two daughters were 5 and 10 respectively, and we decided to have Christmas in Switzerland. We decided that Father Christmas should give the girls a train set, which came in two huge boxes. I bought it on the telephone from the toy shop in the Swiss village. I arranged for the shop to gift-wrap the two big boxes and deliver them to the hotel, where I conspired with the concierge that he would have these large presents delivered to our room at 3 o’clock on Christmas morning, when everybody was safely asleep, and before the girls had started to wriggle their toes to see if they could feel the stockings which they expected Father Christmas to have left at the bottom of their beds.

I issued a stern injunction that anyone who found their stocking and opened it before 6.30 in the morning ran the risk that Father Christmas’ presents would disappear back up the chimney where he had come from. The girls were amazed when they awoke and found that, in addition to fairly modest stockings, they had two huge boxes beautifully gift-wrapped at the bottom of their beds.

Emma, aged 10, had indeed previously had some sceptical thoughts about Father Christmas; but she said, ‘This is amazing, Dad! Those boxes, that the presents came in, were far too big for you to bring on the plane.’ And the magic enveloped us all.

Well, I hope that, even if you were not surrounded by Father Christmas magic, as our daughters were all those years ago, you nevertheless had a happy and blessed time. Perhaps Father Christmas didn’t really come: but what about the baby Jesus? It may be that certain things were not exactly as they were described in the Bible – for instance if you compare the birth story in St Matthew’s gospel with St Luke’s account that we were reading tonight, you will discover that in St Matthew, the wise men were the people who came to see Jesus first, whereas in St Luke it is the shepherds.

And of course no-one could really prove the story of the Virgin Birth. But I am not really so concerned about that. What I am concerned about tonight is understanding some of the significance of Jesus’ birth. We are of course able to draw some inferences from the circumstances; from the fact that Mary and Joseph were clearly not well-off. When they arrived in Bethlehem they hadn’t booked a room in advance and they didn’t have the right frequent traveller cards in order to give them priority on the waiting list for a hotel room.

It has been said that St Luke’s choice of the shepherds to receive the angels’ message first, telling them exactly who Jesus was, about the true importance of the baby, is in itself significant, because again, shepherds were not rich or important people, and in Jewish society of that time they were even worse than that – shepherds were regarded as being devious, dishonourable and unreliable. So just as, later on in the gospels, Jesus is taken to task for consorting with tax-gatherers and sinners, so here the message which the gospel is giving us is not what we would have expected if we were looking for a description of the the coming of someone who would change human history for ever.

He was of course much more in the line of the Servant King in Isaiah’s prophecy, the very antithesis of a mighty conquering hero of the sort that the Israelites were hoping for, to be their Messiah. That is St Luke’s theme, and it is all very well understood. But who was he, really?

As I was coming out of the midnight communion service at St Andrew’s, I picked up a leaflet which had been left on the pews by the team who are about to launch the Alpha course there; a pamphlet called ‘Why Christmas?’, by the Revd Nicky Gumbel, the vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton, where the Alpha programme comes from.

As I was brushing my teeth before going to bed, I flipped through the Alpha pamphlet, and on page 4 there was a sub-heading, ‘Who is Jesus?’ And it said there, ‘Jesus was and is the son of God.’ So I went to sleep on Christmas morning starting to mull over the thought that the baby Jesus ‘was and is the son of God’.

I had a lovely Christmas Day with my family; a splendid turkey, and then a splendid turkey pie on Boxing Day. Then the next day, I sat down to write this sermon. At which point the Alpha booklet, and the Revd Nicky Gumbel’s simple words, ‘Who is Jesus? Jesus was and is the son of God’, came back into my mind.

Somehow, it didn’t feel right. I must confess that, whereas I usually quite happily listen to the Today programme on the radio in the morning as I get dressed, in the last week or two I really haven’t felt like staying with the programme all the way through. The news is so full of terrible things. The terrible shooting in the school in Connecticut; the poor firemen who were burned by the mad arsonist, who said that his favourite activity was killing people; the crisis in Europe concerning the Euro, where the poor countries like Italy or Greece, Portugal and Spain are forced to become even poorer by the rich countries.

In the wider world, we continue to hear terrible stories from Syria. Now it seems quite clear that, whatever the beginnings of the conflict, it has turned into a proxy war where each side is supported by outside interests. Other countries outside Syria supply each side with terrible weapons – and the wherewithal to buy them.

We are told that climate change is going out of control. Those economies that are still growing, where people aspire to have better living standards, almost necessarily produce rising amounts of pollution. They want to live as comfortably as we do. But as a result the outlook for the future of the world is not good.

It doesn’t seem to sit very easily with this catalogue of woe for us simply to say, ‘Jesus was and is the son of God’. What sort of a god would allow all these terrible things to happen? What sort of a god would send his son into such an awful world, so that not only did his son ultimately get destroyed by it, but also so that his son appears to have had so little effect?

As I reflected on this, I was sad. Perhaps it was a normal reaction, coming down to earth after the happy times of Christmas Day and Boxing Day. But I did feel pretty bleak. But then I had a telephone call. It was from an old friend of mine, and she wanted to talk to me about a situation that we had both been wrestling with, where I had got completely stuck. If I did one thing, then I would offend someone that we both care for. If I did another thing, to please that person, I would end up, I thought, hurting my friend.

I knew that she’d tried to ring me a couple of times before Christmas, but I’d been out. She hadn’t left any messages, but I knew she had rung. But I hadn’t rung her back, because I really didn’t know what to say. And then she rang me, out of the blue, and she said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I know the dilemma that you’re in. It’s all right. I won’t be hurt, and I’ll still be your friend, whatever you decide.’ She meant it. Her generosity – the simple, kind thing that she said to me – lifted my whole mood. In a flash I saw one of the things that it could mean for Jesus to be the son of God.

C.S. Lewis wrote, in Mere Christianity, ‘The son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God’ (Ch 27). Because Jesus came, we can have a chance to be like him. In the collect for today I prayed, ‘Grant that we being …. made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit’. Children of God. Us as well as Jesus. But God doesn’t treat us like puppets. He doesn’t force us to behave in a particular way. Just as we can’t always stop our children doing the wrong thing, so he doesn’t always stop terrible things happening.

But he does come, in us and in other people. He is present. We are children of God. My friend gave me grace, gave me permission and freedom in a difficult situation; I believe that it was God at work in her. In the same way, God is always there to hear and answer our prayers, and God comes to us in the people of God. We carry God. God is in us. God in us can lead us to strive against the evils we see at work in our world.

In his childhood, as a baby and even as a wayward teenager giving his parents the slip, Jesus showed us the way. ‘Grant that, as he came to share in our humanity, so we may share in the life of his divinity’.

Tags christmas, christmas in switzerland, church, religion

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The View from the Gods

By publicsquare

December 17, 2012 //

Talk for a ‘Prompt Corner’ Luncheon at the Nomads Theatre, 21st November 2012

When I sat down to write this, I couldn’t remember which part of the theatre I was supposed to be sitting in. Of course like all men, I like to think of myself in my prime, the young man, the world at his feet, striding down Leadenhall Street – but of course those young chaps’ salaries only let you sit in the gods. Hence my title.

But just as there is some cognitive dissonance in the air when I tell my daughters that so-and-so has dark hair, dark hair just like mine – so I have to confess that it’s not the gods, but the stalls that are now better suited to a man of my girth. So perhaps this is really a view from the stalls. Whatever: I am definitely out there, beyond the footlights. This is what I am thinking, as I sit – wherever I sit, watching the play. I am not an actor; I’m in the audience.

By the way – the reference to ‘the gods’ may have hinted at a nod to my being a preacher – six feet above criticism in the pulpit – but don’t worry, I’m not planning to deliver a sermon today.

Why do I go to the theatre? Was Shakespeare right to dismiss the actor’s craft as to ‘strut and fret his hour on the stage …. signifying nothing’? Or is this a very serious business, almost a spiritual work-out, what Aristotle was talking about when he said that in a tragedy the playwright achieves ‘catharsis’ in the audience, a sort of purification of the spirit, through ‘pity’ and ‘fear’?

That might be rather a challenging beginning. I put it almost as a set of logical extremes. Somewhere in between lies the secret, the magical secret, of what we see and hear in a play. Aristotle does specify that he is talking about ‘drama’ rather than storytelling. We need actors, saying their lines and doing their action, on a stage, with scenery and props, in order for the magic to happen.

I think that that is because drama is the most involving form of storytelling. The action doesn’t happen in your head as you listen to the storyteller, but it is there, in flesh and blood, on the stage in front of you. You see people – perhaps people like you in some respects – in dramatic situations, situations which put them to the test. How will they react? What will they do?

The other thing, as well as what the characters do, is what they feel. Sometimes what they encounter in the plot is beyond our experience. We in the audience don’t know what it felt like to be Hamlet, or Othello, or Macbeth. Indeed we wouldn’t identify ourselves with any of those tragic characters. They’re too elevated. But what about Romeo or Juliet? A boy and a girl; they could be any of us, well, at least when we were young.

We often find characters on stage whom we want to identify with. Perhaps we secretly feel, ‘If only … If only I had done this, or had this bit of luck, then it could be me that this play is all about.’

Of course you, as actors, do have to work out what those tragic giants felt, to act out their jealousy, their ambition, their rage. But I’m speaking strictly from the other side of the curtain. And we in the audience don’t know how it feels – we depend on the players to show us, to play out visibly, the characters’ emotions.

Sometimes we know we’re not like the hero or the heroine, but we still admire them, we still love them. Richard Griffiths’ character in the History Boys – actually any schoolteacher in a play, Mr Chips, Miss Jean Brodie – we love them all. They never seem to give out detention or lines! We admire them – they are ideal figures. Here is some of the magic. You come out of seeing The History Boys and you have a warm feeling of having been close to a source of wisdom, a source of goodness. The teacher, gifted himself, nurturing people who are talented, precociously talented as only teenagers can be. Their flame is burning bright – who knows whether it will settle in to generate steady power, or flame out, die away in a couple of years?

That’s another part of the magic – the risk. How can our hero do that, risk that, and not get cut down? How can those young ones risk it all for love – or for a cause? You would like to think that you would take that risk, you would put yourself on the line – but what does it feel like? The play will tell you. I would not dare to challenge a king – even if I was able to speak to him at all – but in any case would I risk it that he might hear me and then say, ‘Off with his head!’? In the play, that’s what happens – and I can see how our hero is shaken, how he is terrified. He is playing out the emotions, the horror, the cruelty. And then, in the nick of time, he is pardoned. How good does that feel?

My daughters, who are now young grown-ups, were very fond of a rather lurid book called ‘How it Feels’. It is all about how it feels to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or be in a plane crash – it’s not about finer feelings. But the fact that teenagers love the inside story of spectacular events does illustrate something about what we get out of seeing a play, and why it is so fascinating. We want to know not only what it looks like when the dirty secret is discovered, but what the jilted lover feels – and what the naughty couple’s thoughts are when they are discovered.

Perhaps it’s like a dolls’ house. Girls say that playing with dolls is like creating your little world. The dolls are actors, and you make a play for them. You lift the lid off the house, and there is life inside. Watching a play, to put it another way, is as though down those streets, in the heart of the city, we could take the lid off and see inside people’s lives.

But what was Aristotle on about? I haven’t identified anything yet in being a playgoer which would have such a fundamental effect as Aristotle thought a good tragedy should have – achieving a catharsis, a cleaning out, of the emotions. Remember, the essential ingredients are pity – our hero doesn’t deserve to suffer, although he does – and fear. Something truly terrifying happens to our innocent victim.

‘Catharsis’ is something much more serious than the mild warmth we might feel after seeing the Mousetrap. It really is something much more spiritual, something which goes to the audience’s hearts, to the depths of their very souls, perhaps. The tragedy – Oedipus Rex, say – is so serious, the disaster for its leading players so complete, but yet so undeserved, so unexpected – that it really shakes us.

Somehow the actors, ‘doing’ the play, acting it out, are able to influence our thoughts and feelings. There is magic here. Somehow working out the scene, performing it, draws us, the audience, right into the heart of the action and makes us part of it. We feel Oedipus’ pain; we are terrified by the realisation of the impossible choices facing him. It moves us. It’s not just what happens that is terrifying, or that is sad. It’s that we are terrified, we are sad. The play has done that to us.

It’s difficult to see precisely what Aristotle expected in the way of catharsis. Was it a question of mental inoculation – being so scared by the play that it freed you emotionally, so you could be much braver in real life? There’s no sign that plays have that effect. Or was it much more mystical, much more mysterious? You cannot completely, exhaustively describe the effect that seeing a drama can have on people.

Here’s another set of words which came to mind when I thought how you can be affected by drama, perhaps by a dramatic spectacle, even, in front of you. The words are, ‘An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. The play, the external manifestation, has an internal effect, or rather, it brings out the innermost secrets in us. This is what is really meant by ‘catharsis’. And some of you will recognise those words, the outward and visible sign, the inward and spiritual grace. They are, of course, from the Book of Common Prayer.

In a religious context, a drama – a serious drama – to act out the life of Christ, (as they do at Wintershall, and Alan, I am sure, will be up for a big part next year): or the miniature ritual of the Eucharist, of Holy Communion, of the Mass: both those are equally serious dramas, and if you attend, if you are not just in the audience but taking part, being involved, then the play becomes a ‘sacrament’. It has religious meaning and worth.

In church, in the C of E that I belong to, there are only two sacraments, ‘… baptism, and the Supper of the Lord – that is, Holy Communion. The magic of the drama is in these too. The words, the actions, make something happen in the people taking part. People say that the sacrament of Holy Communion is not just the business, to use a theatrical expression; not just the sharing of the bread and wine: instead it is the whole drama, the whole performance, that works its magic in the believer.

This is very like what Aristotle was writing about, 300 years before Christ. Catharsis, purification: and indeed the church service usually starts with what we call the Collect for Purity: ‘Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts’, we pray.

Well, I don’t want to break my promise, not to preach to you. But I think I have reached the point where I can say that, as between the poor player in Macbeth, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage, but signifying nothing, and the awesome wrenching of the soul in the great tragedies, I do tend to believe that there is more to a play than just trivial titillation, mild amusement. You actors do have a sacred task to perform. You are, in a sense, guardians of holy mysteries.

And of course, from my humble seat in the gods, I do still see myself as the Prince, as Romeo, as James Bond. You just have to help me to keep on believing.

Tags entertainment, Theatre going

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Women Bishops

By publicsquare

December 17, 2012 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Feast of Christ the King, 25th November 2012
Galatians 3:28 ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’.

Tonight I am going to break one of the rules which I set myself in my preaching, which is that I try always to say something about the lessons which are set in the lectionary for the day. Today as we heard, we had the story of Belshazzar’s Feast and the writing on the wall in Daniel, and in the NT lesson from Revelation we were reminded of the overwhelming power of God: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, the beginning and the end.

But, apart from reflecting on the difference between the ‘principalities and powers’ of which Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans, was one, and The Lord God, almighty, invisible, only wise, which will prompt us to reflect that God is far more powerful and important than the meaning of any particular way of life, I want tonight to deal with something less earth-shaking, but nevertheless important for us in the Church of England today. That is, the question of women bishops.

I am sure that we all know that on Tuesday the governing body of the church, the General Synod, the Church’s parliament, voted against the proposal to allow the ordination of women as bishops, subject to a safeguard for those parishes which did not want the oversight of a female bishop, that in the arrangements for episcopal oversight, due ‘respect’ would be paid to the reasons why those parishes felt as they did. To say that the Synod ‘voted against’ the proposal to allow women to become bishops is misleading. The Synod voted overwhelmingly in favour of it, but under the Standing Orders, the constitutional rules which the church has adopted for the Synod, the vote was six short of the majority needed under those rules for the proposal, the Measure, as it was called, to be passed.

The General Synod has three ‘houses’, for bishops, clergy and laity respectively. They are not houses like the House of Commons or the House of Lords, separate chambers in which each group votes: it is more a question of having groups within the one Synod body, a certain maximum number of bishops and clergy, and enough lay people to reflect the Protestant character of the C of E – it was controlled not by the Pope, but originally by the King, Henry VIII, and the king’s powers have now passed to the people. There are 470 members; 47 bishops, 194 clergy and 206 lay members.

Under the Standing Orders of the General Synod, (SO 35(d)(i)(1)), a vote finally to approve a Measure which provided for permanent changes in the ordinal (the rules for ordination of clergy), requires not a simple majority, but a two-thirds majority of all three houses.

Although 42 of the 44 dioceses in the C of E, including our Diocese of Guildford, have voted in favour of women bishops, and although the requisite 2/3 majority was obtained in the houses of bishops and clergy, in the house of laity the result was 132 in favour and 74 against, six short of the majority required by Standing Orders.

We have four lay members of General Synod from Guildford Diocese. I wrote to three of them before the vote, and two replied. After the vote, as there doesn’t seem to be any published list of votes cast, I asked them to tell me how they voted. So far they have not told me how they voted; however, from the correspondence I had with them beforehand, I think that it is likely that at least those three of our representatives voted against the Measure. I think that it is somewhat odd that at least a half of the votes which doomed the Measure came from a diocese, Guildford, whose parishes solidly supported it. It is a peculiar form of democracy, which allows these so-called representatives to vote completely contrary to the overwhelming wish of their constituents. [The official voting record, issued after this sermon was preached, confirms that three lay members from Guildford voted against the Measure.]

So much for the nuts and bolts of what happened on Tuesday. What are the main schools of thought for and against women bishops?

The first minority group opposed are the so-called traditionalists, or Catholic fundamentalists. They say that, as Jesus, the head of the church, was male, his vicars, which literally means those who stand in his place, from St Peter downwards, must also be male. They also advance the view that the patriarchal society which existed at the time of Jesus is the immutable model for all human society, still valid today. So men are the leaders, the hunter-gatherers who go out to work, and women are the home-makers, whose role is to support the males, produce and rear children.

The traditionalists don’t seem to have any difficulty with the thought that the head of the Church of England is the monarch, which of course for the last sixty years has been a woman – and indeed in the reigns of Queens Elizabeth I, Mary and Victoria, there has been a substantial history of female overall leadership of the C of E.

The second dissenting group are the so-called Conservative Evangelicals, who believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and that because St Paul in his first letter to Timothy, 2:12, wrote, ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence …’, women cannot be in leadership positions in the church – and some evangelicals also refer to a sentence in the following chapter of the same letter to Timothy, 3:1f, where for example the King James Bible translates the passage as, ‘If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work’. ‘If a man …’ In fact this is a wrong emphasis. ‘Man’ in the King James usually just means ‘person’.

The Greek original simply says, ‘If someone aspires ..’ (ει τις … ορεγεται). There is no gender defined – although in the passage St Paul goes on to describe the qualities which a bishop needs, ‘above reproach, faithful to one wife, sober, temperate, courteous, hospitable and a good teacher’, and so on in the same vein. Clearly there, St Paul assumes that bishops will be male, although commentators have pointed out that this passage is about the moral qualities required, against a background which reflected the make-up of society 2,000 years ago. In that sense, the background assumed in these passages is descriptive, describing how things were, rather than prescriptive, saying how they ought to be.

Be that as it may, both these groups, the traditionalists and the conservative evangelicals, are implacably opposed, not just to women bishops, but also to women priests. To them it doesn’t matter that they are a tiny minority – the six people whose votes brought down the Measure amounted to 1.27% of the members of the General Synod. These opponents of women in ministry don’t care if they are a minority, don’t care if the world outside thinks that their views are outdated or inhumane. They believe that tradition, in the case of the the traditionalists, and a literal interpretation of St Paul’s teaching in one of his letters, in the case of the conservative evangelicals, are reasons which trump any more secular or even legalistic considerations, such as equal-rights legislation (although the churches currently have an exemption from complying with it).

But what about the vast majority in the C of E? Are we just wishy-washy liberals who bend to the force of public opinion rather than keeping to the true theological position? Of course you know that I certainly believe that it is right that the church has women in ministry, and that there should be women bishops. And of course you know that I am indeed a liberal in the church: but I would hope no-one would ever think of me as wishy-washy!

I believe that in fact there are excellent theological reasons for women bishops. It is not a question of being in tune with modern society. I see that Bishop Tom Wright, the evangelical theologian, has written an article this week in the Times in which he says that it would indeed be wrong just to follow the dictates of society, and he insists that there must be Biblical authority for what the church does. But he finds that, rather than the Bible ruling out the possibility of women bishops, in fact there is substantial Biblical authority for women having a perfectly good right to be bishops. (See http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=759)

St Paul’s messages on bishops are not as weighted against women as the conservative evangelicals argue. The passages in his first letter to Timothy, about a woman not being fit to teach, are based on an argument that because in the Garden of Eden it was the woman who was beguiled by the serpent, and who led Adam into sin, so women can’t be trusted to teach in public. But does anyone seriously believe that the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis is anything other than a picturesque fable?

On the other hand, in his letter to the Galatians, 3:28, comes this famous passage. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ There is no need to explain that! It should dispose of the whole question.

In St Paul’s greatest letter, to the Romans, at 16:7, he addresses a woman called Junia as an ‘apostle’: surely at that time that was the highest level, the highest status, in the early church. If you were an apostle, then surely you could be a bishop, like the other apostles – certainly like Peter.

In this closing chapter of his great letter to the Romans, St Paul sends greetings to a number of other women who he clearly regards as leaders in the church there, such as Phebe, whom he calls a ‘deacon’, Priscilla and Aquila, who were willing to risk their necks, literally, to save him; Mary, Tryphena and Tryphosa, Persis ‘the beloved’, who are all said to have ‘laboured in the Lord’; and he entrusts the letter to be carried to Rome, and no doubt to be read out to the Roman church, to the deacon, Phebe, who was travelling to Rome on business. In other words, St Paul trusted the safe carriage and exposition of his greatest letter to a woman. So much for women not being allowed to teach!

And of course there are other examples of leading women in the early church – for instance Lydia in Acts 16:13.

But surely what is most striking of all is that at the heart of the most important event in the whole of Christianity, Jesus’ resurrection, it was not the male disciples to whom he appeared, but ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary’ (Matt. 28:1, for example). These women, women, announced to the disciples the most important event in world history. If Jesus himself chose women to convey the earliest Gospel, the quintessential Good News, surely He would be happy for them to be leaders of his church.

I agree with Tom Wright that the justification for there being women bishops, for Christians, doesn’t depend on what he calls ‘Fake Ideas of Progress’, but on the Bible. I would rather say that those ideas of progress, according to which men and women are all equal in God’s sight (Heb. 4:13), are themselves in accordance with Bible precedent, rather than being somehow opposed to it.

So what is the church to do? In particular, is there anything that we in Stoke D’Abernon can do, about the perverse and unrepresentative decision of the General Synod this week?

I think that there is. The Synod has been in effect taken over by minority interests, in the way that all democratic bodies risk being infiltrated by activists. In order to become a member of General Synod, a lay person has to be first a member of a Deanery Synod, and then the Diocesan Synod. These are not seen as very exciting jobs – so the normal middle-of-the-road people don’t put themselves forward. That has to change.

It is really as a result of apathy, a sin of omission, that these people, whose views are not representative of the majority of ordinary church-goers in our diocese, have got themselves on to General Synod. I wrote to one of them, whose views were clearly against women bishops, pointing out that as one of our representatives, surely he should subordinate his personal views to the expressed view of his constituents when he voted. He replied that, if we didn’t like the way he voted, we could vote him out at the next General Synod election. I think that that is exactly how this vote was lost. People like this man, one of our, Guildford Diocese, representatives, put their own esoteric minority views ahead of the majority view, and thereby stymied it.

I do hope that we remember this: that you and I, the lay people in this Diocese, should not stand idly by. Let’s get ourselves into the Synod and make sure that nothing so undemocratic, and so unbiblical, ever happens again.

Remember, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’

Tags Church of England, Women bishops

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Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday of Advent, 16th December 2012 – Rose Sunday Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18

By publicsquare

December 17, 2012 //

Today is Rose Sunday, in the mediaeval church known by the Latin name Gaudete Sunday, ‘Rejoice’ Sunday; the third Sunday in Advent. The mood of watchful expectation which in the church’s tradition in the first two weeks in Advent is supposed to be rather sober, rather monochrome, is now relieved by a hint of colour – we lit the pink candle today as a symbol of this lightened mood.

We are getting closer to our celebrations, closer to the time when we remember Jesus’ coming as the baby in the manger. In some ways it might seem odd to introduce the story of John the Baptist at this point. Certainly John the Baptist had a prophetic mission which introduced the beginning of Jesus’ work. But as S. Luke puts it very precisely, in historic terms which can mean only that John the Baptist was working around 29 or 30 AD, ‘in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar’, we have moved thirty years beyond Jesus’ birth.

In the Orthodox churches, the story of John the Baptist is celebrated after Christmas for that reason, so as to keep the chronology more logical. Jesus is first a baby, and then grown up. After he has grown up, and before he starts teaching, along comes John the Baptist.

All through the Old Testament, the history of the Jewish people, the history of God’s chosen people, is expressed in a way which relates their successes and failures not to economic factors, not to whether they were rich in natural resources which they exploited successfully; not to whether they were successful in wars, conquests or alliances with other powerful nations, building up empires: but rather the story of the Jews is a story of their relationship with God.

If you think of the story of the Jews in the Old Testament – Moses leading them out of Egypt through the Red Sea; the exile in Babylon – the only thing that matters, the only historical driver, is whether the Israelites listened to their God, followed his commandments, kept their covenant with God. If they did that, they were blessed and they were in the promised land. If they turned aside and worshipped other gods, forgot about their covenant with the one true God, then they were invaded, they were taken into captivity, they became slaves.

The Jews believed that God loved them much in the way that a father loves rather unruly teenage children; that sometimes God needed to punish them because they hadn’t obeyed him, but on other occasions they felt the full warmth of God’s love and blessing. The way in which they learned about their relationship with God was through the prophets – Moses and Elijah and the lesser prophets were the ones who brought before the people of Israel the word of God.

Jesus was born when the Jews were going through a hard time. The promised land was under occupation by a foreign power, the Romans. The relative prosperity of the the time of Herod the Great had given way to a break-up of the kingdom into four parts. There had been rebellion against the Romans by the Zealots, which had been brutally suppressed. This was not a high point in Jewish history.

As before in Jewish history, along came a prophet, a prophet who interpreted how the Jews found themselves, their difficulties and their lack of success, in terms of a breakdown in their relationship with God. That prophet was John the Baptist. John’s message of repentance – ‘O generation of vipers …’ was very much in the prophetic tradition. John is saying that the Israelites’ troubles are directly attributable to a breakdown in their relationship with God, that they have forgotten God’s commandments. So his message, the various things that he tells them to do, in order to restore the covenant, are from the heart of the moral teaching in the Jewish Law. After the basic Ten Commandments had been given to Moses on the tablets of stone, then in Deuteronomy, which means Second Law, the law of Moses is developed and refined. Indeed, for the first time in Deuteronomy you have the golden rule, ‘love your brother as yourself’ (Deut. 19:19).

So here, John teaches, ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’ And the ‘publicans’ who are told not to exact ‘more than that which is appointed you’, are not innkeepers, but tax-gatherers. Privatising government services is not a new idea. At the time of Jesus, the Romans had private contractors, τελωναι in Greek, who were authorised to collect tax. They were paid by charging a percentage on top of what they were due to hand over to the Romans. So if the Romans needed 100, your friendly local tax man might actually charge you 110. What John is saying is that the price, what the private contractor, the ancient equivalent of Accenture or KPMG, is charging, has to be reasonable.

The point about this is that these are not just good moral precepts, which they certainly are, but also marks of the Jews being faithful to their covenant with God. It’s not enough, John says, to say, We have Abraham for our father, we are Jews. Instead, John says you have to bring forth ‘fruits worthy of repentance’, you have to show in tangible form evidence that you have repented, you have come back to the fold.

The Jews recognised that this message that John was giving was indeed a prophetic message, and they began to think that perhaps he himself was the Messiah, the chosen one whom they expected to lead them again, like Moses, out of slavery. What John was doing, in baptising, was certainly a new thing. There was no precedent in other religions for baptism in the way that John was practising it.

It was a single ritual washing. Of course are plenty of religious observances where ritual washing is involved. The symbolism is very clear. You wash away everything bad and you become clean, pure, before God. But in other religions that’s a sacramental practice, something that you do as part of a religious service regularly, purification.

But with John it was an altogether bigger thing. The idea of a total immersion in the River Jordan was that it marked a complete reversal in the person’s life. ‘Repent’, said John – μετανοειτε, Greek which means ‘turn over your minds’, ‘turn back your minds’. It’s not so much turning back as turning over, turning over a new leaf, a clean page in the book. That you can only do once. When you have been baptised, you are a new person, a clean person. It is very powerful symbolism indeed.

But despite the power of this, John says that he is making way for Jesus, who will come and not baptise with water, but with ‘the Holy Ghost and with fire’, that he will bring God to his people in an all-consuming way. You can come up out of the water and dry off; but once you have been touched by the Holy Ghost and by the divine fire – ‘set our hearts on fire with love for you’ we pray – then really you are changed. It’s a glimpse of what that baby is going to be able to do.

He will not just be a prophet like John. He will not just be a man, a man grown from the baby in the manger. He will be God, God among us, Emmanuel. That is truly something to look forward to; something to add colour to our expectation. Today, the colour of the rose.
So enjoy Rose Sunday. But also, remember the message of John the Baptist. ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’ … ‘Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.’ Finally, a message to the tax men, ‘Exact no more than that which is appointed you’. The obverse of that teaching is something which some of our multi-national companies should reflect on too. If HMRC should not take too much, Starbucks and Co should not pay too little.

It’s the same message which S. Paul gives to his friends in Philippi. ‘Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.’ This ‘moderation’ that he talks about is a word which really means ‘even-handedness’, ‘sense of balance’. It’s really a word that S. Paul took from the Stoics. Nothing to excess, moderation. When Paul wrote to the Philippians, perhaps around 60AD, the baby had come; he had grown up. He had been baptised by John, and those wonderful three years of teaching, his life, his death and his resurrection, had taken place. As John had predicted, Jesus had brought the Holy Spirit and fire, first of all at Pentecost, on the disciples. The Lord is at hand. The Lord is here. His spirit is with us.

Tags Rose Sunday, St Mary Stoke D'Abernon

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