B&B case: thoughts on the bigger things

The commentary on the gay/christian thing has been done elsewhere. Instead, here are some thoughts on the bigger issues over at my other blog…

Epiphany: a process

Once Hogmanay is over (or, depending on your “bah, humbug” factor, maybe even earlier), the celebration of Christmas easily starts to feel dead and buried.

However, fellow-sufferers of the “January blues” may care to join me in reflecting instead on Epiphany, in which some solace is to be found. Although it’s primarily marked on 6^th January, it goes goes on being celebrated in the Anglican church’s calender for 4 Sundays.

Epiphany translates, roughly, as “revealing”. It’s about God revealing himself to us, and at this time of year we’re encouraged to reflect on the way in which Jesus’ coming heralded salvation for “outsiders” as well as Jews. We remember how the Magi recognised, gave gifts to and worshipped the Christ child.

What, though, was their experience like? Not a “moment” I think. Rather, in their story we see God’s revelation to humans as a journey.

Matthew (chapter 2) recounts that wise men travelled to Jerusalem having seen a bright star. These were Magi: learned advisors, men to whom others looked for guidance, wisdom and discernment. On Jesus’ birth, they looked into the sky and saw something extraordinary: a star that wasn’t normally there, which didn’t fit the map of the skies they knew.  Perhaps they knew something of Jewish culture, that a Messiah was predicted to come. Maybe they had even read Jewish scripture and had it suggested that a star would star signalling his arrival. But these were Gentile men, not Jews. Even if they knew what the Jews believed, why would they take off on a journey to search out a God who wasn’t theirs?

We don’t know the ins and outs of it, but it something pretty powerful must have  motivated men to leave their homes and travel at short notice to Jerusalem. Think about it – setting out on a journey because you saw a star?!  The story goes even further. Not only did they make a physical pilgrimage, but somehow, somewhere along the way they became convinced that what they were seeking was something with more than physical significance. “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?” they said. “We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”  They wanted to worship. Their journey had became spiritual.

The Magi who arrive in Jerusalem are changed people; not men who changed themselves, for there is no suggestion they had become, or sought to become, Jews. Rather, they are a people who have been changed. They are thirsty for God – a God who seems already to have revealed something of himself to them, and who invites them to follow his lead. So they continue to seek after him, following the unlikely leading of a star, and in time, after yet more journeying, they find him. A defenseless baby.

In Jesus, God is revealed. In the most unlikely form, in the most unlikely place, by the most unlikely means. Their epiphany – and maybe ours – is not only a moment, but rather it is also a mysterious, time consuming, captivating process.

Trudging through the January blues, let’s remember that we journey with God, and that as we follow his lead, he shows up where we least expect to find him.

Jesus killed my political apathy

Politics. The mere presence of the header was enough. My right forefinger twitched: “click”. Previous page, please. I don’t want to read political garbage. Life’s too short. I’m not interested in stupid games.

That’s how I used to approach things: apathetic.

It’s not that I didn’t care about the world: homelessness, poverty, famine, the environment, war. But  these are huge, complex problems, aren’t they? I doubted they could be solved. I doubted that politicians could see beyond their personal career aspirations to want to solve them. Therefore engaging with politics seemed pointless. I was busy enough, after all, taking care of my own happiness: building a career, financial security and success. Other people and “bigger” issues came second.

Perhaps that sounds callous. Or maybe you and I have a common thread of experience.

Now fast forward 3 years. It’s 2010.

Things have changed – or at least have started changing. Now don’t get me wrong; I don’t excitedly leap out of bed each morning to scour the headlines for the latest political heist, and I don’t much care about whether Gordon Brown or David Cameron is having the better week. Nevertheless, issues that politicians get involved in catch my attention now. Why?

My faith has started to have an impact on this part, as on other parts, of my life. There are over 8000 verses in the New Testament. At least 718 of them deal with issues of poverty and justice. That’s nearly 10% of the whole thing, and the proportion is similar when you include Old Testament references. Jesus is recorded as talking about these issues at on at least 290 different occasions (The Poverty and Justice Bible). Perhaps, then, it’s unsurprising that as I read more about God’s plan for the world, what he’s doing in it, I find myself challenged to get involved.

Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.

That’s what Jesus did – not by becoming an MP or a high flying executive, but instead by understanding the political world around him and then engaging it in God’s way, on God’s terms. His actions were both profoundly political and profoundly simple. He got stuck right in, loving people without compromise and refusing to allow love’s expression to be limited by state politics. It was a love so radical as to see him tortured and killed.

As I look at pictures of the injured and bereaved of Haiti, I don’t know what to do to help.  I’m disappointed with myself for my lack of knowledge of these peoples’ plight; with my lack of concern about how they might be helped; for my lack of knowledge about the political system of which I’m a part. I’m frustrated: as I read of responses by governments and charities, the power of nations like the USA and the UK over Haiti is obvious, and though there’s huge potential to help, there are even bigger questions about how best to do so, and a huge risk of entrapment for the Haitians of the future if the wrong approach is adopted.

Do we really know the best ways to go about helping Haiti in the long term? Of seeing the Haitians liberated?  And do we honestly desire to identify them? Naomi Klein spells out the dangers. Bill Quigley suggests positive actions.

I have no idea exactly how the biblical principles I believe should be worked out in the world in this instance. Politics are so complicated. Thank God for the aid agencies working round the clock to bring relief, for the people who have chosen to give sacrificially of themselves to help.

Even while I’m so aware of my inadequacy, though, I see that something has changed in me. I thank God that he gives me a desire, nowadays, to love others: that I am affected by these events in a way I never was “before”, so that thoughts translate into action. I thank him that he loves the people of Haiti as he loves me, and that we have an opportunity to see positive change start as the Hatian people, over the enxt months and years, begin to rebuild.

So here’s my resolve: to get informed, at least a little, and take an interest, armed with what little knowledge I glean, in the actions of my state and of NGO’s. Which means that even I, the most apathetic non-politician I ever knew, am going to have to engage.

How about you?

Pat Robertson & Haiti

It’s 24 hours since unmitigated disaster struck Haiti. Their biggest earthquake for over 2 centuries, and the latest in a line of disasters that have left them devastated.

I could hardly believe the comments made by Pat Robertson.  Words fail me. Fortunately they don’t fail Don Miller, in whose capable hands I’ll leave this simple response:

An appropriate response to Haiti:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in..”

An appropriate response to Pat Robertson:

“You seem angry and tired. Christ loves you. He is not impressed with your religious posturing. He really loves you. You don’t have to hide behind anything anymore. The good news really is that good.”

For my part I’ll  do my bit, however tiny, by giving and also by praying for the God of love and hope to hold the people of Haiti close. I’ll also be praying for understanding of how it is that the God whom we trust to love us could let this happen, and how we should respond, both now and in the long term (how can it be right for any state to have been in such a mess even before this happened?)… I can’t help but feel we all bear an element of responsibility as fellow humans.

Yet again, I don’t get how God works. But then there’s nothing very new about that.

Marked

Fast-paced, terrifying… this graphic re-imagination of the gospel of Mark in a contemporary fictional setting is clever and deep. The people are blinded and demon-possessed. Jesus can change them, but they don’t, for the most part, have the eyes to see.

It could almost be real life (ironic, eh?). And therein lies the skill with which Ross retells the gospel story, albeit in a way you might not, at first, recognise.

The preface cautions that pictures often denude a text. If you have the opposite problem when it comes to the Bible, finding it hard to get a sense of the power and the challenge of the person of Jesus from traditional translations, or if you need reminding about what it must have been like to have him burst into the first century cultural setting, then this might just be a good place for you to start.

Loved it.

An American messed with my head…

Shane Claiborne’s first book, The Irresistible Revolution, messed with my head. I don’t agree with his every word, but this man talks a lot of sense about faith. Here’s a letter he wrote at the invitation of Esquire magazine, to people who don’t share his faith: Letter to Unbelievers.

Signposts to simplicity

Posts last week handled some big questions. Mulling them over I started to think maybe it’d be safer to lock myself in my room all day; there’s a big old pile of stuff we can do that upsets God, and even when we try to get it right, there’s a risk we’re getting it wrong. So today, some signposts to a simpler side of life.

I’m bothered about interpreting the bible correctly. Here’s an alternative view:

… we should be trying to work out how to read the bible well rather than reading the text right.”

Paula Gooder

Maybe as long as I’m open to what God wants to say to me, I can cut the paranoia about “right” reading a little.

I still worry about all the stuff I might end up doing wrong, though… What about that?

Let’s shut the door and block out sin!

“Then how”, says Truth, “shall I get in?”

Rabindranath Tagore

Aah. A little irony, and a ring of truth. Perhaps seeing as Jesus offers me “life, and life to the full” I should grab it by the horns and enjoy the ride. Sure, I’m scared I’ll mess up, and of course I will mess up. That’s what I have a conscience for – warning me as I veer off down the wrong track. But God shows up in all the best stuff in life, whether we recognise it or not.

Apparently C. S Lewis once received a letter from a worried mother whose son (aged 9) had read the Chronicles of Narnia. The boy was feeling bad because he felt he loved Aslan (the lion hero of the story) more than Jesus. Lewis replied that they didn’t need to worry:

“For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things that Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before”.

So for now, maybe I’ll try to quit worrying about getting stuff right, and just work on living well.

The Death Penalty: Just Deserts or Justice Deserted?

In Texas yesterday another life ended in the USA’s most-used death chamber.

Khristian Oliver was 32 years old. He was declared dead 8 minutes after administration of a lethal injection.

In 1999 Oliver had been convicted of  a murder carried out in the course of a burglary. His victim was shot and beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. He accepted he carried out the shooting.

Texas is one of several US States to retain the death penalty for such cases. However, the decision to impose it on Oliver courted controversy. It was reported that during deliberations on sentencing, the jury brought biblical rather than purely state law into consideration. A juror allegedly read this aloud:

“And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.” (Numbers 35:16)

Another juror later reported that about 80% of the jurors had brought scripture into their considerations, considering that if civil law and biblical law were at odds, biblical law should prevail. He’s reported to have said that if he had been told he could not consult the bible, “I would have left the courtroom.” Another said jurors looked to and took comfort from the bible in making their decision.

Oliver’s lawyers appealed on the basis that the Jury ought exclusively to have considered state law in reaching their decision, and that accordingly there had not been a fair trial. They were unsuccessful because although it was established that impermissible information (biblical law) had been taken into consideration, no prejudice had resulted given it had been established that a murder, for which the death penalty was open to the Jury under state law, had been committed.

The death penalty is something that seems to escape our attention much of the time in the UK. It’s not something we think about very much. According to Washington’s Death Penalty Information Centre, there were 3297 convicts on Death Row in January 2009. Between January and October, 42 people were executed. Forty two human lives ended at the hand of the state.

Reflecting on Oliver’s death I’m troubled. I have questions.

How does a “Christian” state justify the death penalty? Can it?

Anyone can pick and verse from the Old Testament to justify a position, but what does Jesus have to say about this situation? What’s the effect of the new covenant on this Old Testament teaching? And what of Jesus teaching here:

Here’s another old saying that deserves a second look: ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ Is that going to get us anywhere? Here’s what I propose: ‘Don’t hit back at all.’ If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously. (Matt 5:38-42)

Where is the interface of justice and mercy here? We’re exhorted “to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God“. Is this the face of doing so?

Dat man, he da King?

There’s a part of me, if I’m brutally honest, that sees a video like this one and wants to curl up in a corner and die. If someone had sent me a link to this a few years ago it woulda made my shoulder blades draw together. So why am I posting it here? Well, I stumbled across it over at another blog I like.

As I was watching, the part of me that didn’t want to run screaming from the room was slowly being rooted to the spot. As the voice thundered out and the words flashed over the screen, their cumulative force crept up and struck me.

The claims about this Jesus guy are big. No, really. They’re BIG.

I guess I need to sit down and think (again) about what I really believe about him, and about what that means. Maybe we all need to do that sometimes.

Transsexual Jesus?

Over 300 people demonstrated outside the Tron theatre in Glasgow last night over the depiction in Jo Clifford’s new play of Jesus as a transsexual woman.

My view… I’m not about to join the crowd who were penning hate-fuelled placards, that’s for sure.

First though, let’s be clear. Was Jesus transsexual? Highly unlikely. In the 4 accounts of his life (the gospels) Jesus is consistently and exclusively portrayed as a fully human male.

However, do I think God is male? No. Does God transcend sexuality? Yes. God is triune (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). John’s gospel starts by explaining (describing Jesus) that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning”. Jesus lived on earth as a man around 2000 years ago, but he existed before then, at the creation of the earth, and he continues to live today, one interdependent part of the trinity. For another modern characterisation of God you need go no further than a (fabulous) book like The Shack to have your preconceptions challenged.

Is the play intended to cause offense? I haven’t seen it, so take all of this with that caveat, but I don’t think so. According to an interview with Clifford in the Scotsman:

“Jesus, Queen of Heaven, which portrays Jesus as a transsexual woman and has been condemned by elements of the Christian community, is “about rescuing Jesus from the fundamentalists”. But it’s also about Clifford’s pride in being transgendered; she insisted on performing the role herself. Her honesty is striking and within minutes I get a one-woman show of her memoirs, starting from the beginning, Clifford peppering her lines with laughter and relishing the story of her own life.

It’s taken her a long time to get here. “There is an awful lot of hostility towards transgendered people,” she says softly. “I’d internalised a lot of that and was terribly ashamed. I was ashamed for most of my life.” These feelings formed the subject matter of a play Clifford wrote in 2002, when she still was identified as John, called God’s New Frock. The new play is the sequel. “God’s New Frock was partly an autobiographical piece about growing up transgendered and trying to suppress it,” she explains. “The story I told was of me and God in parallel.”

There’s a trailer for God’s new frock here. It looks to me more like an autobiographical attempt to understand how Jesus relates to a personal situation than anything else. Or am I wrong? I’m open to suggestions as to how else I should look at it.

No doubt there are those who will discard both plays out of hand as blasphemous. Maybe they’re right; I’m not sure. Even if I was, I don’t think shouting it down would be helpful. Building relationships and getting round the table to work through an issue isn’t usually facilitated by reciprocal insult-slinging.

What I do think is that it’s complicated. I think there’s something to be said for Clifford’s desire to “rescue Jesus from the fundamentalists”. We (and I mean everyone, but maybe especially people of faith, who seem to think we can claim “right” understanding of the Bible) need to consider what it is we know about God through the Bible very carefully. I do believe that objective truth is there to be had, but the Bible is a complex ancient collection of texts, and must be recognised as such.

I was privileged to hear and be challenged by a gay bishop, Gene Robinson talk on the subject of our biblical understanding of sexuality earlier this year at Greenbelt. It was interesting to hear just how persuasively he made the case for the alternative to the mainstream evangelical view.  It encouraged me to reflect on how easy it is for us to twist (in many different directions) the Bible’s teaching to fit our cultural norms. God’s Word needs and deserves to be handled with care, respect, and with a realisation of our potential to twist it. For those of faith – in which I include myself – that means being self-aware, studious, careful and most of all prayerful in considering what God wants me to understand from scripture.

The other thing that strikes me as I ponder Clifford’s interview and the trailer for God’s New Frock is (yet again) how sad it is that the best we seem to be able to do as a Christian community is to react to things in such a way that, as Jesus’ followers, we’re viewed as judgmental and exclusive rather than loving and accepting of people for who they are. I struggle to see how protesting outside the Tron fits with following Jesus’ example. Surely we can learn to love better than that.