Fourth Sunday after Trinity 2024

Here in the UK there will be a General Election on 04 July. Over the five Sundays in June, I intend to look at several key issues relating to how we vote, continuing, today, with the environment. My intention is not to tell you who you should or shouldn’t vote for—though I will touch on policies—but to ask how does Christian faith inform how we cast our vote?

I think that I could make a case for the book of Job being the first treatise on the environment. It starts with God in conversation with an angelic being called the Accuser. God asks whether he has noticed how exemplary a human being Job is? The Accuser responds that this is self-serving on Job’s part, because God has planted a hedge around him, to shelter and protect him. God is not convinced and permits the Accuser to cut down the hedge and see what will happen. What transpires is a heady cocktail of attacks from neighbouring tribes competing for resources, and natural disasters, that between them strip away all Job’s flocks and herds and leave his servants and his children dead. When Job persists in his integrity of character, the Accuser asks to afflict his body with sores, but is prevented from taking his life.

When they hear of Job’s misfortune, his three closest friends come to him, and they do a beautiful thing. They sit with him, in silence, for seven days and seven nights. No trying to offer easy answers where there are none, to ease their own discomfort. And after that, Job speaks. A damn bursts, and words pour out of him. He wishes that he had died in the womb, that there had been no joy at his birth, that the stars had been blotted out by clouds. If you have lost a baby, that might be hard to hear, or understand; but Job is not alone in wishing that he had never been born, not alone in finding himself in such a dark place. He feels utterly hedged-in by God—which does not feel like shelter, but like torment—and his anguish pours out from him like water. God notes everything Job says but, for now, says nothing in return. Instead, Job’s friends speak up, and their advice to him is, to put it in environmental terms, a pile of steaming, well-rotted manure.

Only when they have spent all their words does God speak, answering Job’s complaint from out of the storm (starting with our first reading today, Job 38:1-11). He takes up Job’s death-wish image-for-image with God’s own wish for life. Neither obliterated nor silenced, the morning stars sing for joy. The sea is born, full of vigorous life; and God uses the sea fret to make swaddling bands, to wrap the new-born sea tight—as Mary would wrap Jesus—so that it feels safe and secure. God literally plants a hedge around the sea—a boundary to shelter it—and brings the swell of outpoured waters to peace. In what follows, God reveals a divine fascination with and joy in learning about nature, in discovering how creation will participate in the gift of life. Christians believe that we are made in the image of this God: which is to say, we are made to discover and rejoice in the wider environment.

The divine calming of the swelling waves is taken up in our Gospel passage, Mark 4.35-41. A violent storm comes out of nowhere, threatening to overwhelm the boats in which Jesus and his disciples were caught on the lake. We read that Jesus rebuked the wind, but the Greek means to esteem or place due weight or honour on something. We might say, Jesus, as a frail human, paid due respect to the power of the wind—and that the wind, in return, paid due respect to Jesus. There is something here of human harnessing the wind for human good. There is also something noteworthy in the calm displayed by Jesus before calm is displayed by the waves. He models the contrast between excessive fear and having been persuaded of God’s trustworthiness.

The environment is a major issue, and more so for younger voters. For many younger people, climate change and environmental loss is an existential crisis, which galvanises some to action and paralyses others in despair. The four political parties standing in Sunderland Central—the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and the Greens—agree that environmental policy must be tied to energy production and a commitment to reaching carbon net zero. All four promote significant investment in offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar energy production, including more localised storage and distribution, with both the Conservatives and Labour also supporting new nuclear power, to which the Green party is opposed. All four are aware that this will take strategic investment, targeted support for industries in transition, and various mechanisms for holding businesses to account. Holding water companies to account is prominent in the Conservative and Labour manifestos.

Reform UK is also standing in Sunderland Central. They are a registered business, rather than a political party (thus getting around certain restrictions on political parties, such as the need to be transparent about their funding). They take a very different approach, rejecting net zero ambitions, advocating that we adapt to a warmer climate, and calling for fast-tracking of licenses for North Sea gas and oil, shale gas extraction (fracking), small nuclear reactors, and incentivised mining for lithium and clean coal.

Christians believe that God created the world, and continues to sustain it; that God entrusted humanity with responsibility to guard the flourishing of all life on earth; and that the threat to life on earth for all species is at least in part tied to human abdication of that God-given responsibility, with hope for all living things also tied to God’s initiative—through the divine person of Jesus Christ—to restore humanity to their rightful position as environmental guardians. Indeed, ‘to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth’ is one of the five marks of Anglican mission, across the world (the others being: to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom; to teach, baptise and nurture new believers; to respond to human need by loving service; to seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation). While Labour, the LibDems and Greens all highlight the importance of international cooperation and targeted development funding, links across the Anglican Communion allow for actual connection and partnership between local communities. Durham diocese has a link with the kingdom of Lesotho, which could benefit from renewal post the hiatus of the global Coronavirus pandemic.

There are things we can do here, too. Some are large, and will require drawing on external funds, such as replacing our heating systems, in the church hall as a matter of priority and in the church as a matter of planning for the future. But there are other things we can do, to take responsibility in this regard. We can shape and adopt an environmental policy, adapting existing templates for churches to our context. These cover energy use, which banks we might use and which charities we might support, how we apply principles of reducing, re-using and recycling waste to the products we buy for church use, the food and dink we consume, the changes we make in our own homes, and the worship and teaching Sunday by Sunday.

Every church, church school and diocese in the Church of England is also encouraged to engage with the Eco Church scheme, which supports churches to become better stewards of God’s creation working progressively through bronze, silver, and gold awards. We are signed-up to this—and it wouldn’t take a lot of work to reach bronze accreditation—but really we need someone with a vision to serve as an Environmental Champion for the church and parish of St Nicholas, to take this on. Perhaps this is something that God might put on your heart—perhaps in response to a sense of discouragement, as God responded to Job and as Jesus responded to his disciples. Perhaps this is where your faith will grow?

And we can make use of resources from the wider Church to help us engage with care for God’s creation, resources such as those produced to support the annual Season of Creation, which runs from 1 September to 4 October each year. This year’s theme is the firstfruits of hope. Blackburn diocese have produced six sessions of material, including prayers, worship, play, activity and actions to take, designed to help primary aged children join in with creation care. They have generously made this resource available more widely.

The environment is one of those issues that cannot be left to ‘someone else’ to address: we all need to play our part, and as Christians, we do so from a faith perspective. It is also one of those issues where we don’t always know what to do—though there is also plenty of consensus over what we ought to do, but don’t want to do. Here, too, our faith engages us, with the promise that Jesus—the one through whom, and for whom, God created all things—is with us, guiding us where we do not know what we ought to do, and strengthening us where we do know the way forward—or at least the next steps—but do not want to follow, for fear of the cost. Where we are overwhelmed, by guilt or shame or anger or denial, he rises and speaks peace into being in our lives.

Third Sunday after Trinity 2024

Here in the UK there will be a General Election on 04 July. Over the five Sundays in June, I intend to look at several key issues relating to how we vote, continuing, today, with housing, transport, immigration and education. My intention is not to tell you who you should or shouldn’t vote for—though I will touch on policies—but to ask how does Christian faith inform how we cast our vote?

In September 2023 the world-famous Sycamore Gap Tree was felled in an act of vandalism. The outpouring of grief made it very clear that many, many people across the northeast of England, and far beyond, felt a special connection with this one, iconic, tree, a deep bond that is hard to explain to someone who does not share it, but undeniable. There is a real sense of loss, but also hope, a desire that the tree might have a legacy: the stump, left in the ground, will hopefully sprout again; seedlings have been carefully gathered and stored to produce new trees, through grafting and other methods; and the felled trunk and branches have been preserved in hope that commissioned artists will create works to enhance a wide variety of contexts across the region.

Human connection to trees is nothing new. In the Bible, trees are often used as allegories for people, sometimes rulers and sometimes nations. Sometimes these trees are transplanted or cut down. For example, the prophet Ezekiel does this in chapter 17—from which our first reading this morning is an extract—and again in chapter 31. The cedar in chapter 17 is an allegory of the fortunes of Judah, while the cedar in chapter 31 is an allegory of the fortunes of Egypt.

Under king Saul, and then king David, a federation of tribes became a nation. The reign of David’s son, Solomon, was considered a Golden Age. Their neighbour to the immediate north was the island city of Tyre, jewel of the sea. Tyre controlled the great forests of Lebanon, that produced the finest cedars. They used this resource to build fine ships, becoming legendary merchants. But they had no land for growing cereal or farming animals. David and Solomon made alliances with king Hiram of Tyre, supplying food in exchange for cedarwood—and master craftsmen—to build David’s royal palace and Solomon’s temple: and so, the cedar became a symbol of the king in Jerusalem too.

But after Solomon’s death, the kingdom split in two, Israel in the north declaring independence from Judah in the south. The two nations coexisted for some time, until, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian empire—known as the Great—besieged and captured Jerusalem, carrying king Jehoiachin, the royal court and king’s own regiments, into exile in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar put Jehoiachin’s uncle, Mattaniah, on the throne in his place; and Mattaniah take the name Zedekiah. But ten years later, in 587 BCE, Zedekiah rebelled against Babylonia, gambling on an alliance with Egypt. The gamble did not pay off: Jerusalem was besieged for a second time, its walls destroyed, Solomon’s temple burnt down, and the entirety of the remaining population carried off into exile in Babylon. There they would remain until Babylon in turn fell to the Persians under Cyrus the Great, when they would return, in three waves: led by Zerubbabel, who began rebuilding the temple; by Ezra, the reformer; and by Nehemiah, who oversaw the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.

This is what is alluded to in Ezekiel’s allegory of the tree: in the earlier part of the chapter, an allegory of Nebuchadnezzar establishing Zedekiah in Jerusalem, and Zedekiah turning to Egypt to support his rebellion; but towards the end of the chapter, the Lord God promises that he will replant his people in their own land and restore their fortunes. They will become a shelter for all nations (birds) and through them all nations (trees, again) will come to know that the Lord is God.

Trees can be considered an ecosystem in their own right. Our two native species of oak—the English Oak, national tree of England; and the Sessile oak, national tree of both Wales and Ireland—support 2,300 wildlife species, providing food and shelter for insects, birds and mammals, as well as lichens, mosses, and fungi. Likewise, the Scots Pine—our only native pine, and the national tree of Scotland—is a keystone species, supporting many other, including rare, species. Trees are a complex, living infrastructure, which make them a good analogy for infrastructure issues such as housing, transport, immigration, and education.

There is a need for a new vision for housing in the UK, including, crucially affordable housing. The average house value has risen by an average 10% every year for the past fifty years, leaving our housing stock beyond the reach of younger first-time buyers. The Conservative and Labour party manifestos share a commitment to build 1.6 & 1.5 million homes over the course of the next parliament. Labour and the Liberal Democrats both propose a new generation of new towns or garden cities, while the Greens favour smaller scale development. The left-of-centre parties want developers to provide supporting infrastructure, while the right-of-centre parties want to remove this constraint. Some focus more than others on upgrading existing housing to be more energy efficient. Regarding the relationship between landlords and tenants, those on the right want to strengthen the rights of landlords, while those on the left want to strengthen the rights of tenants. The imagery of a tree that supports a rich variety of life in different ways, including nests on branches or hollowed out of dead wood, and sets and burrows within the roots, speaks to a diversity of innovative solutions.

A reliable and fit-for-purpose transport infrastructure is essential if communities are to flourish. Our rail network is key, and all parties are calling for its reform. Labour, the LibDems, and the Green party all call for public ownership; while Reform UK proposes that 50% of our infrastructure be publicly owned and 50% held by a UK pensions fund. Buses are key to connecting local communities, raising questions about fit-for-purpose services are best planned, paid for. The LibDems vison extends to light rail and trams, moving to zero-emissions, shifting more freight from roads to rail, and—in common with the Greens—banning short domestic flights and a moratorium on new airports. Cycleways and footpaths should be integral to urban planning.

Immigration is a thorny issue. Claiming that asylum seekers are illegal migrants is a deflection. An illegal migrant is someone who came into the country on a travel, work or study visa and who remained in this country after their visa expired. Illegal migrants should be sent home. Safe routes to sanctuary must be reestablished for those fleeing persecution. There is both compassion and economic sense in processing claims quickly, allowing those who are granted asylum time to establish themselves (currently they are made homeless within two weeks; the LibDems propose a 60-day transition), and permitting people to work while their application is being processed (Greens). The bigger issue is addressing legal migration: and whether this is best done by a salary threshold (Conservative, currently £38,700 for a family visa) or a strategic workforce strategy identifying specific needs and how to address them through balancing the training of our own population and targeted immigration (Labour, LibDem).

Ezekiel’s vision of the tree included the promise that, in a renewed society, the surrounding nations would come to know that the Lord was God. This raises the question, what is the purpose of education? What is it that we want our children to know? For what are we shaping them? The world is changing, with new technologies advancing rapidly. A primary role of our education system has long been producing a workforce. The Conservative vision is built on rewarding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, fostering competition, replacing the exam structure (yet again) with the Advanced British Standard, with pupils spending more time in the classroom, studying more subjects, including English and Maths to 18 years old. They also promise 100,000 more apprenticeships. Labour look to fund investment in state schools through ending VAT exemption for private schools. They aim to recruit 6,500 new teachers with a focus on areas that present the greatest recruitment and retainment challenges; and address systemic challenges through breakfast clubs and placing dedicated mental health professionals in every school. The LibDems highlight professional development for teachers, a richer curriculum for pupils, and the need to understand and remove underlying barriers to attendance. The Greens would advocate for restoring university grants and abolishing tuition fees; while Reform UK focus on banning the teaching of ideologies they disapprove of in schools, while cutting funding to universities that undermine free speech.

Having an imagination shaped by the Hebrew Bible, as well as the land and its people, Jesus employed crops and trees in his parables, including today’s Gospel passage, Mark 4.26-34. He notes that while the sower scatters seed, the earth produces of itself, which the sower harvests. Infrastructure issues are like this: we invest in certain ways; what grows will grow; and later, we reap the fruit, the good and bad consequences. With a General Election, a government inherits the consequences of whatever someone else has sown. No party has a monopoly on the best ideas, nor control over the soil in which they are sown. No party can take too much credit for the success that follows their actions—the earth produces of itself. Whoever forms our next government, they will face significant challenges and address them as they see best, with mixed results. We must trust that God is at work, through us, and ask how we might both love and bless our neighbour, however small we may feel our agency to be, paying special attention to the most vulnerable. Rather than saying, ‘What difference can one person make?’, attend to the tiny mustard seed and the prolific tree that grows from it.

  

Second Sunday after Trinity 2024

Here in the UK there will be a General Election on 04 July. Over the five Sundays in June, I intend to look at several key issues relating to how we vote, continuing, today, with health, welfare and pensions. My intention is not to tell you who you should or shouldn’t vote for—though I will touch on policies—but to ask how does Christian faith inform how we cast our vote?

Our first reading today, Genesis 3.8-15, is part of the mythic story with which the Bible opens. By myth, I mean a story that transcends the context in which it was first told, and that takes on new layers of meaning in subsequent contexts. We have such myths in our national history—stories of King Arthur, or Robin Hood, for example, retold, reimagined, and repurposed to speak to distant descendants facing crises of their own.

In this myth, God creates the human being—male and female—in God’s image. The world of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, was a world of expanding empires. When an army besieged and defeated a city at distance from their own capital, they would erect a statue, an image of their king, to say though this king is not here in person, they are king here now. These representations expressed the ideal image of the time, to which others aspired. Look at statues of Roman emperors (a timeline that stretches beyond the New Testament) and you will see that the first thirteen, from Augustus to Trajan, are all clean-shaven. This changes in 117 CE with Hadrian: the next eight emperors all follow hirsute suit, sporting magnificently sculpted beards. But the Genesis myth presents us with something different: it is not a statue that represents the king in his absence, but living creatures, sculpted from clay, yes, but breathed into life.

God places the humans in a garden paradise, from which they are to go forth and multiply and fill the earth. But for now, there are boundaries: the limit of the garden walls, and a restriction on what they can eat—the fruit of any tree, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The purpose is not to keep them contained or ignorant, but in fact the very opposite: as we experience adolescence, as we navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood, we need space to explore, to take risks, to make mistakes and together with peers learn from them and decide on a way forward, to learn how to mend small ruptures in relationships, to take on progressively more responsibility, to spend longer periods away from our parents while having a secure base to return to and go out from.

In the garden, the serpent engages the woman in conversation. The humans, remember, are still learning, are facing the challenges that will help them grow. As the woman—with childlike impulse—attempts to help a fellow child grow in understanding, we discover that, whereas God has told them not to eat of the fruit of one tree, they are not yet brave enough even to touch that tree. But the serpent—whose motive is not childlike—claims that to eat its fruit will be good for them, making them like God. Children are predisposed to want to be like their parent—copying them, before we learn to obey, or disobey—and, together, the woman and the man eat. And in this moment, something changes. They see themselves with a heightened self-consciousness. And then, they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hide.

When God calls to them, ‘Where are you?’ the man replies, I heard you, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid. Fear is a double-edged (s)word: it refers both to an elevated reverence for someone else, and to an elevated sense of threat to oneself. One biblical tradition asserts that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge or wisdom (Psalm 111.10, Proverbs 1.7 and 9.10). This, then, is the birthplace of wisdom, of learning how to approach God and of learning how to bear God’s likeness. [This reminds me of the conversation in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Susan asks whether the lion Aslan is “quite safe” and Mr Beaver replies, “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”] But here we also see the birth of comparison: the humans compare their naked selves against the Lord God and feel threatened. They also see one another as a threat, to be pre-empted.

What has this to do with health, welfare and pensions? I would suggest, a great deal.

First, across the English-speaking Western world in particular, we have witnessed a spectacular breakdown in the mental health of our young adults. In his book The Anxious Generation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the impact of the virtual world on girls and boys. As backstory, Haidt notes the loss of play-based childhood from the 1990s onward, as adults became overly protective of children within physical space, denying them the freedom to explore. Drawing on many research studies, he charts the impact of the growth of the internet, and the advent of the smart phone from around 2010. This trend has been bad for boys and disastrous for girls. We all experience motivation to agency—to growing competence and assertiveness—and motivation to communion with others—to cooperation and empathy. But in general terms, boys are encouraged more towards agency, and girls more towards communion. Business understands this, and so, in the virtual world, boys have been targeted by video games (increasingly massive multiplayer platforms) and pornography (increasingly hardcore) and girls have been targeted by social media platforms. Boys have withdrawn more and more from the physical world, losing confidence and competence there, while girls have experienced the devastating impact of manipulated visual social comparison, relational aggression, and wanting to fit in by copying influencers. Girls have elevated impossible and unreal expectations of beauty and, unable to live up to them, have hidden themselves deeper into the forest of anxiety. Boys are being taught to blame women for their woes, exacerbated by a shift from male-heavy industrial communities to service-based economies where women are better-equipped to excel.

All of this is almost entirely unchecked by society, which still tends to overfocus on physical safety. But the physical safety of our children has increased for several generations (in part, perhaps, due to a withdrawal from the physical world). In the UK we have seen a significant rise in knife-enabled crime over the past decade, though injuries and homicides have fallen. Where children are carrying knives, mostly for defence, it is because they perceive the world outside to be more dangerous than it actually is, arguably because it has become a more alien environment to them. Addressing this may involve putting more police officers on the ground (Con 20,000; Lab 13,000), adult-organised youth hubs with mental health provision (Lab), or a dedicated mental health professional in every school (LibDem); but we also need to address the loss of public space where children can play unsupervised (including hostile attitudes towards groups of young people) as well as holding online platform developers to a far greater level of accountability. Where parties want to extend fast broadband, so no community is left behind (Green, LibDem), what measures do they propose to protect our children online? We should pay close attention to the proposals of the different parties in addressing this mental health crisis—a crisis of adult making, but falling on children, who are not a problem to be solved. They are certainly not to be demonised. Which brings us nicely to Jesus’ observation, in the context of being misunderstood and demonised, that ‘if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand’ (Mark 3.20-35).

Health, welfare and pensions are major issues in the forthcoming General Election. They are issues that have an impact on all our lives, and they are issues that play deeply to any insecurity in our sense of identity, and to the sense of fear that springs from comparing ourselves to others—or, for those whose circumstances change, comparing ourselves as we see ourselves today against how we saw ourselves in the past.

Taken as a whole, the income and wealth of pensioners has increased over the past 30 years but is subject to widening inequality. 33% of Asian older people and 30% of Black older people live below the poverty line, compared to 16% of White older people; while17% of pensioners are in the top fifth of all household income. This has significant impact on health, on life-expectancy and quality of life. It has a bearing on hospital-based care, and on social care to support independent living; on how we fund the NHS and how that funding is shared. The Green Party’s proposal for modest tax rises for the wealthiest, and Reform UK’s proposal to remove the ‘free at the point of use’ principle for those who can afford to pay are two very different approaches on offer.

And how do we go about addressing the overwhelming levels of need, including waiting lists, in ways that honour those who work in health and social care, who, despite our claiming that the NHS is a national treasure, are often treated—badly—as our household servants? In Genesis 3, the Lord God moves to remove shame and restore dignity. In Mark 3, Jesus redefines our understanding of family, beyond self-interest, and aligned with God’s desire for a caring society. No one party has a monopoly on the best way forward; these issues deserve cross-party collaboration, not the trading of apportioning blame and deflecting responsibility we have seen so far in this Election campaign.

It is easy to write-off politicians for such human behaviour—as if we are any different. But while there are things best delivered nationally, or regionally, repairing a caring society cannot be left to government alone or to market forces. It requires of us all that we act as those who bear the image of God, and that we recognise our neighbour as bearing that same image. Weigh the party manifestos and exercise your vote. But also ask, how might we as a local community address some of these issues, whether by creating space for young people or through the Parish Nursing movement, by identifying need and working with others to meet it in sustainable ways.

  

First Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

It won’t have escaped your notice that here in the UK there will be a General Election on 04 July. Over the five Sundays in June, I intend to look at several key issues relating to how we vote, beginning, today, with work and the economy. My intention is not to tell you who you should or shouldn’t vote for—though I will touch on policies—but to ask how does Christian faith inform how we cast our vote?

Work impacts all our lives, including the lives of children and pensioners. And work is a good thing, where it enables us to express something of ourselves, in ways that make a meaningful contribution to society, and in exchange to receive back what we need to meet our needs. It is also a sphere of life where humans exploit other humans, and people experience injustice. The UK has a very high level of income inequality [pay, bonuses, pensions] compared to other developed nations, and an even higher level of wealth inequality [land and property ownership].

One of the foundational events in the Bible is the exodus of the descendants of Jacob from Egypt, where they had initially been welcomed as economic refugees but were later heavily exploited amid rising fear that their population had grown too large to live peaceably alongside their hosts. Soon after Moses leads their escape, God presents them with Ten Words—we know them as the Ten Commandments. These were fundamental for society to flourish but needed fleshing-out in practical case law. One of the Words concerned work, and, specifically, the key importance of regular rest from labour or exertion, grounded in the rhythms of nature itself. When, forty years later, Moses restated the Ten Words to the generation who had left Egypt as children, or who had been born after that experience, he reframed the Word explicitly as protection against exploitation:

‘Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.’ (Deuteronomy 5.12-15)

Sabbath means to cease exertion, to rest. And the Word concerning work flows out rest. That is to say, it places restriction on work. In a sense, it seeks to save work from itself. By putting a limit on work, it prevents a good thing from becoming an idol, an all-consuming thing that exploits us. It provides clear margins around work for rest, for celebration, for other expressions of community. And of course, this pattern presupposes that the labour of six days provides for seven. You cannot rest if you are worrying about how you are expected to choose between eating and keeping warm. So, we might want to ask, of each party’s manifesto, what is your understanding of work? And do you value people as more than economic units?

This Word is expansive: it starts with you and extends to others. The primary focus is on those with the most means. The Word places a limit on the pursuit of profit and insists on a duty of care towards others. These are not others who are ‘less fortunate than ourselves’—a phrase I dislike intensely, a phrase that shields the rich from addressing systemic unfairness. No, this Word is concerned with justice for all. The Labour Party’s policy of making the minimum wage a real living wage, and the Green Party’s policy of introducing a Universal Basic Income, giving everyone the agency to take time away from work to care for family, learn new skills, volunteer, or pursue other interests, would be ways of fleshing this out.

The Word turns to addressing young adults. What does liveable work and rest mean for them? Zero-hour contracts might sound attractive when the worker can easily step outside work commitments for a time and take up other employment fairly easily; but where a diversity of opportunity is missing, such terms are exploitative. I don’t know what you think of the Conservative policy that every 18-year-old should do National Service? Perhaps you think it is just what they need. Perhaps you think that many young people are already volunteering in the community, and perhaps it should be compulsory for all ages. Perhaps you think it isn’t a bad idea, but it needs more thought: who is going to supervise these young people, and monitor the value of the experience? But ‘[requiring] another person to perform forced or compulsory labour’ is an offence under the Modern Slavery Act 2015; and perhaps we should rather ask how do we protect the margin of free time around young adults? Related to this, we might ask, why is the minimum wage for those under 21 less than that for those who are 21 and over? Someone might respond that young people have fewer commitments; but that isn’t the basis on which we pay for labour. Why should they not have the opportunity to build up savings, rather than the idea that, in the long run, it is good for people to experience getting into debt? [It isn’t.]

Next, gender is addressed. Do not discriminate. In this country, it is illegal to pay a woman less than a man for doing the same work. But it happens all the time. It happens in hidden ways, such as men being given larger bonuses, and also because women have too often assumed that the law is being observed. Women face discrimination, for example because maternity leave costs an employer in ways that have no immediate benefit to the employer: if profit is your bottom line, rather than a duty of care, women make poor employees, and all employees—regardless of gender—are disposable. What do the various party manifestos have to say about workers’ rights, and about the balance of care between the employer, the state, and the individual?

The Word addresses beasts of burden, which, in our context, might be expanded to include machinery and tools. There is something here about technology, about obsolescence, about the relentless exploitation of the natural world; and about commitment to a greater contentment and appreciation of what we have. Again, there is something here that resists reducing everything to short-term profit, and that asks whether we might reimagine what has been termed a ‘greening’ of the economy.

And the Word addresses our attitude towards the resident alien in our towns. This is, of course, highly contentious in our society: but it is not an issue that will be addressed by ignoring it. Since the lifting of Covid restrictions, and the ending of the EU transitional arrangements, we have seen a very marked rise in long term immigration among non-EU nationals, with those on ‘skilled worker – health and care’ visas having overtaken those on study visas, and dependents of those with ‘skilled worker – health and care’ visas having overtaken primary applicants. We have experienced the impact of this on our own congregation, with healthcare workers from Nigeria and Ghana and India and their families worshipping with us. So, we might ask, if we are content for immigrants to perform care work, for which they are often both overqualified and poorly paid, what might we owe them, as a society? And if we do want to reduce immigration, how might we go about that well? Reform UK propose a higher rate of National Insurance to be paid by businesses that employ non-British nationals, though, tellingly, their proposal would exempt the health and care sector.

Moses ends with a reminder that we do this in part because of an appreciation of our own history of exploitation experienced by previous generations. That we are not to lightly throw away rights won. In this nation, this would include the right to vote, the right to Union representation, rights in the workplace, maternity provision, protection in times of sickness, benefits of the welfare state. Rights that are constantly resisted and pushed back on by vested interests who would exploit others for personal gain. There are many stories of resistance and demand for change in our shared history. Some have been championed by the Church, some ignored, some actively resisted. But stories, and how we tell them, matter.

Let’s turn to our Gospel passage, Mark 2.23-3.6. I’m not going to read it out, you can look it up for yourself later. Here, I simply want to offer some thoughts on how we should conduct ourselves over the coming weeks. The Gospel passage records two clashes between Jesus and a group who saw him as a threat to their vested interests, to their privileged position in society. Who saw Jesus as their enemy, to be destroyed. First, they use a very harsh interpretation of the law to discredit Jesus’ disciples; then they pretend that engaging with Jesus’ questions is beneath their dignity.

In contrast, Jesus reminds them of a story from their history that they have chosen to bury, a story that raises compassion above control. Every party, every candidate standing in this General Election will remind us of certain stories about our shared history, that emphasise particular characteristics. The point is not to seek balance, but to ask ourselves, are the stories told—the characteristics highlighted—ones we would choose to celebrate, or lament in penitence? And how do we respond to the stories we would distance ourselves from? Do we accuse the storyteller of being unpatriotic, or the enemy within; or do we recognise that our shared story is not reductive to the Right or the Left?

And, finally, Jesus ‘was grieved at their hardness of heart.’ He moves to restore a withered hand—to restore the man’s opportunity to contribute to society—while his opponents move to destroy him above all else. May we resist the hardening of our hearts against those with whom we disagree. May we love, and pray for, those we count as enemies.

 

 

Fourth Sunday of Easter 2024

 

Lectionary readings: Acts 4.5-12 and John 10.11-18

Around 12,000 years ago the world was emerging from the most recent Ice Age. Humans had spread through every continent. There were in total around 1 million of them, and they were all hunter gatherers. If they were going to develop beyond that, they would need to develop farming. And that required several factors (such as significant rivers) but two things in particular: indigenous cereals, to produce a food surplus freeing up some of the community to do other things; and the kind of animals you can put to work, of which there are surprisingly few. Australia had no natural advantages. Africa and the Americas, both lying north-south through several distinct climate zones, had limited cereals (sorghum, millet; maize, quinoa) or suitable animals (camel, donkey; llama, alpaca). With a temperate climate stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, producing wheat, barley, millet, and rice, and home to the sheep, goat, pig, cow, and horse, Eurasian farmers had a distinct advantage [see A. Wilson, Remaking the World]. This is why we see the early rise of so many major civilisations—and empires—in this part of the world, growing around the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, as well as the Nile. These are not the only major civilisations, of course, but they are the earliest.

Across this zone, settled communities developed houses: and, across the many diverse cultures of this zone those houses—from humble homes to royal palaces—took form around an internal, or interior, courtyard. Why? In part because it was easier for humans (as well as for grains and other animals) to move east-west, learning from one another. And in part because the internal courtyard offered several advantages:

it invites natural light, while maintaining privacy—walls also storing the sun’s heat for nighttime warmth (passive heating).

it encourages air movement, providing a welcome cooling breeze in warmer regions and helping to maintain thermal equilibrium (passive cooling).

It collects and stores rainwater, typically in a shallow pool, for use in drier times.

it creates relaxing space, a safe place to enjoy company, eat and drink together, discuss ideas.

The internal courtyard is a key indicator of having moved beyond surviving into flourishing.

Which is all very interesting (or perhaps not) but what has it to do with our readings from the Bible (Acts 4.5-12 and John 10.11-18)? Well, our readings bring together an image from the world of agriculture and an image from the world of architecture.

Let’s start with Jesus, and his words, ‘I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.’ The word translated ‘fold’ is the word for an internal courtyard. It can mean sheepfold (its primary meaning in the metaphor of sheep and shepherd) but it also refers to the interior courtyard of a house or palace. Jesus brings those who come to him into his internal courtyard, where we see by his beautiful light; experience the breeze of the Holy Spirit; are cleansed and renewed in baptism, fed in holy communion; and can relax knowing that we are safe from harm. In him, there is, simply put, a rightness to the world.

Now let’s turn to Peter. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter quotes Psalm 118: “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” Literally, it has become ‘the head of the corner.’ The cornerstone is the architrave (the ‘chief beam’) that sits on top of, and holds together, the columns that support the roof, so that the roof—having a large hole in it to let in light and air and water, doesn’t collapse.

Peter’s experience of the church is of a dwelling—a family home, a royal palace—being built for all people around an internal courtyard: around a space that lets the light of Christ illumine our lives; a space where we can feel, and benefit from, the movement of the life-giving Spirit; a space defined by repentance and baptism, and by a common meal; a safe space where we can enjoy one another’s company in fellowship. It is certainly a place of goodness and healing, of restoration of health.

This, then, is the ‘ideal model’ of the Church, for Jesus and for Peter. Indeed, many of the earliest churches met in the internal courtyard of the homes of their hosts. This was the main and semi-public room, around a pool where baptisms took place (Paul baptises the household of a Roman army veteran in Philippi, establishing a second church in the city) and a dining table. And when Christians first began to build dedicated places of worship, they built them around an atrium (the Latin name for the internal courtyard). The shape of our buildings has evolved over the centuries, but we still see that form in the cloisters of our own Durham cathedral.

We don’t have an internal courtyard, but the metaphor stands. And, just as we have covered over the interior courtyard of our buildings, so we see patterns of behaviour at play within the Church of God that try to shut out the light of Christ, keep out the wind of the Holy Spirit, detach baptism and communion from discipleship, and lord over an unsafe place where people experience spiritual abuse.

Even as we get work done to replace the physical roof above the south aisle, let us attend to maintaining the metaphorical opening over our heads, that we may be a flourishing community within the courts of the Lord. The measure might be to ask:

Is our worship focused on Jesus, welcoming his light, and responding in repentance and joy?

Is our worship open to the Holy Spirit, the giver and sustainer of life?

Do we prepare people of all ages for baptism and to receive communion—and to live the life that flows from these sacraments—well?

Do we nurture a safe environment where people of various ages, abilities and needs can get to know one another and flourish together?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘not really,’ how might we attend to that?

And one final thing. Jesus says, ‘I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.’  Jesus goes out into the world to bring others back, with him, into his fold. We are called to follow him, where he leads, and to do the things he does. If we have found, in this place, an internal courtyard in the world, who do we know who might also find a welcome here? Whom might we invite to come with us? Whom might we speak to, whom Jesus might speak to through us, who might hear his voice and respond?

Don’t think of the fold as being tight for space, but as a gracious space, a hospitable space, an inviting space. A blessing you would want to let others in on, that they might be blessed too.

 

Third Sunday of Easter 2024

 

Third Sunday of Easter

Lectionary readings: Acts 3.12-19 and Luke 24.36b-48

Why do we have this frankly improbable story? Well, the Church proclaims that, improbable though it may sound, Jesus was raised from the dead, and that his resurrection was bodily. But I don’t think that is why we have this story. That is why the world has this story, to know that Jesus has triumphed over the forces of death. But we—the Church—have this story to train us to meet the risen Jesus in our own lives, now.

In this story, of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples, we learn several things.

We learn that our bodies matter: that we are not simply souls, temporarily residing in a body; but that body and soul belong together.

We learn that we meet Jesus in food: in the fellowship of eating together, in the people we eat with; not restricted to (but in a special way in) the bread and the wine of communion.

We learn that our thoughts and feelings and experiences and emotions matter. The disciples are startled, and experience terror, fear, rising doubt, joy, disbelief, and wonder, all smushed together. It is A Lot. The disciples in the upper room are like chrysalises inside protective cocoons, that life-stage between caterpillar and butterfly where the insect is being utterly undone and made anew.

Our thoughts and feelings, and our experiences and emotions, can lead us towards God and our neighbour, our fellow human beings. But they can be intense, confusing, painful; and we so often seek to deaden intensity, impose order on our confusion, and numb our pain. We may self-medicate with alcohol, or use our television as an avoidance strategy, or even inflict pain on others in doomed attempts to protect ourselves from pain. Such responses to our bodies cause us to move further away from God and others.

Jesus responds by speaking peace and proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins.

The peace Jesus speaks is wholeness. It is not the absence or repression of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and emotions, but their harmonious integration; the experience of life in all its fullness; our whole being—our souls and bodies—at home in its own skin, and secure in our connection to others.

Repentance is a change of mind, a turning towards the other, an alignment with God and others. And it goes hand-in-hand with forgiveness of sins, with addressing and dealing with the ways in which we have responded to our thoughts and feelings and experiences and emotions that have caused us to turn away from God and others, where we have colluded with the forces of death rather than participated in the life of the very Author of Life.

So how might we respond to this good news story today? I’d like to offer three options.

First, if you know that you need that peace that Jesus offers, you are invited to come to the front where I will anoint people with the oil of healing that was blessed at the Cathedral in Holy Week. You might come seeking healing of body or soul; for yourself, or on behalf of someone else. I won’t enquire as to why you come; I shall simply anoint your head and hands and ask Jesus to bring wholeness where it is needed.

Second, at the back of the church you will see a representation of the tree of life. And you will find many heart-shaped leaves, of different colours; most have different colours on their front and on their underside. The invitation here is to notice the thoughts and feelings our bodies bear today—there may be several—and to choose a colour that represents each feeling; and to add those leaves to the tree. For example, grief might be purple, like a bruise. Sadness might be silver. What colour is jealousy, or disappointment, or contentment, or joy? To clarify, the aim is not to add all the leaves to the tree, but to create a representation of who we, as the body of Christ, are today—and to recognise that Jesus comes to bring life however he finds us.

Third, if you are more cerebral, or perhaps less mobile, you might just want to sit where you are and pay attention to your thoughts and feelings and listen for whatever Jesus might want to say to you about them. For he comes to bring us life. He comes to empower us to love God with our whole being; and to have self-compassion and love for others (which go hand-in-hand, the extent of the former being the limit of the later). And his Spirit speaks to our spirit.

To summarise, come to the front for anointing; go to the back for leaves; and stay where you are for listening. You may, of course, do all three. You have ten minutes. Over to you.

 

Second Sunday of Easter 2024

 

Second Sunday of Easter

Lectionary readings: Acts 4.32-35 and John 20.19-31

Easter is not a day, or even a long weekend. Easter is a Season, lasting seven weeks (which is longer than the Season of Lent, the season of preparation for Easter). It is a Season of learning what it means to be a people, a community, defined by resurrection. And our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles invites us to engage with how the resurrection empowers us to overcome one of the key forces of death in the world: the hold that wealth has over us.

In the Gospels, Jesus speaks about our relationship to money more than anything else. In the Sermon on the Mount, he explicitly says, ‘You cannot serve both God and mammon’ (Matthew 6.24). Mammon translates as riches, money, possessions, or property; and Jesus describes this as operating like a rival god: either we find ourselves serving mammon, and the claim it asserts over our lives; or we choose to serve God. Either way, we are not the masters of our own lives. Mammon asserts its claim over humanity in every age and society. In our context, we swim in the sea of neoliberal free market fundamentalism, that holds so many in the captivity of poverty, and a few in the captivity of wealth—and we tend to assume that, at worst, this is the best of all possible alternatives. This is how Mammon rules over us.

In light of the resurrection, Jesus’ followers recognised that their financial resources were not theirs alone but were given for the common good. They didn’t erase ownership, or pool all their resources into a common purse; but they did release and redistribute capital to meet need.

Of course, these first to follow Jesus believed that he would return within their lifetimes. Our situation is very different; but then, the circumstances of Christians have varied from context to context around the world and through the ages. We are not given an ideology to subscribe to (e.g. Capitalism, Communism) but a principle to bring to bear, in creative ways. In our context, the influence of Christendom has shaped both taxation as contribution to a common purse and charitable giving as a non-governmental form of organised redistribution according to need.

But we likely assume that our money is our own; resent taxation as government taking what is ours; believe that this money is wasted through mismanagement, whether by local or national government or by institutions funded in this way; and think that those who are supported by the Welfare State are sponging off society. This is how Mammon holds us captive.

We at St Nicholas’ are a Christian community whose life incurs financial liability: primarily, the cost of ministry to the parish; the cost of maintaining our buildings [some of these costs are large and can be partially offset by grants]; and the cost of utilities, of heating of buildings so that they are inviting spaces for hospitality and welcome. These are largely our costs to bear. And again, Mammon raises its head.

The Church of England, of which we are a part, does have access to an in-perpetuity endowment fund. The Church Commissioners support the Church of England’s ministry in various ways, particularly in areas of need and opportunity. At the end of 2022, the Church Commissioners’ investment fund held assets valued at £10.3bn. The Commissioners committed to distributing £1.2bn to the Church of England over the three-year period 2023-25. Their support meets around 20% of the annual running costs of the Church of England, including statutory commitments such as pension obligations. They fund mission and ministry in the poorest parts of the country; initiatives such as racial and social justice interventions, engaging with young people, short-term funding for new initiatives, and supporting the Church to become carbon-net zero by 2030; they support chaplaincy, ordinands, bishops and archbishops, cathedrals. They don’t, as a rule, support the ongoing costs of parish churches—although they did distribute money right across the Church of England to offset the fuel bill crisis: we received money, which, being on a fixed-rate contract, we felt that we did not need, and so our Parochial Church Council voted to pass that support on to Sunderland Minster, whose need was greater.

But whenever the Church Commissioners allocate money, others complain: ‘Why don’t we get any of this money?’ This, too, is Mammon, the resentment of others receiving to our supposed cost.

In 2023, the Church Commissioners created a new in-perpetuity endowment fund to address the sin of racial injustice. They determined to allocate a sum large enough to have meaningful impact, without harming their existing commitments, and decided to set apart £100m over a nine-year period. This might sound like a large sum of money, but it is approximately 1% of their current assets. The intention is that the interest on this fund be used to support projects and initiatives among communities who to this day experience the lasting negative impact of the chattel slave trade. A year in, they have invited other institutions and private families, beyond the Church, who benefitted from the chattel slave trade to contribute to the fund, with the aim of raising a total endowment of £1bn.

The backlash has been vocal—this, too, is Mammon. ‘We weren’t personally responsible for the slave trade; why should we take responsibility for addressing it’s lasting impact?’ ‘African kings sold their own or neighbouring people; and the Muslims sold more slaves than the Christians did.’ ‘It is our money, and it is wrong to give it away, when we have needs of our own.’ ‘I shall be withholding my giving to the Church until it reverses this policy.’ All these sentiments—which you can read in angry Letters to the Editor—are simply ways of choosing to ignore need. The scandal is not that the Church of England is committing 1% of her resources to address racial injustice. The scandal is that anyone within the Church should think that this is a scandal. It is a scandal to the servants of Mammon, not the servants of God. But every one of us is vulnerable to such thinking: we may have thrown ourselves on the mercy of God, but Mammon wants us back.

At the national and international level, and at the local level, the Church must wrestle with what God is asking us to do with our money. And we are called to live as people of the resurrection: as if we believe that the forces of death have been defeated.

If you give, financially, to St Nicholas’ Church, I want to say, ‘Thank you!’ And I want to invite you to take this opportunity to review your giving. Our circumstances change. You may need to reduce your giving at this time, and if so, thank you for what you have given and for whatever you are able to continue to give. You may be able to increase your giving at this time, in which case, thank you: it will make a difference. It may be appropriate to maintain your current level of giving, though, please, not by habit or default.

If you consider this to be your church community, and you don’t, at present, give financially, I want to invite you to do so. To contribute to the meeting of our needs, at a level that is honest about your own personal circumstances. Not long back, the Church of England guideline was that 10% of our disposable income should be charitable giving, with 5% going to our local church and the other 5% to whatever charities matter to you. This raises questions such as, is disposable income whatever is left after tax, or after tax and bills? Today, the Church speaks, instead, of encouraging generosity in giving, whatever that looks like for any of us in our circumstances. I think it is up to us to decide what we are able to give; but I would commend to you the practice of making your giving to your local church 50% of your total charitable giving. Why? Because other charities are able to pay fundraisers, have access to advertising, whereas we do not, and are primarily dependent on one another. Yes, our overall costs are smaller than those of national and international charities; but our contributors are also far fewer.

If you do not currently give, and would like to, may I highlight the Parish Giving Scheme as an excellent means to do so? If you are a UK taxpayer, this enables us to claim Gift Aid in real time throughout the year; and also allows you to review and increase or decrease your giving annually. You’ll find information packs by the door.

And if you are unable to contribute financially to our common life, know that you are welcome here. We share what we can, not what we do not have. Thank you for whatever ways you are able to give of yourself for the common good. May we each receive what we need.

We read that ‘the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul’ (Acts 4.32). That their lives were knitted-together as one. The account continues, introducing Joseph, known by the nickname Barnabas, which means ‘son of encouragement,’ whose giving was an encouragement to all. We also meet Ananias and Sapphira. They also sell property, and bring the proceeds, but they keep some back for themselves while being dishonest about that. They have been captured by Mammon—whom Peter associates with Satan. For they did not have to sell their property; and, having sold it, they did not have to contribute it all to the common fund; but they chose to give a deceptive impression. Convicted of this, they both drop dead, one after the other.

We give, not out of compulsion, but in love for one another, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and to address practical needs. Most of all, our giving is a testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus—to the grace it releases among us. May we know that grace in our common life. Amen.