A View from St Albans: Recent Episodes
Simon Carver
"The Bad Tenants" - Matthew 21:33-46
A sermon preached by Simon Carver at Dagnall Street Baptist Church 5th October 2014 pm
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20141005pm.mp3
"My richest gain I count but loss." Philippians 3:4-14
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 5th October 2014 by Phil Palmer
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20141005am.mp3
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 28th September 2014 by Simon Carver
Psalm 19, "The Earth is the Lord’s III: ... and everything in it"
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140928am.mp3
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 21st September 2014 by Simon Carver
Job 1:6-12, "The Earth is the Lord’s II: The Importance of being Lost"
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140921am.mp3
"The Four Female Ancestors of Jesus" Sunday 14th September 2014 am
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 14th September 2014 by Joe Kapolyo from Edmonton Baptist Church
Matthew 1:1-17
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140914am.mp3
"The Earth is the Lord's" Sunday 7th September 2014 am
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 7th September 2014 by Simon Carver
Genesis 1:27 - 2:2
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140907am.mp3
"A Child-like Faith" Sunday 31st August 2014
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 31 August 2014 by Simon Carver
Matthew 18:1-5
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140831am.mp3
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 10 August 2014 by Philip Palmer.
Matthew 14:22-33, "If you want to walk on water..."
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140810am.mp3
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 3rd August 2014 by Simon Carver
The fourth in a series of "Questions people ask."
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140803.mp3
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 27 July 2014 by Philip Palmer.
The third in a series of "Questions people ask."
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140728am.mp3
The second in a series of sermons: "Questions people ask".
Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church 20th July 2014 by Simon Carver
http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/dsbc20140720.mp3
Having not watched any of the previous episodes, I turned on the TV last night and Celebrity Masterchef was on. It was the Final and the last cooks standing were two people I didn't recognise, and Jodie Kidd. I hadn't realised quite how tall Ms Kidd is. Normally she would be among others of her exceptionally tall species, but alongside normal people ... The contestants had one task which was to cook a three course meal of their own choosing in two and half hours. Gregg Wallace and John Torode, the presenters and judges of the show wandered around the cooks' tables, making encouraging noises, but rolling their eyes behind the contestants' back. And then they were done.
One by one the contestants brought up the products of their labours. There is an unfairness inherent in this process in that the last person to come forward, has had their food cooling and congealing on the plates for several minutes before it gets prodded and tasted. If my mother was a judge she would mark it down purely on the basis that it would fail to take the skin off the roof of her mouth.
While I have sat through many Masterchef episodes, I had never before noticed the similarity between the way that the food is judged and the offering up of Ann Darrow to King Kong. This is not a sly dig at Gregg Wallace's pre-diet physique, rather it is a based on the attitude of the contestants. As they lay out the food, their faces show that they are beseeching the gods, "Please like my food. Please love me."
This blog is really an effort not to waste a thought that I'm not going to be able to fit into a sermon which is part of a series of "Questions that people ask". This arose from the idea that the Church is often answering questions that people aren't asking and that if it is answeringthose questions, it is not very good at letting people know. This week's topic is, "Will anyone love me?"
The Masterchef contestants demonstrate very visually the desire that is in all of us to know love. That love come from a person, but it may come from being in a place, or returning to a place. As Mad Men's Don Draper once said:
Round and a round, and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.
If you want to know more, let me know.
God loves dinosaurs!When I was a boy a lot of friends used to like going to the Science Museum in London because there were things you could do. There were knobs you could press and wheels you could turn that made things happen. There were machines, there were trains, there were even rockets that went up into space. Me, I was less interested in the Science Museum than with another of the museums – the Natural History Museum. One of the main attractions of the Natural History Museum was that there were animals there that you would never see in a zoo. Huge creatures like the Diplodocus as big as several houses and which just stood and munched grass all day. And then there was the most fearsome of all: Tyrannosaurus Rex, with its funny little arms, but great big teeth – all the better to eat you with.I say all the better to eat you with, but no human being was ever eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, because they were long gone before the first humans appeared on the earth. The dinosaurs became extinct around 66 million years ago and the first human beings weren’t born until just a couple of 100,000 years ago. It would have been wonderful to have been able to see these dinosaurs in real life, like we can see the lions and giraffes at a wildlife park. We can’t because they are extinct. We don’t know why for sure, but within a fairly short space of time – at least a short space of time for geologists – the dinosaurs went from being top dogs to having been replaced by dogs – or rather mammals in general. What’s very strange is that almost every animal and plant that has ever existed is now – just like the dinosaurs – extinct. Scientists estimate that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now gone. They are extinct, shuffled off this mortal coil.In Genesis 1 we read:And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.God made all these things. We might think that it is a little strange that God made all these things and yet he has allowed 99.9% of all the things that he has made die out. Human beings often take the blame for animals become extinct, but almost all of those species that have disappeared since life began had gone by the time the first human beings appeared, so it’s not all our fault. So why has it happened?I don’t think that the dinosaurs disappeared because God hates dinosaurs. I think that the opposite is true – God loves dinosaurs – although it doesn’t specifically tell us that in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t actually mention dinosaurs, but that’s because the people who wrote the Bible didn’t know about dinosaurs. If whoever write Genesis had known what we know about pre-historic animals we might read this in Genesis 1:And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the diplodocus and he woolly mammoth to chew grass and the tyrannosaurus and sabre-toothed tiger to eat meat, each according to their kinds. And that verse would have ended in the way that all the other verses end in the story of God’s creation … “and God saw that it was good”.God has made more animals and plants than we will ever see and I’m fairly sure that he has made lots more things than we will ever know about. God has made exotic animals, birds and plants that disappeared long before human beings were ever born. God has made all these things because that is what God does and that is what God loves. God loved the dinosaurs when he made them and I believe that God still loves dinosaurs. Just because the dinosaurs are no more, does not mean that God has stopped loving them. They are part of God’s creation and earthly death has no bearing on God’s eternal capacity to love and to hold his creation close to his heart.Even if we ignore all the plants and creatures that have disappeared unseen by us, we can still marvel at God’s extravagance all that we cansee. Why do we need so many different plants and animals? Who knows? Well, the answer to that, I guess, is that God knows and we must presume that God loves variety.One final thought to end with and once again it concerns life and death. I suggested that God loves dinosaurs and I want to emphasise that I said that God loves not that God loved. God loves all that he has made and he continues to love all that he has made. God does not cease loving when one of his creatures no longer has life on earth. The implications of this are huge for us as human beings. We speak about knowing us and loving us, and that is all well and good for the here and now, but I believe that if God truly loves his creation and all of his creation then he continues to know us and love us long after we are gone from this place and into eternity. God has always loved us and will continue alwaysto love us.God loves the dinosaurs, even though they are long gone from this world. And he also loves my Dad, your Mum and Dad, your husband or wife, your son or daughter and he will continue to love you, long after you’ve gone, because God is the God of creation and he holds all that he has made in his hands and close to heart.
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Matthew 27: 5 records that Judas, ‘went away and hanged himself’ having become full of remorse at seeing the result of his actions. The remaining eleven disciples elected a replacement for Judas by taking a vote amongst themselves. And so Matthias was chosen. But what if Judas had lived? What if his remorse led to his begging forgiveness of his brothers – and sisters? What if the eleven and their more loyal female companions decided that Judas had simply acted on the doubts about Jesus that they all shared?These ‘what if …’ scenarios are interesting, but, ultimately, they tend to be not just hypothetical, but also speculative. However, ‘what if’ a real-life Judas was able to share his thoughts?In 1966 Mao Zedong launched a Cultural Revolution in China. His perception was that Communism needed to be enforced and that the way to do this was to remove any vestiges of China’s historical and cultural heritage. There were echoes of earlier movements in the USSR and Nazi Germany as family members were encouraged to give up other members of the family who were not ‘on message’. Persecution was wide-spread and it was stated in court in the trial of the Gang of Four that 729,511 people had been persecuted, of whom 34,800 were said to have died. These are certainly conservative estimates as it is estimated that between 1966 and 1969 half a million people were killed.One of those who died was Fang Zhongmou. She was 44 when she was beaten and arrested. She was forced to kneel in front of a crowd while her ‘crimes’ were denounced before she was taken outside of town and shot. The similarity between Fang’s story and that of Jesus is uncanny – including the execution outside the town. One difference is that Jesus was betrayed by a friend. Fang Zhongmou was betrayed by her 16-year-old son.Now aged 60, Zhang Hongbing is seeking to atone for what he did by telling his mother’s story. Fang was cleared of her crime – tearing down a poster and accusing Chairman Mao of encouraging a personality cult around himself – in 1980 and a headstone was erected where she had been buried. WWJD? What would Judas do? Would he tell the story of Jesus? Would he, like Paul, have become a changed man and an advocate for faith in the Risen Messiah? Would Judas have been challenged as, on the lakeside, Peter was challenged by Jesus? Of course, we cannot know, but I’m sure he would have been – and is – forgiven, because that’s what Jesus does.
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It was my father’s birthday in January: the first since he died last summer. It felt odd not to send him a card and I wasn’t sure how we should mark the day. My mother and I decided that we would have lunch together and raise a glass to Dad. I have been surprised at how my father’s death has affected me. Death is never far away from the working life of a minister and I have lost count of the number of funerals I have conducted. I have worked with hundreds of families in their time of grief, but my father’s funeral was the first that I have arranged myself. It all went well, but it also went quite quickly. The funeral and thanksgiving services were on a Friday and we were off on holiday on the following Monday. After our holiday I was back to work for the start of the busy Autumn programme and I thought that this would mean life was back to normal.I have been surprised at how often I have thought about my Dad over the last few months. These have not been sorrowful moments, but rather occasions of fond remembering. If I have any regrets it is that I had no opportunity for last words. Perhaps I have watched too many films – something for which I can blame my father – but I have felt that there were many things that I might have said if my father’s death had been more predictable. It is hardly surprising that death does not follow a script, when life – as our American friends might say – tends to throw us so many curve balls. Why should we experience life any differently at its end? The Book of Ecclesiastes is full of sombre Hebrew wisdom about the inscrutability of God and the mystery of life. One of the more encouraging passages is this: … there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God. [Ecclesiastes 3:12-13]Life is full of mystery, and there is much that we cannot control, not least the last words that we might say to our loved ones. However, our role is fairly simple: to enjoy the life we live, to do good to one another and to love God.
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One of my favourite Christmas songs is Perry Como’s “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. There’s something about his easy crooning style that seems just right for the song, but there’s also something about the sentiment – the excitement that Christmas is coming near.In church we have particular Sundays that mark the passage of Advent and the coming of Christmas. On the first Sunday we consider the Last Days – the Mayans were three weeks late. Later we think about the Prophets and John the Baptist and then finally the prophecy that Gabriel gave to Mary, that she would bear a son who would be the Saviour of the world. These are the markers that we have in church.There will often be another set of Christmas rituals that we have in our homes. One of mine is getting the poinsettia from the supermarket, marvelling at how its still the same price as last year and congratulating myself on what a fine specimen it is. Then there is the purchase of the Christmas Radio Times which I pore over and see lots of films that I’d like to see. A small percentage I’ll get round to recording and these will then stay unwatched until next Christmas comes.Other Christmas markers are the stories that appear in the news. These are the mixture of good and bad news stories – with nothing in between – that are peculiar to Christmas. They are designed to show that either a) individuals or organisations are Scrooges, or, b) that the spirit of Christmas is not yet dead. There have been a number of these this year.You might have seen the story about the NYPD cop and the homeless man. The incident happened at the end of November, so if we work on supermarket scheduling, that’s well inside the window of Christmas. New York police have not been always received good publicity as one headline suggested: NYPD Officer Caught On-Camera Doing Really Nice Thing. The nice thing that the 25-year-old Officer Lawrence DePrimo did, was to buy a homeless man a pair of shoes. The homeless war veteran, in his fifties, was begging on a cold night, when the officer seeing he was homeless, went into a shop and bought the man some shoes. A nice touch was that he used his police department discount card to get 25% off. A tourist took a photos of the officer giving the man the shoes and by the power of the internet the policeman became famous.A British policeman wasn’t so lucky. He interrupted a school Nativity Play to ask parents to move their cars because they had parked on double yellows and were obstructed the entrance to a doctor’s surgery. There were mixed feelings about whether to boo or cheer the policeman’s action as although he disrupted the play, the parents’ parking was clearly causing a problem and besides, it was a fee-paying school and the cars were all 4x4s, BMWs and Mercs, so they could be said to have deserved it.There was no ambiguity about another story involving a traffic warden. The warden booked two coaches that were loading on a party of disabled children and their wheelchairs. To make matters worse, the children had been carol singing for a homeless charity. The two £70 fines have since been waived – although it would have been a bit of a waste for the Council to collect a fine from a school that is funded – yes, you’ve guessed it – by the same Council.But let’s end with a good news story. Did you see the teacher whose boyfriend turned up at the school where she worked and interrupted the Nativity Play. This time, it wasn’t about getting the parents to move their cars. It was so that he could ask his teacher girlfriend to marry him. Like all public proposals, this was clearly a high risk course of action, but the lady said ‘yes’ and so the children and 200 parents went away happy.School Nativity plays have a long tradition in schools, although it is unusual nowadays to see a straightforward take on the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. For example, I know of one school that this year told the story of aliens helping the crew of a crash landed spaceship return to earth for Christmas Day. Those schools that do have Nativity Plays often include extra characters. The film Love Actually has a scene in which a child plays an octopus in the school Nativity. I also heard a newsreader on the radio this week say that as a child she was a Spanish lady who brought a net of satsumas to Jesus. We saw something of this creativity with our own Travelling Nativity set when our wise men were photographed on the back of a stuffed toy rabbit. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’ve always liked the story of the young lad playing the inn-keeper in the Nativity story. Rather than turn away Mary and Joseph when they came to his door, he greeted them with a big smile and beckoned them saying, “Come on in, there’s loads of room!”I like that inn-keeper, because it seems to me that he epitomises the essence of the Christmas story. OK, so it rather messes up a significant element of the story, but if truth be told, there wasn’t an inn-keeper in the version in the Bible. There were shepherds – generally considered undesirable people on account of their smelling of sheep. Then there were the wise men – they weren’t even Jewish and they were astrologers … and we know what Christians think about astrology. These shepherds and wise men were the first people to welcome God’s Son into the world. The outsiders became insiders, because that’s what Christmas is all about – God turning the world upside down. The Church hasn’t always been very good at demonstrating it, but God’s love is for all and there are no exclusions. The message of Christmas is, “Come on in, there’s loads of room”.
With England out of the Euros – those pesky penalties again – we can concentrate on what we do best – cheering on a Brit at Wimbledon in the hope that this year the name of Fred Perry will no longer need be mentioned as the last British male singles winner. A little research has reveals that the last British man to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon was not Fred Perry, but Jaroslav Drobný. As his name suggests, Drobný was not born within the sound of Bow bells or anywhere near Sauchiehall Street. He was a Czech, but he defected to Egypt and won Wimbledon while playing under their flag. He was already a UK resident at the time, but only his last Wimbledon appearance came as a British citizen. At the time of his death, Jaroslav Drobný had held a British passport for longer than he held allegiance to any other nation and so I think that we can say that he is the last British man to have won the Wimbledon men’s singles. Although, we shouldn’t get excited as it was 58 years ago!
I’m guessing that Drobný spoke his English with a Czech accent, but we have become used to hearing accented English spoken by international sportsmen and women. Of course, the accent that we usually hear is American. Whether the player is Czech, Russian, Croatian or Serbian, he or she will be guaranteed to speak good English, but like an American. This is something that I find slightly irritating. If these players are going to speak English, why can’t they do so with an English accent?
You will already see the flaw in my argument. Is Andy Murray’s accent less authentic, because he is Scottish? I would say not. Murray learned his accent from his parents and from the people amongst whom he grew up – his cultural influences. Like it or, the majority of cultural influences that young people experience are not from this side of the Atlantic. So Sharapova and all the other –ovas speak English with the accents that they have heard – American.
It is almost impossible to separate the Christian Gospel from a cultural setting. It was given to us in a cultural setting – 1st century Palestinian Judaism – and it has been transmitted through the ages by Christian missionaries who have their own cultural baggage. Acknowledging this is important, because it might help us to understand that some of what we think of as Christian is simply the package in which the Gospel came to us. The trouble is that when we receive the Gospel we tend to hang on to the box it came in once we have unwrapped it.
When a parcel comes mail order, there will often be instructions that we should keep hold of the packaging in case we need to send it back. The Gospel comes in a package, but we must be careful not to pass it on. This is true for mission overseas, but it’s also true for communicating the Gospel in our own country. The Gospel might look very different in affluent London suburbs from how it looks in a deprived urban estate.
Our job as Christians is to try to understand what is transferable and what is just for us and our day. It’s a difficult task, but it’s one that Paul faced in Athens and elsewhere and reading the accounts of his journeys abroard is a good place for us to start.
As a supporter of a football team who rarely achieve any success, I find it hard to sympathise with those who follow clubs at the top of the Premier League. Their games are televised every week, they have the best players and yet still their supporters complain that they haven’t won any silverware for the past three years.This season, my team, Brentford, known by their fans as ‘the Barcelona of the lower leagues’, have finished 9th in League One. The top two teams are promoted and the next four play-off for the opportunity of playing in the Championship. The ‘Mighty Bees’ will have finished about six or seven points short of that elusive 6th position and that was how it has been for most of this season. However, for a period of about three weeks, having won five games in a row, it began to look as if they might just sneak into that 6th place.It was at this time that I remembered a quotation from Clockwise,a film from the mid-1980s in which a character played by John Cleese said, “It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.” You see, it is the lot of a supporter of a middling football team to know every so often that hope, only, inevitably, it seems, to have that hope dashed. Having hopes raised before being snatched away in this fashion must surely be worse than following a team who haven’t scored for weeks and who are already destined for relegation by January.I’m not sure that hope of promotion is much like the way that the Bible describes hope, although one used to hear elderly church members describing deceased friends as having been, ‘promoted to glory’. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, defines ‘hope’ most clearly: “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” No one ‘hopes’ for what they already have. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews adds his or her two penn’orth: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is hoping with confidence, ‘playing to the best of your ability until the end of the season’ or, to use an expression I discovered a few weeks ago, “Faith is not being sure where you’re going … but going anyway.”
John and Mary - not their real names - were expecting a baby. A day before the due date Mary was concerned because she couldn't feel the baby moving. She thought that it might be because it close to delivery and getting ready for the final part of the baby's journey into the world. However, a visit to the hospital, an ultrasound and connection to a foetal heart monitor, told them that the fear that lay at the back of their minds was a reality. Their baby had died. For not apparent reason, just one day before they were due to meet their first born, he died. Mary had to go through the process of giving birth - a painful experience, but now without the promise of bringing home a bouncing baby son.
Matthew was born and, after a time with Mary and John, he was taken away. Certain tests were done to try to establish cause of death, but the parents were reluctant to add the trauma of a full post mortem examination to what had already happened to them and their son. So, Matthew was collected by a local Funeral Director and this was where I came in.
I was asked to conduct a service for Matthew and his parents and we arranged to meet. It was a good meeting as we discussed what form the service might take. We touched on some of the deeper theological issues and I suggested that the Psalms are full of the cries of people who are angry with God for allowing 'bad things to happen to innocent people', while the wicked appear to prosper. We looked at possible Bible readings and Mary and John liked the passage in Psalm 139 in which Psalmist speaks of God's knowledge of us and how he "created my inmost being," and, "knit me together in my mother's womb."
This wasn't the first such service I had conducted, but it had been a while since the last one. I still knew to expect to experience a visceral reaction when I saw John carry the tiny coffin in his arms. The service went OK. The family and friends were subdued, rather than audibly sobbing. What does one say about the life of a child who died a day before taking his first breath? This is what I said:
One of the particular sadnesses of this service is that at the time when we come to remember Matthew’s life we feel we have nothing to say.
Yet there are aspects of Matthew’s life that we can celebrate. We can celebrate the love of Mary and John that led to Matthew’s conception. While we are deeply saddened that we had Matthew for such a short time, we celebrate the joy experienced by Mary and John and their families and friends through their period of expectation.
Matthew was a person, yet a person that none of us have yet met. Matthew’s life was lived in the safety, security and warmth of his mother’s womb. His fate was not to know the joy of childhood, first love and parenthood, but nor did Matthew experience the suffering that is part of normal human life through all our years. Matthew’s life was different from ours, but no one life is identical to any other and God loves Matthew as he loves each of us. And he has loved us since before we were born and he will continue to love us long after we have left this earth, as this reading from the Psalms tells us.
I then read the passage from Psalm 139, most of which didn't seem as relevant. The passage from Mark 10 about Jesus welcoming children didn't help me much either - I felt that I was saying that "Jesus wanted another little flower in his garden".
Out we went to the grave - a considerably smaller area than full-size, but it seemed disproportionately deep. I led prayers and offered Matthew into God's hands. Rather than sprinkle dirt on to the coffin, the funeral director had some white rose petals which he offered to Mary and John and the other mourners. Things then took a slightly unexpected turn as John asked if he and some of the other male mourners could fill in the grave themselves. I'd only been involved with this once before - a funeral of a man born in the Caribbean - and then the women sang a funeral hymn while the men shovelled. This time it seemed different. There was silence apart from the sound of metal shovels dragging across the plywood on which the Council gravediggers had left the soil. But the sound of the shovels made little impact on the sound of straws being clutched.
As John finished moving the soil he muttered something like, "9 months and it comes to this". It was hard not to agree. For all the words about God's love and his knowledge and caring for the unborn, the truth was that none of us could really make sense of it. And I guess that this is what we - clergy and people - are not good at: accepting that things don't always make sense.
The inquest into the death of Wales Football manager, Gary Speed, ended with a narrative verdict which told us that Mr Speed died by his own hand, but that this may not have been his intention. Therefore we do not know whether or not Gary Speed was part of the 1 in 6 proportion of the population who currently suffer from some form of depressive illness. While there is still some stigma attached to depressive illness, more and more people in the public eye revealing that this is a burden that they have borne has probably made it easier for ordinary people be recognised as sufferers.
The diagnosis of mental illness is not new, but ‘treatment’ often consisted of removing a patient to a place of safety for them and society. Surgery and Electric Shock Therapy remain controversial treatments into the 21st century, although execution for cowardice has been replaced by treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in cases of ‘shell shock’.
The relationship between mental health and the religious world is reflected in the changing times. Although there is the added dimension of whether or not the symptoms of what the Bible describes as demon possession are the manifestation of mental illness. However, a number of Bible characters and religious figures in the church have also shown signs of suffering from depressive illness. Both Elijah and Jonah in the Old Testament seem to have been unable to cope with circumstances in the lives. In the 16th century, Martin Luther seems to have recognised depression in a colleague who took his own life. He referred to his deceased colleagues state of mind: “This is the tragedy of our human condition, that we fall so far we can no longer see or hear the true God, and we imagine the condemning God is the only God. And then, the God we imagine becomes the God we get.”
Of all people, it is Jesus to whom we might look for an example of God’s presence at the time of greatest despair. It was Jesus who knew the sense of desolation that can come with depressive illness as he cried from the cross about God having forsaken him. The message is that God follows us to the very deepest point that we can reach.
However, this is not a claim that trusting in God will make it all OK. Mental illness requires just as much expert medical care as an illness that affects the body. A part of that care is a person’s need to know that they are not travelling alone. This is the sort of care that we can all offer. We may not know just how the other person feels, but most of us have experienced time in the wilderness and have experienced despair. We don’t need to know the pain of mental illness to walk along side someone who does. We simply have to follow our calling and take up our cross and follow Jesus to the Dark Place. In so-doing we share the darkness, while holding on to the light.
I read an article this week in which a journalist began by lamenting the sense of her life ebbing away having reached the age of 44. Having moved on to the idea of ‘mid-life crisis’, she concluded that ‘mid-life’ takes different meanings for different people. It set me thinking – and not for the first time – about changes that I’ve seen during my lifetime.
It has become common-place to hear people speak of the exponential nature of change. This is usually quoted with regard to technological change and it is certainly true that the number of transistors that can be fitted on a integrated circuit has doubled every two years. The layperson might quibble that commercial supersonic flights have been curtailed as have manned lunar missions, however, the general point seems well-made and it is extraordinary to think that less than 70 years after the first manned aeroplane flight Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. A friend who works in the aerospace industry has told me that it is almost a certainty that within 200 years there will be a Mars-based human colony.
My grandparents were born into a world in which no one had flown in a plane and Victoria was still on the throne. Two of them died having seen a man step on to the moon. I presume that any grandchildren I might have will see even greater changes in their lives and yet change is still hard to accept …. and especially at a trivial level.
The goal celebrations of modern footballers is often in the news. Long gone are the days when Denis Law acknowledged the crowd by walking back to his own half with one hand in the air.
Two players were criticised for dedicating their goals to respectively a friend and a relative in prison by running around with a wrists-together-in-handcuffs gesture. A Brentford player was initially included in this criticism, until he revealed that it was aimed at his young son who is a fan of X Factor.
Referees customary now give out yellow cards for over exuberant celebrations – such as when a 15 year-old playing for Wycombe Wanderers was carded for running to where his parents were sitting in the crowd. This somewhat stingy response wasn’t repeated when Bill Sharp scored for Doncaster against Middlesbrough recently. Sharp’s baby son had just died at two days old and when the player scored he pulled off his shirt to reveal a tee-shirt dedicating the goal to his boy. It’s hard not to feel for a man having suffered such a loss, but removing one’s shirt doesn’t seem the most natural way of celebrating anything.
Until the advent of TV close-ups it was impossible to know what players said to one another, but the recent furore over what John Terry did or did not say to Anton Ferdinand was an eye-opener. The argument seems to hinge on whether Terry referred to the opposing defender as a f** blind c or a f* black c. Racism has no place in football or anywhere else, but the general way in which one player’s feelings were expressed to another might still shock some. Educating Essex, the documentary about a high-achieving school in Harlow, showed that such language is not unusual in schools when a teacher and a female pupil were seen discussing whether the pupil had called a member of staff a f* p or just an ordinary p**.
How does one react to these changes in the world? One way is to embrace it. Not that I’m suggesting that we should all join Terry et al in their use of English, but perhaps we should work with change rather than resisting it.
This has implications for Christian people in that while we believe that we should follow in the footsteps of Jesus, there are many areas of life about which Jesus made little comment. Many areas of Christian lifestyle are dependent on tradition and so are open to pressure to change. There are also instances when the Biblical witness is challenged. For example, few people still accept that the earth is the centre of the solar system, despite the Biblical understanding of the universe. The same is not quite true regarding Creationism, as this still exercises a hold on many Christians.
The issue, it seems, is which tenets of our faith are temporal and which are eternal. I wonder whether this is, and perhaps has always been, one of the Church’s most significant challenges.
The recent tragedies which caused the deaths of four miners at the Gleision Colliery near Cilybebyll, Pontardawe, and one miner at Kellingley, North Yorkshire, were a reminder that there are still UK mines producing coal and that men risk their lives to bring that coal to the surface.
Some of us will remember the Aberfan disaster in which a colliery spoil tip collapsed causing a landslide which buried a Primary School, killing 116 children. This was an unusual sort of mining disaster. The ‘usual’ kind involved the men who worked underground. Mining is safer now that it once was and there are far fewer working mines than there were 60 years ago. Over the course of 65 years from 1844, there were 16 separate incidents that caused loss of life – that’s one every four years. 918 men lost their lives in those accidents, all except two incidents having been caused by gas explosions. These statistics are not relating to national mining disasters, but are only those that took place in the Rhondda Valley coalfield.
While the UK coal mining industry is much smaller than it was, coal continues to be mined in large quantities elsewhere. China, the largest coal producer in the world, has 5 million workers in the industry. It also has the highest number of deaths. In 2006 in China, 4,749 miners died in thousands of separate accidents.
The reality is that working underground, in a cramped and hostile environment, is unpleasant at best and highly dangerous at worst. People will often choose to do this work because it is either well-paid, or the only work to be found where they live. Perhaps we have forgotten that mining is like this, perhaps because of those Chilean men who escaped from their collapsed mine unscathed last year. We rejoiced with them, but perhaps it made us imagine that this is what will always happen. That this is how it will always be.
I’m sure that there were as many prayers offered for those four men at Gleision Colliery as there were for those 33 men at Copiapo in Chile last year, but miracles would not be miracles if they happened in every circumstance. Everybody knows that everybody dies, but some times, just some times, a miracle occurs. Then, we should not ask why or why not death does not visit. We should simply rejoice.
What happens if nobody dies?
I’ve been watching Torchwood: Miracle Day, the latest series in the spin-off from Doctor Who. When it started, Torchwood was advertised as ‘Doctor Who for grown-ups’, although many grown-ups think that Doctor Who is also for grown-ups. The difference is probably in some of its adult themes and its post-watershed timeslot. ‘Adult themes’ in the context of Torchwood tends to mean that Captain Jack Harkness gets the opportunity to allow his sexuality free rein. Otherwise, Torchwood – an anagram of Doctor Who – has given its creator, Russell T. Davies, a platform to play around with political and philosophical ideas that are present in Doctor Who, but less appropriate for a younger audience and a format in which the world has to be saved every 40 minutes.
The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day is that for a reason yet to be disclosed no one has died since a day the media dubbed ‘Miracle Day’. While this seemed at first to be a good thing, it has quickly been found to be a bad thing. The world’s population has begun to spiral out of control. Hospitals can’t cope with people who are sick, but who are not dying, thereby freeing up beds for others. A&E triage has had to be reassessed in that minor injuries get to be treated first because there is no ‘30 minute window’ to treat serious cases before they die, because no one dies. Foetuses with severe impairments that would normally auto-abort go full term and are born. In other words, there is an unexpected downside to immortality.
Just as an aside, there has been no mention so far of the impossibility of abortion. If this were real, it would also prompt questions about how and when life begins. But perhaps this will come out in future episodes.
This theme of immortality is one that has frequently occurred in Doctor Who. The Doctor is effectively immortal and the spin-off character Captain Jack shares this trait. On the other hand death is ever present. In ‘Forest of the Dead’, an episode in series four, a voice-over, River Song, one of the Doctor’s companions says: When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever for one moment, accepts it. Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. The context of this quotation is of interest to those who like to look for faith issues in Doctor Who in that it takes the idea of being saved in an unusual new direction and offers a suggestion regarding the nature of an after-life.
If we bring together these story-lines from Torchwood and Doctor Who, we get an interesting starting point to consider the importance of death and dying. ‘Everybody knows that everybody dies’, but the Doctor refuses to give in to death. ‘Everybody knows that everybody dies, but not every day and not today’, is the starting point for Torchwood: Miracle Day. But how much of a miracle would this be? How important is it for humanity, that we die? How important is it that life is framed by birth and death?
The point of praying for healing and, the much rarer, praying for the dead to be raised is not so that no one dies it is so that some days are ‘blessed’. It is also a demonstration that God does not accept death, in the sense that he does not bow to the inevitability of death. God controls death, because God allows death to happen. One might even say that God has created death in the same way that he has created life. Without death life is not eternal, it is interminable.
I like the idea – John Polkinghorne’s, I believe – that human beings have hardware and software. The hardware dies, but the software can live on. It can be saved. Perhaps our destiny is not to live with God in the clouds, but in The Cloud.
A Modern Parable
There was once a poor man who had a prized lamb. She was so tame that she had become part of the family. There was also a rich man who had lots of everything, but he was jealous of the poor man and his lamb. The rich man was very powerful and he took the poor man’s lamb, leaving the poor man bereft and distraught.
What was the poor man to do? He loved his lamb, but he didn’t have much money. How could he get the rich man to return his pet lamb? Then he had an idea. He would set up a number of websites in which he would give details of what the rich man had done. He would contact the rich man’s clients and ask them if they knew what sort of man they were dealing with. He would post videos of the rich man playing with the poor man’s lamb, so that everyone would know what the rich man was really like and what he had done to the poor man.
Although the lamb rather liked living with the rich man, as she got a better class of food, she eventually returned to the poor man’s home where they hoped to live happily ever after. However, the police knocked at the poor man’s door and accused the poor man of being mean to the rich man and causing him psychological harm. But the poor man insisted he was within his rights to do what he did. Eventually the poor man was asked to tell his story to a wise old prophet, called a Judge. The Judge decided that the poor man had been right all along and that the rich man couldn’t expect to get away with doing such a thing, after all, who did he think he was, an Old Testament King?
This is, roughly speaking, the story of Ian Puddick, accused of harassing Timothy Haynes, a wealthy City boss, via the internet, after he discovered that Mr Haynes was having an affair with his wife. It is hard to know quite how Mr and Mrs Puddick’s relationship has survived Mr Puddick’s onslaught against Mr Haynes, but apparently it has done so. Mr Puddick’s argument was not specifically related to his wife’s affair, but to the reaction of the authorities to Mr Haynes’s wealth and power. His own attitude to his wife’s part in the affair is less clear.
The day after Ian Puddick was found not guilty, it was reported that Brian Haw had died. Brian Haw was the peace campaigner who set up camp on the pavement outside the Houses Parliament in 2001, where he continued to live until hospitalised at the beginning of this year. On hearing of his death Tony Benn said:
“Brian sacrificed his life in his work for peace and against the Iraq war, and although he did not succeed in stopping it, what he did and said and the many hours of the day and night he devoted to it kept alive a flicker of hope in the hearts and minds of people who shared his view. Brian did not stop the Iraq war, but he will be remembered as a man who stood against it and put his life at the disposal of those who were against that hideous operation.”
Mr Haw’s father had been one of the first British soldiers to enter Belsen Concentration Camp at the end of the War. A committed Christian, Mr Haw Senior was traumatised by what he had seen and he took his own life in the church kitchen when Brian Haw was 13. Brian Haw was also a devout Christian and at one time spent 6 months training to be an evangelist. This led to his aim to bring peace to the world. In the 1970s he sang carols in the most hardened Loyalist and Republican districts in Northern Ireland. At the end of the 1980s, inspired by John Pilger’s documentaries, he went to the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia. He was there for three months, but when he returned home, he was disappointed to find a lack of interest in what he had witnessed: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide.”
His next enterprise was to use his minivan to take disadvantaged young people on day trips, but this was met with abuse – verbal and physical – by other local residents. Finally, in 2001, he set up the Peace Camp, decorated with pictures of bloated Iraqi children and placards with wild accusations which were notable for their somewhat erratic spelling.
Brian Haw divided opinion. There were those, like Tony Benn, who supported him, but there were others who considered that there was little to choose between him and the rats and mice that infested the camp.
The modern parable doesn’t really work as a comparison for either Ian Puddick or Brian Haw. If Mr Puddick had come up against King David, he wouldn’t have been around to have fought back. If we were looking for a Biblical comparison for Brian Haw, it could be John the Baptist. Except, if Brian Haw had faced Herod Antipas, rather than Tony Blair, he may not have survived to have died in his bed.
However, both of these men are examples of people who have exercised a prophetic voice: one for his own ends and the other for what he saw as the good of humanity. What links both men is that neither worried about what anyone else thought of him. This is also what links these people with their Biblical counterparts. The means may be different, but Brian Haw’s words should challenge us: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide.”
I feel that I can’t ignore this week’s big news story, which is that the West’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was shot dead in his home in Pakistan in the early hours of Monday morning. How we were supposed to react to this news? Bin Laden was the leader of an organisation that was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people not just in the USA and Europe, but also in the Middle East and in Pakistan. Yet I’m sure I’m not alone amongst you in finding some of the scenes of rejoicing at his death rather hard to stomach. A quotation from Martin Luther King has been doing the round this week: Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Jesus seemed to understand this idea of hate begetting hate and, I suspect inadvertently, Hillary Clinton, put her finger on the same point in a speech in Italy on Thursday:
Osama bin Laden's death sent an unmistakable message from the international community in its stand against extremism, the battle to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates. It does not end with one death and we have to resolve and redouble our efforts not only in Pakistan but around the world.
“It doesn’t end with one death,” said Mrs Clinton, and how right she is, because it never does.
I’m not going to argue that bin Laden’s death was wrong, or any way illegal, because I’m not sure that I would be able to argue that killing Hitler would have been wrong if it could have prevented the deaths of millions of innocents in the 1930s and 40s, but nor can I argue that either man’s death is the way of Jesus.