God makes all things new while we seek the city’s welfare

So here's my piece for this month's church magazine...
Familiar territory for me but always revisiting:

Clarence Mendis is the energetic founder-director of Farms Lanka. It’s a project that offers micro-finance and ideas – along with heaps of motivation – to people with skills and ideas but no money. It makes small loans to help people set up in their chosen line of business – anything from agriculture, animal husbandry, batik printing, pottery making, etc – and gives advice to get up and running and then watches them grow.

Once they’ve reached a certain size, the project holders pay back the stake with a little interest and that money can be used for another person with an idea. Farms currently has 4000 projects across the island and has contributed some 7bn rupees to the nation’s GDP. Not bad for a project that started 39 years ago with 200 rupees and faith, as Clarence puts it. He is a remarkable visionary guy, bold to the point of recklessness, but fabulously blessed and used by God. He’s larger-than-life and curiously down to earth.

I thought of him over the summer as we were exploring Jeremiah’s call to the exiles and I was preparing to return to Sri Lanka. He seems to embody Jeremiah 29:7 more than anyone else I’ve met. He looks around at his desperately poor and divided country and asks how he can help to bring prosperity to his neighbours. And he does it in a way that brings dignity and independence to people struggling to make ends meet.

Jeremiah 29:7 is part of a letter written by Jeremiah to people from Judah who have been taken into exile in Babylon. Many of them were hoping to be home by Christmas but he tells them to settle down and dig in for the long haul; most of them would never see home again.

Although many of us are still living in the town where were born, it has in recent years become an unfamiliar place; social changes, the erosion of the church’s place in our culture and the arrival of people of different classes and races all mean that the world in which we grew up has changed forever. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we feel in exile and would like to go home.

But there’s no going back; this is the world we live in and I believe Jeremiah 29:7 has something really important to say to us about how we live in this strange new world. The prophet tells his first hearers to make a living (29:5-6): that’s obvious enough but it’s what God wants us to be doing. He calls us to be active and productive citizens of this place: working, paying taxes, joining in with our neighbours, even playing our part in politics at a local or national level.

And while we’re getting on with daily life, God calls us to seek good things for our neighbours. The word the prophet uses here is ‘shalom’ (v7) which means wholeness, welfare, peace, prosperity; God wants this for everyone. And this is where Clarence comes to mind; he has been actively seeking the shalom of his neighbours across Sri Lanka for the best part of 40 years. And as I think of him, I wonder what we could be doing that does something similar where we live.

So that leads me to do the third thing Jeremiah told the exiles to be doing: simply to pray for the community in which we find ourselves, to ask God to bless and equip each one of our neighbours for their God-given work, asking God to bring them peace, prosperity and welfare – and sometimes to tell them that we are doing so! And in praying, we are offering ourselves to God to be the answer to our prayers.

It’s easy to feel disheartened and disoriented by the place in which we find ourselves. We sometimes find this strange new world of shopping and mobile phones, reality TV and lack of respect for the church profoundly unsettling. And we ask ‘how can God be here?’ That is what the exiles asked and some of their leaders said that God wasn’t with them but would rescue them soon. Jeremiah, on the other hand, said that while he wouldn’t be bringing them home anytime soon, God is with them in the exile. And he will be bringing prosperity and a future to these people here and now, where they are as they got on with the task of seeking those things for their neighbours. And we see here one of God’s great ways of working: he makes things new as we get on with seeking the city’s welfare.

In 31:31-34 the prophet talks about God making all things new in words taken up across the New Testament. He talks about old ways being ditched and replaced with something more wonderful:  a new covenant, a new relationship, based not on where you live and worship, but on a direct encounter with the living God, so that his Law, which had been written on tablets of stone, would now be written on our hearts. It’s what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 3 and the author of Hebrews (directly quoting these verses) in chapter 8.

If we want to encounter God today, we’ll do so as we seek the welfare of our neighbours; if we want his prosperity and future for us, we’ll stumble across it as we are trying to ensure that our neighbours enjoy prosperity and hope for the future. So, let’s work on ways that we can seek the welfare of where we live. Let’s be creative and bold.

Who among us is going to be like Clarence Mendis and rise to the challenge of helping our neighbours to find their way into the prosperity we enjoy but they can only dream of?

Grabbing our attention

A while ago, during a series on Luke's gospel, I produced the following meditation to get people thinking about the impact of Jesus' manifesto on his audience. I was reminded of it the other day as someone asked if they could have a copy. So I thought I'd share it for a wider audience.

It's the introduction to some reflections on Luke 6 and seem to resonate on this day of debate about wealth taxes and kick-starting the economy...

You can imagine the crowd turning up – a right mixed bag:

poor folk and rich ones;

people in fine clothes who have breakfasted well

and people in work-wear who haven’t eaten yet today;

people able to take a morning off,

others who risk not earning what they need to eat today…

They’ve all come because they’re interested; they’re keen to know what this Jesus is all about; perhaps they even crave a spiritual experience – some might even have received one already.

Jesus’ words would have left each of them spluttering, like they do us – if we’re paying attention:

blessed are you when your benefits are cut

and the damp’s rising in the wall of your temporary accommodation…

blessed are you when you can’t afford your five-a-day

and the payday loan is due…

blessed are you when people call you scrounger and cheat…

woe to you if your salary is 80 times that of your workers

and your table’s heaving with enough food

to feed a small Malian village…

woe to you when people say how well you’re doing…

The lucky people are not the healed and healthy, the well-healed and wealthy, but those who know they’re bankrupt and busted and only God can help them.

I imagine that by v26 he either had their attention or could see them turning and walking away – which was his intention. This is not Robbie Williams saying ‘let me entertain you…’ This is God’s Son grabbing his audience’s attention; calling us to a life of discipleship: do we stay or do we go?

For those with nothing, the choice is easier than it is for those laden with stuff; but for both there’s a sense of disbelief to overcome – does he mean it?

·         Is there good news for the likes of us; those the world looks down on; those who feel their poverty and ill-health to be God’s punishment? It sounds like there is…shall we hang around to hear more?

·         Is there good news for the likes of us; we who’ve worked hard and saved, got an education, bought a stake in the race and are reaping the rewards? Sounds like there isn’t… Should we hang around to hear more?

Yes 

Jesus is speaking to disciples (17b, 20a), to those who are listening (27; 7:1): this is good news for everyone: a radical shake-up that changes everything and from which everyone emerges a winner… No wonder there’s singing at the back!

Thought-provoking lunches

Today I had an extremely enjoyable lunch discussing how we might set up some kind of social enterprise at church, bookended by visits to our annual holiday at home. As ever one of the issues that came up over lunch, which had nothing to do with the reason for getting together, has left me pondering...

It was about the nature of ministry, more specifically ordained ministry and what it's all about for us baptists. This is something that I am not that vexed about but enjoy talking about from time to time. I'm pretty anabaptist about all this (I think; if I understand this tradition correctly). I believe in the priesthood of all believers and the prophethood of all priests; I believe that Ephesians 4:11 applies to everyone in the church, not a select band of chosen leaders. So what is this ordination thing all about?

I feel the need to ponder this. Anyone care to help?

Having attended one too many men's meetings featuring an alpha male in dockers and a polo shirt strutting a muscular self-help ethic masquerading as the gospel for men like him, I was delighted to read this intelligently provocative piece by Jonathan Langley. It's on a website that's new to me but which seems to be offering some stimulating reading matter. Check it out here.

What I like about Jonathan's piece is that it's the first by a man that recognises that men don't go to church for a whole range of reasons and that a one-size-fits-all approach to men's ministry is absurd and demeaning to all involved.

I remember a long time ago attending a men's event that featured an alpha male who at the time was heading up a large national Christian organisation. In order to demonstrate that becoming a Christian had not made him less of man, he told a story about lobbing a spanner (a harmless prank, you understand) at a work colleague ribbing him for joining the God squad. This demonstrated, so he thought, that he was a still a red-blooded male able to bond with his mates. It demonstrated, I thought at the time, that he was a boorish thug both before and after he started going to church. I prayed that he might actually get what Jesus was about.

As Jonathan points out too much men's ministry is aimed at a parody working class male. It seems to me that it mostly fails on two levels: working class men find it as buttock-clenchingly embarrassing as we do and it seems tangentially related at best to anything Jesus is about.

Men are as fabulously diverse as the other 50% of the human race and reaching them with the good news about Jesus requires we get that. So thanks Jonathan for stimulating the grey cells.

Celebrating new music with Roxy providing the soundtrack

Listened to Craig Brown on Desert Island Discs this morning - very engaging. And he chose Sea Breezes off the first Roxy album - so that is my soundtrack for this morning.

I've acquired some good music over the past month. First up is the début album by Alt-J (the keyboard short cut on a mac to create the delta sign, apparently). An Awesome Wave is a quirky mix of indie pop, plainsong, close harmony and African and Asian beats and instrumentation, with literary allusions aplenty in the lyrics. It all sounds a bit sixth form but when it all comes together, the results are sublime.

And after a long wait (17 years I reckon) the new Dead Can Dance album, Anastasis dropped into my in-box last Friday. It's worth the wait. DCD are described as world music - possibly because they hail from Australia and blend asian instruments with their electronic washes to create swirling, anthemic music rich with emotion. But whatever you label you attach to it, it's pretty lovely. While waiting for this new album, they have been releasing a series of live happening collections, downloadable for free from their website (worth checking out and collecting).

But neither album has a song that is as viscerally arresting as Virginia Plain was to a fifteen year old me when it was released as Roxy's first single in 1971/2. Not included on the first album, it did make it to the re-mastered CD. On top of the pops, Roxy were at first sight, just another glam rock combo, albeit more glam than most. But something set them apart: there was a darkness at the heart of their music, a mirror held up to the bleakness behind the glittery surface of the early 70s that resonated with me. And boy, could they play - Andy Mackay blew a mean sax, Phil Manzanera is one the best guitarists these shores have produced, and Brian Eno - what was he? what was he doing? Someone from a dimension none of us inhabited, bringing soundscapes from other, more exciting worlds than ours; even then he was making the waves that would sweep pop music to more interesting shores.

Well, as I'm discovering this morning, it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up; I'm not sure why - maybe it just captured a mood still buried deep in my sub-conscious; maybe it's just fabulous, lush music, danceable with a rich vein of humour.

Preparing, planning and plotting

A whole month later, I'm back. What with the Olympics and preparing for Sri Lanka, there has been no time for blogging. But the Olympics are triumphantly concluded and I have prepared material for two weeks teaching in Colombo and Peredeniya - I have also sent copious quantities of notes and papers for my students to get stuck into ahead of classes starting (yes, I hear the sound of laughter at the back!)

My chief dilemma now is finding a format to transport the notes and papers. The favourite option is an iPad. I am trying it out on a friends unit at the moment before I actually take the plunge and buy one (though the readies are squirrelled away for that purpose).

The aim then will be to travel with just an iPad and a Kindle and not a sheet of paper in sight which will free a huge amount of baggage allowance. Well, that's my excuse; actually what I want is to be one of those travellers constantly updating his cyber profile in every departure lounge he passes through (I'm sure it will pall on the second airport I visit!)

I am teaching the social history of the New Testament for the third time - though I have tweaked the notes for every day and substantially re-written for five or six sessions. The course on NT theology is new - though compiled from existing resources. We'll spend a week looking at narrative theology and the gospel of Mark (day 1), four NT themes, viz Christology, atonement, the Holy Spirit and Church (day 2), 1 Peter and James (day 3) apocalyptic ideas and Revelation (day 4). This will leave day 5 for revision and an exam. Hopefully it will work, given the constraints of the system I am slotting into!

I have also had an opportunity to think through the autumn and spring programme for church and have created something that I think will work well, focusing on 1 Thessalonians and Colossians in the mornings and Matthew's gospel in the evenings. Advent will be given over to Isaiah. We'll be exploring issues such as identity, community, work, sex, hope, grief, the spirit of the age and the power of the gospel. It should keep us on our toes theologically and spiritually.

There'll be a report on cool new music along in a little while.

A thought for Jon Lord

Jon Lord - the great keyboard man from Deep Purple - died yesterday. So, here's his classic composition from Deep Purple in Rock, Child in Time, captured live in 1970. Lord was from my home town - Leicester - and the band was a back drop to my teen years. I was never a big fan but they do represent a certain musical moment.

Child in Time was that potent mix of riffs, wonderful keyboards, classical music motifs and portentous (not to say pretentious) lyrics that lifted Deep Purple above the slew of driving rock bands that flooded the concert halls in the early to mid-70s. So enjoy a nostalgic ten minutes (yes, it really is that long!) or, if you weren't born, roll your eyes and wonder what the fuss was about....

Discipleship is more than a fashion accessory

It's unlike me to commend anything in the Daily Mail. But this is by a good friend of mine who is an acute observer of the interface between faith and life. And I read it as I was midway through reflecting on the second half of Jeremiah 15 (we're part way through a series on this most acerbic of Old Testament prophets).

The thrust of the passage - one of those great 'complaints' or 'confessions' that are scattered through the early chapters of the book - is simple: until we are the message, our words will fall on deaf ears.

We often see Jeremiah as a great resource for living in exile - he is the prophet, after all, who told us to get over the fact of exile and get on with living our faith in it (chapter 29). We often apply this to where we are as a Christian community in the twenty-first century, a church living in exile in the ruins of Christendom. Some lament our position; others see the potential in the discomfort of it. Quite a few have yet to wake up to its reality.

But what I really hadn't realised until I read chapter 15 and thought about the task Jeremiah had been given is that the burden of his message was to preach against the Christendom of his day; indeed it is to announce the end of that world. His work is bookended by reference to the fact that Judah was heading for exile and thus its current way of life was being terminated by God (1:3, 52:27b-34). The settlement under which king and priest formed a cosy alliance was being judged by the God each thought they were serving. This is why Jeremiah was so unpopular.

It's also why in the complaint recorded in 15:15-21, Jeremiah speaks of his pain, what Bruce Cockburn so memorably calls 'bleeding wound that will not heal'. It is a wound the prophet has spoken about afflicting Judah in 8:11, 21-22, a wound at the heart of its national life. And though this wound is born of the nation's sin and failure, it still afflicts the prophet who is highlighting that very national failure. Indeed, in response to Jeremiah's complaint, God tells his prophet to repent of his deep complicity in the failure of the nation to be what God hoped it would be.

The trouble Jeremiah finds himself in is that his message and his instinct are out of sync. Peter Drucker, the management guru, tells us that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. He means that the way a company is will always determine what it does, whatever strategies it devises for growth and change. The same is true of the church. Have we for too long trusted our privileged position in the culture that’s given us a special place in the nation? Have we thought that church will always a part of things if we just keep on doing what we’ve always done? Judah did.

Sadly such trust has robbed the gospel of its power to challenge and change lives and ways of doing things. Jeremiah was called to tear down the Christendom of his day, the cosying up of church and state that led to God being neutered. He found it so hard to do because this was his culture, his way of seeing the world and understanding his place in it. He had to change his mind about that (the meaning of the word repent) so  that he would begin to see the world and his life in it as God does.

We live in times when Christendom is decaying and the question we have to ask ourselves is this: is it God sending us into exile precisely so that we can embody his message for our society in a new way that will give our words fresh credibility? Will we stop bleating about not being able to wear a cross and start reflecting God’s character and concerns to our neighbours? 

Which brings me to the trenchant and prescient observations of my mate George. Maybe on the margins we will learn how to love God and love our neighbour so that we and the communities to which we belong embody the good news of Jesus in such a way that we don't have to wear a fashion accessory to indicate that we're his followers.

Getting down with Dr Dee

Last Saturday evening we went to the opera. That's not a sentence I write very often! We went to the last night of Damon Albarn's Dr Dee at the ENO. And what a splendid evening it was.

Albarn, one of the most creative voices in modern music, has written a glorious and intriguing suite of songs about the weird and mysterious Dr John Dee, a founding fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, astronomer, astrologer, mystic and the man who planned Elizabeth I's coronation.

It was a dazzling show (I'm not sure it's an opera; more a concept album with opera singers singing some of the parts), wonderfully staged, making the most creative use of lights that I've ever seen in a theatre. The stage set was almost bare, scenery such as it was (a table, a bed, a few scientific instruments) came and went behind large curving cardboard books. It was illuminated (literally) by lights that created Dee's mathematical equations and horoscopes. The scene where he plotted the best day for Elizabeth's coronation was a dazzling amalgam of dancers with illuminated orbs coming into alignment behind the gauze curtain on which the lights drew the charts Dee worked on.

The song cycle contains some of Albarn's most haunting melodies and intriguing lyrics. It is a reflection on Englishness - Dee is credited with having invented the idea of a British empire to counter the might of Spain, a scene evocatively brought to life in the show with music and dancers holding the rigged masts of the ships that saw off the Armada. But is also a reflection on ambition and mortality, on the frailty of relationships and the fleeting nature of fame.

So I recommend the album but am hoping that a DVD of the show becomes available or at least a CD with all the songs featured on the night and not just the selection that appears on the album (lovely though that is). I would say 'go and see it' but I can't because it's finished its run and isn't scheduled to return any time soon.

An album you can read as well as hear

If you're looking for some great music to accompany summer (supposing it ever arrives), then look no further than Patty Smith's new album Banga. Ruminations on identity, history and spirituality are sung and spoken over a lush soundtrack that contains some of the best tunes in her 40+ years' output.

It is particularly great to hear the peerless Tom Verlaine - him of Television, makers of one the greatest albums of all time, Marquee Moon - playing glorious guitar on two tracks.

I recommend shelling out a couple of quid extra for the special edition CD. Yes, I do recommend the CD and not the download. I know it's not cool to want to put your hands on a physical product, to think that albums have a beginning, a middle and an end, a dramatic and musical arc that if put together well is richly satisfying. Anyway, if you buy the deluxe packaged CD, it comes in a hard-back book full of great pictures, the story of the recording and writing process and all the lyrics. So, it's an album that you read in bed. Glorious.

Lancing the boil at Barclays and beyond

I left my house to a breakfast meeting this morning - before heading to Hayward (see below) - with a spring in my step on hearing the news, just breaking, that Bob Diamond had quit as chief executive of Barclays. Is it wrong to hope that a criminal conviction for fraud will follow?

And at lunchtime, his right hand man followed him. There's a need for clear-out at the top of a lot of the financial institutions that took the world to the brink five years ago and whose reckless actions have thrown millions into poverty and uncertainty.

It isn't just the criminal fixing of the Libor - a little known but crucial financial instrument - nor the miss-selling of payment protection or small business insurance, nor even the iniquitous bonuses these guys pay themselves. What is truly reprehensible about these investment banks is their role in jacking up commodity prices and throwing millions into food insecurity and worse just so they can enjoy another bottle of bolly.

There needs to be a root and branch enquiry into all this followed by wholesale reform. It needs to look at how these banks operate and how the regulators - both central bankers and politician - fell asleep as they lined their own pockets. It will be painful for politicians all the way back to Thatcher and her cabinet. It will be especially painful for New Labour and the present shadow cabinet. But without it, we will never lance the boil and clean the wound at the heart of our financial system and so never move out of the current recession.