Tuesday 28 March 2017

Do-lang, do-lang, do-lang Doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Another terrorist attack and mass murder, the brutal ending of lives and worlds, the implacably occluded futures of the wounded and grief-stricken – and the inevitable confected aftermath of political fustian, media puffery, and vox-pop cliché.

God is love. Monotonously. Or rather Trinotonously.

God is like an excellent malt whisky. Alas, liberals add ginger ale and ice to it, while evangelicals just read the label.

The church is like a cappuccino: 1/3 creedal espresso, 1/3 milk of human kindness, and 1/3 ceremonial froth.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because if bad things happened only to bad people, we’d be in hell.

One of the best arguments for torture is belief in hell, and one of the best arguments against belief in hell is torture.

“There’s nothing worse than loving someone who’s never going to stop disappointing you,” said Hosea. (Actually, it was a character in a series 7 episode of House I watched last night.)

What was Descartes doing when he wasn’t hunched over that blazing stove cogitating? Probably checking and rechecking and checking again that he had turned it off.

Selfie, ergo sum. Indeed, Selfie, ergo mundus est.

Wow! A new iPhone that can take 3-dimensional selfies – of 1-dimensional selves.

At a recent funeral, a mourner [sic] took a selfie at the graveside as the coffin was lowered. Now if only Joseph of Arimathea had had an iPhone …

Greatest selfie of all time: Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
Runner-up: El Greco, Pentecost.

The binary social media world of Thumbs-up/Thumbs-down – it’s missing a third icon: Turd = Who Gives a Shit?

Did you see the pilot for the brilliant new sitcom set in the Brady Briefing Room?  It’s called That Was the Week That Wasn’t (subtitle: Fake You!), starring Donald Trump and co-starring a cast of discombobulated journalists.

Let’s be clear: Trump does not drive me to despair.  The reality of his presidency suddenly flashing like lightening across a clear blue sky – my reaction is always “WTF!”, not despair.  In fact, I have moments of lucid hopefulness. Trump is a compulsive fantasist, and our fantasies always fuck us in the end.

Stanley Hauerwas has recently written: “I want to suggest that one of the essential tasks of those called to the ministry in our day is to be a teacher. In particular, ministers are called to be a teacher of language.” God’s bollocks! From the fact that Hauerwas feels it is necessary to make such a “suggestion”, one can only conclude that our seminaries have become cemeteries.

To re-endorse Hauerwas: the ministerial vocation is ecclesial speech therapy.

People often say to me after worship, about the sermon, “Thanks. You really gave us something to think about.”  And I think: another Sermon Fail. Imagine someone coming up to Jesus after preaching and saying, “Thanks, Rabbi. You really gave us something to think about” (cf. Luke 4:28-29).

Every year the Times runs a “Preacher of the Year” event. Seriously. Commensurate with the theological vacuity of such a contest, I propose that the winner should be awarded their own celebrity brand of cologne, perfume, or (if High Church) incense.

So The Rt. Rev. Christopher Cocksworth [sic] has apologised after accidentally voting against the Bishops' report on marriage and same-sex relationships, confessing that the mistake had been a “moment of distraction and some confusion” (BBC, 16 February). Rather like the report itself.

Breaking News: The District Attorney of Denver has announced that the three fundamentalist Christians who were arrested for the abduction of the Lutheran minister and human fresco Nadia Bolz-Weber have pleaded guilty to the charge of artnapping.

As a Protestant I don’t have a problem with Mariology, only with mariologiae gloriae. So I guess I’ve got a problem after all.

Why biblical criticism and hermeneutics? To unsettle the text. It is to the bewildered that the Spirit speaks.

Who am I when I do not know who I am? That may seem to be the predicament of the person with Alzheimer’s. It is, in fact, the human condition. Advantage, however, to the person with Alzheimer’s: he does not lie to himself or deceive others about it.

Early Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Late Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the rain gets in.”

Saturday 11 March 2017

Born Again? (a sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent)

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Raise your hand if you’re a Christian … Now raise your hand if you’re a “born-again” Christian … Just as I thought: a disparity. Which disappoints me hugely, but doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been asking the question to congregations for 35 years and the results are always the same. Instead of being a term with which all Christians can and should identify, “born-again” has become a phrase that some Christians are hesitant to claim for themselves, while others claim it for themselves with a sense of exclusive ownership, both fervently and vehemently, in a weaponised, “Gottcha!” sort of way.

In the US, you get this phenomenon at its worst, because it is associated with evangelical Christians who have an ultra-conservative cultural and political agenda. You’ve heard of the Religious Right, with its idolatrous identification of America as “God’s own country”, its twinning of faith with patriotism, its hardly hidden racist agenda, not to mention its election-winning support for Donald Trump. Fortunately, the UK has been spared this kind of distorted nationalist, nativist faith. Unfortunately, we have not altogether been spared abuse of the term “born-again”.

Above all – yes – the way the term is used by some Christians to make themselves feel more Christian and others feel less Christian. Apparently it is not sufficient to say (as Jesus himself rephrases being “born again”) that you have been “born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5), that is, that by baptism and faith, the gift of the Holy Spirit, you have been incorporated into the church. No, to be a “real” Christian, you’ve got to have a special conversion experience, usually dramatic, often dateable, and frequently expressed in public “testimonies”, punctuated with proof texts from accredited Bibles. Otherwise you’re suspect.

And then there is this: because the focus is on personal experience, our theology of mission, which includes God’s global work of reconciliation and liberation, becomes truncated. Evangelism is reduced to Christian cloning – inducing the “born-again” experience in other people and directing them to so-called “Bible-believing” churches; salvation is marketed as “fire insurance” (“Turn or Burn”, as the bumper-stickers so invitingly put it), or at least as the spiritual “equivalent to a healthy retirement fund” (Beverly Gaventa); while a commitment to justice and peace, as well to ecumenism, is completely marginalised.

The huge irony is that all this is quite unbiblical, for justice for the poor, peace among the nations, and a passion for the unity of God’s people – these are fundamental, not negligible, let alone expendable, biblical themes. Justice/Peace is the central message of all the great prophets – Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. And the theme of the ministry of Jesus is – what? The “kingdom of God”, which is a corporate concept and refers to the establishment of shalom, not just in souls but in bodies, not just for individuals but for communities, and not just for some after-death or post-apocalyptic future but for the here-and-now. Or do we need reminding of the manifesto of Jesus, proclaimed in his inaugural sermon in Nazareth (no altar call – the congregation tried to kill him), his “mission statement”:

God’s Spirit is upon me:
God has chosen me to preach good news to the poor;
to announce pardon for prisoners and sight for the blind;
to unchain the enslaved and emancipate the oppressed;
to announce: “This is salvation! Right here! Right now!”

And St. Paul, following Jesus’ great prayer “that they may be one” – again and again the apostle fervently pleads for a common purpose among Christian communities.

That is what mission is about: not about saving my butt and getting sinners, via my church, out of the Pit because “the Bible tells me so”, but about witnessing to the fact that in Jesus Christ God is renewing, reconfiguring the whole universe, inviting people to join in his cosmic programme of reconciliation, and encouraging churches to demonstrate God’s shalom by embodying in their life what Jonathan Sacks calls the “dignity of difference”. Each of our experiences of coming to faith – these are no doubt different. But this vision of the one church and the new creation – that is what binds us to Christ, to each other, to the world.

So to be “born again” – well, let’s look – closely – at the famous text in the encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus in John 3.

First, observe how Jesus begins by pointing Nicodemus to the “kingdom of God”. Right from the get-go we’re not talking about personal salvation and getting to heaven, we’re talking about the new world that is God’s work in progress.

Second, Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without” (John 3:3) – without what, exactly? In the Greek text, “without being born anothen”. Anothen may certainly mean “again”, but it more commonly means “from above”. So the question is: what does anothen mean in this context? Nicodemus obviously takes it to mean “again” – hence his bewilderment at the idea of entering a womb twice. But what if we take anothen to mean not “again” but “from above”? Then what Jesus tells Nicodemus links perfectly with what John tells us in chapter 1, where we read that Jesus, the incarnate Word, gives to all who believe in him the “power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man but” – of what? – “of the will of God” (John 1:12-13), the God who, in John’s up-and-down heaven-and-earth cosmology is “above”. And then what Jesus tells Nicodemus also links perfectly with what John tells us at the end of chapter 3, where in a single verse (31), he refers to Jesus as “the one who comes from heaven” (v. 31c) and “the one who comes from” – you guessed it! – “anothen” (v. 31a), which clearly means not “again” but “above”. Thus not “born again” but “born from above” turns out to be the better translation of anothen – as, in fact, many Bibles in English now acknowledge.

But look, I’m not the word police! By all means let us speak about being “born again”. Paul never does in his letters, but the First Letter of Peter does (“born anew”). Rebirth is actually a quite fantastic image. It speaks vividly to the point that Jesus is making to Nicodemus, namely that faith is, well – “Wow!” – like a new-born emerging from darkness into daylight, a new world alive with possibility, because (as the mysterious Mr. Smith declares on arriving from London in the small 18th-century town of New York, in the cracking Francis Spufford novel Golden Hill) – because “what I am is all in what I will be”. To speak of being “born again” is not a problem unless you make it a problem by reducing its meaning to a specific experience that all Christians must have. Being “born again” or “from above” – they are both powerful metaphors of transformative faith. But the how of faith is not important.

Only two things are important. Firstly, the that of faith, which finally demonstrates its authenticity not in our personal experiences and “testimonies”, however compelling – we are, after all, notoriously unreliable narrators of our so-called “inner lives”, and Christians have form in being rather egocentric about salvation – but in the outward, public, and often costly practices of grace and actions of love. “Only a person who obeys believes,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Christianity without discipleship is Christianity without Christ.”

And, secondly, the object and the content of faith around which the that of faith orbits. The object of faith: Jesus, of course, but Jesus “my personal Saviour” only insofar as he is identical to Jesus the strange, disturbing, feral figure that stalks the pages of the New Testament, the one with a fondness for those who aren’t in my gang, otherwise he is simply the Jesus of my personal fantasies. And the content of faith: the quite specific teaching of Jesus – for an overview, that Nazareth Manifesto, and, for more detail, the radical demands of the Sermon on the Mount and those subversive tales-of-the-unexpected we call parables. It’s no good crying “Lord! Lord!” or claiming Jesus “lives in my heart” unless that Jesus and what he teaches actually matches the person and project of the Jesus of the Gospels.

Finally, remember that the new birth is just that – a birth, a beginning; but discipleship – that’s a daily departure from the safety of the neonatal unit and a lifetime of growing up, leaving home, taking risks – like old Abraham and Sarah, whose road trip from Haran to who-knew-where, further and further, is the defining journey of biblical faith.

So the next time someone asks you if you’ve been “born again”, don’t feel intimidated and don’t be shy; rather modestly but boldly say, “Of course – I’m a follower of Jesus! But following Jesus – and keeping up – that’s the arduous journey of a lifetime. Are you too on the way?”

Friday 10 March 2017

Barth Graduate Student Colloquium

In case you hadn't noticed, the Center for Barth Studies in Princeton has been developing an exciting number of new initiatives over recent years. One of these, The Barth Graduate Student Colloquium is presently calling for applications. The colloquium is open to any doctoral student whose works touches on Barth's theology, and the meeting this year will focus on CD III/3. If you need further enticement to apply, you should note that Willie Jennings is this year's senior scholar and will deliver a paper during the colloquium. So, without any further excuses, follow the link to read more about the colloquium and apply.

Wednesday 1 March 2017

To dust

“Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death / Pray for us now and at the hour of our death” - T. S. Eliot

My teeth ache as though I were biting ice-cream. The chill wind blows through my lips and circles around my incisors—it dries my eyes and freezes the condensation on my upper lip. I look down and continue to make my way along the English roadside. I notice the puddles from yesterday’s rain. No longer wet and young, they are frozen with age. Deliberately, I let my foot fall on one and relish the satisfying sound of puncturing the world’s surface. Creation, I realise, is brittle.

Remember that you are dust

I lie still, listening to the clicks and hums as I am slowly drawn up into the tube. The song of moving parts and hidden magnets plays up and down my brain and spine. I rest here in my little mound of dust.

And to dust you will return

I lean forward, keeping as still as I can. The needle goes near the spinal cord. From deep within, she drains my nervous essence into tubes and flasks for examination. Somehow, this blessed cocoon of dust holds together.

Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ

When we first arrived here, I saw the moon cover the face of the sun. It was vision of the end. The skies will darken and the ocean will recede. When the last stars fall we will see that all the lights of heaven were but the embers of a fire disturbed.

We are what you say we are, O Lord. Do not be silent.

On that day we will warm ourselves in the Lamb’s light, as the sun warms the soil. The seeds of faith will germinate, and the tree of life will stand tall amidst our beloved dirt.


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