Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice

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I never thought I’d be using Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, as an illustration of the difference between talents and character, between the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. But the graduation speech at Princeton University shown above is certainly an example. He might seem a surprising choice, given this recent article about Amazon’s ruthless business methods and this one about the effect of their low download prices on musicians, though. Surely the difficult decisions that individuals have to make in favour of kindness need also to be made corporately.

Yet sin will always be a problem. This is where it becomes more than an issue of choice: it is about needing to co-operate with the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in all areas of life. And that is not an instant thing. It is acquired with practice, as Tom Wright argues in Virtue Reborn. Bit by bit, we train ourselves to behave and react differently, until holiness becomes more of a habit. It takes time to acquire Christlike habits. Perhaps that is why Paul refers to ‘the fruit of the Spirit’: fruit doesn’t just appear, it takes time to grow.

Bezos’ speech above is only short and cannot cover all bases in twelve minutes. A longer exposition might explore a relationship between gifts and character, such as using gifts with character. It might also take on the thought that although gifts are given, we still need to work on crafting them. But whatever the failings of Amazon as a company, his call at the end of his speech to students to make a difference in the world with kindness is a welcome one. It might not be what we expected from a billionaire entrepreneur, but it is a breath of fresh air.

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The Picnic

Yesterday (Thursday), our children finished at their primary school before our forthcoming move from Essex to Surrey. The other week, the mother of one of our daughter’s friends texted us to ask whether we would be free to share a picnic with her today. We were, so we agreed.

At 11 this morning, we made our way over to the park where we had agreed to meet. Only it wasn’t just this one family. It was a whole collection of families. And more turned up over the next couple of hours. We were deeply touched by their affection for us, and their gratitude for the part we had played in the community.

It reminded me of a story from a previous sabbatical, when Debbie and I worshipped at a Church Of Another Denomination. The pastor was a friend and a good preacher, but one Sunday morning a lay elder preached. He pranced around at the front like an evangelical superstar, and pronounced in his sermon that when non-Christians ask you how you are, they never mean it. Only your Christian friends truly care about you.

“Idiot,” we both thought. We have both had good reason to be grateful for our non-Christian friends. Sometimes they have been far better friends than some of our Christian acquaintances.

Whatever I believe about the need for everyone to follow Christ (and I do believe that), we need a theology to cope with the goodness of non-Christians.

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Filtering Information Overload On The Internet

How do you deal with the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet? Do you spend too much time surfing or hunting down further information? Here are a couple of ideas I have found.

Firstly, here is a piece on some personal self-disciplines. As a Christian, I would substitute the references to Buddhist meditation with other approaches, but I find it a helpful article.

Secondly, there is a new tool available for sorting through the mass of tweets and updates on certain subjects. It’s called SwiftRiver, and the BBC has a report on it.

Do you find these helpful? What approaches do you take?

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The Farewell Season

As my regular reader knows, my family and I are about to leave this appointment and move to a new one. It’s that time of year for Methodists in the UK: we play Musical Manses. Hopefully, when the music stops, there’s a manse for us. (That’s facetious: the Church covenants to ensure that, when we covenant to leave our old lives behind to follow the ministerial call.)

From the minister’s perspective, it’s a mixed and emotionally strenuous time. You may have grown to love the area, as my family and I have done with Chelmsford, or you may have felt like a fish out of water. You may have developed a special bond with the churches you have served, or you may have been a square peg in a round hole. As you move, you hope and pray your spouse and children will settle in the new town, new house, new school and perhaps the new job. If they settle, you will.

From the congregation’s perspective, if the relationship with the minister has been good, then this season is like a mini-bereavement. The lack of an ‘interregnum’ in British Methodism inhibits the grieving process. If the relationship has not been good, then people need to guard their hearts, and also watch that they do not load too many excessive expectations on the new minister.

So for everyone going through that time at present, here are two songs. Firstly, for those who are sad to leave, here is Jimmy Ruffin and ‘Farewell is a lonely sound’:

Secondly, for those who are relieved to leave, here is Buddy and Julie Miller‘s cover of Richard Thompson‘s ‘Keep your distance’:

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Sermon: Martha And Mary

Luke 10:38-42

When I began at secondary school, I was given a homework diary. It was designed as a record of all the homework I was assigned and had completed, and my parents had to sign it each week. Within it were the expectations of the school about the amount of work that would be involved. When you started at the school, you would have two pieces of homework a night, each lasting thirty minutes. But by the time you revised for public examinations, that would increase to what the headmaster gleefully called “endless toil”.

I suspect many churchgoers see the Christian faith as a matter of ‘endless toil’. Not simply the relentless list of jobs to be done in church (as some people here know only too well), but the sense that you will never have done enough in order to please God. The Methodist ordination service says that the ministry will make great demands on ministers and their families, and while it goes onto promise the help of the Holy Spirit, it nevertheless leaves an impression that genuine ministry is about ‘busyness’. That’s certainly the way congregations often measure their ministers – are they busy? More worryingly, it’s often the way ministers measure their own value. Am I busy? A full diary becomes a sign of spirituality.

So we come to Martha and Mary. We may be tempted to think that the contrast is between Martha, who is on her feet, and Mary, who sits at Jesus’ feet. If we value the idea of being busy, we will have a problem with Jesus’ commendation of Mary. A church member I once knew said she felt sure Luke didn’t record the whole story, and that Jesus would have asked Mary to go and help Martha.

But the story is not a contrast between Martha ‘doing’ and Mary ‘being’. It cannot be. It occurs immediately after the Parable of the Good Samaritan (which was last week’s Lectionary Gospel reading, and you may have had a sermon on it). Jesus can hardly commend the radical action of the Samaritan one day, and condemn Martha for being busy the next day. Maybe instead this story balances the Good Samaritan story.

Martha’s problem is not that she has a lot to do. It is that she is ‘distracted by her many tasks’ (verse 40), as Luke puts it. Jesus tells her she is ‘worried and distracted by many things’ (verse 41). The worry and the distraction are the core issues. Martha is frantic and fretful. And that’s where Jesus picks her up.

In some respects, worry and distraction are only human. How often have you said to someone – perhaps a loved one – “You drive me to distraction”? Maybe a son or daughter gives you cause for concern. Perhaps you don’t have enough money for all you think you need. It wouldn’t be surprising if worry took over.

Or it might be that you believe that your acceptance by God depends on whether you are a good enough person. You devote all your energies to doing what you are believe are the right things. However, it’s a tyranny, because you never know whether you have reached an acceptable standard. Probably you haven’t, and so with even more worry you redouble your efforts. All the time you do this, you might say you believe in the love of God, but really your whole existence is being lived in complete doubt as to whether God loves you or not. Your image of God is actually of a tyrant.

Think of some attitudes we encounter in the church. We are told that we should not be slapdash in our preparing to meet God – quite rightly: excellence is a noble thing. But someone then says to us, “You wouldn’t be so careless if the Queen were coming to your house; why are you about meeting the King of Kings?” We then feel that nothing we can ever do is good enough for God. Either we strive even more, or we give up in despair.

If it’s not a matter of fear, it might be a question of pride. If I can earn my own place of favour with God, how good am I? it’s tantamount to saying, “I don’t need the Cross of Christ. I can make my own way to God on my own.” It’s as if we dare to stand before Jesus on the Day of Judgement and say, “Lord, it was awfully decent of you to die on the Cross for the sins of the world, but you really didn’t need to, old chap.”

Another way of looking at the motives behind being distracted by the tasks we have to do is to see it in terms of urgency. There is so much that needs doing, and so little time. So I have to crack on. I can’t let up. Something will be missed if I don’t keep at it relentlessly.

But of course, while this may sound like an efficient use of time, it is both foolish and dangerous. It is like saying, “I have a long car journey to make today. I cannot afford to stop for a rest, and neither do I have the time to call in at a petrol station and refuel.” This is the plague of being distracted with busyness: our commitment to keep on do-do-doing all the time may be for honourable intentions, but it sucks us dry. It leaves us with nothing to feed on, and nothing to offer. Is it any wonder many churches seem as arid as the desert when the distractions of busyness dominate such places?

All of which brings us to Mary’s honoured place in this story. We pause a moment to note how revolutionary it was that Jesus was teaching her in the first place. Women did not normally have the privilege of being taught by a rabbi. But Jesus was different. He was ushering in a kingdom that was open to female and male, child and adult, Gentile and Jew. Martha in her fretting and worrying had missed the fact that Jesus was teaching a woman – like her! She could have had this privilege, but her over-busy lifestyle means she misses this radical implication of the Gospel. It makes you wonder how much of the Good News we also miss, because we are too obsessed with doing this, that and everything.

So what makes Mary’s grabbing of her Gospel privilege as a daughter of God so important? For one thing, she understands something about grace. She knows that before anything else, a disciple needs to receive from Jesus. Discipleship doesn’t start or depend on all the effort we make for God: it begins with God graciously and lovingly approaching us in Christ, especially in the Cross. For there we learn that we are not people who are capable of pleasing God by our own efforts. We need God’s forgiveness in Christ through his death in our place. Everything starts there for the Christian. And it sets a pattern for the whole of life. It all begins with Jesus, not us. In a simple way, I believe Mary knew that.

Therefore, alongside the joy Mary has being a woman whom Jesus has chosen to teach, there is a basic humility. If Martha stands over Jesus, Mary sits at his feet. Everything worthwhile will come from Jesus taking the initiative and listening to him. Jesus himself said he only did what he saw the Father doing; it becomes the rôle of the disciple to listen to Jesus first and then respond.

All of which tells us that Mary’s action is not a case of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. It is ‘being’ before ‘doing’. She takes the old maxim of ‘Don’t just sit there, do something’ and reverses it into ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’.

Why? She knows that you can’t set off on all those good and noble tasks that Martha has plunged herself into unless you have first received direction from Jesus. What does he want me to do? There are plenty of good things to do in the world, but I cannot do them all. Which ones does he want me to take on? When you know that, you are freed from the frazzling effect of a Martha-like frantic lifestyle. There is no danger that Mary will simply stay at the feet of Jesus and not turn it into action – she won’t be a hypocrite like that. But she knows what needs to come first.

Put it this way: the English word ‘obedience’ has its roots in the Latin word ‘audire’ – which means ‘to hear’. Mary has to hear from Jesus first, before plunging into work.

Not only that, Mary knows that you need a balance in your Christian life that features both being and doing. We need both action and reflection. It is something the early church came to understand very quickly. Think of the story in Acts chapter 6 where there is a crisis over the distribution of food to Greek-speaking widows. The apostles resist the idea that they must do everything. They ensure that the food distribution project continues by having the community appoint a team of Spirit-filled people to undertake it. For themselves, though, they cannot compromise their call to ‘the ministry of the Word and prayer’. Between the apostles and the team appointed to serve the widows, the balance is held: the community together embraces both listening to God and practical action for the kingdom of God.

What it amounts to is this: you can’t just be a ‘being’ person and you can’t just be a ‘doing’ person. Nor can the church just be one or the other. If all we do is listen, pray and contemplate, we will be too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use. If all we do is plunge ourselves into action, we shall burn out. The Marys of this world know that you have to fill up the car before you can set out on the journey.

I hope the implications for all of us are clear, especially because I believe this is often important for Methodists. Surveys in recent years have shown that generally we are a people who are good at social action but less comfortable with prayer. Jesus wants Marys, but Methodists are often Marthas. Too many of us therefore become discouraged, exhausted and burnt out.

We need to find our ways of sitting at the feet of Jesus before we do anything else. Exactly how we do it will vary from person to person, because we have different personalities and temperaments, and our life circumstances are not the same. But we need our own ‘ministry of the Word and prayer’ in some form: we need to reflect on the Scriptures and how they are pointing us to Jesus, and we need to pray. These things need to be more than just something that is done for us on a Sunday, and they need to be more than at crisis times. In my experience, we need to aim for a daily pattern of devotion.

So you may find that first thing in the morning works best. You may like to reflect prayerfully on the day at its end. You may be one of those people who likes to read the Scriptures and pray during a lunch break, reviewing how things have gone so far and looking forward to the rest of the day.

You may use Bible reading notes, a daily Lectionary, a website or some other pattern. You may find one approach to prayer works better than another for you. Just so long as it’s Christ-centred, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the time of Bible reading and prayer doesn’t just feed your head with interesting titbits of information, it draws you close to Jesus.

For if it does, you will soon find that by sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary, he will then raise you to your feet for action.

And – unlike Martha – you will be ready and equipped.

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Another Sermon On The Good Samaritan

I preached on tomorrow’s Lectionary Gospel three years ago in a rather similar way to what follows for tomorrow. But then, you’ll see I based both that sermon and this one on the same piece of scholarship.

Luke 10:25-37[1]

“You’ve got an attitude problem.”

How often do we hear someone say that – or say it ourselves?

And how often is it true in the church, among the community of faith? Too often, I’m afraid.

I’m not going to tell any secrets, although there are far too many examples of attitude problems I could cite from my experience as a minister. And to be honest, it isn’t just congregations. I could tell some awful stories about ministers, if I really wanted to break confidences.

The lawyer whose encounter with Jesus leads to ‘The Parable of the Good Samaritan’ is also a man with an attitude problem. Multiple attitude problems, if truth be told. For starters, he is two-faced towards Jesus. He ‘stood up to test Jesus’ (verse 25). Standing up was a sign of respect, but he then sets out to test Jesus. The respect means nothing, because of the testing. Being acquainted as I have been with Christian backstabbers, this scenario is familiar to me. To your face come the affectionate words or respectful titles, but later you discover that in their hearts they are plotting against you. That may be shocking to some, but I am afraid it is true.

The lawyer thinks a lot of himself, too. He asks Jesus, ‘Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ (Verse 25) Hang on for a moment before those familiar words zoom past you. Since when can anyone do anything in order to receive an inheritance? An inheritance is a gift. When Debbie and I wrote our wills, we made decisions on what our children would inherit. It never occurred to us that we should enter clauses in the wills to make our children’s inheritance dependent upon them doing anything. They will receive from our estate simply because they are our children.

But it’s a matter of pride for the lawyer that he should feel he has done something virtuous to receive the inheritance of eternal life. He does not want mercy, nor does he believe he needs grace. He simply wants to know what signs mark him out as one of the favoured ones. And – as we shall see in a moment – he wants the bar set pretty low so he can jump over with ease in a way that shows that he is one of the chosen people, while other less desirable types most certainly are not.

None of this is an attitude of heart that is endearing to Jesus, but the remarkable thing is, Jesus responds to him on that very territory, all the while undermining his assumptions. He goes onto the lawyer’s territory by bringing the discussion to the Law (the Jewish Law):

He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ (Verse 26)

The lawyer comes back with his answer about wholeheartedly loving and God and loving neighbour (verse 27). We’re so used to these words, but it was a remarkable answer. Chronologically in the Jewish Law, the command to love neighbour was given before the command to love God. But perhaps the reason Jesus commends the lawyer’s answer (verse 28) is because love of God leads to love of neighbour. ‘Do this and you will live,’ he says – that is, ‘Keep on doing this and you will come alive.’ If you make this a habit, you will know life like nothing else, Jesus tells him.

But that’s the point at which we discover more of the lawyer’s attitude problem. Jesus’ invitation to discover true life brings this out in him:

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ (Verse 29)

It’s always ugly when someone wants to justify themselves. I do it too often myself. When I feel I’m being criticised, I launch into a defence of my actions or motives. I want to justify myself, too. Perhaps the lawyer feels that Jesus’ invitation to life is a criticism of his current lifestyle. He wants to prove he is in the right with God – something ultimately that we cannot do for ourselves, because we are sinners. What pride lurks in our hearts when we want to show we are acceptable to God by our own efforts?

Maybe he knows in the recesses of his heart that he can’t justify himself entirely by the Law of God. However much he says he has kept the Law fully, probably he knows if he’s honest that’s a false claim. So he tries to lower the bar with his question, who is my neighbour? If he can just get an easy enough definition of neighbour, then he can believe he is justified before God. Jewish scholars debated who constituted a neighbour and who didn’t. Roughly speaking, another Jew was definitely a neighbour, a convert to Judaism might be a neighbour, but a Gentile definitely wasn’t, let alone a heretic like, say … a Samaritan.

So when Jesus launches into the parable, this isn’t a nice Sunday School story. You might just as well go into Tel Aviv today and tell the story of the Good Hezbollah Terrorist. No: Jesus launches into a subversive parable that will undermine all the lawyer is basing his life upon.

As he begins the story, the lawyer will sniff danger. The seventeen-mile descending road from Jerusalem to Jericho was known to be dangerous, and still has been in modern times. When the robbers leave the traveller stripped, beaten and half dead (verse 30), that description is important. Remember the Jewish categories of who constituted a neighbour? There were two ways in which you could tell where someone came from. One was their accent, the other was their dress. Both were very specific to particular groups. Because the traveller is stripped, no-one can tell his background from his attire. Because he is ‘half dead’ (a rabbinic expression that means ‘at the point of death’), he is unlikely to be able to speak, and hence no-one can tell from his accent, either. Big Question: does he qualify for neighbour-love or not?

As the man lies on the point of death, a priest comes ‘down’ the road (verse 31). ‘Down’ indicates he is coming from Jerusalem. If a priest was leaving Jerusalem, he has probably just finished a tour of duty at the Temple. As a member of the upper classes, he is almost certainly riding on an animal. When you remember that when the Samaritan turns up he puts the injured man on his animal, you will realise that this priest is well placed to help.

But … contact with a dead body or a Gentile would make him ritually impure, and this man could be either or both. If the priest becomes impure, it will have implications for him. First of all, when he returns to Jerusalem he will not be able to minister at first but will have to stand at the Eastern Gate with other ‘unclean’ people as a humiliation for becoming impure. This priest cannot cope with identifying with the unclean.

Secondly, if he is ritually impure, he cannot eat the food allocated to him and his family as a ‘wave offering’, a tithe of all the tithes. He will go hungry. So will his family.

Hemmed in by the purity laws which make him fear for his professional reputation and his family’s well-being, the priest makes sure he stays more than the statutory four cubits from what he supposes to be a dead body, and passes by on the other side.

The Levite presumably comes fro the same direction (‘So likewise’, verse 32). Given the contours of the road and the fact that the wounded man is close to death, I think we can assume it’s not much of a gap between him and the priest. Which means the Levite has probably watched from a distance the actions of the priest. The purity laws are less strict for him: they only applied to him when he was on duty. He isn’t now. He could help the man.

But he doesn’t. He is inferior to the priest. If he helps a man whom the priest has judged should not be assisted, then he is criticising his superior’s interpretation of the Law. And you just didn’t do that.

Moreover, being from a more humble social class, he may be walking, not riding. If so, then all he can do is offer minimal aid and wait with the man. He then puts himself at risk of attack by the robbers. Put it all together, and there’s only one thing the Levite is going to do: copying the example of the priest, he passes by on the other side.

At this point, the lawyer is expecting a third character. After a priest and a Levite, the next standard character is a pious Jewish layman. Will he help the man?

Except Jesus doesn’t do standard characters, and instead we get a heretic. The Samaritan. Now the Samaritans still recognised some of the Hebrew Scriptures, and because of that he risks ritual contamination, too. If he becomes impure, then so does his animal (or animals) and any goods he might be carrying to sell. His animals and his wares also make him a likely target for the robbers. There is no way this man is going to stop and help.

Oh. Wait a minute. It seems he just did. He is ‘moved with pity’ (verse 33), a strong expression of compassion, used at other times of Jesus. He binds up the man’s wounds and pours on oil and wine (verse 34). While in the story that describes physical first aid, the binding up of wounds is also a description of God’s salvation in the Old Testament.

Furthermore, oil and wine, while being regularly used in ancient first aid, were also sacrificial elements used in worship at the Temple. They were the items regularly used by the priest and the Levite. Except here, those who used them frequently did not do so, and a man who has no right to use them does so. An unclean Samaritan who won’t have paid the tithe uses them – and that means the responsibility for paying the tithe now falls on the injured man, who already cannot pay his hôtel bill. The lawyer would therefore have been pleased if the first aid had not been administered.

Then he leads the man – to whom he lends his own animal – to an inn (verse 34). There is an important social distinction between people who lead animals and those who ride on them. Those who lead are socially inferior to those who ride. Yet the Samaritan gives up what status he has for the sake of getting the man to an inn.

By bringing him to the inn and staying overnight (‘The next day’, verse 35), the Samaritan takes a huge risk. It is quite possible under the ugly practices of the day that the injured man’s relatives, looking for someone to blame but not finding the robbers, could have taken their vengeance on him. Such cases were not unknown. But he risks his life for the wounded man.

The next day he saves the injured man from being arrested for debt by paying two denarii to the innkeeper (verse 35). By doing this, he probably also protects the man from potential retribution from the innkeeper. People of that profession had a terrible reputation for violence and lewdness.

The Samaritan, then, is a rejected outsider who uses symbols of salvation and sacrificial worship, and who risks even his own life for the sake of the half-dead man. Who does he sound like? Pardon me if he doesn’t sound rather like the man to whom the lawyer is speaking. His name begins with ‘J’.

Who was the neighbour? It was the Christ-like Samaritan. To love one’s neighbour means loving Christ, and then loving like him. It certainly won’t be the minimal ‘what can I get away with’ definition of neighbour that the lawyer wanted. For if we truly take on board what the Samaritan-like Christ has done for us, then what will we want to do in love as a response?

As the lawyer admits, the neighbour is the one who – like Christ – showed mercy. The only worthy response is, as Jesus said, to ‘Go and do likewise’ (verse 37).

[1] This sermon owes much to Kenneth Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, pp 33-56.

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Raoul Moat

Without in any way condoning the suffering he inflicted on others, how much emotional pain was Raoul Moat in? Read this from the BBC News account of his death:

A guest-house owner, who did not want to be named, told the BBC: “He actually said, the one thing that sticks in my mind, ‘I haven’t got a dad’… and he also said that, ‘nobody cares about me’.”

I repeat: I don’t condone anything Moat did. I am not making excuses for murder and attempted murder. But unresolved emotional pain wreaks havoc in people’s lives – and through them, in others, too.

UPDATE, 15th July 2010: Just thought I’d link to two stories that pertain to some of the discussion below: Raoul Moat tribute page removed and Gunman Roaul Moat asked for psychiatric help.

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Farewells To Schools

The last two days have seen my final assemblies at two primary schools. How I shall miss them.

At one, they presented me with a ‘Goodbye Book’. Every child had written something to me. Elaborate messages from Year Sizes; just the names from Reception Class children. The School Council had also mentioned ne in Dispatches to the Anglican Diocese (it’s a church school).

At the second – our own children’s school – the Head presented me with a box of chocolates.

What a contrast with my arrival here five years ago, when I had never taken an assembly. But gentle persuasion by the woman who was then Head of that first school and now leads the second changed all that. From fearing assemblies to loving them, I now can’t imagine ministry without them.

It just shows you what God can do.

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