Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. Render Unto Caesar? (2/3)

Luke 20:20-26

It’s hard if you are of a certain age reading this story not to remember the time when Margaret Thatcher patronisingly said that Jesus ‘got it about right’ with his teaching to render unto Caesar. In one Christian magazine at the time, a writer compared her attitude to that of Field Marshal Montgomery, who one day was appointed to read the Old Testament lesson at Matins in a parish church. Montgomery began, ‘And the Lord said unto Moses – and in my opinion quite rightly …’

What a dangerous thing it is to put ourselves in judgment over Scripture. And it is not even more dangerous that the temple authorities in our story put themselves in authority over the One to whom the Scriptures witness, Jesus Christ himself?

What is at stake?

We left those leaders down on the canvas yesterday after Jesus outwitted them on the question of authority. But they have not been knocked out. They are going to get up and continue the fight. Indeed they must, if they are to preserve their position, their power, and the institution that gives all that to them. Like Arnie, they’ll be back.

And they are back here, albeit at arms’ length. They do not show their own faces immediately but instead send spies. That in itself is sinister enough. They are practising surveillance of their enemy. Think today of governments that plant spies in churches – China, for example.

Naturally, Jesus is not fooled by this tactic of confronting him from the shadows. He knows who his questioners represent. He knows what Luke tells us in verse 20, that their motive was to have evidence that would enable them to hand him over to Pontius Pilate as a seditionary.

In fact, the trap the spies lay is threefold. One element is indeed that if Jesus were to say, do not pay taxes to Caesar then that is an easy win for handing him over to Pilate. Look, they will say, here is someone who is undermining the Pax Romana. He is treacherous. Oh, and by the way, aren’t we good citizens for snitching on him?

And that last element about their own reputation with Pilate was significant. Because Pilate was in a politically weak situation with them, even though he was the Roman governor.

Why? Because earlier he had authorised some actions that were so offensive to the Jews when he allowed Roman symbols to be set up in the temple that a delegation of Jewish leaders had gone to Rome to complain about him. He had received a telling-off for not respecting the local religious customs and was now on thin ice. One more wrong step and he would be gone. The religious hierarchy here hope to further strengthen their position with him. As it is, they will certainly play on Pilate’s politically weak position later in Holy Week.

This, then, is the first trap. Jesus may win popular acclaim if he tells people not to pay taxes to Rome – think how the tax collectors were hated. But if he does so, he effectively signs his own death warrant. And the temple authorities are in a strong and increasingly stronger position with Pilate, which suits them nicely.

The second trap is if Jesus takes the opposite position and simply says, of course you should pay taxes to the ruling authorities. This is what the good believer does. There is a good case in both Old and New Testaments for Christians being loyal citizens – at least far as their consciences will allow – when living under the rule of nations that do not sympathise with their faith. The most striking example of this is the Jewish exile. Jeremiah tells the exiles in chapter 29 of his prophecy to seek the welfare of the city to which they have been sent. Daniel and his friends serve Babylon as far as they can and only stop at the point where to continue obeying would mean disobedience to God. Later, after Babylon has fallen, Nehemiah serves as cupbearer in the court of King Artaxerxes.

But for all this, if Jesus does endorse paying taxes to Caesar, this will be seen by the ordinary people as caving in to the hated occupying Romans. These are the unclean people who must leave or be driven out of the Promised Land. The land must be cleansed of them. The Torah must be the law of the land and Israel must obey it. Then the Messiah will come. Groups like the Pharisees taught something like this. The Zealots took it to extremes with their violent and military opposition to Rome.

Not only that, there was what you might call a social justice element to the opposition to rendering to Caesar. Although the Roman tribute only amounted to an annual payment of a denarius, a day’s wages, that would still have been significant for the many peasants who lived on the borderline of economic subsistence. They needed every penny, and even then survival was still precarious. They could do without another tax.

These are the two traps that are most obvious in the text, and the two we hear about the most. But there is a third trap. I opened the first meditation by talking about the significance of the theme of the temple, and this is where it makes an appearance in this episode. Guess who was responsible for collecting that annual payment of one denarius to Rome? Why yes, it was the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. Some would say they compromised their loyalty to the Jewish faith by doing so, but in their eyes they were making a small concession in order to guarantee the continuation of the temple cult and the identity of the temple. To them, the temple mattered more than anything else. If Jesus opposed the payment of taxes to Rome, he would be undermining the Jerusalem temple itself, and that most certainly was not to be tolerated.

How does Jesus respond?

Yesterday, we noticed how Jesus responded to a question with a question of his own. He does the same again today. He will not be boxed in by his opponents. He takes the initiative. He is after all Lord, even if they don’t acknowledge it, and he reserves his right to interrogate.

Not only that, but we shall also see that the outcome of his response is not a straight answer to the dilemma posed by the spies. If anyone is looking here for a simple answer about whether we should pay our taxes, Jesus’ answer will disappoint us, because he refuses to ask that. We are going to see that what Jesus does exposes the sin of the religious leadership. No wonder they are silenced afterwards.

So here is how Jesus responds with a question:

²³ He saw through their duplicity and said to them, ²⁴ ‘Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?’

‘Caesar’s,’ they replied.

²⁵ He said to them, ‘Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.’

Well, lo and behold the spies do indeed have a denarius, just as Jesus asks. What a surprise! After all, as I mentioned, the Jerusalem Sanhedrin administered the Roman tribute tax for the occupying army. They are caught red-handed.

And given that, there are two ways in which what Jesus says condemns the temple authorities. First is his language about ‘image.’ What are they going to think of in biblical terms when the word ‘image’ comes up? They are going to remember that all human beings were created in the image of God, and that the commandments forbade any graven images of the one true God. Yet here in the denarius is a coin that bears the inscription, ‘Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.’ By colluding with the Roman authorities to collect a coin with that text, the temple leadership, the people who should have been defending and propagating the faith of Israel, are in fact colluding with false gods. They are promoting idolatry. They have no moral or religious authority, because it is undermined by their actions, which utterly contradict the basic tenets of the faith they are supposed to promote.

The second is when he says, ‘Give back to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s.’ Traditionally, we’re used to hearing, ‘Render unto Caesar’, but the emphasis is not simply on ‘Give,’ but on ‘Give back.’ In other words, Jesus is not saying, you have some civic duties and some religious duties. He is not answering a general question about taxation. Margaret Thatcher and others misunderstood him. No: he is telling the Sanhedrin to get out of administering the temple tax. They are more concerned with winning favour with the Roman powers-that-be than they are with winning favour with God. They have compromised their faith for the sake of political gain.

Don’t get me wrong: Jesus is not saying that true disciples should not be involved in politics, but he is saying that followers of the One True God should not sell their souls to politics. They should not place it above their devotion to God. They should not use politics as a means to an end of personal gain. And if that sounds uncomfortably like what we have seen in the USA with Donald Trump’s MAGA Christian supporters, well, it is.

Politics is a worthy if difficult place for a Christian to serve God in the world. Christians should take on such a call on the grounds of the old saying that if Jesus is not Lord of all then he is not Lord at all. He is Lord over politics. But going into that field must not be for personal gain. It must be to serve others, regardless of whether any benefit comes our way.

Besides, when people play with politics for their own ends, what kind of people do well out of it? Is it the poor and the powerless? No. It’s the wealthy. It’s people who already have power. That should concern Christians. Again, look at America, and perhaps this time look at Elon Musk.

No, Sanhedrin, says Jesus, give back to Caesar. Your job as leaders of God’s people – if that is what you truly are – is to speak truth to power, not to prefer power to truth. It’s a searing critique, and one the church needs to hear in every generation.

Ultimately, this is not that different from when Jesus said, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. You have to make a choice, you ‘gotta serve somebody’, as Bob Dylan sang, but it can only be one and not both. The temple authorities have chosen to side with the Empire rather than the kingdom of God.

The spies are silenced. They have been caught out. Moreover, they have been shamed by this public exposure of their utter disloyalty to Israel’s God.

But while their shame may indicate that their sin has been laid bare, it is no more than remorse at best. It is not repentance. They do not change. They stay on their evil course, as the rest of Holy Week will demonstrate.

April 16, 2025 0

Paul’s Favourite Church 6: Gotta Serve Somebody (Philippians 3:15-21)

Philippians 3:15-21

What do you think the Apostle Paul’s musical taste was? If he were alive in our generation, I would put him down as a likely Bob Dylan fan. Because today’s passage fits very well with his song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’:

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody, he sings. And there appear to be those same two stark choices in life laid out in Philippians 3. On the one hand we have

¹⁸For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. ¹⁹Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

And on the other we have

²⁰But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, ²¹who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

A nice, simple binary choice.

Or if you don’t like Bob Dylan, then maybe you’ll take someone I’ve quoted before, St Augustine of Hippo, who said that the key to our lives is not our thinking but our affections. Who or what are we devoted to? The great Augustinian scholar James K A Smith puts it like this: ‘You Are What You Love.’ He says there is spiritual power in what we devote ourselves to habitually.

So Paul asks us here: who are we going to serve? Who or what will have our love and devotion?

Let’s hear Option One again:

At the end of every week, the BBC News website has a fun quiz on the week’s news with seven questions. This week’s finished with a question about the theft of luxury cheese from the famous Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, and the final screen, which told you how many answers you got right assigned you a famous quotation about cheese accordingly.

For those who got all seven right, the quotation was from the comedian Steven Wright: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Those like me who scored between four and six were assigned words by the French man of letters Eugène Briffault: “Cheese complements a good meal and supplements a bad one.” Those who scored between zero and three had a Spanish proverb: “I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

“I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

The problem for many of us is that metaphorically we do want the cheese while still getting out of the trap. To change the food proverb, we want to have our cake and eat it.

For having taken God out of the picture, all we are left with is devotion to our senses: ‘their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.’ We place a priority on satisfying our bodily desires – not that food is unnecessary, but that we elevate things like that above the level of necessity and staple, because without God to satisfy our deepest needs we turn to lesser things to gratify ourselves. They become ends in themselves.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that in a world like Paul’s that was full of temple prostitution he says ‘their glory is in their shame.’ A good and beautiful gift of God is turned into something that is only about personal pleasure. Thus today, sex is no longer the sign of the covenant between a man and a woman for life, now it is something we purely do for our own pleasure, just so long as the other person consents. We have so detached it from the covenant of marriage that we now have ‘friends with benefits’, where two people, usually single, agree that if one of them needs their urges fulfilling, the other one will oblige, just so long as they don’t become romantically attached.

This is the world of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser, who infamously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ Campbell may have only meant that in in the context of politics, but in a culture where we generally don’t do God then people seek satisfaction elsewhere in merely human things. ‘Their mind is set on earthly things.’ That’s all you can focus on then. Our sensual desires are a natural avenue in such circumstances.

And as Paul says, that’s disastrous: ‘Their destiny is destruction.’ When the ultimate reality is actually God and not our own senses, but we put him out of the picture and devote our affections purely to our own sensory desires, then there can only be one end result. If God is going to make all things new but we are just interested in our physical satisfaction now, then there can be no place for us in eternity. It’s that bleak, and that logical.

So now let’s restate Option Two:

Here’s where we place our devotion. Here’s where we set our affections as Christians. We look to Christ and to eternity. We gratefully acknowledge that Jesus knows all about the frailties and weaknesses of our bodies and he will make them new in the resurrection of the dead. Instead of loving the creation, we love the One who is the Creator and the Re-Creator of all he has made. To worship the creation is to set our hearts on an idol; to worship the Creator gives us proper focus and perspective.

Our guiding principle for living becomes that of Jesus’ teaching and considering eternity: what will the creation be like when it is made new? I do not know how our bodies will be sustained in eternity, but I do know Jesus refers to feasting in the life to come. I will leave the details to him. In the meantime, I will seek to look after my body because he made it, but that body will not be my focus, Jesus will.

And in contrast to our society’s obsession with sex, I will remember Jesus’ eternal perspective that there will no longer be marrying and giving in marriage in the age to come. For since death will have been abolished, we shall no longer need to replace those who have died.

More generally, if Jesus has ‘the power that enables him to bring everything under his control’, then my goal will be to place my life under his control. What he says matters, because in his life he showed us what a life under his control looks like.

If you ‘gotta serve somebody’ and you choose the Lord, it looks something like this, says Paul.

But here’s the problem. We know all this. I daresay we aspire to all this. But what about the times when we succumb to ‘Option One’ living instead of this ‘Option Two’? How about the occasions when we allow our sensory desires to dictate our actions, rather than Christ, eternity, and the new creation? Are we no better than anyone else? Are we condemned? Do we lose our salvation?

In response I’m going to follow material from a recent article by Dr Jason Swan Clark, a former church leader and college principal who is now moving into the area of spiritual direction. This is how he talks about his conversion when he was a young man:

As I consider my faith, I am grateful that the youth leader who led me to Christ invited me to follow Jesus and exchange my life, plans, and past for one where “I would have something to live for, die for, meaning, adventure and purpose, every day of my life”. My sin has always worked against that salvation story and sought to create an anti-story. To repent means to realise how my sin has disordered me and moved me away from my story with God and to return to my adventure in Christ.

He says that for us, sin is like what we do when we are asleep and don’t want to wake up. Confession is to wake up – to the truth. And here’s how he describes sin:

The greatest lie of the enemy is that I am free to create myself into any image I want to and, even worse, expect God to comply with my directions to him about my self-creations.

God wakes us up to our true identity and destiny. The Good News is this:

God is very aware of our past sins, but what if his principal interest in them was how they stop us from discovering and living into and out of who he made us to be? God loves us into being and wants us to be free from how Sin forms us away from Him. God meets us within this at our affective and psychological levels.

Note that: ‘God meets us at our affective … levels’ – our affections and loves, the very things I set out at the beginning. He knows our affections are truly for him, but that we have let our desires become disordered, and he describes confession and forgiveness by recounting some words from St Thérèse of Lisieux, the famous nineteenth century Carmelite nun who died from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four. She wrote these to a priest:

I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows. He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart.

Here is God’s discipline of those who fail but truly want to serve him: he punishes us … with a kiss.

So when we are faced with the fact that we ‘gotta serve somebody’, let us not choose the indulgence of our senses by not ‘doing God’; let us place our affections and desires on Jesus Christ, keeping our vision on his coming new creation, and knowing that when we fail him he will restore us with a kiss.

November 3, 2024 0

You Are Not Alone: The Temptations Of Jesus, Matthew 4:1-11 (Lent 1 Year A 2023)

Matthew 4:1-11

So we begin Lent and our journey with Jesus to the Cross. When we get to the Cross, we are used to saying things such as, ‘Jesus died for us,’ and indeed he did.

But one thing we miss is that Jesus could only die for us because he lived for us. Yes, his death was an atoning sacrifice for our sins, as the New Testament says, but there is more to it than that. In his death and our faith in him, we are united to his life and the benefits of his life for us. He did not only die for us (as if everything up until Calvary was just filling in time), he also lived for us.

I think that’s important when we consider the temptations of Jesus. It’s important to say he was tempted for us. And that’s the way I want us to explore this oh-so-familiar story that we read in one of the Gospels on the First Sunday of Lent every year.

So here are three strands of the temptations story that help us because we are united with Christ:

Firstly, fellowship.

Most weeks when I prepare a service I have to choose the hymns before I have written the sermon or even know what direction I’m going in with the Bible passage. More often than not that works out all right, but I have to confess that this week we’re now going to be singing a hymn after the sermon that takes a completely different tack from what the passage says.

What we’ll be singing is the hymn ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us.’ It imagines Jesus in the wilderness and the hymn-writer says,

lone and dreary, faint and weary,
through the desert thou didst go.

And that’s how I’d conceived Jesus’ wilderness experience – as a tough, solitary time.

However, then I began to read and consult scholars about the passage, and I’ve had to admit I was wrong. Ian Paul points out that Jesus wasn’t alone. At the beginning, the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness (verse 1), and at the end of the story ‘angels came and attended him’ (verse 11).

So if last week when we thought about the Transfiguration we sang the old 80s song ‘Weak In The Presence Of Beauty’ by Alison Moyet, this week we sing with Michael Jackson, ‘You Are Not Alone.’

Jesus was not alone in facing temptation. Neither are we, and that’s good news. It’s easy to feel that we are on our own when temptation comes, but it’s not the case that we are isolated. The Holy Spirit is with us to give us strength to do what is right. God’s angels are not far away to encourage us in the ways of the kingdom.

We may well feel alone when temptation comes, but that is all part of the lie. God’s Spirit is on hand to help us to say no to temptation and yes to Christ. It may be that all the noise and pressure of the temptation is there to stop us recognising God’s presence with us, but present he is.

Or it may of course be that really to our shame we want to give in to this particular temptation, and so we ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit with us in our hour of testing.

But God is there. He is our escape route. He is our strength in times of weakness.

When we are tempted, let’s look for God. He won’t abandon us.

Secondly, obedience.

I once heard a preacher declare as if it were blindingly obvious to everyone, ‘Of course Jesus was unable to sin,’ but I sat there thinking, well if that’s the case, the whole story of the temptations is pretty pointless!

I think the preacher’s error came from so wanting to defend the divinity of Jesus (which is a right and noble thing to do) that he forgot Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. And because Jesus took on sinful human flesh, it would have been possible for him to sin.

The Good News, though, is that he didn’t. Here at the temptations as at every stage of his life, Jesus, in the words of John Calvin, took sinful human flesh and turned it back to obedience to the Father.

You can’t miss the parallels between Jesus in the wilderness for forty days and Israel in the wilderness for forty years. But whereas Israel disobeyed and her life became futile, Jesus obeyed. He redeemed sinful human flesh by his obedience.

So when you and I find ourselves facing temptation, our union with Christ means that we have his obedience available to us. Before we resist the devil we submit to him and say, ‘Lord, give me the gift of your obedience.’

Our world doesn’t appreciate talk of obedience. It claims we are only answerable to ourselves and only need take others into account by ensuring we don’t hurt them. Obedience to anyone – let alone the Almighty – is out of date and repressive.

But you know what? Obedience to God is nothing of the sort. It is in fact the way we enter into true freedom. For true freedom is not the chance to do anything we like, but freedom to do what is right instead of being enslaved to sin. And as such, obedience to God is the most liberating of practices.

The expression, ‘Do what thou wilt’ is actually one of the cardinal tenets of Satanism. But ‘Do what God wills’ is the road to freedom. It may seem difficult, if not unattainable at times, but it is possible for the Christian because we are united with Christ and he gives us the gift of his obedience.

Thirdly, example.

The thing about the temptations story when it comes to us preachers is that it looks like an easy shoo-in for one of our favourite three-point sermons, one point for each temptation. And I’ve done that plenty of times over the years.

But while I’m still giving you three points this morning, I’m trying to show you the bigger picture. And so I want to think about all three temptations under this one heading about Jesus’ example. Because the temptations that the devil tries on Jesus come in some form to every generation. And Jesus’ example shows us how to rebut them.

So the devil tries to attack Jesus’ identity – who God says he is. God has just spoken from heaven at his baptism to say that Jesus is his beloved Son, and so the devil kicks off two of the temptations with the words ‘If you are the Son of God.’

Likewise to us he would love us to take on any identity except that of being beloved children of God. I could say that my identity is male heterosexual, a husband, a father, a Methodist minister, and a photographer, but these all pale into insignificance beside the fact that God loves me as his child. There is no more secure identity than that, and it’s important not to let the enemy to tempt us into skewing what our most fundamental identity is.

The devil wants Jesus to live by bread alone, just as much of our society, especially that influenced by atheists, wants us to believe that life is solely comprised of material things, that there is no soul or spirit, and unless something is material, it doesn’t exist. You and I know otherwise, and we cannot afford to compromise or forget that truth.

The devil wants Jesus to test God by jumping off the top of the Temple to certain death, and many people today say they will only accept the existence of God if he passes a test they set for him. It even comes in apparently heart-rending forms: ‘I will believe in God if he heals my auntie from cancer.’ Now it isn’t that God lacks compassion, but it is that allegiance to him must come first, whether he blesses us by fulfilling our requests and tests or not.

Finally, the devil comes out with his most naked temptation: you can have all the kingdoms of this world, Jesus, if you will only worship me. And this reminds us that we are all worshippers, whether we accept it or not. As Bob Dylan sang,

You’re gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

To what do we give our time, our affections, our money, and our energy? This will give us a good idea of who or what we worship. Those which are lesser than God may well be good things, but if they command our affection ahead of him then in our lives they are instruments of Satan.

Conclusion

Lent can be quite severe as we engage the spiritual discipline of warring against evil. But Jesus teaches us here not to lose heart, and to be encouraged.

For he is with us, and we can draw on his presence when we fight evil.

His obedience is available to us through our union with him so that we can conquer.

And his example shows us that what we face today is nothing new but rather simply old tricks given a new polish. They can be resisted in his name as he did, and we can live for the glory of his Name.

February 26, 2023 0

Christmas Playlist

A plague on the X-Factor, with its manufactured music and manufactured hype to get the Christmas Number One. (Not that any of these things are new.) So a campaign to usurp it, like the previous one to get Jeff Buckley‘s version of Leonard Cohen‘s ‘Hallelujah‘

up the charts, rather than Alexandra Burke‘s, is something I would welcome.

Except I can’t really go for Rage Against The Machine‘s ‘Killing In The Name‘, with its proliferation of f-words. Sorry.

But more positively, it set me thinking about what would be on my personal Christmas playlist.

Sufjan Stevens‘ 5-EP collection ‘Songs For Christmas‘ contains so many gems. How about his version of ‘Come, thou fount of every blessing’?

For fun, you have to have Dylan. Yes, really: the old goat is laugh-a-minute. The recent ‘Must be Santa’ has to be in there:

Bruce Cockburn‘s ‘Christmas‘ CD from the 1990s was pretty stunning. ‘Joy to the world’ is but one of the gems – unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to add the video into WordPress either directly or indirectly, so click here or possibly here to see it. Anyway, you won’t be surprised to find Cockburn in this list, since this blog’s name is inspired by him!

Back to the daft, and I have an irrational affection for ‘I Want An Alien For Christmas’ by the Fountains Of Wayne:

And for real Christmas kitsch, there’s nothing like a pseudo-Phil Spector sound, so over to Bruce Springsteen for ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’:

Or for the real thing, Darlene Love and ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’:

I mean, you just don’t need Mariah Carey, do you?

Of the mainstream big Christmas hits, there’s something I like about the guitar sound on Chris Rea‘s ‘Driving Home For Christmas’:

But where’s the Christian stuff? Randy Stonehill has written a couple. I can’t find a video online of ‘Christmas Song For All Year Round’, but someone has put pictures to the poignant ‘Christmas At Denny’s’:

For Christian cynicism about the commercial season, I can’t trace a video by Larry Norman himself of his song ‘Christmastime’, but here is Stonehill’s version, complete with the immortal lines

Christmastime is coming and the kids are getting greedy
They know it’s in the store because they’ve seen it on the TV

Well, that’s just some random stuff from me. What do you love at this time of year? What can’t you stand?

December 18, 2009 3

Back Home

I’m back from hospital, and now have two weeks’ convalescence where I must not mix with many people for infection control reasons. I have been ordering Bob Dylan CDs from the library to keep me occupied, along with my books.

Things began well yesterday morning. I was one of the earlier patients taken to theatre. The modern anaesthetics are amazing. One moment I was talking to the anaesthetist and his assistant, the next I was waking up bright as a button in the recovery suite. I have suffered no pain or nausea after the surgery, either.

Not everything was straightforward, though. The bleeding from my nose took longer to halt than expected. The nurses decided this was connected with the fact that my blood pressure was misbehaving. So instead of coming home last night, I was kept in, just in case a nasty nose bleed started up.

As it happens, all that occurred was that I didn’t get a single second of sleep. The operation leaves patients with highly bunged up noses, largely with congealed blood. You are not allowed to try to remove it, because you could expose the work of the surgeons underneath. It would be like a child picking a scab on a knee before the new skin had formed. This left me finding it hard to breathe sufficiently deeply for sleep. Breathing through my mouth didn’t work either, because I had a sore throat from the tube that had been placed down it during the surgery.

However, at least the blood pressure was a little more co-operative this morning. Combined with the fact that the only bleeding I had in the night was the result of a sneezing fit, my discharge today became routine.

So I phoned Debbie and arranged that she would pick me up outside the main building at the drop-off point. We agreed on 9:15 am. Come 9:20, she still wasn’t there. My mobile vibrated in my pocket. “Where are you,” she asked, “I’ve driven past the entrance and you’re not there.”

“I’m outside the pick up and drop off point.”

“But I’ve been past A and E and didn’t see you.”

A and E? St John’s Hospital doesn’t have one. She had gone to Broomfield Hospital, eight miles away.

But before I leave this topic, I must include praise for all the staff on the ward. Their advice and care was first class. The NHS may be far from perfect, but give me that system ahead of a national private insurance scheme any day.

The rest of the day has included some joys at the children’s achievements. Mark won a special effort sticker in assembly today for always getting on with his work straight away, and at swimming after school he swam a width without armbands for the first time. We have promised a family meal out when he managed that, and with Friday being a non-pupil day at the school, that will probably be our day. Rebekah, too, has done well, going up another stage on the reading scheme today.

It will be an early night tonight. Goodnight, all.

May 20, 2009 14

Taking Off My Suit

Sunday night. I took off my suit and clerical shirt. No robes, cassocks, preaching tabs or anything like that for me. And definitely no cassock-alb – technically known in the congregation as ‘that white thing your predecessor wore’. A clerical shirt and collar is hard enough for me to cope with sometimes. As an Anglican friend once said of himself and me, ‘Not so much low church, more like subterranean.’ I changed into casual clothes, and thought, ‘I won’t need that suit or those shirts until 10th May now.’

It wasn’t a morbid thought along the lines of ‘Mama, please take this badge off of me, I can’t use it anymore’, as Bob Dylan sang at the beginning of ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. Instead, it was a case that I had taken my last Sunday service before my much-anticipated sabbatical, which starts next Sunday. I shall have to put my mind into proleptic mode this week to prepare worship for 10th May. I shall also have a number of important appointments this week, not least including a Church Council and an away day for the Circuit Leadership Team. But unless a crisis occurs, the suit, clerical shirts and collars are sharing fellowship with the mothballs for the immediate future.

Realising I would now be wearing civvies for quite a while, I had another thought: ‘Great. I can be myself now.’ When I dress as a minister, I am putting myself in a rôle. That’s both bad and good.

It’s bad in this sense. If I have to put myself in rôle, like an actor putting on a costume ready for a performance, then I wonder whether something dishonest is going on here. This is not the real me, I’m not meant to be an actor portraying a different character. Ministry can only come out of who I am in Christ. Who is this guy in the clerical collar? It doesn’t look or feel like me.

But it’s also good, and the reason it’s good is like the obverse face of what I’ve just described in saying it’s bad. There are times when, to fulfil my calling, I have to play a rôle. I don’t mean that I’m pretending in the sense of trying to deceive anybody. I mean that it gets me into the rôle God has called me to take.

And that’s important for me, because – as anyone who knows me reasonably well will be aware – I frequently feel a dichotomy between who I am as a person and the fact of my calling to the ministry. I resisted the call to the ministry for ages, thinking I didn’t have it in my sensitive personality to cope with people’s deep problems. I still find that, like the majority of ministers in the historic denominations, I’m an introvert, and many congregations want an extravert. The latter is an issue I’m going to spend some of the sabbatical exploring.

I don’t like dressing differently from the rest of the church. Theologically, I have always recoiled from it. I find it undermines the priesthood of all believers and disempowers people when that doctrine and the related one of the Body of Christ calls all disciples to make a contribution, and not to honour the more obvious ones above the others. For the same reason, my stocks of calling cards have never had the word ‘Reverend’ or any abbreviation of it printed on them. They say I’m a Methodist minister, but titles give me discomfort, because it’s another dubious sign of status and superiority.

Personally, I dislike it, too. I’m just a guy who doesn’t like dressing up. Until recently, our four-year-old son Mark would always protest at having to dress up for fancy dress parties. ‘Can I wear ordinary clothes?’ he would ask. (Having said that, he’s starting to change.) But that’s me: ordinary clothes. I even resisted a suit for years. Looking smart, complete with a tie to strangle me, was something I associated with unhappy memories of school. Why repeat that? It took a long time to see I’d developed a self-esteem issue, and that scruffy appearance was an outward sign of feeling pretty scruffy inside. Feeling better about myself smartened up my appearance more than any harshly applied rules. There’s a lesson there, you know. I even began to enjoy buying suits and building a collection of striking ties. It dawned on me what I needed to do: buy shirts with collars half an inch bigger than I really needed. Then I could be both smart and comfortable. That was a winning combination I never expected after school uniform days.

But despite my theological objections and personal reservations, I still wear formal minister’s attire for formal occasions. Sometimes I admit it’s just to keep the peace. Some older, more traditional folk just wouldn’t understand my message if I didn’t wear it to take services, and especially not ones particularly associated with the ministry, such as the sacraments, weddings or funerals.

At other times, though, wearing the gear is a reminder to myself that yes, this is my calling, despite my periodic bouts of incredulity at that thought. ‘What am I doing as a minister? Should I continue? Wasn’t I right all those years ago to think I wasn’t suited?’ – these are thoughts that orbit my brain and occasionally land for a while. And that’s when I need reminders.

The reminders can come in many forms. At one especially dark time when I felt very close to jacking it all in, Debbie said to me, ‘What about all those ways in which you knew God had called you? If you quit, you’re denying all of them.’ I knew she was right. When I was exploring what the call of God on my life was, I had written down all the little hints of what it might be and the evidence why I thought God was saying that – Bible verses, striking passages from books, comments by friends, and so on.

That kind of reminder works well for me. They are like pieces of data that can be assembled to make a rational case. But visual reminders serve well, too. They work well for me because they are out of the ordinary in terms of the way my brain usually works. I like logic, theory and principles. Much as I can enjoy photography, you don’t see many photos on this blog. It tends to be words (apart from some video clips from time to time). The visual comes from outside my normal experiences of validation.

In using something that’s outside my conventional learning style, God creeps up on me. In speaking through something about which I have theological and personal qualms, God catches me unawares.

But no, I’m not planning to wear it at all during the sabbatical. Because first and foremost, before I put any sense of identity and self-worth in my calling to be a minister, I’m going to enjoy my primary calling.

And that’s the primary calling of all Christians: to be a child of God.

January 26, 2009 21

Back

We arrived home at the weekend from a fortnight on the Isle of Wight. I thought I’d type up a few highlights. No, please keep reading: this is meant to be more than those boring ‘let me show you my holiday pics’ conversations. I’ve tried to offer some reflections in what follows. If any of my stories or observations are helpful, feel free to pinch them. You might also smile or laugh – I hope.

Friday 15th August A wild fox entered the garden of the bungalow we were renting. The children (and we) were full of wonder. We are used to direct encounters with tame animals. Meetings with wild animals are usually managed or mediated, such as at the zoo. A direct encounter with the wild is not encouraged in our society – nor in our church. Was it Brennan Manning who called Jesus ‘wild’?

Saturday 16th We’re doing our little bit to make our break as eco-friendly as possible. Although we had to drive here and take the ferry, Southern Vectis Buses do a great ‘freedom ticket‘: £40 for two adults and up to three children for a week. I know friends would advise cycling, but I have a poor sense of balance and can’t ride a bike.

Sunday 17th A return trip from last year to one of the most family-friendly churches we’ve ever come across: Shanklin URC.

Meanwhile (not during the service!) I’m finally reading Tom Wright‘s ‘Surprised By Hope‘. Great quote on page 87, recounting part of Oscar Wilde‘s play ‘Salome‘. Herod the tyrant wants to forbid Jesus from raising the dead. He asks his courtier, ‘Where is this man?’ The courtier replies, ‘He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find him.’ Jesus is elusive in so many ways – not just the sense of his absence since the ascension but yet present by his Spirit, also the way that we no more than Herod can control him.

Monday 18th Two newspaper articles over the weekend bring out the dark side of the Olympics. Matthew Syed in The Times points out that the modern Olympics were founded with an elitist bias and they remain so, especially in favour of western sports and the privately educated. Ian Gallagher in the Mail On Sunday tells an awful story of how one Chinese pistol shooter managed his best ever score. He won bronze, only to be humiliated on national TV for not winning gold. And before we get too snooty about the Chinese (who clearly used the Games rather like Soviet Russia and the USA before the Berlin Wall fell), let’s remember the ritual humiliation the British press has handed out to sports stars like Tim Henman in the past.

Tuesday 19th We’re waiting at Ryde bus station to catch either the number 2 or 3 back to Shanklin. Rebekah and Mark have been frustrated that only Mum and Dad have had a bus timetable. They find a box of them on the ground. A customer assistant walks over to take one for a passenger who has made an enquiry. Beautifully, she asks our children if she may take one from the box. ‘Yes,’ replies Mark, ‘but you must put it back!’

Wednesday 20th A trip to Amazon World: not only a chance to see some animals, but the opportunity (if the kids let us read the displays, ha ha) to learn more about conservation projects and the plight of the world’s rain forests. In the gift shop, Rebekah’s eye is taken – as always – by bright and sparkly things. In this case, they are small chunks of rocks and minerals. Since they are only £1.50, I agree she can choose one. She selects Pyrite, a.k.a. ‘Fool’s Gold’. She spends the rest of the holiday desperate to take her Fool’s Gold everywhere. I’m sure you can find your own parallels …

Thursday 21st Fired Art Ceramics Café in Ryde is our venue to decorate a bowl ready for my parents’ golden wedding anniversary in October. We didn’t notice the café bit, but the proprietor was warm and welcoming. She struck the right balance between needing to protect delicate and hot items, yet children feeling safe and happy. Now there’s a challenge for our churches.

Friday 22nd If you’re ever in Shanklin Old Village, you have to buy an ice cream at Pearly Boise. An unbelievable huge range of home made flavours. It’s three months to the next dental check-up. More on ice cream in the next few days’ entries: you’ll see why.

In the afternoon, we take the children for their (and my!) first ever experience of live circus. Jay Miller’s Circus does not use animals, so we are happy. It’s not the biggest one you’ll ever see, but there were some astonishing acrobats, and we were ringside – which meant that Debbie and Rebekah got covered in spaghetti and custard pie from Peppi the clown. They weren’t distressed: Mark was.

Saturday 23rd Rebekah has an invitation next month to a ten-pin bowling birthday party, so we thought we’d better introduce her to its delights. At least it proves to be a delight to her when she wins, but not when she is second or lower. It turns out that on Ryde Esplanade there is a branch of LA Bowl ten-pin. Finding details before we went to the Isle of Wight had been frustrating. Tourist information sites listed the bowling alley, and it’s mentioned on LA Bowl’s home page, but not when you click ‘locations‘! They have a visibility and communication problem – not unlike the church.

Sunday 24th My sister and her boys come over from Hampshire for the day and meet us at Dinosaur Isle. (I’m a theistic evolutionist, not a creationist or Intelligent Design guy.) The Isle of Wight is rich in fossil history. It was over the heads of our kids, who still haven’t grasped that dinos are extinct, unlike my ten-year-old nephew, who fancies a career as a paleantologist. One section of the exhibition invites you to put your hand inside slots in a box and guess what you are feeling. Unfortunately, the first thing Mark feels is dino poo! We hear for the rest of the holiday about how it should have been flushed away.

Later, watching the BBC Ten O’Clock News, James Reynolds reports on the closing ceremony of the Olympics. He opens by saying, ‘In a state which has no god, the Olympics have been a religion.’ He closes with the words, ‘Now these people will have to find something else to believe in.’ Perhaps G K Chesterton was right all those decades ago when he said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Or as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.

Monday 25th Rain makes us reverse our plans. An afternoon visit to The Old Smithy at Godshill becomes a morning visit. Instead of gorging ourselves on the finest cakes we’ve ever found in four holidays on the island, we settle for morning scones. Still stunning.

Then we make a return visit to Robin Hill. We’d been the previous Monday, and if you return within seven days, you get in free. Bad news: no longer do they sell New Forest Ice Cream, they’ve gone over to Minghella’s. The latter has apparently won forty-four awards, and was described in the Sunday Times as the best tasting ice cream ever. Could have fooled us. It melts in seconds, is indistinguishable in taste from ordinary stuff, and costs £1.70 per cone instead of £1.40 for New Forest. The biggest taste in Minghella’s is the hype.

Tuesday 26th We’re in Newport when Debbie suddenly sees a bus for Alum Bay. Now I’ve wanted to go there all holiday, I just can’t take her sudden and impulsive plan-changing approach to life. We won’t have time for everything there in a couple of hours. But we do get to the spectacular chairlift. Debbie and Rebekah, the family daredevils, love it. I have to restrain my intermittent vertigo to be safe person for little Mark, who is frightened at first. Sometimes that’s what I’m called to do in other ways as a minister. Churches don’t like looking down at the drop sometimes, but rather than staying on terra firma, I have to encourage them to get out on the chairlift, even if I too am frightened at the thought of looking down.

Wednesday 27th The Isle Of Wight Zoo And Tiger Sanctuary (‘Home Of ITV’s Tiger Island‘, we are repeatedly told) is much smaller than our much-loved Colchester Zoo. Enclosures are overgrown, with some plants even growing up the sides, making it difficult to see some animals. We have overgrowth in the church, making it hard for people to see Jesus.

More light-heartedly, we were watching some lemurs when one spontaneously urinated in front of everyone. Rebekah launched into an instant chant or rap: ‘Do some wee! Do some wee! We want you to do some wee!’ Thank goodness they didn’t know I was a ‘vicar’.

Thursday 28th On an X40 Island Coaster, returning to Alum Bay. The bus is crammed with people most of the journey. We stop en route at Ventnor. The bus driver calls out, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ Not thinking everyone has heard he even climbs out of his cockpit and comes upstairs where we are. He repeats, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ ‘No!’ cries back Rebekah, obviously thinking she has the right to speak for everyone. Do you know people like that.

Well, I think that will have to do. Hopefully this has raised a few smiles and given the odd pause for thought.

September 1, 2008 6

Tag: Bob Dylan