Pentecost: Fire lights on Babel Tower

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...

What emerges from Acts 2 is the original Multinational — founded on absolute Equality, universal in scope, affirming particularity, non-Imperialistic (but welcoming to Roman tourists like anyone else), minimally and functionally hierarchical but inwardly driven by the Spirit. What’s wrong with that?

Sadly this simple vision conflicts with some dirty little habits:

• Inequality
  usually expressed as the feeling of entitlement you find in racists, bigots and sexual predators of all stripes, mild and strong, ancient and modern. It’s all about power, not sex.
• Narrow Tribalism
  even the corruption of the Pentecostal Community into a tribe. The idea was that all instincts of particularity that used to express themselves over and against each other should become a symphony of disparates. The Church’s calling was to transcend tribalism, not become a specialist faith group that revels in its habits and routines and, literally, idolises its particularity.
• Homogenisation
  because birds of a feather flock together. The herd instinct turns in on itself and opts for safety in numbers, the tyranny of the tidy-minded, groupthink and doubletalk. The Institution takes itself far to seriously. The Sprit is subjected to the letter of the law, bureaucratised and neutered

Perhaps the big crises the Church faces are not intractable issues in themselves, but the inevitable result of losing touch with its roots. The outward and inward predicaments the Church faces often draw out instinctive pragmatic love, especially at street level. Difference is no more than an invitation to love even enemies. 

Sadly, the same predicaments also produce flashes of inequality, bigotry and discrimination, imperialism, institutional inertia, complacency and self-obsession. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees says Jesus. “Be watchful of yourselves, whitewashed tombs, brood of vipers!”

We can't fix the problems beyond us, but we can attend to the rot within us and among us. Then, in the light of such repentance, we could look outward in the light of all we had learnt and, in Wendell Berry’s unforgettable phrase, Practice Resurrection. Who knows? Engaging and transformative vision could go viral as it did on the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. 

Starting here. Couldn’t it?

Beyond Sneering

We need words to communicate, but we also use them to consolidate the tribe. On the Day of Pentecost God used words to include everyone as they are in the tribe. It was the end of tribalism.

Back in the eighties the great ra-ra sneer was “Fundamentalism.” All it meant was “something unpleasantly Conservative better rubbished than understood.” The more Conservative noughties brought a new ra-ra term — “Revisionist.”
The give away is always that the person being described thus wouldn't use it of themselves. It may one day become a badge of honour, like “Methodist”, but until it does, whenever you see it used you know all that is going on is mindless sneering.

Then there’s the L-word. At a meeting in 2004 about the Windsor Report, our Diocesan Registrar told us of a young man he saw in Sierra Leone when he was a missionary there in the seventies, necklaced for being gay. He supposed “most of us here were more Liberal than that.” A hand shot up — “Why are you accusing me of being Liberal?”

Since the 1830’s “Liberal” has been the Napoleon of ra-ra words.

Served up in a tasty ad hominem all it means is “if you’re one of those people who believes in say, not hanging people, voting, ending Apartheid, rehabilitating criminals — well then... splutter... you’re just one of those people who believes in...” Preached to the choir, the name-calling combats tribal insecurity, oft reinforced as howler monkeys do, by bouts of furious mutual masturbation that, unlike the simian version, is mercifully mainly verbal.

But what lies beyond? Why, for example, do I believe passionately that women and gay people are equal apart from a mere irrational attachment to a social agenda and a drably conventional theology of Creation that says “whatever God has made is good?”

It struck me yesterday how the cacophony of language on the day of Pentecost says difference is good and unity is emergent. God respected the people’s varied cultural idioms, but the ensuing chaos told the mighty acts of God. To receive the word people didn’t need to divest themselves of their cultural particularity, as would have been necessary if God were a merely tribal deity or mascot. One mark of toxic Pharisaism is scouring land and sea to make people like yourself.

The mightiest act of God is his commandment to love him as we love our crooked neighbour with all our crooked heart. It’s shockingly unconditional. Someone wrote to me last month to say it beggared his belief that a bishop should think that “Love thy neighbour as thyself” applied to homosexuals. It beggars this bishop’s belief that anyone should think that it doesn’t.

“Yes,” I hear some say. “We love people, of course. We welcome all. But that doesn’t mean endorsing what they do.” On one level this is obviously true. Best of luck to you, say I. But make sure you really are welcoming people, not just laying a grinning veneer over a subtext of disapproval. It doesn’t work because, I find, people who have experienced oppression have an almost psychic radar about that kind of hypocrisy. And please remember two other primary truths of the Gospel —

1. I am in no position, as one sinner, to endorse or not endorse what another sinner does. The Lord does that bit. In God we trust. All others pay cash. I therefore have to be very careful and critical of my own perception. Only when I have removed the plank from my own eye can I help my neighbour see more clearly. It is comical if I, as a Pharisee prone to anger, contentions, party spirit and self-righteousness, all things Jesus taught are evil, rise up and denounce anybody for things Jesus said absolutely nothing about.


2. We need to assess, ruthlessly, our impact and its fruit as well as our intentions. The good Samaritan teaches us that our actual performance with real people matters more than our good intentions. This is the hardest discipline of all, perhaps. A second sign of toxic Pharisaism is laying burdens on others’ backs too heavy for them to bear. If our welcoming strategy is experienced as oppression it doesn’t work and we need to repent of our hypocrisy ten times more than the object of our welcome needs to divest themselves, even if they could, of whatever it was about them that disgusted us in the first place. By their fruits ye know them. Any policy of the Church that produces scarred, broken self-loathing or even the anger of feeling oppressed in the people it is designed to help needs to change. because either God has given up on all that “Love thy neighbour as thyself / do unto others...” stuff, which is unlikely, or it’s a pretty useless policy.

This, not some notional tendency called Liberalism is the root of the matter. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it. That’s all.

Equalities and discrimination 101

I am puzzled when Christian people speak of equality as some godless imposition on a Church whose duty is to preserve tradition by contending for, well, inequality. Have they not read the New Testament? Jesus taught we are all sisters and brothers, and we have one father, and should “call no man father.” He opened up and subverted attitudes to women and children in his society in a way that still reverberates today. His early disciples held all property in common, refused to stigmatise disabled people or women, and developed a glorious vision of a body in which every part was equally valued, whether held in greater or lesser customary honour. This body was to think of itself as the firstfruits of the whole human race.

This radically open society, the Church, looked forward to a day when Christ would be all in all, above every rule, authority, principality and power of the present age. The apostles were severally and corporately agents of this process, and were to structure their life around service not status. These are not isolated soundbites, but major themes of our Scriptures that we may not have fully grasped and inculturated in our context, but we are charged with nevertheless.

Therefore we need to recognise that the struggle against wrongful discrimination is a moral struggle, recognised as such by most people around us of all faiths and none, and if the Church has fallen behind the values of the Kingdom in this regard, shame on us. Our task is not to remodel kingdom values to suit our cultural prejudices, but to embody them in our lives. We contend against inequality because we believe in the Incarnation.

Is all discrimination wrongful? Well, choosing particular people can be justified. A football team agrees freely only to have members of one gender because without such an agreement they could not play football against other similar football teams. A sickle cell anaemia self-help group can choose only to enrol people with sickle cell anaemia. A religious order can agree to be gendered because of a voluntary commitment to celibacy, and if people disagree they can leave at any time. A political party only signs up people who are willing to agree with its founding principles. All these are private commitments, freely undertaken.

But even they have limits. If a football team tries to exclude players on racial grounds, society intervenes and says that fairness and openness cannot be served by that degree of discrimination, so their freedom must be limited for the good of all.

The other core awareness is that discriminatory is as discriminatory does. If I refuse to serve people of a particular racial group people in my Café, it is no defence to say

• I gave them fair warning, they could start their own café,
  nor
• that I did not intend to discriminate or consider that I have
  nor
• that I’ve never served such people in 2,000 years,
  nor
• that God told me to do it,
  nor
• that some of my best friends are x and agree with my policy,
  nor
• there are other parts of the world where such discrimination would be acceptable
  nor
• I say my behaviour is not discriminatory, so it’s not.

None of these defences stack up because however reasonable they may sound to the people concerned, they compromise the fundamental possibility of equality.

In many of our parishes we govern schools in which these principles are implemented throughout with ease and grace. The reason is that our leaders, many of them inspired by Christian commitment of one sort or another, have turned what was originally an eccentricity of the enlightened into a social norm.

How sad if the Church that is supposed to be the corporate expression of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, whose words undermined all injustice and inequality, then and now, has to be dragged along as an afterthought, kicking and screaming. So we sometimes see the last first, and the first last — another gospel principle that implies fundamental equality for all God’s children, and the necessity of social as well as spiritual transformation in the Kingdom...

The Machine Shop that Rocked

Made in Dagenham is a great big steaming mug of works canteen tea with six sugars in it. Some will find parts of it over-sugared — Bob ’Oskins singing “my old man said follow the van,” for example. That got me queasy, but great acting drew me in, and won through twee, formulaic characterisation.

First Class honours go to Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James and, particularly, Miranda Richardson reprising her Blackadder role as the dyspeptic Virgin Queen, reincarnated as Barbara Castle. Whatever will they think of next? John Sessions as Harold Wilson. But it all just worked.

Rita works in the Machine shop at Ford’s Dagenham plant. The management have re-graded her work as unskilled, notwithstanding the fact that most of us would be hard pushed to make a car seat cover with no more than a pair of scissors and a sewing machine. More to the point, Ford has been in the habit of paying its women a mere fraction of what it pays workers with XY Chromosomes. Aided and abbetted by her mates, she does an Erin Brockovich and forms a rainbow alliance — including a lovable Union Rep, Secretary of State Barbara Castle, and even Posh Lisa who gets teated like a cocktail waitress by her old man, notwithstanding her double first from Cambridge.

The money shot is the point at which Rita’s hubby Eddie experiences epiphany. She points out to him that his decency in not getting drunk, knocking her about, or dumping the kids on her, is not some Star Turn qualifying for a double dose of droit de seigneur, but simply the way things should normally be between two human beings who respect each other.

It's a matter of morals — basic right and wrong. As indeed gender equality is for the vast majority of the population. The Church claims moral leadership, but they are amazed to find much of it in the guard’s van, kicking and screaming about what seems to them a primary moral law, somehow kidding itself it’s in the driver’s cab. How crazy is that?

Anyway, the Equal Pay Act passed in 1970. The Equalities Act came into effect last week. That’s good news for people whose hearts are warmed by the Dagenham story. The bad news is that UK women, forty years on, still earn an average of 16·4% less per hour than men. 40 years of good intentions, foot-dragging, appeasing hypocrisy and hoping it will all go away has not yet delivered the goods...

Weaving the Rainbow in Wycombe

Rainbow Worship is a regular outfit based at St Birinus and St John High Wycombe, which started four years ago and increasingly draws in several dozen people with learning difficulties from all around, to network, celebrate, and worship. It’s a congregation that’s started from the other end, not so much trying to jam people into conventional observance as to allow simple and engaging expressions of love and prayer to emerge from a very diverse crowd.

RW is rumbustous and celebratory some of the time, but hushed and awed at others. Comments are chipped in from all around as things happen, like an ol’ time revival meeting. Craft actvities are built in, and the management has radically tried to break down the distinction between client and helper. On one occasion, as Noah’s Ark was revealed in all its glory, a loud voice cried from the back, “This is one I made earlier.”

Last night I confirmed six members of this community. It’s extraordinary how live it feels praying with people who have no “side” or pretensions, but simply respond instintively in the moment. Highlights included a Creed delivered to thunderous band in clubbing style, melding into a sea of friendly, open faces, dancing and banners, and losing myself in the joys of dance with a marimba. One of the first things I believe we will lose in heaven is self consciousness, which will be subsumed in self-awareness, and the tingling joy of being alive, as death is swallowed up in victory. That’s what we did last night anyway. A lot of us came away feeling we had had a trip to the cleaners — and that doesn’t always happen when we worship, does it?

I found it the experience of a lifetime to bless, anoint and confirm in such a place. There had been modest anxiety in the setting up about how some would cope with the touching and liturgics.
Actually, it was a liturgical stroll along a moving walkway, to call people by name into the kingdom, to anoint them as a sign that they are royalty with the King of Kings, to bless on the basis that “God has called you by name and made you his own...”

Although the language of inclusiveness is politically usable, I don’t actually think it quite covers such experiences. “Inclusiveness” assumes there is a some thing that really belongs to “us” (whoever we are) into which “they” (whoever they are) need to be “included” preferably by the things “we” do for “them.” This did not feel like that at all.

The truth is that we are all exceptional people, all fearfully and wonderfully made, with varying awareness and ownership of what makes us exceptional. Some people with learning difficulties have far more of this than the well-heeled. The real emergence of something heavenly occurs naturally when we all embrace our exceptionalities — why should we wish to be deceived? — and lose ourselves in the emergent transcendence.

One interesting little piece of inclusiveness though, was the inclusion of Morag who founded and leads the group. She was stuck in Switzerland waiting for a plane, so was skyped into the event on one of the worship leaders’ laptops.

It was the first tme I had seen that done in a confirmation, and it somehow affirmed the irrelvance of geography, as well as “disability” to the proceedings.

Many thanks to Steve the Vicar, Morag, Roger who led the talk, craft leaders, and Jay who led much of what geeks would call the Synaxis, and friends, including Scratch the Preacherman Dog.

When you get to heaven it will seem a more natural carry-on to you than it wll people who have been further up themselves on earth, because you will have been practising first.