Six commandments of Isaiah

It is wonderful to be part of a large tradition of Biblical interpretation that is so much bigger than the latest paperback, or the shallows of Fundamentalism. It is a joyful thing to swim in deep water, which we do when we engage with the Hebrew Scriptures in depth, accompanied by the rabbis.

Licensing my friend and colleague Jo Gallant at Flaunden on Friday, the call of Isaiah came up. Someone has been asking me for the reference to the “Jewish Book” I used.
People have asked where it came from, it was from the Gemara of Chapter 3 of the Fifth Tractate (Makkoth) of the Fourth order (Neziqin) of the Babylonian Talmud.

It relates to the Mishnah of Rabbi Hanania ben Aqashya on Isaiah 42 about the number of mitzvoth the Eternal has commanded. If you wanted to have a passage of the Hebrew scriptures handy, it would be Isaiah 33:15-16. It looks as though this particular segment of Gemara is ascribed to Rav. Hamnuna, a fourth century Babylonian rabbi — “Isaiah came and reduced the number of commandments to six.”
I’ve put my comments from Friday in italics!

1. Walk in righteousness (Like Abraham in Genesis 18:19) — we are called to something much bigger than a way of life, not a religion
   
   
2. Speak uprightly, and do not provoke your neighbour in public — It is always sad if people get into habits of speaking behind their hands about others in the house of God. Let everyone speak the truth. Or to put this the way Jesus did, let your yes be yes, and your no no. Anything else comes from the enemy.
   
   
3. Spurn profit gained from injustice — The first claim of love is justice (MLK). That’s not me, that’s Martin Luther King. The man was right! So if you must fight, fight fair.
   
   
4. Wave away a Bribe —We live in a society where nobody will do anything if there isn’t something in it for them. But you all will, won’t you. Love seeks not its own. It’s all about the good of the person you love. Bribery is the ultimate transaction — I can get you to scratch my back by scratching yours first. God is all about grace, undeserved gift, a generous eye, and a free heart.
   
5. Stop your ears against hearing of blood — or as we call it in the trade, gossip. Some parishes degenerate into a kind of ongoing soap opera of he said this and she said that. But you don’t have to be like that. Just say no.
   
   
6. Stop your eyes against looking on Evil — Look for the positive in others, and the wonderfully positive in yourself, because that is where you will find what is of God. That should give you enough to be going on with.
   

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...

Blood & Honey: Jacob's Ladder

Tony Robinson does the Old Testament. Having been shown some creative children’s bible stories this week, my mind turned to Blood and Honey — shorts that used to go out on Sunday mornings so I’ve only seen a couple, but they struck me as the best Bible storytelling I’ve ever seen. I love the way in which he manages to keep the pace going on various levels at once, and connect the story to his viewers without being preachy. Magic stuff — yea, the best ever. Sadly now almost unobtainable, though, even in our mediarich multiverse.

Bruised hands rock the cradle

Rape and violence against women are not topics for polite conversation, but they are realisites of life all over the world. It’s especially shameful if the Church becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. Yesterday saw a challenging morning in the big top, sharing with spouses a Bible Study on II Samuel 13, the story of Tamar. Introducing the session, Jane Williams reminded us of the basic principle that “Violence done within the Body of Christ is violence done to the Body of Christ.” A performance by Riding Lights about Jesus’ dealings with women had two bishops near me blinking back tears. This was a straightforward, African Bible Study, lasting most of the morning, with men and women studying separately to provide safe space in which both could discern meaning from their gendered experience.

Leading an open Bible Study for 1200 people from 130 nations is not easy. There were inevitable clunkinesses about flow and content. Some points of view, especially from Portugueses speakers, were trenchant. It wasn’t to the taste of all bishops. Stewards reported that over 100 had slid off within an hour — all men! So this was raw, challenging stuff, but all the more worthwhile for that.

Only a dozen or so of the 1200 people there had ever heard II Samuel 13 read on a Sunday. It’s a powerful warning about the way a family can be ruined by civil war arising from politicking behind the scenes à la Jonadab. It tells of a brave and resourceful victim of rape, who refuses to stay silent. The passage unlocked fierce responses to issues of gender and power in the world church. We were reminded of violence by some women against men, too, but the heart of the problem was the other way round. One passionate North Indian contributor told of human trafficking and the abuse of women.

“There are serious issues we are not talking about that matter far more than homosexuality.”

This comment was followed by a spontaneous ovation from the floor, lasting almost half a minute. Another male contributor suggested

“talking about homosexuality may be a way of avoiding the greater problem of heterosexual males behaving badly.”

It was instructive to explore this Scripture, and various responses and to do some rigorous self-examination of the way the Church can become abusive in its handling of institutional and personal power. The voice of Tamar stands witness within our Scriptures of a need for self scrutiny. These things were written for our learning.

I also want to record that the blunt African way of prising open texts directly and drawing them alongside personal stories, which some English colleagues seem to find so basic and uncongenial, has actually been one of the great spiritual discoveries of this Lambeth for me.

Wisdom, truth and hope

An extraordinary evening with the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks. His talk was warm and passionate, spiced with rabbinic wisdom and storytelling. He explained two kinds of covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures — Noah’s covenant of Fate sealed by the rainbow, and Moses and Abraham’s covenants of Faith, looking forward. From these we learn the sanctity of life, the integrity of all creation, and the value of Diversity in the rainbow’s split light. These provide foundations for friendship and common witness to the world, healing 1,000 bitter years of anti-Semitism in England up to the holocaust. If we were not particular we could not make a covenant, and if we were all the same, we would have nothing to say when we got into one.

A moving testmony came after the talk, when Sir Jonathan was asked about divisions in the Anglican Communion. This is what he said:

Every faith, being particular, has cracks and schisms. But the Anglican Church has held radically different people together more graciously and successfully over many hundred years than any other Western religion I know. I view it with wonder, awe, and admiration. Your ability to hold together in a world driving people apart is your gift to a landscape of hope.

He told us something about his education in Church of England schools, echoing what we find all the time in ours — that faith speaks to faith:

I was a Jew in a Christian school. Never once did I hear an anti-semitic remark or incident. Because the teachers knew about their faith, they could understand how I cared about mine. That is what the Church of England gave me, growing up.

Food for thought as we turn to business later this week...

Real Biblical Living with A. J. Jacobs

Once upon a time, in undergraduate Hebrew class, I referred to the ten commandments. “What about the other 603?” asked a friend who was a rabbinic student. A few years later an esteemed but more fundamental colleague said to me “all the problems in this parish could be solved if people did exactly as the Bible said.” I didn’t want to disagree, but, I wondered, “all the precepts of the Bible? Stoning Adulterers? banging holes through people’s ears? shunning mixed fibre clothing? ” No, said my friend. “Of course not. You’re just darkening counsel with words.” I don’t think I was. I was just trying to take what he had suggested seriously.

The word “Biblical” is used in all sorts of ways, often rather freely by some Conservative Evangelicals as a catch-all rah-rah term for anything they approve of really heartily. But what, actually, is “Biblical?” Six verses in the Bible could have anything at all to do with homosexuality, whilst over 3,000 deal with poverty. Yet when someone tells me they believe we are departing from “Biblical standards” they’re almost always referring to sexuality not redistributive social justice. Why so selective?

Enter A. J. Jacobs, a secular Jew from New York, journalist and human guinea pig.

I grew up in an extremely secular home in New York City. I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say: Not very. I attended no Hebrew school, ate no matzoh. The closest my family came to observing Judaism was that paradoxical classic of assimilation: a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree. It’s not that my parents badmouthed religion. It’s just that religion wasn’t for us. We lived in the 20th century, for crying out loud. In our house, spirituality was almost a taboo subject, much like my father’s salary or my sister’s clove cigarette habit...

For a long time, I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world. The potential for abuse too high. I figured it would slowly fade away like other archaic things. Science was on the march. Someday soon we’d all be living in a neo-Enlightenment paradise where every decision was made with steely, Spock-like logic.

As you might have noticed, I was spectacularly mistaken. The influence of the Bible -- and religion as a whole – remains a mighty force, perhaps even stronger than it was when I was a kid. So in the last few years, religion has become my fixation. Is half of the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I’m missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And most important, I now have a young son – if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don’t want to pass it onto him.

So I knew I wanted to explore religion. I just needed to figure out how.

A. J. decided to spend a year doing everything, as literally as possible, by The Book. He found 700 rules for Biblical Living, checking them through with serious Christian and Jewish scholars to resolve questions of interpretation. The challenge was not to be selective, but go the whole nine yards. Some Old Testament provisions seem particularly quaint and colourful, but he did also attempt seriously to follow big precepts about truthfulness, prayer and giving.

The result is hilarious and graphic, occasionally deep and often thought provoking. Especially if you go beyond quarrying for sound bites, it’s worth a read this summer, however you use the word “Biblical.”

1. Conservative Christian? it’s a challenge to examine your own selection criteria.Why do other sincere people just not get the things that seem so obvious to you in the Bible?
   
2. Agnostic/ Secular? it’s a challenge to reconsider your assumption that the Bible is irrelevant to real life. To what extent is all that is positive in your humanism agenda dependent on ancient wisdom?
   
3. Liberal? free and easy in outlook? it’s a challenge to consider how pattern, law, habit and obedience really are a powerful basis for positive personal change. What’s the positive role of allignment and authority in delivering good progressive principles?
4. Neocon? it’s a challenge to consider the limitations of “choice” as some kind of virtue in itself. In some core areas of life freedom from choice is actually more liberating than freedom of choice.
   

Just to get you started, the rules are here, and suggestions for how you too can live biblically, from someone who’s tried, here.

Stowe: alternatives to crass materialism

Great confirmation this morning at Stowe School. This public school, founded in 1926, lives in one of the most remarkable eighteenth century mansions and landscape gardens in England, formerly home to the Dukes of Buckingham & Chandos. Sir Richard Branson went to school there, but the school’s alumnus I think speaks most into where we need to be is Leonard Cheshire, VC, pioneer humanitarian. His bust is the first thing you see when you come out of the chapel. After wartime RAF service which included being there as they dropped the first atom bomb, he devoted his life to humanitarian causes including disaster relief and hospice care.

At the back of the chapel, there’s a small new seated quiet area, for ad hoc use by individuals and groups. It’s been marked out by a massive etched glass door that celebrates four kinds of virtue, as reflected in the stories of Old Testament characters. The artist spent time in school with a sketchbook recording aspects of pupils’ lives and work, and has interpreted the bible stories he was given in terms of life at the school.
His figures represent four excellent virtues:

First up (clockwise from the bottom right) is Esther, who is beautiful and knows it,and how to use the fact, drawing her beauty to the glory of God.
Next up, Samson, whose lurches of brute strength and determination may or may not achieve what he hopes.

Next round is Ruth, who speaks of faithfulness and friendship — what the Victorians would have called constancy. Finally Elisha works away quietly in his study, celebrating intellectual achievement, passion to see into the causes of things.

Default life aims for many posh people in our culture are mindless conformity, crass materialism and the cult of celebrity. Any or all of these four would achieve rather more. In this context, the work’s amazing.

Dat’ll be de Mille dat I die

As Old Testament Readings at morning office lead us through the story of Moses, a new generation is renewing the view of Old Testament history we got from those good ol’ Biblical epics of the fifties and sixties:

All members one of another?

Michael Schluter of the Relationships Foundation & Jubilee centre spoke this morning at the Chiltern Prayer Breakfast, with MP's, business and community leaders. Michael was a world bank economist, frustrated by the ineffectiveness of much aid activity, and the various theoretical models offered in East Africa. Michael believes Biblical (OT) teaching about Jubilee, Freedom from economic slavery, relational criminal law & education, are resources for an increasingly divided, unhappy and frustrated UK. Our manic, fragmented and precarious relational life came bottom of the UNICEF advanced nations wellbeing/ quality of life survey, with 1/8 of the population medicated for depression.

1. 100 people in a room actually represent (by the time you tot up their links) half a million relationships! Our educational system examines academic and learning skills, but not the main thing employers find makes a difference — emotional/ relational intelligence. How crazy is that?
   
   
2. Pretty much all the measuring sticks for human activity are financial. We think we are ‘the developed world,’ when actually we are relationally underdeveloped compared to some poorer countries. Yet this whole language reinforces the idea that only money really matters.
   There has to be more to life than GDP! Dr Schluter quoted Bobby Kennedy —

Gross Domestic Product
does not measure the health of our children,
the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry
or the strength of our marriages,
the intelligence of our public debate,
or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures everything, in short,
except that which makes life worthwhile...

Bobby Kennedy, 1968