Ride a dead horse...

As our politicians try to find ingenious ways to save cash, Private Eye tells us that in 2007, The Ministry of Defence managed to find £700m of efficiency ssings, whilst the National Audit Office found that MoD’s procurement budget had ballooned by £733m the same year through “deliberate delays.” The dear old NHS last year saw a 2% rise in the number of nurses, 6% in the number of medical consultants, and 12% in the number of managers.

Meanwhile, in Churches all over the country, some programmed activities stagger on way past their sell-by date, bereft of passion, commitment and support, running on guilt and the fading memory of supposedly glorious days gone by.

Into these troubling predicaments ride Jeff and Caroline Wilkinson of Towson, Maryland, USA, (h/t Ali Kaan) with a breakthrough discovery for manegement consultants everywhere:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." However, in modern business, education and government, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired".
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements on all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

One might add “introducing a new appraisal scheme” and “setting smart targets.” Why don’t Christians have a more coherent internalised theology of death and resurrection? We are called to what St Paul called “carrying about in the body the death of the Lord Jesus so that the life of the Lord Jesus may live through us.” That’s why churches rot away on the outside, but are continually renewed within, by God’s good providence.

Inability or refusal to grasp and internalise this basic “life and death” principle of Christianity leads to triumphalism, dead institutonalism, infallibilism, fundmentalisms various, and paranoia about being persecuted. It saps energy and stirs contention. It encourages Christians in stormy waters to cling to the wreckage, when they should be putting out into the deep.

Real Easter faith, is accepting the deadness of what really is dead and to trusting in God, who raises the dead, for all that is to be. As demonstrated by Jesus on the night of his arrest, saving faith is about knowing we have come from God and are returning to him, whatever may come in between...

image of King Wenceslas riding a horse upside down from Adam Paul: All rights reserved. Used by kind permission.

Practice Resurrection!

Easter Day: The Lord is risen indeed! Thanks to the 200+ with whom we lit a fire in Aylesbury Churchyard last night, and 37 souls who braved the wind and rain on the Bury field in Great Missenden this morning to proclaim that love is strong as death. The thought that true resurrection is not only an event, but can be a way of life, brought to mind a poem by Wendell Berry:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Easter: the Real Deal

There is no such thng as “Resurrection Lite.” It’s all or nothing. Be not fobbed off by anything less than the whole nine yards. I was impressed by a straightforward, historically founded, and challenging Easter piece in the Times by Tom Wright. He suggests that the simple truth is far more a resource than the pygmy, patronising versions we have sometimes contented outselves with in the past 150 years, scaled down to our own expectations, comfort zones, and sentimental ideas of probability.

“Resurrection” to 1st-century Jews wasn't about “going to Heaven”: it was about the physically dead being physically alive again. Some Jews (not all) believed that God would do this for all people in the end. Nobody, including Jesus's followers, was expecting one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history. The stories of the Resurrection are certainly not “wish-fulfilments” or the result of what dodgy social science calls “cognitive dissonance”. First-century Jews who followed would-be messiahs knew that if your leader got killed by the authorities, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the revolution or get yourself a new leader. Going around saying that he'd been raised from the dead wasn't an option.

Unless he had been. Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn't have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he's still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he's gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.

The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn't defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon - He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.

Let's be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn't mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God's life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect - and in the whole world.

....The split between God and the “real” world has produced a public life that lurches between anarchy and tyranny, and an aesthetic that swings dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism. But we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim “inspiration” when they put cows in formaldehyde.

The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn't have the last word. When the Church begins to work with Easter energy on the twin tasks of justice and beauty, we may find that it can face down the sneers of sceptics, and speak once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard.

Easter is for life...

...and not just for Christmas. Archbishop Rowan’s YouTube messages are setting a consistently high standard of thoughtful comment. He explains simply what Christians do, and what it means to us. He pictures Holy Week and Easter as a journey, following the story with multiple subtexts and inner levels — Just add imagination and honesty, and you never know; you may get some personal revelation.

L4/44-50 Bringing it all home at Easter

Not a bad approach and landing. Flunked 46 and 47, but managed most of the others; although the day job that helped with some tasks didn’t seem to help with others, and made one completely impossible:

44. Help someone carry a burden
Talking through job applications with a colleague or drumming up cash for historic church buildings could be seen as this, or are these activities too metaphorical? Carried the bag back to the car after our weekly shop at Sainsbury’s, just in case...

45. Forgive someone
Hard to think of anyone who’s wronged me really, but I forgive them anyway! As someone more sinning than sinned against, I’ve wondered down the years, about the difference between saying “sorry” (where the wrongdoer retains control) and “please forgive me” (where control passes to the person who was wronged.) Why is forgiveness such a dying art? perhaps many people are just so angry so much of the time, they just can’t focus on anything else?

46. Make Easter Card for a neighbour
Failed. Dong. I always love to get them from the select few friends who bother, and feel I ought to bother, and maybe we should make more of Easter Cards than Christmas cards, but never get round to it...

47. Polish someone’s shoes for them
Only bishop in England not doing this today. Next year? I miss it from parish life, though it was always difficult to get people to consent to having their feet washed. Maybe we’re just too prissy for this stuff in England...

48. Five Minutes Silence at 12 noon
Impossible, since I was kicking off a three hours service at exactly 12 noon, and if I’d fallen into total silence at that point someone would have called an ambulance.

49. Watch a film about Jesus Life
I need to admit that filmic Jesus seldom floats my boat. In the first century they had real problems accepting Jesus’ full humanity, but those are nothing compared to fifties Hollywood. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, pretty much a spoof of Hollywood Jesus, had a point. Mel Gibson was gross and schlocky, with a few shafts of light, but I couldn’t watch Casualty for months afterwards. So I settled for The Jesus of Montreal, which accepts Jesus’ basic humanity and is true to what it purports to be rather than creating a silly Disney world.

50. Celebrate Easter
Did that, round the fire first thing, in the snow at Coleshill, and at Buckinghamshire’s smallest parish church — Little Hampden.

PS Lucy’s and my chocolate fast did happen this year, though there was one party at which we were uncertain whether a brown smudge on a cream slice did or didn’t contain Chocolate. I resolved the situation by issuing a Rabbinic style decision that it didn’t. Perhaps I'm beginning to get the hang of this religion thing...

Dreaming of a White Easter

Principal Mass of Easter at Coleshill in the snow — beautifully decorated and very full, with an unusual but very apposite Resurrection East Window. To the Left is Lazarus, and, Right, the Widow’s son at Nain. Proceedings ended up very amicably in the Red Lion pub next door.

The congregation included a lady who was born in 1912, and had thus experienced Easter this early, as a baby. Here are the facts as I have received them (h/t Martyn Green & Ron Immelman). The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913. It can only ever be one day earlier (March 22). The next time this will happen will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has seen, or will ever see, it any earlier than this year! So in 200 years time, Babies may be born who will experience both dates. Unless, that is, Aubrey de Grey is correct, and the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born (but that’s another argument)...

Easter Fire — Christ is Risen Indeed!

26 insomniacs at 5·50 in Great Missenden, not quite Dawn, as the clocks haven’t gone forward yet this year. Walking through the village afterwards, a dove (I kid you not) watched us go by from one of the cottages in the high street. If Candle light is a sign of Easter faith, it’s corny but notable that our candles guttered and occasionally blew out as the snow began to fall, but as long as we stayed together and re-lit from each other’s, we were able to carry the flame from our early bonfire all the way to the paschal candle in Church. Then the snow started in earnest... We are an Easter people. Alleluia is our song. Don’t know what the neighbours made of it, but one day they’ll understand!

Again the Light said, ‘Unlock!’
Said Lucifer, ‘Who goes there?’
A huge voice replied, the lord
Of power, of strength, that made
All things. Dukes of this dark place
Undo these dark gates so Christ come
In, the son of heaven’s King.
With that word, hell split apart,
Burst its devil’s bars; no man
Nor guard could stop the gates swing
Wide. The old religious men,
Prophets, people who had walked
In darkness, ‘Behold the Lamb
Of God,’ with Saint John sang now.
But Lucifer could not look
At it, the light blinding him.
And along that light all those
Our Lord loved came streaming out.

The Vision of Piers Plowman (Langland — 14th Century)