John Davies - Notes from a small vicar

Big Brother and the desert experience

The TV programme Big Brother isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The prospect of watching a house full of strangers thrown together for a few weeks with very little to do except eat, sleep, do their make-up and talk, doesn’t appeal to all. And the characters, chosen for their quirkiness or likelihood to create tabloid headlines, aren’t always the most endearing, more often instead self-promoting, self-serving, not the easiest people to live with in a confined and highly-controlled space, for any length of time.

But look at it another way and Big Brother is a fascinating experiment in human behaviour, an exploration of how people relate, bond, make decisions, form groups, fall in and out of love, when all that they have to do all day is to focus on that very process and their part in it.....

I got Pip Wilson (who champions Big Brother) and a meditation on the ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ experience into my February article in The Lydford village magazine [Big Brother and the desert experience]: with the suggestion that this Lent people consider the parish church available as a real-time Diary Room ...

Turning water into wine, and blaming the ship's captain for a disaster

... I also like to think that Jesus performed the miracle of the wine at the wedding at Cana for the sake of the bar staff, the caterers. It may or may not have been their fault that stocks ran so low; whatever, they would have got the blame and took the shame when the wine ran out. Jesus saved them from all that. 

How quick employers are to blame their staff for mistakes: how little time it takes for a shipping company to blame the captain of a stricken vessel for a disaster, and how quick everyone else is to join in the scapegoating. Evidence is not required - just a victim.

This brings us to the very heart of the gospel where Jesus’ crucifixion is the consequence of scapegoating, but Jesus the crucified victim brings the scapegoating mechanism to light for all of us to see; on the cross the scapegoating mechanism dies with Jesus and Jesus’ self-giving generosity reveals another way we can be. That’s the very heart of the Good News. The miracle at the wedding in Cana gives us the first hint of it. 

From my talk today, Intemperate Christianity - the good news.

Nathaniel and the new vision of God

Nathaniel and the new vision of God: today's offering.

 

Epiphany - dreamers and stargazers

Epiphany - dreamers and stargazers: today's offering.

At the year’s turning: with Mary, pondering

Happy New Year, reader. I sincerely hope it is for you.

Today's talk, At the year’s turning: with Mary, pondering, owes a tremendous amount to the opening chapter in a small but characteristically powerful book by Walter Brueggemann, Subversive Obedience: Truth-Telling and the Art of Preaching, which begins, 

We might as well concede at the outset that we live, all of us, in a promiscuous, self-indulgent society which prizes autonomy. As a consequence, "obedience" is a tough notion, which we settle mostly either by the vaguest of generalisations, or by confining subject matter to those areas already agreed upon.

How to preach "subversive obedience" into such a society? This is Brueggemann's subject which he tackles with skill and subtle power. If I can get even a modicum of this into my preaching I'll be happy. No prizes for guessing my new year's resolution.

 

Happy Christmas, reader

Happy Christmas, reader. Hope it is a good one for you. Some seasonal contemplations for you, from recent services:

Zechariah - considering new possibilities

When he told me I was pregnant

.. and this morning's offering, Be My Baby, a reflection on the following, which I originally wrote for a Greenbelt Christmas special event at The Greenhouse 1992:

BE MY BABY 

Be my baby

Be my little bundle of fleshy joy

Be innocent

Be a gurgling, smiling distraction

For me

 

Be my baby

Be simply playful

Be soft to touch

And totally trusting

Of me

 

Be my baby

Let me hear your pretty giggles

Let me hold your tiny hands

Let your clear untainted eyes gaze

At me

 

Be my baby

Take my attention

Be the keeper of my hours

Make uncompromised demands

Of me

 

Be my baby

Be the giver of surprises

Be the source of troubled nights

Create moments of embarrassment

For me

 

Be my baby

Bind me to yourself

By your dizzying devotion

Trust the well-being of your body

To me

 

Be my baby

Make me feed you

Be my baby

Make me hold you

Make a sold-out suffering servant

Of me

Prepare in the wilderness a road for God

A voice cries out,

'Prepare in the wilderness

a road for God'

Isaiah 40.3

Working through advent with Ruth Burgess' Wild Goose book Hear My Cry. The Isaiah reading makes me think again about roads, which were for quite some time the one-and-only theme for me (see my other blog Walking the M62). The theme of preparation: recalling all those struggling men who hacked out large corridors of Britain in the push for motorways in the 1960s and 70s, their story captured poignantly in Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballad, Song of a Road, with its descriptive track titles including We Needed a Way Cut Through the Land, Sixty Tons of Steel, What Made You Come into This Game?, Come All You Gallant Drivers and I'm a Roving Rambler. Preparation is a rough, rugged, difficult task, and it relates well to my Advent prayer life at present. But the other trigger-point is thinking about the visionaries of the 1920s and 30s corporations who created the great out-of-town estates, neat houses with gardens front and back, tree-lined avenues, space for air and play - new homes for those previously crammed into inner-city slums (see eg my paper Towards an Urban Theology of Land). Preparation follows vision; results in something better. An advent theme with promise....

 

In search of leadership in a time of darkness

As we make our act of remembrance today we do so in a society and a world which needs good leaders. People who will not shrink from difficult decisions in government and economics, and conflict, who will embrace the realities, grapple with the complexities, act on conviction - people of all generations who can help and influence others along the way. Leaders like you and me.

Especially we need leaders (parents, grandparents, friends, neighbours) who can teach deep values to others, especially the young, who may be in the dark about such things: in a recently-published book on just war, the former defence advisor and leading public Christian David Fisher argues (along with General Lord Dannatt) that many modern soldiers have had little prior education in religion or morality: he says that "It was striking how Lynndie England, one of the participants in the Abu Ghraib abuses, claimed in her defence that she had assumed the abusive practices were acceptable because no one had told her otherwise."

In search of leadership in a time of darkness - my offering for Remembrance Sunday's services, with the Parable of the Talents as a conversation-starter on the subject of leadership. The quote comes from a book review in the Church Times this week, of David Fisher, Morality and War: Can war be just in the twenty-first century?.

In search of love in the face of Apocalypse

This is a time of red skies and uncontrolled fires; this is a time when the dead are recalled, whose souls are alive to us again in the potent atmosphere of remembrance. This is a time of All Saint's, All Souls', of Halloween, of Bonfire Night, of Remembrance Day, when we set fires to protest at the growing darkness of winter, when the red poppies we wear throb with the pain of history, when we are full of the sense that the end of the year is nigh.

And this is an apocalyptic time; this is a time when people at large, the whole world over, see, in the stormy skies and violent tides of contemporary disasters, signs of the end of time; where it is not uncommon to hear talk of apocalypse in the doomsday scenarios of politicians, filmmakers, terrorists and ecologists.

So the question is, how are we to live in an age of apocalypse? Inspired by the Fortean Times cover article on the Tate Britain John Martin exhibition, my talk today: In search of love in the face of Apocalypse.

A wedding party you'd want to avoid

There are some parties you just wouldn't want to go to. And the wedding party in today's parable of Jesus is precisely one of those. Now wait a minute, you might be thinking, isn't this a parable of the kingdom of heaven, and therefore isn't the king in the parable meant to be God, and the wedding feast a picture of heaven, and we, the people that king invited? And doesn't the parable tell us quite clearly that we really ought to want to be at the party if we don't want God to reject us? And it's understandable if you were thinking those thoughts, because that's the way this parable has been taught for many, many generations.

A wedding party you'd want to avoid - the latest in my series of talks borrowing heavily from William Herzog's genre-defying Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (reading the parables as a form of social analysis and theological reflection 'on the gory details of the way oppression served the interests of the ruling class'), and various Girardian writers usually sourced from Paul Neuchterlein's essential lectionary site. Today, The Parable of the Wedding Banquet in which, I was keen to demonstrate, the king in the story isn't meant to be seen as God, he's meant to be seen as a king, 'A man with an army on a drive for power'. And that the parable mirrors the real-life behaviour of King Herod the Great on his rise to power.

But sometimes Jesus tells parables to illustrate not so much what the kingdom of God is like, but what we human beings are like, in stories from everyday life which have a ring of truth for their listeners. Like those of the vineyard workers, owners, tenants, we've been grappling with in recent weeks. Difficult stories of dangerously driven men willing to resort to violence against the 'other' to fulfil their desires. To discern what Jesus wants us to learn about the kingdom of heaven from these parables we have to read between the lines, just as to discern what he wants us to learn about the kingdom of heaven from our experiences in daily life, we have to develop an eye for seeing what God is doing in the gaps, an ear for listening for God speaking to us through the nuances.

This week's talk owes an enormous amount to Marty Aiken's tremendous paper 'The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet' [download Word doc here]. My talk is here.