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.