John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Jesus: One for the Community

... Note where and how Jesus first revealed his glory to the world: not by a wonderful healing, not with a stunning sermon, but by going round the back of the bar at a wedding and generously boosting the stocks of best wine. And thus revealed the real good news in Christianity. That Jesus is One for the Community. ...

Jesus: One for the Community - my exposition of the Wedding at Cana of Galilee, to a gathering of community leaders at St Mary's, Gosforth, Cumbria, this evening.

Something constructive

For fifteen years Paul and Emma have been doing something constructive with their weekends - walking the coastline of England and Wales a couple of days at a time, and in no particular order. It was great to receive a postcard from them today telling me that they've reached the end, with just one six-mile stretch to go, on which they hope to be joined by some of the people who've journeyed with them on the way. My bit was between Hightown and Liverpool on 25 November 2006 (pictured here with Emma and one of Crosby beach's 100 cast-iron Antony Gormleys). Looks like they're planning on attempting Scotland's coastline next. Their blog recording each walk is a good reference for anyone contemplating visiting bits of unknown coastline: like where we're going tomorrow, between Scafell and Sellafield, of which Paul wrote, '...if you want to walk this stretch of coast, make sure you do it anticlockwise. The view is much better that way'.

Starting from scratch

Congratulations to my sister Linda on getting a proper book in print (mine have all been self-published, they used to call it vanity publishing...). Starting from Scratch is a very useful Grove booklet for any churches considering what's needed to get some youth work underway. Recommended.

The good builder and the cowboy builder

And we very easily recognise the situation described in today’s parable. A story about two builders. The decent builder and the cowboy builder. The one who did his homework on the structure, prodded and dug and found the solid rock which he knew would fix those foundations firmly. And the one who did a quick job, dumped his structure on the cheapest bit of ground he could find, took his money and ran before the people who bought the house from him noticed the cracks in the plaster and the wobbling brickwork and the shifting eaves. 

Of all the parables of Jesus this is one of the plainest. It tells us very clearly that those who hear the words of Jesus and put them into practice are like a good builder, solid, secure, like a rock, and those who don’t are like the cowboy builder, shaky, insecure, liable to spend life looking over their shoulder, running away from their mistakes.

Not the most coherent sermon of mine, but I was only commissioned to do it at 8.00 last night. Happy to be back in role for a few minutes, happy to help out in a crisis and to be among friends at St Gabriel's, Toxteth, this morning, talking about the good builder in the parable as a whole-life disciple: The good builder and the cowboy builder, my talk today.

No one should be sacrificed

Sometimes a book comes along which... well, you know. I won't say that James Warren's Compassion Or Apocalypse?: A comprehensible guide to the thought of Rene Girard has changed my life, but if I hadn't been grappling with Girard's astonishing gospel revelations for the past decade or more, then reading about them here for the first time might have had that effect. It has certainly been the best 'introductory' read I've yet had on the subject. Gripping stuff. And I commend it to you, highly.

Girard's thought is 'difficult' to grasp not because it's knotty theoretical, detached, stuffily academic, but because he is dealing with the question of who we are at the most foundational level, and describing those aspects of us which are so fundamental to who we are, that we usually don't notice them, human characteristics so obvious that we can't see them. Warren has done a very good job in providing clear discussion and some extremely memorable images, to help us. For instance, I thrilled to read his comparison of the violent sacrificial God (the God of of ancient myths and the Old Testament, whose home is in the bloodstained temple) to a nuclear reactor - overwhelmingly powerful, a power for good if attended to faithfully, carefully, in great detail, hour by hour, otherwise liable to explode with catastrophic effects.

We are driven by our desires, which mimic the desires of others. Just as society looks set to implode with the violent energy of all these conflicting desires, all is resolved when a victim is sacrificed. Ancient cultures were based on a 'founding murder' which segued into a sacrificial system, in which it is understood that it is always better that one person should die, to maintain the stability of the whole. This system sustained human culture, because it was hidden from view, until Jesus came along - Jesus, whose crucifixion revealed the sacrificial system for the first time; Jesus, whose resurrection as the crucified victim (scarred hands and feet on view) announced the end of the sacrificial system and the breaking-in of the power of self-giving love.

'Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,' he said on the cross. Since he rose again, humankind increasingly got the message - we now do know what we do, scapegoating innocents, creating victims. Without recourse to the divinely-discredited old forms of sacrifice we are torn now between being knowingly driven by our mimetic desires, understanding the rivalrous violence they cause but upholding all that as 'the way things are' (which is the position taken by 'Sacrificial Christianity', the Christianity of Empire, any form of Christianity which upholds a wrathful God), and on the other hand, allowing our desires to mirror the desires of the God of Jesus - who is not in rivalry with anyone, never in violent conflict, only in self-giving love. And because of that tension, we are in crisis.

Warren (following Girard) tells us that of all people Friedrich Nietzsche understood this better than anyone, and put the whole gospel into one memorable phrase: 'Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.'  What we do with that revelation, where we go with that, absolutely determines our future.