John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Forgive anyway!

Imagine a world where the greatest power in it, the principle by which the world operated, was that of mercy, compassion and forgiveness. 

Imagine a world where you called up your credit card company, said, “I’m sorry, I’ve overextended myself this month; and I can’t make my payment,” and the bank said, “Oh, that’s O.K., you’re forgiven. Don’t worry about it.” 

Imagine a world where you make a huge mistake at work that cost your company thousands of pounds, and your boss simply said, “Never mind! These things happen. You’ll do better next time.”

Imagine a world where Philip Green takes a look at his finances, hands over three-quarters of his personal billions to his BHS employees, and says, “I’m retiring from this, but here, organise yourselves into a workers cooperative, do it your way, and succeed, with my blessing.” 

Why do we laugh at such suggestions? Only because the world we live in, which has shaped our outlook on life, is a world which doesn’t operate on mercy, compassion and forgiveness, it operates on the cold, hard exchange of value, on the survival of the strongest. The business world is a ‘dog eat dog’ world.

What would it be like to live in a world which was run on merciful and compassionate  lines? 

Our calling as Christians is to be people who can imagine such a different world, and in the imagining, help bring this world into being.

Our faith is that the ‘dog eat dog’ way is not the only way, for we can see the way of mercy, compassion and forgiveness gently breaking in, like flowers through concrete. Our task is to tend these carefully so that they flourish and spread.

Our inspiration is Jesus of course, whose teachings about the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, whose parables, provoke and encourage such imaginings. ...

- the start of today's talk, Forgive anyway! which is substantially Paul Neuchterlein's. Always a valued  guide and inspiration.

Living where lost and found collide

“There is another world, but it’s in this world,” the poets and mystics of every age tell us. Knowingly or unknowingly they’re following Jesus, whose descriptions of heaven are rooted in earth, whose take on salvation is about celebrating those moments where lostness gives way to  foundness, moments we all know and feel from time to time. Jesus, who is always seeking redemption in the company of those who know they’re lost.

- quoting Geoff Dyer's Foreword to Annie Dillard's The Abundance, in my talk today, Living where lost and found collide.

On carrying our cross in the Anthropocene

"We have travelled to a new planet, propelled on a burst of carbon dioxide. That new planet, as is often the case in science fiction, looks more or less like our own but clearly isn't. I know that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself on purpose. This is the biggest thing that's ever happened." (Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet)

Now if we can’t accept that this is the way the world really is now, we should ask ourselves who and what are we believing instead, in who or what are we putting our faith, and why?

But if we do accept that this is the way the world really is now, then the wise thing to do, according to our Archbishop, is to celebrate what’s good, and to lament what’s bad, and to be angry about the things that are unjust, and to take those things to God so that he will tell us what to do about it.

And if we accept that the wise way is also the way which requires us to ‘carry our cross’, in the work of protest and lament and healing on this rapidly and irreversibly changed planet, then our challenge is to weigh up the costs involved, and to be prepared to take the consequences. Bill McKibben is clear when he writes, 

"We're not … going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilisation developed.  We're like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack.  Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill but half his heart is dead tissue.  We’re like the guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke.  He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either."

There’s no going back. The question is, how will we go forward?

Let us go forward lamenting what is bad - the carbon choked-up, rapidly overheating planet, product of centuries of industrialised production and unrestrained consumption which is all that many generations, in this part of the world, have ever known. 

Let us go forward being angry about the things that are unjust in this - not least that the world’s poorest people invariably suffer the most in this situation, and that the wealthiest nations - who created the problem in the first place and perpetuated it by following the idol of growth - refuse to help. Those who have weighed up the cost and are determined to dump all the consequences on others.

Let us go forward celebrating what we might find here to be good - seeking opportunities to nurture a broken planet back to health, making friends with others across all social, economic, religious and national boundaries in pursuit of healing ways.

Let us us go forward taking all these things to God so that He will tell us what to do about them.

- My talk today is a Greenbelt 2016 mash-up (inspired by it even though I couldn't go), merging the childrens' interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury with Bill McKibben's Eaarth visions: Carrying our cross in the Anthropocene.