John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Jesus the satirical gardener on the road to the future of God

... So here Jesus is presenting this violent theology which separates wheat from weeds, where those who are wheat keenly anticipate an end-time of fiery hell for the weeds we condemn. And into this, Jesus injects a line which sounds absurd to all the gardeners and farmers listening, saying, “don’t bother separating the weeds from the wheat. Let them grow together until the harvest.”

In a camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle sort-of way this statement of Jesus is memorably nonsensical. That’s no way to garden. And that’s an impossible task to perform at harvest-time. Jesus is painting the whole idea of wheat and weeds and hellfire as an absurdity. 

Do you get what this must mean? It must mean an end to our separating ourselves from others and in judgment condemning those others to hell. It must mean a beginning of our growing together with others towards the bright fulfilment of God’s good purposes for us all. ...

- from my talk today, Jesus the satirical gardener on the road to the future of God.

 

Alongside The Sower, getting busy with dirt

How do we understand The Parable of the Sower?

What if Jesus was trying to teach that the well-being of the soil and our own well-being depend deeply on each other?

For,  “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” [Wendell Berry]

- from my talk today, Alongside The Sower, getting busy with dirt.

 

Come, all you weary and burdened, in the Crimewatch generation

... Our present generation also sounds like children in the marketplace calling to one another. They will say to us - ‘You shouldn't be going to church, we know the way that church people really live, church is for hypocrites’; and then in the next breath they will say - ‘You can't close down that old church, it's a vital part of our village community, it holds our history, you've got to keep it open’. 

And we too, may be like children in the marketplace calling to one another. We say - ‘Let the young people come into the village, we long for more young families, let’s create affordable housing’; and when they come we tell them, ‘Keep the noise down, don't let those kids play ball games, you can’t  park your car on this road’. 

Just as we are burdened by people’s expectations so at times we burden others too. The good news is that Jesus wants to lift from us all those burdens, and in doing so, to give us the wisdom to live in such a way that we don’t burden others. ...

from my talk today, Come, all you weary and burdened, in the Crimewatch generation.

Kevin Crooks, M62: The Transpennine Motorway

Kevin Crooks: Scammonden

I'm delighted to be collaborating with photographer Kevin Crooks on his book M62: The Transpennine Motorway. His pictures major on the heights between Scammonden reservoir and Windy Hill (where the Pennine Way footpath crosses the motorway) and I've contributed some words to accompany his visuals. Kevin already shows some of the photographs on his website: here. The book, and possibly a touring exhibition, to follow.

Bringing Water to The Little Ones: Consolatory Empathy under Grenfell Tower

... The church of St Clement, Notting Dale was built and paid for in 1867 by Alfred Dalgarno, a philanthropist vicar with deep pockets and a compassion for the poor. The local council ward, the Dalgarno ward, is named after him. Parish priest and local councillor Fr Robert Thompson last week said, “This parish was built pre-welfare state and it is going to be needed as we now enter the post-welfare state.”

It seems quite clear that it was no accident that that church rapidly became a focal point for relief work and support during the  terrible crisis of the fire at Grenfell Tower - for throughout its history it has kept its focus on the little ones of its parish.

St Clement’s runs a charity called the Clement James centre, which  helps thousands of local people every year, into work, into university. That’s why the parish is so trusted locally. As the vicar explained, “We are called to share in the brokenness and the forgottenness of the people we serve.”

Now it’s always more difficult to identify who are 'the little ones' closer to home. In my experience even in the poorest parishes, people are reluctant to acknowledge the poverty. And even in the wealthiest parishes, we may find it hard to admit where a poverty of spirit, a loneliness of heart, prevails beneath the respectable surface.

But if we want to be faithful to him then this is what we are charged to do as followers of Jesus: to learn consolatory empathy; to focus our attention away from the big ones, the successful ones around us, to renounce our need to model our lives on them, and instead to seek out and understand 'the little ones' in our midst, and to act on what they tell us, on what we see and feel in our relationship with them. God gives each of us the particular gifts and characters to respond to this challenge in our own distinctive way. ...

- from my talk today, Bringing Water to The Little Ones: Consolatory Empathy under Grenfell Tower. With a big thanks to Giles Fraser and Michael Hardin.