Theology Everywhere

by Jennie Hurd.

The Welsh priest and poet R S Thomas wrote in his poem “Welsh Landscape,”

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky[1]

It’s a dark and brooding work, painting a bleak picture of a country trapped by its past. I am not Welsh, but I have worked in Wales as a Methodist minister for sixteen years to date. Thomas’s poetry is essential reading for me, but I often want to dare to put an alternative understanding alongside the message of much of it. The past need not constrain us but can be a source to set us free.

“To live in Wales is to be conscious” also of the sacredness of the land and the presence of the saints of years gone by. In Wales, you are never far from a community whose name begins with the prefix Llan – Llangollen, Llandeilo, Llandaf and so on. Llan is not easy to translate, but it implies a religious settlement, community or church. Often, it indicates a place where a holy man or woman lived and prayed, sometimes with followers, or where people wished to name their church in his or her honour. There is no escaping these local heroes, many dating back to the Age of the Saints in the sixth to eighth centuries. They are offer inspiration and encouragement and are remembered still.

If this is so in Wales and in other Celtic nations, it’s also true in England, if a little less obviously. St Albans, St Neots and Bury St Edmunds might be clear examples of places with associated saints, but historic holy men and women are often present, wherever you go Sometimes it takes some digging, that’s all. When I lived in Lichfield, I became aware of St Chad. St Who? He was one of four brothers who were among the first monks on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne when King Oswald sent St Aidan to establish his missional community there in 635. Chad became an apostle to the Mercians and lived for a time in Lichfield where you can still visit his holy well. Chad sent me digging. I found that his brother, Cedd, was the founder of St Peter’s on the Wall at Bradwell, Essex, and of the community at Lastingham in Yorkshire, as well as being an interpreter at the Synod of Whitby in 664.

King Oswald spent part of his youth in exile on Iona, to which he looked when planning the evanglisation of Northern England from Lindisfarne: Aidan was an Iona monk. I dug further. I discovered St Paulinus who had come over to England from Rome in 604 as part of the second Gregorian mission. He became chaplain to the wife of King Edwin of Northumbria who became a Christian and enabled the baptism of thousands of people, including his niece Hilda, later Hilda of Whitby. I discovered Paulinus’s association with Goodmanham in East Yorkshire and Dewsbury in the West Riding as well as further north, for example at Yeavering. Oswald built on Edwin and Paulinus’s foundations. I learnt that John of Beverley was educated under Hilda at Whitby, and that led me to the Hermit of Spurn Point, at the very edge of the east coast of Yorkshire, my native county. From Lichfield I returned to live in Wales, near to where Oswald died in battle, the place marked by a well. I’m sure you get the idea. We are never far from the heritage of a local saint.

I do not have a clearly developed systematic theology of the communion of saints, but I do know that my awareness of them and of their geographical closeness to familiar places inspires me and helps me in my discipleship day by day. I feel they stand in solidarity with us. I have never visited the Holy Land, but perhaps my experience rings true for those who have walked where the New Testament saints walked. I treasure being part of the one church on earth and in heaven, and to know that some of the great heroes of the faith – local heroes – were familiar with places I also know makes my journey that little bit easier. I feel they accompany me on the way, as they accompany many.

I wonder who are your local saints, your local heroes? Perhaps an awareness of them helps and inspires you as well.  

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[1] Thwaite, Anthony (ed.) 1996, R S Thomas Selected Poems, London: J M Dent

by Angie Allport.

There are a number of women called Mary in the New Testament. Some of them have not only been confused with each other, but with other women briefly mentioned in the gospels.

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.[1] (John 12:3a)

Who is the Mary in this reading? From the context, it is probably Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, as the anointing is said to take place in their house in Bethany.

And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.[2] (Luke 7:37-38)

Who is this woman in the house of a pharisee named Simon? Which ‘city’ is Jesus in? His last identified location in Luke’s Gospel was Nain.

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.[3] (Mark 14:3)

Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table.[4] (Matthew 26:6-7)

So now we’re back in Bethany at the house of Simon ‘the leper’, who may or may not have also been a pharisee, and the woman is not identified as ‘a sinner’.

Is the unnamed woman Mary Magdalene? There is nothing in the texts to suggest that it is, but she has come to be identified with her. The mistake appears to have been made in the fourth century by Gregory the Great, who identified her as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus, and the idea has been a powerful force since then, even to the extent that Mary Magdalene came to be viewed as a prostitute. You may even have heard this view propounded from the pulpit. Yet there is no justification for identifying the ‘sinner’ from Luke’s account with Mary Magdalene, who appears in the next chapter (Luke 8:2-3) as having been healed from possession by seven demons (i.e. mental illness) and as accompanying Jesus with some other women and the twelve men.  It also says the women supported Jesus from their resources, and Jesus is hardly likely to have lived off the earnings of a prostitute!

Western literature, film, music and art more often than not portray Mary Magdalene as a sinful woman repenting of her (sexual) sins – as an internet search of images of her will show. This was to play into the idea that women are inherently promiscuous and ever in need of repentance. But what do we know of the biblical Mary Magdalene?  Apart from her healing and accompanying Jesus, we find her at the centre of Christ’s passion and resurrection: she is named as being among the women at the foot of the cross and at Jesus’ burial; on Easter day she is portrayed as going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, an act which she wouldn’t have to perform had she anointed him when he was alive; it was to her whom the risen Jesus revealed himself, and it was Mary Magdalene who was chosen to proclaim that Jesus is alive.

The ’repentant sinner’ was to be sainted by the Church. In 2016, the Roman Catholic Church raised the liturgical celebration honouring Mary Magdalene from a memorial to a feast, putting her on par with the apostles. Her Feast Day is 22^nd July.

Mary Magdalene, of course, is not the only character whose story is not consistent either within or beyond the Biblical texts. Why not, for example, look up the references to Judas Iscariot and see what you make of his story in relation to what you have been taught.

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[1] The Holy Bible. John 12:3a. New Revised Standard Version: Anglicized Edition (2007). London: Harper Collins.

[2] The Holy Bible. Luke 7:37-38. New Revised Standard Version: Anglicized Edition (2007). London: Harper Collins.

[3] The Holy Bible. Mark 14:3. New Revised Standard Version: Anglicized Edition (2007). London: Harper Collins.

[4] The Holy Bible. Matthew 26:6-7. New Revised Standard Version: Anglicized Edition (2007). London: Harper Collins.

by Gary Hall.

Back in 2016, inspired by the radical political evensong led by Dorothee Soelle and others in the 1960s and 70s, and galvanized by the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, we created Political Night Prayer in Birmingham. We were responding to a perceived need ‘to work continually at real solidarity, when the political agenda is to divide and to annexe resources for the already privileged who imagine themselves entitled’. I’m quoting from a PNP email exchange of the time. 

In 2016 it was Donald Eadie and Renate Wilkinson who brought to us a vivid sense of how, in late-1960s Cologne, Dorothee Soelle held together ‘the burning actualities of political situations’ with biblical encounters, meditation, discussion and faith-motivated action. We pondered why, in our experiences of then and now, this was not more of an everyday ecclesial reality. The many who turned up for each Political Night Prayer demonstrated a hunger for this kind of work and worship, and for this kind of gathering which was itself an instance of the reflective practice we were trying to articulate: communion, connexion, ekklesia, solidarity, different ways of naming something we were feeling about our human (and more-than-human) interdependence, and about how we wanted to live together into the future.

Since then, the Methodist Church in Britain adopted a Strategy for Justice, Dignity and Solidarity and fostered invaluable solidarity circles. The priority has been, rightly, to get on with good practice across the connexion; but it goes hand in hand with the ongoing work of delving into what solidarity can actually mean in Christian, theological understanding. To this end I turned to several recent presentations by Rowan Williams, for whom the theme of solidarity has become increasingly prominent.[1]

He sets his own work in the context of twentieth-century Catholic social teaching, especially the 1987 encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (Concern for Social Affairs). This is the encyclical which defines solidarity as a virtue revolving around truly recognizing one another as persons, and recognizing interdependence ‘as a system determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements’. The solidarity evoked ‘is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.’[2] Solidarity is when feelings get grounded, when you and I live out the implications of the realization that our flourishing is always bound up with that of the other person; never over against the other. Solidarity is an essential characteristic of deep peace, and a mark of a healthy democratic society, a conviction enfleshed as, for instance, the trade union founded by Lech Walesa and others at the Lenin / Gdansk Shipyards in Pope John Paul II’s Polish homeland.

In Christian theological perspective it is also more than that. This ‘more than’ is vital. Following a trail laid by his late friend and mentor, Kenneth Leech, Rowan Williams evokes the richness of solidarity by describing several things it is more than. For instance, it is more than a commitment to the common good. It is also more than communitarianism, and more than empathy.

It is more than commitment to the common good because that good must remain relatively undefined whilst we learn to live the inevitable conflicts and tensions of our clashing ideas of what is good for us. How even do we face these conflicts constructively and intelligently, then navigate them to a better place together?

Solidarity is more than communitarianism, a love of the community which gives me identity, because community-bound affinity can flip into the kind of romantic nationalism which grows out of harmful forms of nostalgia. Dare I say that whilst Flower of Scotland and La Marseillaise are spine-tingling football anthems, they are potentially lethal battle hymns in the wrong hands or circumstances. When we are too closely defined by comforting and truncated expressions of our particular social/tribal belonging, then it is all the harder to see the potentially better values, habits and power structures of people who are not like us.

Solidarity is also more than empathy, because empathy can always morph into acquisition or occupation of the other person’s experience. When ‘I know how you feel’, then I cannot be properly attentive to how your experience of the world may be utterly other than I can know or imagine. Solidarity includes the art and habit of standing with strangers whose struggles and hopes and pains are not mine.

In fragile times, when ‘many of the structures of relationship in our epoch have been eroded, leading to a sense of lostness, of fragmentation, of exile’,[3] faith involves discerning together how the tough realities of political life might more closely approximate to the human and more-than-human solidarity which, for us, is expression and extension of communion, koinonia, connexion – and a little echo of that redemptive solidarity enacted by our incarnating God.

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[1] See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_k-EHVFxzo, ‘Ethics and Solidarity by Rowan Williams’ – a lecture recorded on Saturday 25 February 2023; or the Bampton lecture 2024 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H9vz0QqFCY&list=PLWCAltzb4KrORSI9r8KLs8AIlWEPNyryI&index=2 or https://baptistnews.com/article/politics-faith-and-mission-a-conversation-with-rowan-williams/

[2] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html, 38 & 39.

[3] Kenneth Leech, The Sky is Red, DLT 2003, page 10. For more on this theme see especially Chapter 1, ‘Solitude and Solidarity’.

by Catrin Harland-Davies and Afon Harland.

Catrin:

In May 1997, aged 19 and having just voted for the first time in a general election, I stayed up all night to watch the nation become a different place. I had only ever really known one party in government, and suddenly new things felt possible. It wasn’t just about my own political preferences (although I will admit that it played well to them), but also the idea of change, of new ideas, of fresh energy and enthusiasm. I was on the cusp of my adult life, coming of age into a whole new era.

This week, July 2024, I sat up all night with my 18-year-old to watch the country change once again. I had nearly three decades of adult cynicism under my belt, and (although it once again played to my party political preferences) was well aware of the realpolitik which means that compromises and pragmatism are needed to win an election. And I was deeply upset at some of the narrative of hostility and hatred which surfaced at many points during campaigns in many constituencies. But still, I couldn’t resist the thrill of watching a nation change leaders and change direction.

But I wondered what my 18-year-old, also voting for the first time in a sea-change election, made of it…?

Afon:

Undeniably, the chance to participate in an election that brought about a fundamental change of government was exciting. The chance to alter the direction of the country from the only path I can remember kept me engaged in all the debate for the long six weeks (although I must admit, as a politics student I am easily excited by the debate and choices that come with an election campaign).

In contrast, I am that fresh-faced 18-year-old filled with idealism. As a politics student, I am firmly rooted in my ideas and the reasoning behind them and so it can be hard to accept that everybody else doesn’t have the exact same views. I struggled a bit between wanting to support a party that matched my ideals, and wanting to see actual change in the country. I joined, campaigned for and voted for a party that I had some problems with, but which stood a chance of being in government and making a difference. But I still feel a bit, I guess, disappointed that it falls short of what I’d like to see.

Catrin:

Perhaps it’s too easy to see any government through the lens of disappointment – the failures, the decisions with which we disagree, the decline into in-fighting, the heavy defeat at the polls. Some combination of those things always happens. And the positives often seem so fragile. There may be improvements in the economy, but some people will still live in poverty. We may work for peace, but the world still always seems full of wars. We may see greater equality, but we also hear voices of hatred and fear. But perhaps that’s always what the Kingdom of Heaven is like? Jesus talks about some single moments of transformation, like finding treasure or the world’s most improbably valuable pearl. But most of his ‘kingdom’ stories are about seeds, coins, sheep – ordinary things, which might seem a bit insignificant.

And when I think back to 1997 (or any term of government, probably), I can see glimpses of hope, some of which grew into tangible differences in people’s lives. There were things I noticed at the time, and other things that happened so gradually that I hardly noticed, and took them for granted. There are always things that leave me feeling betrayed. But there are also things that feel, when I look back on them, like glimpses of kingdom values. Of course, many others will see individual policies and actions more or less positively than I do. The mechanics of how kingdom values are brought about (and sometimes what those values look like in practice) are very much debated.

But I wonder if there’s a deeper question here, about how far we should rely on our elected politicians to bring about change for the better. Isn’t that our responsibility? Is the problem that we often look to elected politicians – especially when they promise much and suit our own political outlook – to be some kind of messiah or saviour? I wonder if we fall into idolatry, placing our political leaders on a pedestal, rather than seeing ourselves as partners with them in the work of seeking God’s Kingdom?

Afon:

I think that’s right. I recognise that the country as a whole isn’t necessarily going to vote for what I want, and that leaders of parties have to be pragmatic and compromise. I think it’s hard to accept change, even when we want it, if it doesn’t come in the shape that we want. But if you look at the ways in which the Kingdom of Heaven is portrayed in the Gospels, it’s not just  surprisingly small, but also not quite what lots of people expected it to be? I’m not suggesting that the new (or any) government is the same as the Kingdom of Heaven!! And I’m certainly not wanting to call any politician ‘Messiah’. But there’s also a danger of thinking we know what the Kingdom will look like, and how it will come about. After all, I’m not the Messiah either!

Catrin:

<Resists making a Life of Brian reference…>

by Graham Edwards.

A few weeks ago, on the Spring Bank Holiday, I was at Cliff College for the festival. As I wandered about the site, I could not help but remember the days when I was an undergraduate student there over twenty years ago. I remembered people, and events; I remembered that the college doors were locked every weeknight at 10:30pm and the creativity needed to get in if you ended up locked out; I remembered the challenge of morning prayers at 7.45am! A rush of nostalgia filled me. “Ah,” I thought “the good old days…”  Nostalgia is an easy thing to fall into, and sometimes it is a nice, comfortable thing as we reminisce with friends and family. Sometimes of course, nostalgia can move us to say “it was better in the old days” or some variation of that. In the life of the church I sometimes hear things such as “it used to be so full in here you had to stand for a service”, “in my day the minster visited every member once a week before dinner on a Monday”, “we used to have a hundred children in our Sunday School” and so on. Nostalgia is, perhaps, natural, but I wonder what it might do as we share life of the church.

Firstly, I think nostalgia can help us preserve the heart of our communities. The memories that we have and share, hold a meaning-making power in the community of the church. Clay Routledge, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jacob Juhl and Jamie Arndt (2012) point out that nostalgia has four psychological functions:  it generates positive affect; enhances self-esteem; “serves as a repository for social connectedness” (p. 453) and fosters understanding of positive experiences. As we tell stories of church experiences, we remind ourselves to look beyond our current experience, the stories enable us to recognise that our history connects us to something ‘larger than [our]selves’: and when we are trying to make sense of our present challenges, we are reminded that our belonging is rooted in that larger context (Sakaranaho, 2011, p. 153). Nostalgia and memory does not, as Hervieu-Léger (2000) argues, simply transmit religion and faith from one generation to the next; it is how we continue to build community. Rooted in ‘our experience,’ and the memory of ‘us,’ our memories enlighten the present, we tell the stories because they remind us who we are and what we are about, so that we might make sense of the present.

Secondly, nostalgia can become a form of lament. Sometimes we want to acknowledge what we feel we have lost, the things that have changed, and the things that we wish we could recapture. Lamenting the changes in our experience of church might frustrate some, but it can be important. John Swinton (2007) argues that the church needs to reclaim the process of lamentation. He understands lament as providing a language through which pain and anguish can be brought to God, and therefore he says it becomes an act of faith. He writes ‘lament spurs movement towards God at a time when our natural instinct is to move away’ (p. 114). It would be wrong therefore, I think, to claim that directing anger or frustration toward God in a time of suffering, sadness, or challenge is inappropriate, rather it may be considered an act of true faith, seeking to bring those emotions before God. The telling of stories, the shared nostalgia may sometimes be a way in which we hold our experience before God and seek a response.

There is, of course, another place where we tell stories and sometimes engage in nostalgia – a funeral. We tell the story of the deceased as we grieve and offer thanks for their life, and to remind ourselves of those things we loved and found challenging about them, as we gather to celebrate the promise of new life.

Perhaps, then we should enjoy some nostalgia, enjoy telling our stories, not simply to wallow in the past and “how good it used to be.” Rather, we remind ourselves who we are and what we are all about, to lament the things we have lost, as we gather in the community of the church with God’s promise of new life.

Hervieu-Léger, D. (2000). Religion as a Chain of Memory. Polity Press.
Routledge, C., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Juhl, J., & Arndt, J. (2012). The Power of the Past: Nostalgia as a Meaning-Making Resource. Memory, 20(5), 452 – 460.
Sakaranaho, T. (2011). Religion and the Study of Social. Temenos, 47(2), 135-158.
Swinton, J. (2007). Raging with Compassion. Eerdmans.

by Ben Pugh.^[1]

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Some parts of this post have been adapted from my “A Second Conversion? Reflections on a Recent Experience,” Methodist Recorder (10 May 2024).

As a Pentecostal, with a specialism in Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, I have long been familiar with the importance of experience, but my 12 years of working within the Wesleyan environment of Cliff College has further confirmed its importance to me. As all Methodists know, it makes up the fourth and vital element in the famous Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Four years ago, after coming to the end of a three-book project examining the atonement I had emerged with a very strong participation-in-Christ theme, and I knew this needed exploring as I contemplated what to follow the atonement project with. I picked up the threads of a long fascination I already had with Paul’s concept of being ‘in Christ’ and published a popular book: One With Christ: 40 Biblical Meditations on Paul’s “In Christ” Idea. However, I wrote all that without as yet experiencing any of the ideas I was talking about. I was becoming conceptually clearer and clearer about something that experientially almost wholly eluded me. This pattern continued as I then became engrossed in the Eastern Orthodox doctrines of recapitulation and theosis. I also soon rediscovered the writings of the nineteenth century Higher Life movement, as well as Wesley himself. By the beginning of this year, I was focusing my attention on the theme of abiding in Christ in John’s Gospel, helped in my devotions by Andrew Murray’s classic Abide in Christ. In February I prepared a sermon on the Vine and Branches passage of John 15. Then, quite suddenly, something happened. On the morning of 2 March, the day before I was due to preach it, I had just returned home from a routine car trip dropping my 16-year-old daughter off at the café where she works on Saturdays. I sat down to write this in my journal:

He has always been there, of course, but now I know he’s always there: I always in him and he always in me. It’s like the release of dying and going to heaven, except I’m still here. I sat in the car for some time once I arrived back home, soaking up how good this was. It was like a safe haven I’ve been trying to reach all my life and now finally I’m here and I can know for sure that everything is always going to be alright because I will always be in him and he in me.

This experience turned out to be a lot more than just a passing moment of illumination. That evening, I found myself saying to my wife, ‘I feel like I’ve been born again, again.’ There was nothing special about that morning’s 5-minute trip out in the car – and definitely nothing special about the car – but something in me had changed.

I carried on feeling noticeably different. It was as though Christ had just moved deeper into my life. I had been taking medication for high blood pressure, but my blood pressure plummeted instantly. I was filled with peace, joy and a social confidence that was unusual for me. All forms of anxiety or stress were either gone altogether or very much reduced. I had been a devout Christian for 34 years, but this was like the ‘second conversion’ that William Boardman described. My experience also had some resonances with the experiences described in Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, which I then read with renewed interest. But the main way I would describe the experience is that I became happy. In the months that have elapsed, the great waves of emotion have settled down somewhat, but there is still a steady, unshakable happiness, like the ancient Epicurean aim of ataraxia or, imperturbableness.

I hesitate to define the experience as sanctification. In fact, there are some days when I am just as amazed by how little I’ve changed as I am on other days by how much I’ve changed. In fact, I have wondered whether the big mistake was that so many holiness teachers defined this deeper experience as ‘entire sanctification.’ The terminology was unpopular, of course, because it could generate either disappointment or dishonesty when it was found that the experience did not, after all, eventuate in perfection. Modern bloggers in the US who still object to such ideas object more on the basis that claiming such experiences can create two classes of Christian: the haves and the have-nots, the holy and the not-so-holy.  

I find Boardman’s description hard to beat. He called it a ‘deeper work of grace, a fuller apprehension of Christ, a more complete and abiding union with him than at the first.’^[2] I think this is potentially very good news in a world so lacking in real peace and joy, and I hope to find ways of bringing it. Maybe the mistake of our forebears was to view these ‘second’ blessings and deeper works as something reserved for those who are already Christians. Maybe this ‘more complete and abiding union’ is meant to be that complete and abiding from the very start.

However, my main point in writing this is just to confirm again for us all something that I trust we all agree on: the vital importance of experience in our ongoing task of thinking theologically.

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[1] Some parts of this post have been adapted from my “A Second Conversion? Reflections on a Recent Experience,” Methodist Recorder (10 May 2024).

[2] William Boardman, The Higher Christian Life (New York: Appleton, 1859), 48.

by Inderjit Bhogal.

This Bible story is illuminating, placed in the context of discussions around food, eating habits, and who is at the table. Matthew and Mark present this as a healing story, but both know it embraces much more.

Jesus is hard pressed, and is caught up in controversy. Some of Jesus’ opponents are subjecting him and his disciples to greater scrutiny (Mark 7:1-9). He sees value in taking some time out for respite (Mark 6:31). With his disciples, he crosses the border into Tyre and Sidon, beside the Mediterranean Sea, to have some quite time.

Jesus’ quest for rest is soon disrupted. A woman breaks into the male circle of Jesus and his disciples. She is a Canaanite, according to Matthew, a fact that evokes a historic and deep-rooted prejudice and enmity, and places her as an outsider, someone different.

Canaanite she might have been, but the woman addresses Jesus with a Jewish Messianic title, “Lord, Son of David”. No name is given for her. She enters the scene “shouting” a plea, “have mercy on me”. Her daughter is seriously ill.

How will Jesus respond? I see four movements in the story as it unfolds, and in them can be discerned at least four different responses to those who are different.

First, we note that Jesus says nothing. This is one response. Stay nothing. Is Jesus reluctant to break his quiet retreat? Was he ignoring the woman? Was he hoping she would just go away? Was he thinking before speaking? Was he waiting to see how his disciples would respond?

Second, the response of the disciples, it appears dismissive. Does it reflect their prejudices and hatred towards Canaanites? Were they just being protective of Jesus? They ask Jesus to dismiss the woman, “send her away…she keeps shouting…” Is this an appropriate response from Jesus’ followers to those who are different? 

Third, Jesus then speaks up. Initially he seems to be dismissive too, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”. Is this another response, we have enough on our agenda, we can’t take on any more? We have to look after our own first?

At least, Jesus engages in conversation, the woman was not easily dismissed, and insisted, “Lord, help me”.

Fourth, If Jesus’ initial silence suggests he is thinking before he speaks, he responds with words that make his hearers think. He has been challenging people to make sure that the words that come out of their mouths are not dirty and hurtful. Mind your language.

What are we to make of Jesus’ words, “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. His use of the term “dogs” provoked a deeper discussion with the woman. Is he being dismissive and prejudiced? Are his words a degrading racist slur. How were his disciples to deal with this language on the lips of their teacher? They go against all the values of Jesus of love and respect, especially for those who are rejected by others and on the margins of society. Perhaps there is something else going on in this interaction. Some commentators say the word translated “dogs” here is a diminutive of the root Greek word Kuon. In its diminutive form It refers to harmless small house pet dogs as opposed to wild dogs who represent dangerous religious falsehood, which feature in Matthew 7:7, Philippians 3:2 and Revelations 22:15. This comment is meant to soften the language. Does it?

Whatever Jesus’ disciples made of Jesus’ language, the Canaanite woman responds with courage, courtesy and challenge. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table”. She is familiar with crumbs. She wants to be at the table with Jesus.

She draws words from Jesus that affirm her gender, motherhood, and nationality, and show deep respect. “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish”. The woman’s daughter is “healed instantly”.

Jesus affirms the woman’s faith in him, and does not dismiss her faith tradition as religious falsehood. Jesus’ concluding words to the Canaanite woman challenge his followers to recognize the gifts of goodness and grace beyond the bubbles and boundaries we live in. 

Respectful conversations with those who are different from us can help us to see how abundant is God’s grace, bring us closer to Christ, and grow our courage and persistence in confronting prejudice, and in refusing to be silent in the pursuit of justice.

by Frances Young.

That heading might occasion some surprise. Surely “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20.35); and, according to Acts, Paul quoted that as a saying of Jesus (though it does not appear in the Gospels). That emphasis on giving is so engrained in our tradition, isn’t it? And yet giving can be terribly patronising – even controlling (cf. Mrs. Pardiggle in Dickens’ Bleak House); and receiving with grace can not only be a sign of deep humility but also a way of giving dignity to the one who offers some gift or service:

Brother, sister, let me serve you,
Let me be as Christ to you;
Pray that I may have the grace
To let you be my servant too.[1]

The second half of the verse is surely as important as the first. How difficult I used to find it to accept help, to trust that another might be able to care for my severely disabled son … We surely need to distinguish between proper receiving, with grace and genuine gratitude, and taking, grasping or grabbing, the expression of selfish desire or self-concerned need or want.

And theologically there is even more to receiving than that – it surely lies at the heart of Christian worship. On one occasion recently my Call to Worship suggested something like that, and afterwards a member of the congregation said he couldn’t disagree more with my opening statement… But surely worship is fundamentally a response to God’s grace and blessing rather than something we DO, a task to be performed. The hymn quoted earlier ends thus:

When we sing to God in heaven
We shall find such harmony,
Born of all we’ve known together
Of Christ’s love and agony.

Receiving lies at the heart of Christian prayer – receiving absolution, receiving grace, receiving the Spirit whereby we may say, “Abba, Father” and become new-born as children of God and heirs with Christ. (Romans 8.15-17)

Receiving lies at the heart of Christian identity – receiving from others by belonging, and also through an ecumenism stretching over time (tradition) as well as in the present (experience).

Receiving lies at the heart of doctrine, receiving the teaching which was early on distilled from scripture and the apostolic witness, embraced in the Creeds and embodied in the life of the Church  (after all, dogma (Greek) and doctrina (Latin) are simply the words for “teaching”)… We don’t make it up ourselves or simply read idiosyncratic beliefs out of scripture. Classic questions in our post-Enlightenment world can easily trip up and cause disquiet by putting the focus in the wrong place. We need an openness to receive, to let ourselves be drawn back to the tradition despite those questions. I shall never forget that moment in the vestry before leading a Carol Service: all those questions about the birth-narratives came welling up – the mistranslation of Isaiah 7.14 as parthenos (= virgin) provoking the development of that scientifically-dubious, quasi-pagan myth of a divine being having sexual intercourse with a human woman. But then – was it a Word of the Lord? – Luke’s picture of the Spirit overshadowing Mary recalled the Spirit hovering over the chaos in the Genesis creation-story. The story is about new creation, new birth, and the truth of new creation in Christ surely overtakes  whatever questions we might have about happened literally or scientifically – it has a superabundance of meaning that explodes our earthly categories …  Get the focus in the right place and it is possible to receive the tradition with intellectual humility …

I guess I’m not the only one who cannot give without receiving … nor the only one to have discovered that thanksgiving for all we have received (even from the things we find most difficult, not to mention the darkest things in our lives), lies at the heart of Christian spirituality – along with the trust that comes from accepting them with grace.

Visiting a synagogue once I was struck by the words on their Notice-sheet for the week: “We hallow God’s name by asking for bread.” The explanation was that the request acknowledges our utter dependence on God. That is the fundamental reason why I would continue to defend the claim that receiving lies at the heart of worship – for in God’s presence we find our self is put into perspective –  we empty ourselves to be filled with the Spirit. To receive is to be blessed, and then we can give …

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[1] Richard A. M. Gillard; Singing the Faith 611.

by Josie Smith.

I have always valued the hymn ‘Now thank we all our God’, and when I was an active preacher I used it frequently as the final hymn in acts of worship. Gratitude is something I feel every day (just for still being alive, for one thing!) but it is only recently that it occurred to me what sickeningly familiar circumstances this hymn arose from.

The author was a pastor in a town on land contested by warring nations.  Refugees from the surrounding countryside, rendered homeless, had moved within the town walls ‘for safety’ as first one army, then the other, gained the upper hand.   Farms were abandoned, crops ruined, food became scarce, prices rose, people were constantly hungry, and overcrowding led to infections spreading throughout the population.   Increasing numbers of people simply had nowhere safe to go.   We have seen it, and agonised over it, in so many parts of the world today.   When will we ever learn?

And then came an infection so horrible that people died from it in huge numbers.   The pastor was kept increasingly occupied conducting the funerals of his parishioners, at first in ones and twos, but later things became so bad that mass funerals had to be held, and mass graves dug. 

His own wife was among those who died.   

It was a long time ago – at the time of what came to be known as the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).     The epidemic which killed large numbers of the population was the Plague, which later spread to our little offshore islands and is a familiar chapter in our own history books.   But the pattern is repeated wherever there is fighting over the possession of land.     As though the land can ever be said to ‘belong’ to anyone except the Creator.

And it was Martin Rinkart who wrote this hymn of gratitude and praise.

Now thank we all our God,
with hearts and hands and voices,
who wondrous things hath done,
in whom His world rejoices;
who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.

It is difficult to be aware, as we are via the media, of world events as they happen, and not to feel a sense of despair that we as one human race continue to inflict so much terrible suffering on our fellow human beings.   And yet there are lovely human stories all around us of help and healing and hope in the face of all the inhumanity.   

I am writing this late in the day of Pentecost.     May the flame which ignited the early church spread, to counter the plague of human stupidity.

And may we help to fan the flame by being people of hope.

Now thank we all our God!

by Philip Sudworth.

A long time ago there lived a man who loved flowers and plants.  As he wandered around the countryside, he would plant seeds in barren areas and he would encourage plants by removing the thistles that were choking them, by watering those wilting in the heat and by giving them vital nutrients.  If he thought that a plant was too weak to survive where it was, he would replant it near his house so that he could give it special care.  He was able to see the potential beauty in plants that were nearly dead and people were astonished at how he could transform a sickly specimen into a magnificent bloom.

His work, particularly with the flowers round his house, attracted interest and a few people started to help him on a regular basis and to learn from him how to bring out the best in plants.  He had a simple slogan – “Plants are beautiful!”  He became known as “the plantsman”.

One day he had to leave for a distant country where his father needed him.  He left his assistants to carry on his work and they in turn recruited more helpers. 

All went well for a while, but plant seeds are blown by the wind and bees cross-pollinate flowers.  Several helpers became concerned that some flowers were mutating and producing different colours and shapes, and the new generations of others were growing further from the house.

It was decided to build a high wall round the plants nearest to the house to create a garden, so that the plant strains could be kept pure.  Gardeners were appointed to look after the plants within the garden.  They found it easier to work on a simple rule that any plants outside the garden were weeds. 

The head gardener drew up, using stories and letters about the plantsman, details of what each plant must look like to be accepted as beautiful.  These criteria became known as the beauty rules.  Any plant in the garden that did not conform to these rules had to be dug up and burnt.  The slogan was amended to: ‘Only the beautiful are plants’, because they decided that this is what the plantsman had really meant to say.

Gardeners still went out into the countryside to search for plants that had the potential to fit into the garden.  Some were very diligent in this.  If they found any that met the beauty rules, they would try their best to transplant them into the garden, though some of these wilted in the new surroundings.

By now there was no-one left who’d met the plantsman in the flesh.  They eagerly listened to stories about him or read reports of what he had said.  One popular story was that the plantsman’s last words had been that he would be back and they fully expected him to return sometime soon. The gardeners were convinced that with their help he would apply the beauty rules across the world, root out all the weeds and turn the world into one big garden of beautiful plants that met all the criteria.

One day the plantsman did return but his appearance had changed a great deal over the years and no-one recognized him in modern clothes.  Most gardeners were too busy maintaining the garden to take much account of the quiet figure.  He was very sad to see the high wall and the new division between garden plants and weeds that he saw as wild flowers, because he still loved all plants and could see the beauty in all of them. 

He watched what the gardeners were doing and occasionally asked them questions.  Many laughed at the old fellow who couldn’t understand the beauty rules, but some were greatly encouraged by his interest and a few felt strangely challenged by his concern for wildflowers.  Most of the time, however, he spent back at his old task of nurturing and rescuing the plants in the countryside.  Occasionally, he came into the garden unseen and added nutrients to certain plants.  Both in the garden and in the countryside you could see where he had been, because the plants there bloomed at their very best and gave joy to all who saw them.

• Who or what do you identify with in the story?  How does that relate to the church today?

• How do we relate to those people that our society, our church or even ourselves dismiss as weeds, as worthless or outside the scope of salvation.