Destruction of the cosmic Temple? Tish B'Av and Christians

Reading about Tisha B'Av in the Jewish calendar, I understood that it is much about the destructions (yes that's plural: one by the Babylonian empire and the next by the Roman, there has been no third temple) of the Temple in Jerusalem and also folded into those sorrowful recollections have been the calamities that have afflicted Jewish people (pogroms, expulsions, shoah, etc). The destruction of Temple in this way becomes a metaphor for other destructions -including Hiroshima. I wondered whether also taking the idea of creation -or at least the Earth as God's temple- it could be a time of lament for climate-chaos and breakdown? Perhaps a mini-liturgical season could be honoured informally?

If so, how might it look? The Tisha B'Av 'season' is three weeks and the timing is set by the Jewish lunar calendar relating to the anniversaries of the destruction of the Temple (on the ninth of the month of Av). It often takes in Hiroshima day (6 August) and that seems to be one of the things that a number of Jewish people fold into their observance of the season. So maybe the thing to do would be to take in the dropping of the nuclear bombs the 2nd being at Nagasaki on 9 August, and perhaps taking a week or two before that with, therefore, the Feast of the Transfiguration also on 6th. So end of July to start. Perhaps Mary Magdalene's feast day on 22 might be a good starting point -the story of her taking spices to anoint Jesus' body and also witnessing the resurrection are good starting points for considering 'calamitous' events? She's often associated with the woman who anointed Jesus' feet "for his burial" too ...

So I'm not proposing to change Sunday readings or anything at this point but to keep the days in between as times of reflection, prayer and repentance regarding human-made calamities affecting the cosmic Temple that is the Earth.

A prayer for these times

A prayer for these times:
Saving God whom we name 'holy';
Cast down the mighty from their thrones
lift up the lowly
fill the hungry with good things
and send the profiteers away empty.



ձռɗ.͜. (@AndiiBowsher) / Twitter

Alive in the eternal remembrance of God

I have just found a theologian saying what I've been thinking and trying to express well in the last couple of years. The emboldened clause is the key bit for me just now:

In the long term, I think that theology is about knowing that our life as we know it could finish in a second; but on the other hand, if we are kept in the memory of God, we are really immortal. How can we live our everyday life like that, on the edge between mortality and eternity? The only answer I have touched on is love, which became personal and incarnated for us. The main message of the gospel is that love is stronger than death. In the end, faith is not a set of beliefs, but feeling surrounded by the love of God and reflecting that love back to the world Interview: Andreas Andreopoulos, theologian

The bit that I'm struggling to find a way to express and that Andreas doesn't say here is to do with how the memory of God holds us so that we are freely ourselves in God's love and philosophically how we might understand continuity of identity.

I suspect in regard to the latter, the answer is probably that we are always in God and that never ceases; our eternal medium of being continues because it is eternity itself; God. Or something like that. God present yesterday, today and tomorrow, knows us in each moment and carries us over beyond the moments of this life. This life cannot continue to hold us, but God's can and will.

LongLent preparing for a DelayedEaster of Re-Membrance?

A week or so back, I read an article which was suggesting that after Easter we would still experience an indefinite awaiting time until we would be able to re-assemble (re-member is a term I'd commend) as churches and that such an occasion would be a kind of second Easter. Which makes the time now a kind of second Lent. So I'm suggesting we kind of approach it that way a bit. I'm not saying don't celebrate Easter, just turn the volume down on it a bit and inject some sombre into the interim: some sombre for those struggling to save life, those struggling to continue breathing, those mourning early deaths and the many struggling to adapt to isolation and distrupted lives. By all means continue to remember resurrection and the hope it gives, celebrate it but then Lent was ever oriented to Easter (just read the liturgical preface to the season again).

To be clear, I'm not suggesting a Lent do-over, rather that we have a Lenten thread to the coming weeks and months until Re-Membering can take place.

So what could this look like? Well, I'm considering each Wednesday tracing a cross on my hand with soil**, as a sign harking to the ash cross of Ash Wednesday but with a nod towards the idea of humility -humus or soil being the etymological root of 'humility'. It seems appropriate to recall still our frailty in times such as this. I'm also going to be thinking about how best to celebrate an Easterish weekend at the end of the crisis. What kind of liturgies would be appropriate? What kinds of themes would be best to highlight or bring to it? Should there be a place for lament? (working answer: yes).

 And are there disciplines that are appropriate to this LongLenten time? I'm thinking that perhaps a discipline of reading the resurrection texts seriously and closely against the background of the things we know continue to characterise these times -as mentioned in the first paragraph. Asking what such hope means for people caught most sharply in the jaws of the crisis? What it means to be not just a hearer of the word of the hope of new life but a doer of the hope of new life?

 #LongLent #DelayedEaster

  Endnotes
*"Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting. By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord..." See here. See also here.

**I'm considering a simple form of words to go with this action. Currently considering an adaptation of the words with ashing. So: "I remember that I am dust, and to dust I shall return, in sure and certain hope of rising to eternal life in Christ Jesus our risen Lord." In that way capturing a sober yet hopeful mood. Or perhaps "I remember that I am dust and to dust shall I return, who will deliver us from this body of death? -Thanks be to God -through our Lord Jesus Christ" or even "... I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me: the life I live in the body I live through faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (see Gal.2:20)

Communion via internet?

Our bishops have produced a brief service of Spiritual Communion When Unable to Attend a Celebration of the Eucharist which outlines a brief 'antecommunion' service culminating in an act of spiritual reception of Christ. This to avoid, it would seem, the pre-distribution of bread and wine to participants to be consecrated* by a duly ordained person present remotely by means of the internet. I would guess that this is because we collectively have not yet discussed this possibility in practical theological terms. And I recognise that my characterisation in the previous sentence already pre-loads some assumptions (so critiques might start there!)

 So what might be at stake in holding a communion service via an online meeting platform (Teams, Skype, Jitsi, Zoom, Big Blue Button etc)? It seems to me that there is one big difference that leads to consequential difference with a physically gathered community. The congregants are not together in one physical space: they cannot shake hands with one another at the peace, nor receive bread from one hand to another in that physical space, nor take hold of the cup of wine in that space that stood on the altar/table as the presider said the eucharistic prayer. In short there isn't a common loaf and a common cup.

The only way to make it work in real time is for each worshipper or household to bring to the event some bread and some wine of their own. But let's also note, near the outset of consideration, that the Church of England has traditionally not allowed communion to be celebrated by a priest alone**. That said, the definition of 'alone' is part of what is under consideration here. But I do note that if we don't count electronic attendance as 'presence', then a priest-presider cannot 'do communion' on their own even if they are 'witnessed' via media electronica.

The questions that, let's call it, 'remote presence Holy Communion' (RPHC) raise are as follows, I think.

• Do we need to have a common loaf and a common cup for it to be okay? (I'm avoiding the word 'valid' because that seems to me freighted with canon-law ramifications). 
• What is the value of physical presence that might make it decisive? 
• What indeed *is* human presence in such scenarios? 

 I wonder if concretising it might help to reflect upon these and any other issues. Imagine this: a duly ordained priest has before them on a clear table with a fair linen cloth on it (BCP allusion there!) a chalice of wine and a piece of bread. Perhaps they are in their home, perhaps a private chapel. Before them also is an electronic device using a conferencing platform so that people not in that room can see and hear and also vocally and visually participate in the proceedings. In rooms around the city are a dozen, say, people who are seeing and hearing the priest via their own electronic device connected to the same platform allowing them to be in a conference electronically with their priest. They have have the same order of service before them all. So the remote congregants pray with the priest silently and vocally, some of them read scriptures at appropriate moments, some of them lead the petitionary prayers at the appropriate time, they say the responses at the appropriate moments. They can hear each other and see each other. They greet each other with waves and nods and smiles at the peace. Are they at the same event?
 And then ... Well, what next?

Let's say the priest continues, prays the eucharistic prayer with the remote congregants joining in silently and aloud with the opening responses, sanctus and acclamations, Lord's prayer and words of humble access. The priest breaks the bread, consumes it and drinks the wine, in remembrance of Jesus. Has that priest taken communion? Now add to this scenario that each of the remote congregants has also before them a piece of bread and a glass of wine set on a fair linen cloth. Everything is as described in the previous paragraphs and also when it comes to the communion part, each remote congregant breaks the piece of bread before them and drinks the wine before them. Have they taken communion?

In the case of the priest alone consuming bread and wine in that scenario, the answer in BCP terms seems to be 'no' because there is no-one to communicate with the priest. If the remote congregants consume bread and wine also, then the answer is 'yes' if a meeting together really is a meeting together when electronically mediating otherwise remote congregants. It is 'no' if remote congregants do not add up to a meeting.

So at this point I notice that in another area of its life, the CofE has recently published something that may give us an answer to the question about what constitutes a meeting. This is to do with church council meetings check out the article linked to the next paragraph which summarises the article. So, are PCCs allowed to meet without meeting?

"PCCs should continue to meet, albeit remotely by Skype or Zoom or, where that is not possible, by a telephone conference call. Minutes can still be kept of such a “virtual meeting” and record as present all those members taking part."  So, for legal purposes a remote-participant meeting is okay. Can this 'okayness' transfer to a meeting for the purposes of Holy Communion? Well, clearly, the ability to act in community is possible since people can speak with and see one another. People's lives are affected by what goes on: minds are changed, emotions are roused or mollified, learning takes place, decisions with binding effect are taken in both kinds of meeting. In terms of the impact on people's hearts and minds clearly a meeting has taken place in both a remotely presenced PCC meeting and a service for worship together. It's not quite the same but the essentials as so far described are in place in both scenarios.

I asked previously whether the people in the scenario were at the same event. If they were watching a football match on a TV in a pub, I would say they were witnessing the same event but not 'at' the football match. However, I do think that the interactive nature of the scenario (they can see and hear each other and interact directly) means that they are doing more than witness an event (in this case a service), they are 'at' that event. They are participants in every meaningful way that I can think of.

The next question, then, is whether the addition to this scenario of bread and wine taken and shared in remembrance of Jesus depends crucially on non-remote presence in some way for it to be okay. Is there something essential added by the ability to physically touch other congregants? It's hard to say so when a number of congregations of the CofE have actually tried to avoid touching (in some congregations extreme social distancing has long been a norm) and yet still celebrated a Eucharist which is presumably okay. They have been remote in space. Though still housed within the same building -so is it being under one roof that is important, or in the same room? And if so, what would it be about that shared space that constitutes the okayness of the communion? If some congregants were in a different room, linked by a live electronic link and then some of the eucharistic bread and wine was taken to that other room for distribution, is that okay? (It's not far from what I've seen happen in some cathedrals when there's been a big service; there's been in effect two or three congregations sharing a common acoustic space -often electronically enhanced). I'm going to say 'yes' -even if not ideal.

Is there something essential added by having the same loaf and same cup of wine? -Given that many churches have already busted that by having wafers or more than one cup -even having individual cups ... well, let's say I don't think it 'breaks' communion; again even if it's not ideal. Is essentialness, then, in having the elements from the same altar/table? Maybe, but how far is that a convenience of administration? Ie if individual cups are pre-distributed, are they not consecrated? If a bunch of deacons held bread and wine as the president led the eucharistic prayer, would those pieces of bread and cups of wine be unconsecrated? I suspect no-one would seriously argue that.

I think you see where this is going by now. I'm struggling to find any essential thing missing from the RPHC scenario. It may not be ideal, but then a number of ways of doing communion often aren't. I don't think it's ideal to have wafers (far from it) but I don't think I don't have communion if the bread is a bunch of wafers.

The one last thing that occurs to me as something that might be essential and missing from the RPHC scenario is that the bread and the wine are the same bread and wine. In the RPHC scenario people might have different bread and wine: one has Sainsbury's white bread and a merlot, another has home-baked bread and homebrew and so on. And yet the fact that we can have wafers and individual cups seems to apply here too. And if we did think this was a deal-breaker, couldn't we arrange to pre-distribute to the virtual congregants -and wouldn't that be a grand way to symbolise the unity, fellowship and belonging to one another of that congregation? So, I can't really think of a substantial theological reason not to have RPHC. I'm left with only concerns about possible misuses. These would be things like whether people have suitable bread and wine, whether they can be trusted to be suitably reverent, to dispose of left-overs in a seemly fashion, not to open it up to mischief with irreverent persons making of with consecrated elements for no-good purposes, and so on. And there are practical ways forward for all of those things because they all exist in some form in the non remote way of doing things currently.
I have a final act of naughtiness to perpetrate on this reflection. Canon B40*** of the CofE canons says we're not normally supposed to celebrate Holy Communion anywhere but a duly consecrated building without permission from our bishop. The exception is that we may do so in the houses of people who are sick -such that they can't attend church. Clearly the situation of pandemic lockdown was not in view in drawing up that canon leading to the impediment of a priest from entering such a house for fear of infecting the household (or being themself infected). It does seem to me that allowing RPHC in such a case would be within the spirit of the canon.

 And as a bit of further reading: try this twitter search and find that lots of people are already not scrupled about this. (PS a more recent article in Church Times seems to coincide at points with this post)


 End notes 
 * I'm using the word 'consecrated' as shorthand for the processes of making sure that the bread and wine are the elements of communion when people take them in remembrance of Christ. You'll notice I'm trying to avoid being specific about which theological interpretation of it is foregrounded. I take it as unremarkable that God can do whatever God wants. So a further question could be -do we think God wants us to do this?
**I've not been able to find this in the CofE canons though the BCP says: And there shall be no Celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest, according to his discretion. And if there be not above twenty persons in the Parish of discretion to receive the Communion: yet there shall be no Communion, except four (or three at the least) communicate with the Priest. (Book of Common Prayer 1662, postscript to the communion service)
*** Canon B40: "No minister shall celebrate the Holy Communion elsewhere than in a consecrated building within his cure or other building licensed for the purpose, except he have permission so to do from the bishop of the diocese: Provided that at all times he may celebrate the Holy Communion as provided by Canon B 37 in any private house wherein there is any person sick, or dying, or so impotent that he cannot go to church"

The Green Good News | A review

What drew me in to reading this was that this description rang important bells for me as someone who since my teens in (winces) the 1970s when I joined what was then the Ecology Party and shortly afterwards, became a follower of Christ, The latter in part because my understanding of what was needed for a just and sustainable lifestyle implied, to my mind, also challenging and dealing with the inner life that drives or supports unsustainable living. We need people to become less materialistic in the sense of seeking after more consumer goods and more materialistic in the sense of valuing the material of the world that God has made and upholds, and co-operating with the systems of sustenance that God has caused to be: cycles of water, gases, bacteria, fungi and all the rest; networks of mutual living and dependence. For us to live otherwise is to sin against neighbour and so against God.

The description that got my attention was this:

The Green Good News |  The Green Good News finds a fresh take on the Gospels, painting a picture of Jesus as a humorous and subversive teacher, an organizer of alternative communities and food economies, as a healer of bodies and relationships, and as a prophet who sought to overturn an empire and restore a more just and joyful way of life.

I think this is a fair, accurate, summation of what the book does and the kind of perspective it generates in a willing reader.

One of the things I've been enjoying in reading this book is that it feels like it is developing with or out of a reading of the gospels which resonates strongly with Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man (which is explicitly drawn on and referenced) or the historical background work on the gospels that we can see in Dominic Crossan's work. This is so nicely reworked with attention to the ecological implications and interweaving. Much of the book is, in effect, an extended meditation on the linkage between exploitative systems which impoverish many and their extractive effect also on the environment. This is a critique on the current models of doing business and distributing resources: they are unsustainable environmentally and murderous in their slow-burn effects on humans.

The long look at parables (and I like the phrase "the pedagogy of the parables" to capture the way that parables in general open up issues by implication and reading them against Empire context) and helping us to unpick them from being sewn to authoritarian and exploitative habits of interpretation, and that's really helpful because we have a lot of unpicking to do.

I also enjoyed the insight about gardening being referred to Jesus in the Garden (of Gethsemane). It made me think of the strand of interpretation of Genesis 2 which reminds us that the best understanding of where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be is north east Palestine -and Gethsemane would be part of that. Then there is the play with the figure of the risen Christ -mistaken by Mary for the gardener -except that it's not a mistake for he is, in a sense, the prototypical gardener, it's just that it's not the gardener she thought it was.

Quotes I liked

to dwell with Jesus as a branch of the vine will require the loss of certain parts of themselves — the loss of their illusions of independence, the loss of the promise and security offered by the Empire, the loss of their numbing agents, the loss of the rhythms of their past life. But as both the images of pruning and cleansing underline, this loss is an addition by subtraction. It is a loss that makes possible fruitfulness and that is made possible by self-giving love (p.59)

We are called not just to teach a man to fish rather than simply giving him a fish. Teaching him to fish will not feed him for life if the lake is polluted and his community is decimated (p.62)

By telling them that they will fish for men Jesus is not recruiting them into the shirt-and-tie, door-to-door business of saving souls. Rather he is taking a repeated image out of the prophetic tradition and telling them that they are going to overturn the whole imperial order. In Jeremiah the Lord, in disgust at the idolatry and iniquity of the elite of Israel says: “I am now sending many fishermen, says the LORD, and they shall catch them... For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight” (Jer16:16–17) ... So to be made “fishers of men” is to be agents of justice who will fish out and remove the elite who have oppressed the poor and broken covenant with God. [p.67]

I enjoy the prayerful task of getting on my knees in the bulk food aisle and filling up our reusable containers with organic grains, beans, and flour. During the summers our small town holds a farmers market where we can purchase produce grown locally and regionally  [p.72]

Handing the hungry person a box of processed foods is a bit like the Roman Empire pretending they are feeding the fishermen by giving them back a small fraction of their catch in the form of fish sauce. These acts of charity that are taken to be the solution to the problem rely on the unsustainable food systems that are producing enormous ecological debt for future generations and are built on the backs of impoverished food workers [p.85]

What effect does it have on our understanding of the Creator, creation, and creatures, when we repeatedly hear stories that portray the divine as a vengeful slave owner, a profit-seeking businessman, a condescending rich man, a petty and murderous king, or a capriciously forgiving ruler?Alternatively, what vision of God and creation leads us to read a story of terrible violence and exploitation and assume that the perpetrator is ametaphor for the divine? And yet, this is how the parables are too often still read. [p.116]

By looking around, instead of up, we can come into different relationships of trust, solidarity, and love that help us find wholeness together [p134]

Link-Love for this Review

The Green Good News on Amazon
The Green Good News Website
T. Wilson Dickinson on Facebook 

#TheGreenGoodNews

Canary in a Coalmine? A missional meditation on university statistics.

I was looking at the religious-related statistics for my university and it seemed a significant milestone had been passed. For the first time, this year the number of those who ticked the ‘Christian’ box as they enrolled at the University fell below 30%. A bit of context will show the significance. Last year there were just over 30% registered as Christian. In 2012, when these figures were first collected, the figure was just over 36% (and the national universities figure was 43% in that year). Let’s remember that the census in 2011 showed 59% ticking the Christian box nationally -that figure includes a higher proportion of older people as well as a smaller percentage among younger people.

It shows quite starkly that there is a declining proportion of young people identifying as Christian. It alerts us to a significant cultural shift taking place.

Our response is crucial. It can be disheartening to see such figures but we need to recognise that and work through our grief.

Christendom is now largely gone and we haven’t yet properly begun to wrestle with what it means to be church in post-Christendom times. And the Church of England, pillar and bulwark of Establishment is perhaps in the worst position of all. So it’s little wonder that we’re struggling; no wonder we are showing, collectively, signs of being in the first stages of grief.

We are called through and beyond our grief to a profound re-orientation of mindset -and that’s something that an aging population are less likely to be good at! (And the Churches are older proportionally than the general population).

So let’s start by making room for lament: to recognise all the things we have valued that are now gone; to lay to rest our assumptions that were formed in Christendom and  let go of our nostalgia for it. It’s hard but unless we do this work of letting go, we cannot truly enter God’s future and we cannot connect with solid hope. Let’s allow ourselves to feel our shock, despair and sorrow at the passing of the things we have loved and hoped for or at least grown used to. Maybe we should do this as churches: liturgically mark the end of the era and commit ourselves to discovering our calling in the era that is beginning. Services of laying down and lament are called for. A season of lament is needed.

We might then ask what these figures could suggest to us. I suggest that perhaps one thing that is happening is that people are giving up the label ‘Christian’ as they recognise their own realities and experience less cultural gravity pulling them towards that label. Perhaps it’s mostly a cultural identification that is passing. Perhaps it is that people now see more clearly the gap between their life-commitments and following Christ. But perhaps too, there as just as many people who are responding the sanctuary of their own hearts to the first wooing of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that they don’t associate that with what the churches seem to offer?

Our approach to mission now requires a re-orientation like the one I see played out in a modern secular university. In Christendom, the church and the Christian story was part of the cultural centre of gravity in our society. This meant we didn’t even know the word ‘mission’ except as something that happened overseas. The church simply occupied a place where it naturally drew in people who developed an interest in spiritual things and there were well-worn occasions of interaction around life-events, seasonal happenings, parish groups and community use of buildings.

Now people who develop a spiritual interest are more likely to join a yoga class, go along to a meditation group or diy-construct their own customised spiritual path borrowing resources from the internet, books and occasional events. And in this cultural moment, the church does not seem especially attractive or credible. It sits alongside other offers in the marketplace of ideas and causes and may even be held in suspicion because of scandals and newsworthy groups like Westboro Baptists not to mention the newsworthiness of sociopathic Christian groups.

So we have to learn to reach out without the cultural heft and social power that characterised our previous 1000 (or more) years. And that’s hard: so much of what we do and how we think and how we imagine possibilities is wrapped up with an imagination created by that social and cultural power. Imagining and thinking differently is disturbing and difficult. To borrow insight from the sending of the 72 in the gospels, we are now called to learn how to be guests rather than hosts. To do that we will need to join ‘their’ things and discover God at work where we do not control the agenda… or the building… or the purse. And then we can work with them and find Church growing ‘out there’.

In Advent we recalled the ministry of John the Baptiser. He dressed in camel-skin and belt and so looked the part of a prophet calling people to God. We are called to look the part of a people in touch with God, so that when they develop an interest in the things of God (prompted by the Spirit -and they do and will) we will look like we can help them connect with the love, hope and power of God. What does that mean for our church life, our outreach and our discipleship?