Merry Christmas, everyone!

I haven't anything very profound to say, other than that: but I just found this wonderful retelling of Luke 2 from Joseph's point of view, by the fantasy author Jo Walton.  It's really rather lovely.

Have discovered II aorist verbs. 

*sobs quietly and wishes she could use the Vulgate*

Homilette for Christ the King

I was preaching at the college Eucharist on Sunday; it was bashed out in a bit of a hurry, due to pressure of work, and it's not the greatest sermon I've ever written.  It also illustrates my tendency to resort to the Middle Ages when looking for inspiration... But Elisabeth of Thuringia is a Good Thing, so I am less apologetic than I might be!

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Today is Christ the King, when we celebrate… yes, you guessed it, Christ’s kingship.  But what does that actually mean?  Well, the Gospel focuses on the idea of Jesus as king, and how that’s understood – or misunderstood – by those around him, and I’ll come back to those in a moment.  But I want to start somewhere slightly different.

Last Thursday, the church calendar commemorated Elisabeth of Thuringia, or of Hungary, as she’s sometimes called, a thirteenth century German noblewoman.  It struck me that it’s appropriate that she’s usually celebrated round about Christ the King, because Elisabeth’s an interesting figure to help us think about the idea of what royalty means in terms of God’s kingdom.  Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary, but was sent at a young age to Thuringia, to marry the heir to the dukedom.  And she was very pious, and very charitable – and so far, she doesn’t sound very different from any number of interchangeable mediaeval women saints.  But there are a couple of things that make Elizabeth different.  One thing is that she had an unusually strong sense of justice and awareness of the wider ramifications of political power.  She refused to eat any food which had been produced by unfairly exploiting the poor – I suppose you could call her the patron saint of Fair Trade. 

But the other is that she simply didn’t have any patience with the strict rules of precedence and proper behaviour of the power structures of her day if it conflicted with the loving thing to do.  You can see it in the stories about her spending her dress allowance on food for the poor – which is a fairly standard thing for a mediaeval female saint to do – but you can also see it in less clichéd ways, like the way she disturbed the members of court by actually insisting on sitting next to her husband at dinner, so that they could talk.  And it’s shown, above all, by what happened after her husband died.  Royal widows often went off to found monasteries in the middle ages – it was a respectable retirement job, I suppose, but Elizabeth, to the disgust of her family, and in the face of very considerable opposition, went off to found a hospital.  And she disconcerted everyone by joining in with all the nursing and the chores.  The evidence available, incidentally, suggests her cooking was really dreadful…

Elizabeth’s life turned the conventions of what royalty was supposed to do on its head, and she did this because she was trying to live the life of Christ.  Elizaebth’s ‘royalty’, her power and influence, was only significant to her because she could give it away, and in doing this she was following the example of Jesus, who though, as Paul put it ‘the image of the invisible God’ emptied himself of all his power, to the point of painful and humiliating death, so that there would be nothing in human life, however broken and horrible, where God was not present.  “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”

The gospel reading does some interesting things with this concept of Jesus as king.  The people mock Jesus for claiming kingship, when he’s powerless, betrayed, and abandoned.  Yet the joke is really on them.  Jesus is the king, the lord of all, the only person who can rightfully be called a king.  But the kind of king he is is not what humanity – who think that power exists to be held on to and used over people – expects.  He is a king who gives up his power for the sake of others.  In a final irony, the only person who manages to recognise this is the ‘good thief’.  Luke leaves it totally unclear what prompts him to ask to be remembered ‘when you come into your kingdom.’  Dorothy L Sayers, who as well as writing detective stories wrote a very good series of radio plays based on the gospels, actually suggests that the thief was just being kind and humouring a harmless lunatic – which might explain why he’s the only person in the gospels to call Jesus by his first name, without any sort of title.  But that act of kindness is enough for Jesus, who with the generosity of God, responds to all our attempts at goodness, however inadequate they are.  Jesus’ kingship is about self-giving love, and one of the forms that self-giving takes is God’s willingness to treat us as better than we are – and thus make us into the better people God wants us to be.

It’s hard for us to grasp the sheer goodness of God, of the depths of the love of God which makes him become a human being, and live and die to bring us from death to life.  The world couldn’t cope with Jesus – they couldn’t stand the challenge to the structures of power and authority we all build up in an attempt to protect ourselves.  It’s why they killed him.  And we, too, find it hard to cope with God’s love.  We’re a bit like Elizabeth’s courtiers, unable to grasp why she couldn’t just stick to the rules of proper behaviour.  But she didn’t because it was the loving thing to do; it wasn’t proper behaviour for a mediaeval noblewoman, but it fitted the kingdom of God.

Josephine Butler, Christian Feminist.

One of the courses we do specifically as part of our formation for ministry (as distinct from the university theology degree) is a course of lectures on the history of Anglicanism, and they've asked us to do group presentations on an Anglican woman of our choice.  My group picked Josephine Butler, and while the presentation will include a number of different angles, I went for Butler and women's issues.  I'm posting it here, because she's one of my heroes...

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Josephine Butler’s probably most famous for her campaigning on prostitution – an act which many of her contemporaries considered shocking.  Her activities among and on behalf of marginalized women only make sense if we look at them in the context both of her faith and her take on the question of women, which is part of her wider views on how Christians ought to behave, and what a Christian society ought to look like.

Butler first became conscious of the problems of women when listening to the colleagues her husband brought home.  She sat, silent and angry, as men criticized Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth, which deals with a young woman who is seduced and abandoned, as indecent. They maintained a blatant double standard.  Women who sinned were evil and lost; men who sinned had just slipped up.  Butler only found her voice later.

There are two strands that can’t really be separated.  Firstly, after her daughter’s death, Butler sought to cope by finding ways to live out her faith among the poor and destitute.  Working in the ‘casual ward’ of the Liverpool poorhouse and in the jails, she attempted to show these rejected, vulnerable, criminalized women that they still had value in God’s eyes, and to teach them to pray.

But secondly, Butler realized that this suffering was the result of wider injustice, and that the problem could only be solved by social change.  She became involved in wider campaigns.  In the 1860s she was signing petitions for votes for women, petitioned Cambridge University for the right for women to take examinations, and became involved in running campaigns for the married women’s property act.  She published 90 pamphlets and books campaigning for women to be allowed to work freely and without restriction.  This was directly connected to her concern for the poor and marginalized.  When she received a letter defending the restrictions on women’s work on the grounds that ‘a women’s place was in the home’, Butler responded by calling such views ‘satanic’, providing detailed statistical evidence for how the restrictions on poorer women in particular led, not to a happy domestic life caring for children, but to struggling on starvation wages.  Should anything go wrong, they were left with little alternative but prostitution, and ‘the destruction of bodies, of consciences, of souls.’  As she sharply pointed out, men were not caught in the same trap.  Better-off women still had their dignity and self-respect destroyed by the necessity of marrying for mercenary reasons. 

Even when, later in her life, she campaigned for the raising of the age of consent for girls, she kept her distance from the ‘purity’ campaigners, not because she disagreed that promiscuity was morally wrong, but because they put all the blame on individuals.  For Butler, helping people to live as Christ called them meant helping them directly, and she recognized “fallen women” as victims of injustice who had very little choice.  Showing Christ’s love meant giving them a choice.  She criticized those who 'were ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.'  Instead, she argued, 'Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.'

Butler’s radical commitment to social action in the name of Christ, even at the price of public disapproval, comes out most clearly in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act.  This legislation, initially affecting ports and garrison towns, took no action against men who bought sex, but mandated forcible medical and police inspection of women suspected of prostitution.  There was no right to refuse these very intrusive gynaecological exams; if you did not consent, you were imprisoned.  Butler became one of a coalition of middle-class feminists, radical working men, and non-conformists who spoke out.  The campaign was described at the time as ‘the revolt of the women’; press and public were astonished to see ‘respectable’ women talking about venereal disease.  Butler, recognizing that this law was just another instance of more powerful men blaming and exploiting vulnerable women, bluntly used the term ‘surgical rape’, which treated women as ‘foul sewers’ rather than moral agents.  Butler risked insult and injury – during one by-election, she had to escape from a barn which had been set alight by her opponents, while the police looked on – but stuck to her guns, trusting that God called her, like all Christians, to uphold the oppressed. 

When we were talking about Butler earlier, there was some resistance to calling her a feminist – but I think she only makes sense in the context of first wave feminism (although the term ‘feminism’ only came into use in the 1890s, it had a precursor from the 1860s on in ‘womanism’).  Yes, her life was dominated by a wish to serve the poorest and most marginalized of Christ’s people – but the concrete form that took was an authentic and distinctively Christian feminism, which proceeded from the recognition that the Kingdom of Heaven has no second class citizens, however much the world may degrade and misuse them.

Gaps in the fabric of reality opening up on the altar? Send for Aquinas!

This evening I found myself laughing at the Summa Theologiae.  I think I may actually be going mad.

Aquinas is discussing transubstantiation, specifically why the change in substance has to happen instantly:

If this were to begin to happen before the instant of consecration, there would be some time during which under a part of the host you would have neither the substance of bread nor the body of Christ.  This would be a most undesirable situation (quod est inconveniens).

At which point, I'm afraid, I found myself actually giggling.  Not at the theology, I hasten to add.  It's just the deadpan quod est inconveniens.  Bits of reality suddenly ceasing to exist, even though it looks like they're still there?  Sounds like the premise for Lovecraftian horrors. Quod est inconveniens, all right.

Time is flying, and I keep meaning to update the blog - for much has been happening - but so much has, in fact, been happening that I've no time to blog.  The usual problem (I recall having had a similar problem during my attempts to keep a diary as a kid).

I had my first supervision today, on Augustine's Confessions and the question, "Is thinking about oneself a good place to start thinking about God?"  My essay was, I think, solidly meh, but the ensuing discussion was helpful in more ways than one.  Primarily, it was useful in clarifying what sort of God Augustine is thinking about, and how this relates to his understanding of the church as a community of believers, but it did contain a rather wonderful moment:

We had been talking about Augustine's concept of 'seeing with the eyes of the flesh' compared to his idea of spiritual vision, which comes closer to seeing one's self and the world as God perceives it (subject to human limitations, which are pretty great).

Supervisor: So, when Augustine say he's "become to himself a vast problem", what do we make of this?

Self: Er, he's alienated from God and therefore can't make any sense of his life.

Supervisor: In what sense?

Self:....

Supervisor: It's pretty egoistical, isn't it?  "A vast problem"? To whom?  A vast problem to God?  Try seeing him from God's perspective.  Loved, yes, absolutely.  But a vast problem?  Come on, Augustine, get over yourself!

A lesson for everyone there, I feel.  Particularly clergy, or those in training, taking yourself too seriously being one of the occupational hazards (and an absolutely fatal one).

Freshers' Week Bop, I mean Induction Week Gala Evening

My mental image of theological college had not, up till now, included a young man in a tweed jacket bopping to "Sexyback".  But it does now....

Made it!

Which is to say that I've made it as far as theological college, which at the moment feels like a minor miracle in itself - and I'm not talking about the feat of surviving moving when jetlagged from a trans-Atlantic flight, though that's probably one too.

It's the third day of inductions.  At times I'm feeling somewhat buffeted by various pressures, ranging from the mild shock of going back into somewhat cramped student accommodation, to meeting a large number of new people, to trying to get my head round the degree requirements, and the frankly terrifying manner in which the idea of the priesthood is beginning to resume reality - and above all, information overload.  But for all that I'm enjoying things, and feel like I'm in the right place, strange as that may seem.  Though it is strange to look round all the (very friendly) faces and imagine them all above black shirts and clerical collars.

I was amused that the inaugural Eucharist involved the hymn Father hear the prayer we offer, which as you may knows goes:

Father, hear the prayer we offer:
not for ease that prayer shall be,
but for strength, that we may ever
live our lives courageously.

Not for ever in green pastures
do we ask our way to be ;
but the steep and rugged pathway
may we tread rejoicingly.

Not forever by still waters
would we idly rest and stay;
but would smite the living fountains
from the rocks along our way.

Be our strength in hours of weakness,
in our wanderings be our Guide;
through endeavor, failure, danger,
Savior, be thou at our side. 

I will forever associate this hymn with the priest who conducted a retreat I was on recently, who, in the course of telling us that we should make sure we were being honest when we prayed or sang, not just repeating things we considered pious, told us how he refused to sing this hymn.  "I don't want to tread the rugged pathways, I'd much rather stay by the still waters.  Especially if there's someone to bring me a cocktail."

In some ways I saw his point - the masochistic urge to psuedo-martyrdom is unhealthy! - especially as I knew he had gone through some fairly hellish times.  It did strike me, though that the hymn was written by a woman, in the nineteenth century, and that does make a difference to how we read the hymn.  Maria Love Wilkes, a Unitarian from Boston, was a magazine editor and married to a doctor.  While she had, as far as I know, an active and fulfilling life by the standards of comfortably off Victorian women, it's easy to read the hymn as the cry of someone who is sick to death of being protected and told that their role consists of being 'the angel in the house' while the men do the dangerous and dirty work.   A job, however difficult, and the strength to do it, is vastly preferable.

Of course, that's assuming you don't get a job that's beyond your strength.  The role of women in the church still isn't easy - particularly if you're in the catholic tradition - and our divisions and differences are painfully felt.  And the life of a priest can be lonely, frustrating, and difficult, in any case.

Still, whatever the path before me, I'd like the strength to tread it rejoicingly (which applies to the degree, too).

And I do think the next couple of years are going to be a lot of fun, as well as hard work, too.

Testing RSS feed....

Ecumenism as she is spoke.

I was leafing through my parents' Life and Work (the magazine of the Church of Scotland - a bit like the Church Times, but a glossy monthly), and - in between an enjoyably snark correspondence about Latin grammar, I noticed an ad for guided retreats for clergy (and indeed for laity) conducted by Jesuits on Iona.

It's tempting to wring one's hands about the state of ecumenism - I was feeling depressed about it myself. after reading correspondence in the Church Times about ARCIC and the ordination of women - but for all the scandalous divisions afflicting us and the small likelihood of reunion this millenium, it's worth remembering things have changed.  It's not so long, really, since it would never have occurred to any of the SJ to place an ad there.  And it's also, in the grand scheme of things, striking that they think there's a market for guided retreats in the Kirk...

As I mentioned, at the moment I am learning NT Greek, having been told to get cracking on it before arriving at college.  For various reasons I'd been putting this off, so I am still at the stage of very simple sentences.  Most of the examples and exercises in the textbook (Duff's Elements of New Testament Greek) are - not unreasonably - drawn from the Bible, which means that you get a lot of useful Scriptural vocabulary.  It also gives them a rather pious flavour - the crowds see the angels, the brothers untie the slaves (for some reason the first verb you learn is "to untie"), the Lord Christ frees people, etc.

However, one sentence that came up recently was "They are throwing bread."

Shades of Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club!

I must admit it makes a pleasant change from wall-to-wall stained glass.

Welcome!

I would write something more substantial - but at the moment I'm learning Greek, and finding it rather heavy going.  (Despite the subtitle, I haven't actually got to theological college yet; I go in Septemebr and am just doing the pre-reading).

I'm also reflecting on the Church of Scotland ordination and induction service I attended at the weekend.  The Kirk's take on ministry is naturally a bit different to Anglican ideas about the priesthood - but it was a moving event.  The minister was charged to love the people of his parish and be faithful, which is certainly something every priest has to take to heart...

But while that's the most central - and at times most difficult, I'd imagine - aspect of ministry, I think it's also reassuring to be reminded that human measures of 'success' are not always appropriate.  Indeed, they can be a snare and a delusion: what God requires is first and foremost that we make ourselves open to him, and open to others.  And he can work with the tiniest opening; the danger is that we get so caught up in managing ourselves and others, and striving for whatever our image of perfection is, that we close ourselves off.

Which is, perhaps, why Julian was right to say "sin is necessary, but all shall be well"... but that's a story for another day.