Harvest or hubris?

Here's my magazine article for September:




What do Superman, the Addams Family and 'Wir pflügen' all have in common? Answer: they are all tunes that my family uses to sing a 'grace' before a meal. 'Wir pflügen' is better known as the tune to 'We plough the fields and scatter' but you'll have to ask me the lyrics to the other two next time you see me!

As things slowly start to return to normal, so does the regular cycle of special services, the first major one being Harvest. Despite living in a rural area surrounded by people whose living depends on farming, we, like our more urban neighbours, have largely lost a sense of how dependant we are on the natural processes of food production, and in particular on the importance of the harvest. So a bad harvest will affect the livelihood of agricultural workers but rarely affects consumers. I would guess it is also fairly rare for people to start their meals with a 'grace' – thanking God for the food they are about to eat and those who had any part in producing it.

This can lead to an unconscious hubris that we as humans are no longer subject to the vagaries of nature; that we can control nature to produce what we want, whenever we want it.  This arrogance also extends beyond food to everything we have – we have gained or earned it and it is ours to do with as we please. Perhaps this is why natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes shock us so much – they remind us that the natural world is actually beyond our control. 

So the dwindling importance of harvest celebrations may not be just because we've lost the connection between what we eat and how it is produced, but because harvest itself is a reminder that we are not in control, that we are dependant upon God's provision through nature. Harvest is an affront to humanity's sense of self-sufficiency.

But harvest is also a reminder of God's generosity to us: he didn't have to create us, but he did; he didn't have to give us a world with all its variety for us to enjoy, but he did; he didn't have to send his Son to die so we could be forgiven, but he did. Our response should be thanksgiving but also a desire to be generous as God is generous. One of the prayers we use in church when we receive the collection is “everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.” We need to go along a journey that starts with ‘how much of my money do I give away?’ to ‘how much of God’s money do I keep?’

It’s not an easy or straightforward journey – but this harvest is a good time to start.

A Christian perspective on sport

Here's my magazine article for August:

Photo by Einar Hansen from FreeImages

When it comes to board games, I can be quite competitive and if I'm honest, I'm not a very good loser. However, I've never got to the stage where I throw the board in a fit of rage, unlike an unnamed member of the Royal Family which is apparently why the Queen has banned Monopoly! As we enjoy another summer of sport, it is perhaps worthwhile reflecting on the themes of winning and losing, on success and failure.

It might be assumed that Christianity, if it has anything to say about sport at all, would be against the idea of competitive sport. After all, doesn't loving our neighbour mean that we want them to win and turning the other cheek mean that if they beat us at something, we should let them beat us again? Happily that's not the case, but it does help us to see how we can approach competitive sport in a Christian way.

Firstly, loving our neighbour means that cheating is not acceptable. There are many times in the Old Testament where God commands fairness in business and justice (like Leviticus 19:15 and 35), which could equally apply to sport. Paul says that “anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules” (2 Timothy 2:5). Secondly, turning the other cheek means that if we do lose we should do so graciously and not be filled with anger and a desire for revenge.

It is this second one that is sometimes very hard! The more the competition means, the more painful it is to lose. The answer is not to give up caring about winning and losing (e.g. by saying that it's only the taking part that counts) nor to dispense with the idea of winning at all (e.g. the 'non-competitive' sports days). Rather the answer is to put sport into the correct perspective.

The Latin root of the word 'competition' means 'to strive together' – by having something to strain for (i.e. victory) all competitors push each other on to improve. So in this sense it is the taking part that counts, because both winning and losing are learning opportunities, and losing is probably more instructive and character-building. This image may also lie behind the exhortation to “consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24) - church is a competitive activity!!

But sport, along with all human activity, needs to be put in its proper place: Paul reminds us that athletes “do it to get a crown that will not last, but we [follow Jesus even when it is difficult] to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9:25). As great as human success can be “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36). Failure in sport, in career or in exams can be traumatic but failure to respond to Jesus' invitation to repent and trust in him has eternal consequences.

Anything can happen if you let it. Discuss.

Here's my magazine article for July:

The first production I saw at Broughton Juniors, as it then was, was Mary Poppins in 2012, and they are doing that same musical this year, albeit in a different way. Growing up I loved watching the Mary Poppins film, and I was amazed at how well the Broughton children performed it. There were a few differences as theirs was based on the stage show, one of which was the song 'Anything can happen'.

This optimistic song is about dreaming big and aiming high: "When you reach for the stars all you get are the stars... When you reach for the heavens, you get the stars thrown in". These are the kind of messages we like to give children and young people to inspire them to work hard and pursue their dreams, and often schools have motivational phrases like this on their walls. They are also theme of thousands of memes on social media, and the summer's sporting events will give us plenty of stories of people who succeeded 'against all odds'.

However, I worry that we are selling a false hope. To say that 'anything can happen if you let it' is inspirational but not true – for example even in my younger, fitter days I would never have been able to play football for England: I could have been a better footballer if I'd have practised more but I don't have the natural talent and ability that you need to become a professional never mind an international. Similarly, I would never have been able to fulfil my childhood ambition of being a King!! Some things can be taught and practised but others can't.

But even if these aspirational phrases are not strictly true, what's wrong with giving people an inspirational thought? It seems to me that false hope can often be dangerous. I've written before about putting our hope in vaccines, which may help with the physical effects of COVID-19 but cannot help with our underlying fear of death. I've also written about how a false hope that our loved ones are 'safe' and 'happy' after death and that we will be reunited with them after our deaths means that we fail to take heed of Jesus' warnings that salvation is only through true and lively faith in him.

As well as this, encouraging false hope will inevitably lead to disappointment and bitterness, particularly if the message is “if you dream it, you can achieve it, just believe it”. When a person who thinks this is unable to achieve their dream then they automatically blame someone else: their belief was enough to achieve it, so the fact they haven't achieved it must be due to someone or something else. This feeling of entitlement to success or to have dreams fulfilled means that any opposition, however logical or reasonable, must be silenced (or 'cancelled'). Dreams and desires then become inextricably linked with identity – 'I am whatever I want to be' - and if anyone disagrees that becomes an 'abuse of human rights'.

So let's teach our children to dream big, aim high and work hard, but let's not kid them, or ourselves, with a false hope that we can achieve or be anything just by wishing hard.

Holding out for a hero?

Here's my article for the June magazine:

The theme for this year's Scarecrow Festival in Scawby is 'Heroes' – a very appropriate theme given the year we've had since the pandemic struck. We've been encouraged to clap for the heroes of the NHS, and to hail other key workers as heroes too – including the often overlooked jobs such as refuse collectors, cleaners and delivery drivers. And then we've had the shining examples of people like Capt. Sir Tom Moore and others locally who have done outstanding work to raise funds, help other people or keep the community spirit up. Perhaps 2020/2021 will be seen as the year of heroes.

Whilst it is always right to thank those who make our lives better in any way, and particularly to thank those whose contribution is often taken for granted, we do need to be careful about using the word 'hero'. The main reason is that we can use the concept of 'hero' to assess a person's value and dignity: the more heroic they are, the more value they have.

Since the start of the pandemic, we've had to think a lot about the value we put on people's lives: whether that through the Me Too campaign or the Black Lives Matter awareness or simply through thinking about who we prioritise for treatment / vaccines for COVID-19. In an interview on Good Morning Britain, Lord Sumpter suggested that the lives of the elderly like himself were worth less than those of the young and so treatments and restrictions should place the interests of the the young before the elderly. Piers Morgan countered that Capt. Sir Tom Moore was 99 when he did his fundraising walk. There is a full discussion about this exchange on the 'Speak Life' YouTube Channel, entitled “Are All Lives Equally Valuable?” the jist of which is that both Lord Sumpter and Piers Morgan are wrong because they see human value in terms of what a person contributes to society, or their potential to contribute.

The problem with thinking like this is that the category of 'good for society' has no definitive meaning, it is always decided by those who have power, usually to protect their own position. All oppression and all abuse has at its core seeing someone else, or a group of people, as less valuable and less worthy of respect. Another problem is that we also tend to think of 'heroes' as being most qualified for a good afterlife.

The Bible is quite clear that human value and dignity does not come from things like cleverness, beauty, ability, fame, power, wealth, beliefs and not even from character; humans are valuable because they are made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). This is the only firm foundation for human dignity and also for human equality. But the Bible is also clear that all of us, no matter how heroic we are, fall short of God's standard for living – which is perfection (Romans 3:23 and Matthew 5:48). That is why we need the forgiveness Jesus has won for us by his death and resurrection, which is available freely to everyone equally.

So let's thank and celebrate those who do heroic things, let's aim to be heroic ourselves, let's value each other as people who are made in the image and likeness of God and let's ask God to forgive us for failing to value each other and failing to be God's heroes.

Can you truly say the Lord's Prayer?

 Here's my May magazine article:

Ascension Day, forty days after Easter, is on 13th May this year and it again marks the start of the 11-day global prayer movement called 'Thy Kingdom Come'. The title is taken from the Lord's Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his followers as a pattern for our praying as well as a prayer that we can make our own. The familiarity of that prayer means that we can lose sight of the radical nature of what we are praying for, and perhaps the most radical part of the prayer is the most over-looked: the opening two words - “Our Father.”

Our Western civilisation is so saturated in Christian thought that it is quite natural to think of God as 'Father'. However, this is unknown in Greco-Roman culture and unthinkable in Islam (hence the famous account of Bilquis Sheikh's conversion from Islam to Christianity entitled “I dared to call him Father”). Even in the Old Testament, God is the Father of the nation of Israel, and only of certain special individuals such as David. Conversely, the Christian-soaked Western world takes the idea of the Fatherhood of God too far the other way: as God is the Creator and originator of everything, the thinking goes, every human is therefore a child of God.

Jesus' radical message saves us both from a distant deity and from a conception of our position as God's children that is so wide that it becomes meaningless. John's gospel opens by telling us that Jesus would be rejected by many “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). Paul tells the Christians in Galatia: “you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26 New King James Version) and “God sent forth His Son...to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons...Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:4-7 NKJV).

These verses tell us important things. Firstly, only those who believe in (in the sense of putting their faith and trust in) Jesus are truly children of God. Secondly, adoption as a child of God is a result of redemption, i.e. by repenting of our sins in the faith that Jesus' death has paid the penalty for those sins. Thirdly, we are adopted as sons. This last point seems to be sexist, and indeed most modern translations of the Bible in these verses will render the Greek word 'son' as 'child'. However, Paul deliberately uses the word 'son' for a particular reason: in the society of his day only males could inherit, so Paul wants us to understand that those who are adopted as God's sons will share in everything the Father has. This distinction might also help us today for though it could be said that by virtue of being created by God we are all children of God, only those who are redeemed are sons of God and thus inherit the kingdom / salvation / eternal life.

The Lord's Prayer is therefore a family prayer – the prayer of those who have been adopted as God's sons through faith in Jesus. Can you truly say that prayer as part of that family?

Living Hopefully

Wildflowers in Scawby churchyard

Here's my article for April:

Spring has sprung and in the natural world we are seeing signs of new life, and with them brings hope that the cold winter days are past and the warm (and maybe even hot!) days of summer are on their way. But it's not just in nature that hope is springing: with the government 'road map' we have a hope that the dark days of the pandemic are coming to an end and the bright days of 'normality' are getting closer. Although hope is a powerful emotion that can keep us going through difficult times, it is good to question what the grounds of our hope are.

As we emerge from the shadow of COVID-19, the obvious grounds for our hope is in the vaccines, and then (as it has been throughout the pandemic) in the NHS to treat us if we fall ill. But these aren't solid grounds for hope. With each variant that appears there is concern that the vaccines won't be effective against that strain of the virus. With each rise in cases there is concern that the NHS will not be able to cope with demand – it is not surprising that one of the constant slogans has been to 'Protect the NHS'. The development of the vaccines is something to be celebrated and the NHS do fantastic work with all sorts of medical needs, but vaccines and the NHS are not solid foundations on which to build our hope of overcoming this plague, still less are they solid foundations on which to build our hope of overcoming the root cause of our fears about the virus.

We are desperate for protection against the virus because ultimately we fear death. To those who believe that the physical world is all that there is, death makes all our lives ultimately meaningless. As it says in Ecclesiastes 5:15 “We leave this world just as we entered it—with nothing. In spite of all our work there is nothing we can take with us” (Good News Translation). To those who do believe in a supernatural afterlife, death brings the uncertainty of eternal existence – uncertain because of not knowing what the outcome will be. The general sense that if you're good enough you'll have a nice eternal existence sounds reassuring until you ask the question of what 'good enough' means, and if we're honest, we don't even come up to our own standards! Death then is something to be feared and therefore our only hope is to delay it as much as possible. Unless there is a better and more solid ground for hope.

Thankfully, there is a better hope – the new life of spring overcoming the death of winter is one way God points us towards the good news of Easter; that Jesus' death and resurrection mean that death is no longer something to be feared. Our lives have meaning because they don't stop at death, and we can be forgiven for our constant failure to be 'good enough' because Jesus took our punishment on the cross. Just as we benefit from the work of many scientists by having the vaccine so we can benefit from Jesus' sacrifice by putting our faith and trust in him. So this Easter, live hopefully!

The answer to suffering: caprice, karma, chaos or Christ?

Here's my magazine article for March:

Anniversaries are usually happy occasions, but this month marks a year since the first COVID lockdown and I suspect few of us thought that one year on we'd still be facing restrictions. The pandemic has prompted many people to ask deep questions about life and death; and meaning and purpose, some of which we've looked at in previous articles (see here for some of them). However, we haven't looked much at perhaps the biggest question of all: why does God allow suffering? The problem is often put like this “Suffering exists so God either cannot do anything about it, in which case he isn't all-powerful (omnipotent); or he is unwilling in which case he is not all-loving.”

The first thing to say about this is that this is a specifically Christian question. Although it is often used as the knock-out argument against a belief in God, philosophically, suffering is only a problem if Christianity is true. In other worldviews suffering may exist, but it's not a problem.

If we look at other ancient religions, and to a certain extent Judaism and Islam, the will of the gods is supreme. Norse, Greek and Roman gods were capricious and fickle, they would cause humans to suffer on a whim and were not expected to be fair or just. As ABBA sang: "The gods may throw a dice / their minds as cold as ice / and someone way down here / loses someone dear" ('The Winner Takes it All' 1980). Similarly, for strands of Judaism and Islam, God is so supreme that he can never be questioned even if he acts unjustly. Suffering is therefore not a problem, it should simply be accepted.

For those who believe in karma there is solace (and often glee) in the thought that those who have hurt them will be punished for the suffering they've caused. However, to be consistent the karma-believers should also recognise that the suffering they face is a just punishment for wrongs that they themselves have done. Suffering is therefore not a problem, it is deserved.

The problem for atheistic philosophies is that we see suffering as a problem, because logically there is no grounds for complaining about suffering. If everything that exists exists because of chaos - random atoms banging into each other and 'accidentally' forming the universe – then suffering too is part of this random process. Alternatively, in evolutionary terms suffering is natural: nature is red in tooth and claw, suffering is the by-product of evolution. Either way, suffering is not a problem, it is random or natural.

But we do find suffering problematic. That's because we expect the world to be good and we expect any suffering to be just, because the Christian God is good and just. Only in Christianity can you have a problem with suffering, and only in Christianity can you have the solution to suffering. God created a perfect world, but humanity through rebelling against God (what we call 'sin') corrupted that world and so suffering became part of our experience. Despite that suffering being a just punishment for our rebellion, God did not want to abandon us to that suffering. And so he came to earth as a baby in Jesus; grew up like we do; experienced our suffering and pain; and then took that suffering and punishment on himself by dying on the cross; and in rising from the dead he showed us the new life, free from suffering. By becoming a suffering God, God is able to sympathise with us in our suffering (Hebrews 4:15) but more importantly to enable us to enter the new creation where there is no more suffering (Revelation 21:4). If you have a problem with suffering, then Easter is your answer.