you give them something to eat

Isaiah 55.1-5; Matthew 14.13-21
St Thomas the Apostle Finsbury Park
Sunday 31 July 2011

Our gospel reading today starts with Jesus in a state of exhaustion and grief. His cousin and colleague John the Baptist has been beheaded by King Herod. Jesus responds in the way many of us would on hearing bad news. He withdraws to a quiet place to be alone with his thoughts and with feelings of great sadness. This was no ordinary bereavement. For Christ it was a foretaste of his own death; a powerful reminder of the forces that were working against him and would not rest until he had been executed. Who wouldn’t need a bit of space?

But crowds of people still demand his attention. They want to hear more of his stories; learn more about the Kingdom of which he speaks; to bring their sick friends to him to be healed. In spite of his weariness and troubled mind Jesus feels great compassion for the people and performs many healings.

They are in the middle of nowhere. The crowds have followed Jesus out of the villages to this deserted place. The disciples – no doubt mindful of their own hunger and tiredness – suggest to Jesus that he sends the people away so they can buy food.

His response? “You give them something to eat.”
“What with?” they reply. “We’ve got nothing here except some bread and a few fish.”

Here, Jesus exhibits what the Americans might call a can-do attitude. Don’t clutter the situation with your own problems and needs, just feed them. Yes, it is late. Yes, we are in a desolate place. Yes, there is nowhere to buy food. You give them something to eat.

How often do we bring our objections to the call that being a disciple of Christ makes on us. We’re tired. It is not a good time. It’s late. We might even dress up our objections as caring for other, as perhaps the disciples did. “Look at you Jesus, you’re exhausted. Send the people away.”

“You give them something to eat.”

Two years of drought in the Horn of Africa have left over 12 million people in need of food. These include half the population of Somalia, many of whom have fled to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Not everyone lasts the journey. Others make it as far as the camps only to collapse with exhaustion.

The British fundraising campaign has so far raised £37 million. This is a terrific achievement in such a short space of time, and is typical of the generosity of people in this country in a time of need.

Nevertheless perhaps we could do more. The amount raised equates to about 60p for every person in the country. Of course it is not simply relief aid that is required. The action of the international community is vital in solving some of the problems that this region of Africa faces. Political solutions, technological and agricultural solutions are all required to ensure that the people of the world have enough to eat. It isn’t that we lack the resources or the ability. But the will of wealthy nations to share what they have at the levels necessary seems as lacking as ever.

What is it that stops us from doing more for the poorest people of the world? Like the disciples, we sometimes bring our well-meaning objections to the situation.
“There are so many problems in the world - we don’t have enough to fix them all.”
“The aid doesn’t reach the people who need it.”
“Their governments are corrupt. It is their own fault!”
“We’ve got our own problems. Don’t you know there is a recession on?”
“I’ve already donated £1.”

“You give them something to eat.”

Jesus’ command cuts through our objections as much as it did those of his disciples. Like them we may already feel we’ve done the caring thing, made the compassionate suggestion. For Christ, though, our thinking - like the disciples - is sometimes too small. The costliness of following Jesus suddenly becomes costlier still.

Yet, Jesus is able to take whatever little we offer and make the most of it.

As Tom Wright puts it,

“This is how it works whenever someone is close enough to Jesus to catch a glimpse of what he’s doing and how they could help. We blunder in with our ideas. We offer, uncomprehending, what little we have. Jesus takes ideas, loaves and fishes, money, a sense of humour, time, energy, talents, love, artistic gifts, skill with words, quickness of eye or fingers, whatever we have to offer. He holds them before his father with prayer and blessing. Then breaking them so they are ready for use, he gives them back to us to give to those who need them. And now they are ours and not ours. They are both what we had in mind and not what we had in mind... It is part of genuine Christian service, at whatever level, that we look on in amazement to see what God has done with the bits and pieces we dug out of our meager resources to offer to him.”

Food is at the heart of our worship as a community of God. We meet week by week to feast on the goodness and generosity of God. And we can be a bit possessive about that too. “You can’t have it until we know you are really serious, until we know you are one of us or understand what you are participating in,” we object. Are these really objections made in the name of the one who said, “You give them something to eat.”

Perhaps people don’t need to know, or go on a course or be confirmed. Could it be that simply being hungry for God is enough of a reason to allow a person to feast at the table of Christ? That participation in his love feast should be based on need, not understanding. Do we trust the Holy Spirt so little that we have to inhibit her work to those who hunger to be fed?

The love and presence of Christ that we encounter in the Eucharist is not something to be rationed out, or controlled by entry qualifications. Like the 12 baskets of leftovers after the feeding of the 5000 we must trust in God’s abundance. There is more than enough to go round.

“The Lord says this: Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.” [Isaiah 55.1]

“You give them something to eat.”

SOURCES:
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: a radical conversion (Ballantine Books, 2008)
Tom Wright, Matthew For Everyone part 1 (SPCK, 2002)

the events of the last week challenge self-serving interpretations of scripture

Today's epistle (Romans 8.26-39) contains some of the best known verses in the New Testament, and are among the most cherished by Christians:

‘All things work together for good for those who love God’
‘If God is for us, who is against us?’
‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’

These promises have comforted and reassured Christians throughout the ages. But they have also been distorted to justify inappropriate action - or sometimes a lack of action - on the part of Christians.

Paul’s assertion that ‘God is for us’ has been used by armies to claim divine protection as they set off for war. ‘All things working together for good’ is sometimes glibly treated as a way of imagining that God will get on with the business of caring for his own so that we don’t have to – or, even, that if people are faithful to God nothing bad will happen to them. So if you suffer, it is obviously your own fault. I’ve heard very committed Christians utter the complete tosh that even catching a cold is evidence of a lack of faith.

These are appalling and twisted ways of interpreting the points that Paul was trying to make, and they take his words completely out of context.

If anything should make us think twice about investing cherished Bible verses with naive and self-centred meanings, it is the events that we have seen unfold in the news this week.

Firstly, the worst drought to hit East Africa in 60 years is putting the lives of 11 million people at risk. So far the country worst hit is Somalia, where 1 in every 10 children is at risk of starving to death. Hundreds of thousands of people are already trying to leave the country, many of them dying on the journey or shortly after arriving at aid camps in other countries. The situation is expected to worsen.

God doesn’t call us to sit back and say, ‘Well it will all work out somehow.’ Or that he’ll look after his own. Or that it is their own fault. Or even, as I hear people at St Peter’s say, charity begins at home. Christ’s mission and ministry reached across religious and national divides. God’s preferential option for the poor is not for Christians. It is for poor people, regardless of which faith - or lack of - they adhere to. But we are called to act as Christ’s hands in a suffering world.

The only thing keeping the images of starvation off our television screens at the moment are the actions of a so-called Christian fundamentalist thought to have blown up government buildings in Norway, before pitching up at youth camp and shooting dead 85 people, mainly teenagers. I wonder if he drew strength from the idea that God was for him and nothing could be against him?

Fundamentalism of any sort - Christian, Muslim, Communist, Fascist - is intolerant and oppressive. The actions of this one young man may be extraordinary and exceptional, but they are rooted in the same hatred and fear that fuels all intolerance. There is nothing about the love of Christ present in the actions of the Norwegian gunman, and we stand together with other Christians this morning in saying, “Not in our name.” One of the possibilities already beginning to emerge in the light of Norway is that Christian Europeans might now be better able to identify with, and offer support to, the millions of law-abiding and peaceable Muslims who also say in the aftermath of extremist acts of terror, “Not in our name.”

Paul did not write to the church in Rome to offer bland reassurances that nothing bad would ever happen to them, or that God was on their side and destroying their enemies. The situation in first-century Rome was quite the opposite, with Christians being roundly persecuted. It is in this context that he says, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” These were not imagined possibilities for Roman Christians, they were everyday life. But even in the face of such desperations, Christ love is constant.

Paul quotes Psalm 44, one of the so-called Psalms of Complaint. It is a national lament and a prayer for help. In spite of their faithfulness to God, the people of Israel experience terrible suffering. We’ve heard from our ancestors about all the great things God did, they say. But all we experience is hardship. “For your sake we are being killed all day long, we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

What kind of consolation is Paul offering to the church? Not that God will save his people from suffering, but rather through it and perhaps even because of it [see Tom Wright]. That in some way the hardships encountered are gathered up into God's purposes, and lived out by his people as an extension of Christ's love. We see in the terrible imagery of Jesus Christ on the cross, not the beloved Son of God being saved from his suffering, but rather one who would triumph over it and in so doing extend God’s love to the world.

We have our own share of suffering here at St Peter’s - of terrible illness, of grief, of mental anguish. Paul tells us that in the face of these troubles Christ prays for us. That even when it is hard for us to find the words to say to God the groanings of our heart are understood and carried before God in prayer. What we are promised is that even in terrible suffering God the Father stands alongside us, God the Son brings hope, and God the Spirit brings healing.

As a community of God’s people we share the conviction with which Saint Paul ends this passage,

“...that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

St Thomas: Patron Saint for the Age of Me

We live in an age of scepticism where people are abandoning their -ologies.

For centuries the prevailing -ology was theology, as the teaching of the Church shaped everything from the law to the ordering of society. Not always well admittedly, but nonetheless it was the dominant paradigm.

For much of the twentieth century political ideology captured the imagination and aspirations of millions. Socialism, Communism, Fascism were causes worth fighting and dying for.

And in the 50s and 60s people placed their hope in technology and science to solve humanity's problems, cure our ills and take us to new levels of achievement.

But in the 21st century the hopes invested in these -ologies lie shattered by the disappointments and failures of these movements.

Church attendance has plummeted as scepticism rises towards an institution that is perceived as archaic and out of touch. There is the scandal around sexual abuse by clergy. The rise of the toxic and intolerant religious right. The bad taste left by the perceived cultural imperialism of missionary work. And besides, who in their right mind believes in something you can't prove?

The rot set in for political ideology when Fascism led to holocaust, and Communism was corrupted by greed, fear and domination. More recently the absence of conviction politicians, the expenses scandal in parliament and the era of soundbite and spin have led to voter apathy.

And who trusts their GP anymore? Once a pillar of the community whose opinion was never questioned, the controversy over the MMR vaccine, the tragedy of Thalidomide and the unscrupulous practices of pharmaceutical companies have left some patients wondering whom they can trust.

So what does today's generation believe in if not the priest, politician or doctor? The answer is, of course, themselves. Like St Thomas, who would only believe in the risen Christ if he could touch his wounds, Generations X and Y will only believe what they know to be true from their own experience. The notion that one might invest trust or hope in an institution without personally verifying it's authenticity is regarded as immensely naive. The Age of Me is driven by scepticism, conspiracy theory and distrust.

But putting the Self at the heart of one's experience or opinions means elevating the very thing that corrupted the institutions that are the focus of scepticism. The drive for money, sex and power by individuals within Church, Government, and Science are what sullied their reputations. The Age of Me idolises that same self-centredness, and conveniently side steps the examples of those who set aside their own needs for the greater good.

The Christians who took on vows of poverty and chastity to better serve the needs of the poor. The missionaries who lived among lepers. The volunteers who joined Brigades to fight fascism in Spain. The campaigners for freedom who languish in a Chinese prison. The medics who experimented on themselves to find cures or push the boundaries of science.

When Jesus says to Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen but have come to believe," he once again challenges us to take our selves out of the centre of our existence and place God there. When we do so, like others before have done, we become outward-facing and better able to look our neighbours in the eye while stretching out a hand of generosity.

Holy Week: An opportunity for Christians to fetishise torture?

A well-known British writer once said that he could never be a Christian because of the way we venerate the Cross. He regarded it as fetishising torture, which seemed just a bit sick to him. It is a wry chattering-classes remark, but doesn't come close to understanding the real meaning of the Cross.

What we remember week by week as we celebrate the Eucharist, and focus on particularly in Holy Week, is an act of self-giving so powerful that it inspires us to persist in countering the self-serving behaviour that is so deeply rooted in human nature.

The Cross is a reminder of what society is capable of when confronted with a force of goodness that it finds threatening to power, vested interests or the status quo. Christ crucified draws our attention away from ourselves and onto innocence made to suffer at the hands of humans. The Cross incriminates us in the daily injustices that the world continues to mete out to those who do not deserve them.

Even if the crucifixion was nothing more than a myth or a parable it would still give pause for thought about our actions and conduct. Imagine a story in which perfect goodness walks the earth. How would we respond? The answer of course is not to embrace it but to become so uncomfortable, so convicted by our own comparative shortcomings and weaknesses, that such goodness would have to be got rid off. For this reason I believe the Cross has something to say to people of all faiths and none.

Christians of course view the cross as more than myth. It embodies the extraordinary idea that a merciful God would place himself at the mercy of flawed and selfish humanity. This is an act of humility so potent that to be reminded of it whenever we break bread, and especially now in the events of Easter, cannot help but challenge us to reorientate our lives away from the gravitational pull of our own selfishness.

As we enter the season when the Cross is most contemplated I will see not only a generous God hanging there but also the suffering of all humanity, confident that the arms of Christ are reaching out to embrace us in another way of being.

gay audiences love a coming-out movie. Christians of all people should understand why.

Last week the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival finished its run at the BFI on the South Bank, albeit a much curtailed affair this year due to funding cuts. Nonetheless, as it has done for the last 25 years, the festival drew on the output of film-makers from around the world in a diverse programme of queer movies.

For all the variety on offer - drama, documentary, shorts, comedy - there are recurring themes found in each year's pick of films. The impact of the AIDS epidemic is one. Or the effect on particular cultures or characters as they encounter homosexuality would be another - last year's Eyes Wide Open powerfully explores a same-sex relationship in Jerusalem's Orthodox Jewish community, and has gone on to wider cinema and TV release.

Films which explore the struggle of the protaganist in coming out are a perennial favourite with gay audiences. Last Monday's matinee, the very sweet comedy Sasha, played to a packed house. What is it about coming out stories that draw gay audiences in again and again?

For many, of course, there will be resonances with their own struggle in coming to terms with who they are (which is not to presume that coming out is hard for everyone). While we are accustomed to think of coming out as the revelation of one's sexuality to friends and family, the first step is coming to terms with, and understanding, oneself. The process of doing so is perhaps a common bond with which gay audiences identify.

It wouldn't hurt those who decry homosexuality as a 'lifestyle choice' to enter more fully into the narrative of those for whom coming out was far from what they initially hoped or imagined for themselves.

A coming out story presents a narrative arc that lends itself well to film-making, and should have an appeal far beyond gay audiences. To become more fully human, to overcome limiting social conditioning of family, friends or self, to realise one's full potential -- these are universal themes in movies of many genres. It is, for example, the subject of Billy Elliott.

Christians from those traditions that more readily embrace spirituality (who perhaps see conversion not as a moment in time but a lifelong process) will also understand the language of becoming more fully human, more whole. Coming to terms with who we really are, learning what it means to be free of the hold that our broken humanity has over us, setting aside lowest common denominator social norms to move on and grow in the love of God, is another kind of coming out.

These days it is hard to know which is more socially awkward - coming out as Christian or coming out as gay.

In both cases there is a learning to 'come home to oneself', an expression Timothy Radcliffe explores in Why Go To Church? He writes:

Repentance is, inseparably, an awakening to God, oneself and each other. Most sin is pretending to be someone else, admirable, or powerful or sexy, who will have value in other's eyes and one's own.

It is in stripping away such pretences and embracing humility - a grounded understanding about who and what we really are - that we can begin the journey towards wholeness that is sometimes also called holiness.

For some gay people the challenge is not to throw off one set of limiting self-beliefs only to become bound by a collective obsession with body image, hedonism or sexual liberation so easily found in the queer sub-culture.

And for Christians the journey towards wholeness must hold us in that place of humility that is far removed from the smug, self-satisfied judgementalism that too often leaks out of the Church and corrodes society.

the world doesn't need another blog about Rob Bell's new book

and he sure as hell doesn't need any more publicity...

But I have been thinking about why some Christians feel so threatened when you suggest Hell might not be real.

You see if you remove Hell from the picture it takes away the central plank of their marketing strategy. Every product or service is the solution to a problem, and a good sales campaign will point up the problem to remind you of why you should buy into what I'm selling. So if you're peddling religion, scaring people with the prospect of eternal torment is a great way to line up your pitch of getting them to become more like you and do what you want.

I have no doubt this works because it is the same strategy they taught us on day one of sales training in the financial services industry. "Mrs Jones, have you thought about how you and the children would survive if your husband suddenly passed away?" And as a look of alarm flits across her face you slide over a form and a pen. Helpfully you've filled out all the blanks. All she has to do is sign, and peace of mind can be hers forever. (At least until she dies and goes to Hell because, friends, I'm really not sure about some of her lifestyle choices...)

This approach was very popular in the middle ages, when the Church's leverage on superstitious and poorly educated people was at its height.

The really good news about Hell as a marketing strategy is that it fits right into the modern Christian's hectic time-poor schedule. No need to waste time on all that tiresome self-examination, or bleeding heart acts of love, welcoming of outcasts or challenging injustice. Jesus, who has got time for all that these days when there are souls to save?

The doctrine of Hell too easily appeals to those Christians who think it is their job to convert people, not the Holy Spirit, and who rely on sales techniques to bring people to Christ. Instead let's focus on living lives of personal example that witness to the love of God, and let him worry about judging others.

should the Daily Mail come with a mental health warning?

An enterprising young man wants to persuade his mother to stop reading the Daily Mail, so has set up a group on Facebook which lists all the paper's cancer scare stories over the last few years. It is an astonishing list, painstakingly linked to each article on the Mail's website - almost 150 carcinogens from flip-flops and hugging, to talcum powder and till receipts. Smoking isn't mentioned.

I remember Mike Yaconelli once saying that good satire doesn't always need to provide witty commentary. Sometimes it is simply enough to hold up a mirror to what someone has said or done. The Facebook list does just that, and speaks for a news agenda that plays on our fears and anxieties.

It is a little unfair, I suppose, to single out one newspaper. The front pages of papers are dominated by bad news, and can leave one gasping for hope amidst the litany of woes that are the headlines. What does our exposure to all this news of greed, violence, and catastrophe do to our state of mind?

Michael Moore's conclusion, in his film Bowling for Columbine, is that the anxiety created by the news agenda in the USA is responsible for the number of people who own - and consequently discharge - guns.

Others have suggested that levels of anxiety, depression, panic attacks and social withdrawal are linked to fear stoked by the news.

But it is not all bad news, of course. The media is limbering up for the overboard coverage they are sure to give the royal wedding. Sometimes a good news story can spread itself across a dozen pages of a tabloid newspaper. And remember the coverage given to the remarkable rescue of the Chilean miners?

There is another argument. We don't actually get enough bad news, because our diet of reality is diluted by celebrity gossip, political commentary or those feel-good 'And finally...' stories. Editors know that it is hard for us to swallow too much depressing reality and must leaven the mix to keep readers engaged. Attention-grabbing headlines, that draw us in by playing on our fears, give way to cheering human interest stories to remind us that everything is fine really.

Writing in the Church Times (£) a few months ago, Giles Fraser suggested that the instinct to tone down the news might have something to do with how we wish to see ourselves.

I wonder why it is women who write best about evil: Mary Midgley, Gitta Sereny, Gillian Rose, Hannah Arendt. Perhaps it is because, unlike men, they do not so readily refocus their distress at hearing [stories of human atrocities] into some passionate expression of retributive anger. This allows time and space for a more disturbing reality to dawn: that we might have more in common with the perpetrators than we are comfortable acknowledging.

News of inhuman treatment towards others is appalling to read. Part of that shock is realising the capacity of some people to do things we would never dream of. And yet perhaps within us is an understanding that what drives people to commit acts of terror, assault, abuse or murder is the same sorry collection of fears, insecurities, shame and hatred that we all have to confront within ourselves. We may not be driven to the same extremes, but which of us hasn't had moments when we could have cheerfully throttled a colleague or family member? Or fantasised about the 'disappearance' of a difficult person from a challenging situation?

Reading the paper may or may not be bad for our mental health. But perhaps it should prompt us to examine closely the state of our spiritual well-being.