I’ll be wearing a white poppy again today, just as I did last year (and here). My annual struggles with Remembrance Sunday go on, but this year it seems there is more space for debate, but also perhaps, less tolerance overall, if this piece in the Guardian is to be believed. It says,
In 1968, no British soldier died on active service. But that turned out to be not just the first but the only year since 1945 when the claim could be made. The uncomfortable question is whether our way of remembering war, or at least war’s casualties, has contributed to making that possible. The pacifist White Poppy movement, and some Christian thinkers, would argue that it has, that there is a hypocrisy about it that is reflected in the way the dead are honoured while the last military hospital is shut and those who survive with physical or mental damage have to fight for adequate care. They detect a whiff of militarism in the way civilian dead are ignored, and jingoism in the refusal to recognise that many of the enemy died believing they were fighting for freedom too. But above all, they are offended by the sight of politicians who have embroiled us in war laying wreathes at the Cenotaph in memory of the young men and women who have died fighting it. This is the final corruption of the original intention of remembrance: it has not prevented war happening again. Worse, it can be seen as a balm to the consciences of all of us who have failed to stop it.
The link to the Ekklesia report is also worth following. The abstract of the report says,
Remembrance Day needs to be re-imagined to make it more inclusive, more truthful and more meaningful for future generations, says this report. This would include an honest acknowledgement that some did “die in vain”, an end to “selective remembrance”, a positive stress on peacemaking, and making Armistice Day a bank holiday. The report follows the death of the ‘last Tommy’, Harry Patch from World War 1, who sadly described current patterns of Remembrance Day as “just show business”. Remembrance has been ‘cheapened’ by a failure to back up words with action, particularly when it comes to successive Government’s care for war veterans, but also the lack of resources put into peacebuilding.
A Conversation with Bob Lupton
Here is another one of those regular but unpredictable invitations to an event at the Mission. We’re hosting Bob Lupton from Atlanta for a few days, as part of our Mission Anniversary celebrations, and we’re planning an open conversation on Friday 20 November from 10am to 1pm, ending with lunch. If you’ve been to one of these before you’ll know it’s quite informal. Bob will address the group and then engage a conversation on Urban Mission.
Bob left a successful business career to move into inner city Atlanta where he founded FCS Urban Ministries in 1976. Since then the organisation has diversified and grown into one of the most significant urban ministries in the US. Bob is a well known conference speaker, and serves on the Board of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA).
He’s a real character, with great humour and insight gathered over decades in urban mission and this will be his third visit to Belfast.
I would be delighted if you could join me and the EBM staff and volunteers for what will be a fascinating encounter.
If you can make it, let me know for catering purposes – drop me an email using the contact details on the ‘welcome‘ page.
This is a photo I love. I took it in 2007 in Belfast at an international conference on urban mission. From the left it’s our own John Dunlop, Bob Lupton, Peggy Lupton and the legendary John Perkins. I had the privilege of transporting the latter threesome around Belfast in my car.
FCS Urban Ministries
FCS has blossomed over the years into a rather holistic ministry with a broad range of services including an array of youth programs, support for families and seniors, housing, economic development, church planting and educational programs. None of these is particularly unique in itself; however, when focused on a single neighborhood with the aim of community transformation, the effects can be dramatic. When invited to partner with a neglected neighborhood, FCS takes the lead in developing a comprehensive revitalization plan, mobilizes needed expertise and resources to implement the plan, and recruits “strategic neighbors” to help re-neighbor the community with strong, committed new neighbor-leaders. The goal is to re-create a stable, mixed-income community that is safe, socially and spiritually healthy, and economically viable.
‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go’.
Am I alone in thinking that the order of the forsaking is unusual? Surely it makes more sense to build up from family, people and country, particularly when the promise is firstly to a land and then to a new family.
Of course it could be a reflection of the patriarchal society, or could it be that God knew that the leaving of the father’s household would be the hardest for Abraham.
So hard, in fact, that Abraham disobeyed – he takes Lot. Verse 4 says expressly that he left as God had told him, and Lot went with him. Terah was still alive in Haran apparently so he could have stayed behind. If he had he wouldn’t have been about to cause the heartache he caused later in the story.
Furthermore, verse 5 says Sarai his wife went with him, but repeats the fact that Lot went with him, and that he took all the possessions he had accumulated and the people they had acquired.
So did Abraham obey only partially? Or conditionally? Did he lack the courage at this stage to be wholly and radically obedient? And did his partial obedience store up issues for later?
Not that I’d ever do anything like that!
‘So Abraham left as the Lord had told him.’ Gen 12:4
When Abraham left his land, either to complete his father’s journey or to embark on his own quest, it was unlike any journey in the Bible so far.
This was not Adam or Cain or the people of Babel, who travelled as an act of exile or diminution. This journey was a response to a divine imperative. But God’s curious call was one, as Avivah Zornberg says, ‘articulates and emphasises displacement as its crucial experience’ (Genesis: the beginnings of desire, p 74).
‘A call that emphasises displacement’, now there’s a phrase. It appears that Abraham had no destination in mind when he left. Instead he was to look, to all the world, as if he was lost. The only real direction was ‘keep moving!’
What if we were to experience the call of God on our lives more as a sense of displacement or dislocation, rather than a comfort or security?
The disturbing thing is that this first great trial of Abraham finds a later echo in Genesis 22 when he is called to another journey ‘to a place I will tell you about’ (22:2). Once again God calls him and tells him ‘I won’t tell you the destination just yet!’
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Who really got the call to go to Canaan?
The story begins in Genesis 11:27 with the account of Terah. After a brief statement of the family tree, and of the tragedy of childlessness, we read,
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran they settled there.
Did the call of God and the promises come first to Terah? Did he see Canaan as the Promised Land but lack the drive to finish the journey? And did Abraham pick up not just the call of God but also the unrealised dreams of his father?
If you follow the chronologies laid out in the Bible it seems that Terah lived a further 60 years in Haran after Abraham and the family left, and one stream of Jewish tradition suggests that when the Torah says Terah died in Haran, it really means his dreams and hopes died in the settled life of Haran. He stepped off the pilgrimage road and settled down. And died. He settled for less in life than he set out to attain.
Or, and this is really fanciful, is there a grief connection. His son Haran dies and he can’t move on from the place called Haran. His dreams died with the death of his son.
It strikes me that the Old Testament is full of unfinished journeys. In a way Abraham’s was unfinished. He never saw the fulfilment of the promise God made and died while wandering around.
Moses himself never finished the journey and died on the mountain overlooking the land. And of course the Torah itself finishes on the banks of the Promised Land and never gets there.
So how do we cope with such disappointment? What has faith to say in the context of a life that is unfulfilled or unfinished?
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote,
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.”
For a rabbinical comment on this story perhaps we could turn to Rabbi Tarfon,
“You are not obligated to finish the task but neither are you free to neglect it.”
Or Wendell Berry’s injunction in The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front to ‘plant sequioas’.
Terah, Abraham, Moses all began journeys which they never finished, but that is not to say that life was unfinished.
Short but very interesting quiz here on world hunger from the excellent American Jewish World Service and their campaign Fighting Hunger From The Ground Up
I’ve been re-reading the story of Abraham in recent days and been struck by the amount of the story that is untold, or at least unpreached.
I’ve been wondering why that is so? Why, though his life is the frequent subject of sermon series, do we manage to avoid so much of it? I think it may be because we have fallen into a trap of seeing his story solely in the light of good example. He is our great example of faith and we should therefore avoid the dark corners of his life, for fear that we might adopt a bad role model.
But is that really the way it is? Must we airbrush his life, making extensive use of our theological photoshop to make it as attractive as possible? And what does all of this say about how we read the bible?
I want to re-read the story, traversing some strange, unmarked territory, but also looking again at some of the familiar stuff all in an effort to find some humanity in the guy. Assuming it’s there.
Last year I read two books by favourite writers, both of which disappointed a little. The biggest let-down was Exiles, by Ron Hansen, at least part of which was about a poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The other more slight disappointment was So Brave Young and Handsome by Leif Enger, which was about a novelist with writer’s block.
So, The Anthologist, about a failed poet with writer’s block, was approached with just a little trepidation. The poet in question is Paul Chowder, who, though of some renown in his younger days, has aged badly. His continual failure to complete a collection of poems about ‘flying spoons’ is a regular rebuke. He has been commissioned to publish an anthology of rhyming poetry and write an introduction to it but he constantly procrastinates. His gentle exasperated girlfriend has left him, his dog smacko is neglected and all he seems to do is sit on a white plastic chair in an attic room and reflect.
In between regular fulminations about modernist poetry, and poets he despises, or loves or is jealous of, nothing much happens. He cuts his finger and lies down. He receives a left-over chicken dinner from his neighbour who is delivering meals on wheels. He lays a wooden floor for a friend. He rings his girlfriend looking her to return.
And it’s delightful. Absolutely delightful. Funny. Moving. Instructive. Honestly, if you imagine that a series of chapters on the mechanics of poetry could be worse that the latest Dan Brown, you’d be wrong.
I loved the regular advice on poetry that he offers, like read your writing in a foreign accent. Or most tellingly, at the conclusion, when asked how he achieves the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem, he has his breakthrough with the advice that he says has sustained him over the years,
I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?
Go ahead and try it.
Ched Myers has written a review of a new book ‘In the Shadow of Empire: reclaiming the bible as a history of faithful resistance‘ for a forthcoming edition of Princeton Seminary’s Theology Today. He quotes from John Dominic Crossan’s contribution,
“Before Jesus the Christ ever existed and even if he had never existed, these were the titles of Caesar the Augustus: Divine, Son of God, God, and god from God; Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World. When those titles were taken from him, the Roman emperor, and given to a Jewish peasant, it was a case of either low lampoon or high treason” (p. 73)
Incidentally, a new website to be launched at the end of the month will be the hub of all things Ched. Worth keeping an eye on.
Friend emailed me from the USA telling me of a friend, Juan Armando Rojas, a fellow academic who is also a poet and a social activist, who was arrested, working late in his office. A victim of racial profiling. A victim of some form of paranoia that still infests the country. It is said that the police report said he was wearing a teeshirt featureing a revolutionary carrying an AK-47, with a ‘terrorist slogan’. When translated it said, ‘Everyone has everything except we who have nothing’.
I was listening to William Elliott Whitmore’s latest album in the car a couple of days ago. It’s called Animals in the Dark. And when I heard track 2 I thought of him. It’s a beautiful lament over loss, but it is not hopeless. [lyrics below]
Who stole the soul
And who stole the heart
And who took the spark from inside of me
Why can’t I breatheAnd I’m afraid they won’t stop
Til all the poets have failed
Til all the good men are jailed
For nothin’ at allWho let them take the fall
And they’ll bring devastation
And call it diplomacy
But an occupation won’t bring a nation to peaceOh and I’m so ashamed
In these things beyond value
That we cherish so dear
I won’t let them go
No I won’t let them go
And who stole the soul
And who stole the heart
And I got back the spark from inside of me
And I can finally breathe
Hear the shuffle of my dancin’ feet
And if you get a chance, check Whitmore out in a live gig.
