I was toying with the idea of buying a Kindle recently and decided against it at the moment, mostly for reasons of cost. But I can see advantages to the electronic readers. That was until I read this. I hadn’t realised that Amazon have the technical capabilities of deleting your bookshelf. Am I the last one to learn this?

Maybe this was huge news earlier in the year and I missed it, but is certainly worth highlighting again.

As our media libraries get converted to 1’s and 0’s, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider.

Now Amazon says it won’t do it again. That’s good, so far as it goes.

image from here.

In Genesis 16 Sarai is in the place of Abraham, and he plays the role of the Pharaoh. In the face of a pressing need, childlessness this time, she presents an innocent, powerless woman to the powerful Patriarch in a painful echo of her experience in Gen 12.

Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant and gave her to her husband to be his wife. (Gen 16:3)

Just look at the complex of relationships his wife…her maidservant…her husband…his wife.

Has Sarai learned from her husband’s pragmatic, self-interested behaviour? Or is this revenge? When the trap is laid she turns on Abraham and blames him for her predicament. Has this resentment been stored up for years and years? In front of Abraham she claims to have ‘put my servant in your arms’, but earlier it was clearly stated she gave Hagar as a wife.

Just as in the previous example of spousal abuse Abraham is silent and it all happens around him. Is this because he had already surrendered the moral high ground by what he did in Egypt? Here, he limply hands the outcomes to Sarai to do as she pleases with Hagar. ‘Do what you think is best’ he says, but we already know that neither of them are prone to good judgment and decision making.

Past hurts and wounds are raw and continue to control present behaviour.

And what of Hagar in all of this?

Just a few days ago my eleven year old son came home from school bursting with enthusiasm for a book one of his teachers was reading aloud to them in school. Cloud Busting, he said, and it’s written like a big long poem about a boy and his friend. He claimed that I’d love it.

So enthusiastic and so certain was he that I ended up downloading the audio book and we listened to it there and back again on a school journey. It’s only 45 minutes long but boy it packs a punch in that small package.

It’s a story about poetry and imagination, about bullies and victims and haiku, about poverty and isolation, about guilt and forgiveness, about redemption and the choices we make to be the person we are or the person we want to be.

Over the years we have used audio books to pass long car journeys. In fact I remember one such journey finishing whilst there was still 20 minutes left in the story and we sat in the car, all of us, until it was over. Fish, it was called, by L S Matthews. Another standout was Girl Underground by Morris Gleitzman. I also downloaded quite simply the best children’s book I ever read aloud to my son, the hilariously imaginative Muddle Earth, which we still talk about and still listen to, years after I read it to him at bedtime.

These books have been brilliantly written and and thoroughly engaging and, perhaps with the exception of the latter romp – a spoof of Middle Earth – they have tackled the most profound of subjects. Girl Underground is about politics and immigration and minority communities, Fish is a story of poverty and migration and hunger. They have tackled these big themes in ways that have had our kids and their parents rapt.

And they call them books for children.

In Genesis 2:24 the narrator declares that a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. There is a profound act of letting go required before something new and fruitful is made possible. The leaving and cleaving one becomes one flesh with his wife.

Like anyone who experiences this need to cleave to another, the old securities and familiarities need to be relinquished to create the possibility of newness and new fruitfulness.

Abraham’s journey from his father’s house has all the echoes of a search for a bride and the creation of new oneness with the fruitfulness that we take for granted must follow.

Only this time the couple are barren, and they travel solely with the promise of God and the hope, perhaps, that his word can be relied on, the make them into a great population.



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