Ministry Team Letters January – June 2007
David being away, and there being a space to fill, I begin to write this on the day that Tony Blair announced his resignation as leader of his version of the Labour Party, and as Prime Minister. What are we to think?
Clearly he has presided over some remarkable achievements. Income tax is lower; hospital waiting times are shorter; schools are better staffed and school buildings are better provided for. There is a minimum wage and tax credits for the badly paid. Fewer people than ten years ago live below the poverty line. But that has to be set against the fact that the gap between the poor and very rich has widened, and the evidence is that social cohesion depends crucially on there being a relatively small gap. People’s commitment to each other depends on where they see themselves in the pecking order.
To have brought to fruition the process begun by John Major – peace between opposing ethnic and religious forces in Ulster – must be a positive achievement for which Tony Blair will be long remembered. We can only admire his skill in presenting Ian Paisley with the awful choice between his love of abusing Roman Catholics and his desire to be First Minister.
But Blair’s taking us into war in Iraq is another matter. Commentators disagree over whether he has moderated the worse excesses of George Bush’s administration, or whether he has simply done as he was told. Either way, his legacy will always be tarnished by a war that has made life for ordinary Iraqis far worse than it was under Sadaam.
My problem with Tony Blair is that if he believes something, he thinks it must be true. That is familiar because I was brought up in a protestant sect in which my father was a slightly leading light. When I began to acquire a smidgeon of education, I would challenge his dogmatic beliefs, only to be told (and I can still hear his voice from the long distant past) ‘But, son, I believe it’. The fact that he believed it, made it true. It didn’t matter much in the context of a sect most have hardly ever heard of. It does matter in the context of the life of a nation. Tony Blair’s message is that his policies were based on his personal belief. If he believed it, then it was true.
Having earned my living as a scientist and as an expert witness, and having spent my free time as an amateur theologian, I think that what we believe should be based on the available evidence. After all, why would God have given us brains, and minds, and intelligence, if we were to suppose that truth ought to depend on what we believed, rather than that our beliefs should depend on what could be shown to be true?
Jeremy Craddock
The vicar writes from Japan
I am writing this while on holiday in Japan, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to give you a little picture of one corner of this country and one particular church here. We are staying with Yoko’s family in a small town in south-western Japan, not far from Nagasaki where we used to live. Yoko’s father is a seaweed farmer, who produces nori, the dark green edible paper-like coating that often wraps sushi and accompanies many other Japanese dishes. The town lies on one bank of a broad estuary, where the nori farmers keep their boats and at the mouth of which the nets used to grow the nori float on the surface of the sea, attached to long poles stuck in the sea bed. Most of the households here are engaged either in producing nori or in rice growing, and unusually for mountainous Japan the landscape is completely flat and scored by ditches, dykes and rivers. It feels somewhat like the fens, with the difference that mountains are visible in the distance, including an active volcano. Beside the house is a large processing shed. The nori grows very fast in the warm sea, and a different section of the crop is harvested nightly in the growing season (it quickly goes bad if exposed to sunlight once out of the water). The boats then speed back with that night’s crop, and the green sludge of raw nori (which means ‘sea moss’ in Japanese) is poured into one end of a giant processing machine in the shed. The machine washes, presses, dries, cuts and packs the nori in one continuous process, so that it emerges edible and ready for sale at the other end only hours out of the sea. At the moment, it is the slack season; the harvest ended in March, the nori has all been shipped, and Yoko’s father is working on maintaining the nets ready for the next growing season in October. The surrounding fields are full of nearly ripe barley – once that is harvested, very soon now, the fields will be flooded and planted with rice, which will grow rapidly in the hot and humid Japanese summer and in turn be ready for harvest in September.
Yoko’s family live in the prefecture (equivalent to an English county) of Saga. This is the only prefecture in Japan that has no Anglican church, and some years ago the diocese decided that there should be some sort of Anglican presence and started a small mission in the prefectural capital, only a few miles from Yoko’s family home. I used to be involved in the life of this little gathering when we lived in Japan, and found it very refreshing and rewarding to be part of something new and open, in contrast to the somewhat staid life of the more established churches. Last Sunday (May 6th) we joined this little group again after an absence of a year. The meeting takes place in the home of one of the members, a Christian, and comprises a healthy mix of Christians and enquirers. The priest from the nearest church comes once a month to celebrate communion (I used to do this when he couldn’t make it), a table is turned into an altar, the piano is played by a local doctor, and ten or twelve people, usually including a few children, squeeze into the front room overlooking the pocket garden to join in a service that would be recognizable to anyone who had ever been to an Anglican communion anywhere else. When the service is over, a bring-and-share meal takes place, with everyone sitting in the same place they were during worship. The communion thus flows entirely naturally into a fellowship meal, which makes this small house-gathering feel in some ways like something out of the pages of the New Testament. Everyone is close enough to each other to join in a general conversation, which often ranges over religious matters, including the questions and insights of the enquirers, and which can also be a chance to discuss plans for the future and so functions as an informal PCC. The long-term goal is to establish a church, but the hope is that the warmth of this intimate fellowship, in which non-Christians feel welcome and equal, will not be lost.
From our brothers and sisters in Saga, greetings. May God bless them and us.
With love,
David
Dear Friends,
At the time of writing, Iran is much in the news because of the taking of Royal Navy personnel as hostages, and their accounts subsequently being sold to the press. However, when this story fades from our collective mind, as all news stories do, Iran will remain a place to which we have to pay attention as it draws ever closer to becoming a nuclear power and as its influence in the Middle East continues to affect the policies of our own and other western governments. To move from the geo-political scale to the personal, I owe the inspiration for my journey towards both faith and ordained ministry to one particular Iranian perhaps more than anyone else. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti was bishop of the small Anglican community in Iran, numbering a few thousand. When the Islamic revolution took place in 1979, pressure was put on him to hand over church funds to the state. He resisted, and an attempt was made on his life. He then left Iran with his wife, and shortly afterwards his son Bahram was assassinated in Tehran. He has since lived in Britain, with no prospect of returning to his homeland. Soon after these events, Bishop Dehqani-Tafti gave a talk at my university, and something drew me, then still quite undecided about my own faith, to go and hear him. Having spoken of his own tragedy, he ended with the prayer below. Hearing this, I realised, perhaps for the first time, that Christian faith was not a matter of assenting to abstract and impenetrable propositions, but a way of living that has the potential to forge a new kind of human being. Below is the best contemporary example I know of what that new human heart is like. Here, for me, is the essence of our Easter faith. A Father's Prayer for the Murderers of his Son Oh God, we remember not only Bahram but also his murderers, not because they killed him in the prime of his youth and made our hearts bleed and our tears flow . . . but because through their crime we now follow Thy footsteps more closely in the way of sacrifice. The terrible fire of this calamity burns up all selfishness and possessiveness in us. Its flame reveals the depth of depravity and meanness and suspicion, the dimension of hatred and the measure of sinfulness in human nature. It makes obvious, as never before, our need to trust God’s love as shown in the cross of Jesus and His resurrection. Love which makes us free from hate towards our persecutors. Love which brings patience, forbearance, courage, loyalty, humility, generosity, greatness of heart. Love which more than ever deepens our trust in God’s final victory and the eternal designs for the church and for the world. Love which teaches us how to prepare ourselves to face our own day of death. Oh God, Bahram’s blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls. So when his murderers stand before Thee on the Day of Judgment, remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives, and forgive.With love,
David
Dear Friends,
‘How can you prove Jesus came back from the dead?’ ‘Might the story of Jesus coming back from the dead be just a trick by his friends?’ These were two of the many challenging questions I was asked recently by pupils from Godmanchester Community School when they visited the church. What excellent questions! Straight to the heart of our Easter faith. What is that faith built on? How can we be sure we are not simply deluding ourselves?
In a few days’ time we will proclaim loudly, ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’ What gives us the audacity to make that claim? It is tempting to want some kind of proof for this most extraordinary of beliefs. After all, as St Paul says, if Christ is not risen, we are of all people the most to be pitied, because we have put our trust in a lie, and a particularly extravagant one at that. Because it seems so important to be certain, it would be easy to talk about the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as if it must be the answer to some kind of straightforward question. Did Jesus rise from the dead or not – yes or no?
I believe that to put it that way is a mistake. If we are looking for the kind of proof that would satisfy a historian or a judge, we are looking in the wrong way. All we have as direct evidence of the resurrection of Jesus is a few rather sketchy and somewhat inconsistent stories in the Gospels. If that were all our faith were built on, I could agree with my young questioner that it might indeed be just a trick by the friends of Jesus. But in fact, important as they are, the Gospel stories are not in themselves the basis for our Easter faith. Those stories are not first hand accounts, but arose some years after the events they describe among groups of people who were already convinced that they could speak of Jesus as being alive after his death. In other words, the Easter faith comes before the Easter story.
When my own faith came alive after many years of questioning and uncertainty, I felt two things happen inside me at once. One was an undeniable sense that I was being summoned by Jesus. The other was a deliberate choice that I made to try to live as if he were alive. I was not suddenly given an answer to all my doubts and hesitations (they are still with me), but they became unimportant in the light of this new resolve to see for myself what life would be like if it were lived for him and with him. The evidence for the resurrection is not in this text or that, but in the lives transformed because men and women have chosen to be Easter people. How can I say, ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’? Because of you, the Easter people in this place and because of all who have gone before.
Happy Easter! Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.
With love,
David
Dear Friends,
Now we are in Lent, it seems a good time to talk about giving. This is a subject that has to be addressed from time to time in the life of the church, but I have to admit I don’t greatly relish it. Still, here goes!
Colin Thirlwall has written a piece elsewhere in this month’s magazine setting out the facts and figures very clearly, so I suggest you refer to that for the background to what I am saying here. We are truly blessed at St Mary’s in having a very dedicated Treasurer and Finance Committee. Thanks to them and to the efforts of all who give to the church and all who work to raise money, our financial situation is not actually too bad, but as you will see from Colin’s piece we do need to raise more money if we are to keep our house in good order.
I don’t want simply to say, ‘Please give more!’ Our giving is between each of us, or perhaps between couples, and God alone. Apart from the Treasurer, who can’t help seeing the amounts of standing orders and free-will offerings, no-one in the church knows how much anyone else is giving. It goes without saying I have no idea of who gives what. The question I would like us all to consider this Lent is how we approach the matter of giving. You sometimes hear non-churchgoers complain that ‘the church is always asking for money.’ It’s a great pity if we come across like that, not least because it is worshipping Christians who ought to be first in meeting the financial needs of the church. But I wonder whether those of us in the church sometimes feel the same way: the church wants more of my money.
If we do think like that, we have a problem. We have then begun to think of the church as something outside or separate from ourselves which is making demands upon our hard-earned cash. It feels rather as if we belong to a club that is always putting up its membership fees. But the church is not a club. I wrote here last month about the church as a family, and that is not a figure of speech but a spiritual reality. As members of the body of Christ, we belong to each other and to God, not to an organisation or institution. Almost all of us are prepared to make material sacrifices for our dependants if we have any, and other blood-relations in times of need. The needs of the church, of our Christian family, are no different. We are not being called to give money to a ‘worthy cause’.Our material wealth, be it great or small, is not something we can generously offer to God out of the kindness of our hearts but is actually part of his blessing to us. He calls us to respond to his blessing joyfully.
With love,
David
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
I have just got back from a half-day training session on child protection and child abuse. Obviously, much of what we had to think about on the course was pretty grim. However, it also brought into focus some thoughts on the family of the church that I have been musing on in a vague way for many years, and especially since becoming a parent nearly four years ago.
The gist of these thoughts is celebratory: A reasonably lively, open and cheerful church – which I believe we can say we are – provides a wonderful extended family for all its members, children included. (Conversely, a moribund, exclusive and miserable church, and they do exist, would be a particularly unpleasant and in some ways harmful place to be!) From the earliest days, Christians have thought of the church as a family. That is what we mean when we address God as Father. We are brothers and sisters to one another. This is more than just a way of speaking. I have always felt that the social life of a church is not an enjoyable ‘extra’ tacked on to the serious business of worship, study and mission, but is at the heart of what we mean by a church. We are supposed to enjoy each other’s company. Even though we inevitably find it easier to get along with some more than others, if we commit ourselves to our ‘enjoyment’ of each other, we can in fact learn to get along better with more people than we might have imagined. A church that devotes time to the serious business of enjoyment is a good place to be, one that will find its work and life much easier to manage and that will have a greater success in drawing others into its fold. Children will find that they have a large family that they belong to, encompassing all ages and types, and nuclear families under pressure will find a measure of relief in being part of this larger circle. Those who have few or no blood-relations to care for them will find not only a place where they are ‘family’ but also a role in nurturing others. Such a church, where each is looking out for all, will also be a place of security and will have a real contribution to make to genuine child protection.
Starry-eyed and unrealistic? No, the wonderful thing is that this can be, and often is, a reality, however imperfect. I believe St Mary’s to be one place where this imperfect but wonderful reality can be encountered, and for that I thank God. Let us continually deepen our enjoyment of our family life as a church – so much more will flow from it than what we usually mean by ‘mere’ enjoyment.
With love from your brother,
David
Dear Friends,
Happy Christmas! Yes, I do know you may be reading this in the New Year, but Christmas is traditionally a twelve-day festival that begins on 25 December and ends at Epiphany – or Twelfth Night – on 6 January. In Japan – where, as I may just have mentioned before, we used to live – there is no official Christmas holiday since it is a predominantly Buddhist and Shintoist nation, but in December many shops and some homes do sprout Santas and reindeer, and piped carols can be heard in supermarkets. So it’s just like here in that respect. However, all of this is swept away on the 25th itself, because the actual festival has little meaning for the largely non-Christian Japanese. In our church in Nagasaki we had a large Christmas tree put up outside where it was visible to passers-by, and I used to make a point of leaving it there until 6 January. Occasionally, people would ask why I had forgotten to put it away, which would give me an opportunity to explain that the church was still celebrating Christmas.
In Japan, New Year is the major festival of the year and has something of the same significance and feel as our Christmas. Before midnight people gather in the temple grounds to take turns tolling the single huge bell, which is symbolic of ringing out the sins of the past year and ringing in blessings for the new. Simple meals will be served and prayers will be offered. After midnight, huge crowds surge into the shrines to make offerings and buy lucky charms. Then the first few days of the year will be spent with the family, eating certain celebratory meals that appear only at that time. The Church has generally not made much of the New Year as a festival, but 1 January is in fact the feast day of the Naming of Jesus. The name Jesus means ‘God saves’, and in a sense the Church claims the start of the year for Jesus, the one who saves or rescues us from the darkness that always threatens to engulf our existence.
Just as it is good for the Church to try to reclaim Advent as a season in its own right that means something more than ‘the run-up to Christmas’, so I feel we would benefit from remembering that Christmas extends into the New Year. It is while we are still celebrating the birth of our Saviour that a new Annus Domini, Year of our Lord, is born. This new year of 2007 AD represents, after all, the number of years, approximately, since the birth of Jesus. If we remember that, then the hopes and fears that accompany the start of a new year can be seen in the light of God’s incarnation, which is the Christmas revelation that the source of our being and the ground of our hope is here and now with us and within us in a form we can recognise and embrace. In other words, allowing Christmas to spill over, as it were, into the New Year would help us see that all of the year, all of time itself, and not just the special seasons, is lit up from within by the light of Christ. With this faith, we can face 2007, or any other year, with the courage that comes from knowing that no matter what the year may bring God is with us and therefore nothing that is good and no human soul will in the end be lost.
May God’s peace and blessing be with us all, this year and always. Happy New Year!
David