controlled by cookies

They know. They are clever. And they never forget.
They remind you. They prompt you. They stalk you.

Do you fear them?

Or do we embrace them?

After all, there is nothing to fear. All they are doing is saying if you liked that, you may also like this. You bought this album, you may like this one. How very lovely, we think, I’ll give it a go. Have a cookie. Thanks for the thought.

boxed in

My recommendations from Amazon are sometimes very useful, sometimes way off the mark (80′s rom coms are not really my scene, it was Fran’s birthday…) (honest). But they are always based on my previous purchases, or things I have shown an interest in. Do they show me anything new? Or do they simply affirm my tastes and keep me in the same box? Does the shuffle on iTunes play things I have played more recently based on what I have played recently, so that gradually the net shrinks and it shuffles the same songs?

I was imagining a Bible app that would do the same. Maybe there is one. You know, one that says

• ‘as you like *Isaiah 61*, you may also like *Luke 4*’,
  
• ‘as you like *Acts 2* you may also like *Joel 2*’ or my favourite,
  
• ‘as you like to *misinterpret metaphor in Genesis* you may also like to *misinterpret metaphor in Revelation*’.

Then I thought, don’t we already do that. Don’t we already self-select the books we read, the Bible passages we read, the podcasts we download. Don’t we already take recommendations from our friends who we agree with, and in so doing affirm our own rightness by listening/reading/watching stuff we know we will agree with? I was struck by Nick Baines (not literally) a few weeks ago when he said that he doesn’t read books by people he knows he will agree with, because what’s the point? I guess that’s great for an avid quick reading academic like him, but is it realistic for the rest of us? I am about to start a Tom Wright I bought in 2008. That’s how behind I am with my book pile, and that’s mostly books I know I will like. Though it does include a John MacArthur (I was lent that one).

Given the choice, I will read Rob Bell not John Piper. Given the choice and limited time I am unlikely to critically engage in a meaningful sense with someone I am likely to disagree with. Which is exactly what I criticized people for doing with Rob Bell’s new book, people who slandered it before it was even published.

A challenge for me as part of the affirmation generation, who buy/listen/read things based on computer-generated consumption assumptions and tweets from our global ministry heroes is to break out and break free from being controlled by cookies. To try something new. To read someone I don’t agree with and find something good in it.

As Spring Harvest looms, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunity…!

Meanwhile here are a few more ideas for my ‘affirming your own beliefs’ Bible app. Do add your own..!

• as you like *sporadically applying Levitical laws when they suit you*, you may also like *The Pharisees*
• as you like *Luke 10*, you may also like *Deuteronomy 6*
• as you like *denying bodily resurrection and the new creation*, you may also like *The Sadducees*
• as you like *sending non-believers to eternal physical torment in hell*, you may also like *Matthew 25.31-46*
• as you like *to write long letters to church leaders* you may also like *Paul*

a ruthless bible

As we walk through the Bible in our little congregation tucked away on the forgotten borders of Sutton, Morden, Mitcham, Croydon and the sewage treatment works of Beddington, it can be easy to understand how the family of Abraham, who have become the tribes of Israel, became a little territorial. So easily we define ourselves by who we are not – we are not them, because ‘they’ are bad. It reminds me a bit of the M Night Shyamalan film “The Village”, where fear of the unknown is used to define and control. We read the dramatic stories of the Exodus, we flinched slightly at the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea, passing briefly over the historical question of why in the Bible it is called the Sea of Reeds but popular imagination is such that we need to keep saying Red Sea…

We passed through the conquest of Jericho, to the book of Judges, and some of the most controversial stories contained in Scripture. Stories that seem to advocate a sort of genocide, certainly military conquest of a violent nature. This is where people get the idea of God – Yahweh – as a violent, bloodthirsty despot. I don’t believe he is, of course, though he is not a cuddly teddy bear either. Some of that comes down to how we believe the Bible was written. Is it God dictating his thoughts, or is it the people struggling to understand theologically what is happening geographically? Is the history re-written with subjective theological edits – such as, we won WWII because God was on our side, or people get STDs as a punishment from God for their sexual immorality – or did God really tell them to slaughter other armies?

These questions are hard for me. They are not easily explained. And so I cling to Ruth. A Bible without Ruth would be a darker place. Certainly the book of Judges would be a darker place. With all the extremes of characters tucked away, I feel in need of a bit of redemption by the end and there is Ruth, poised and ready. You see, for the all the anti-foreigner urges in Judges, and especially anti-Moabism, the book of Ruth tells a story of a family who break all the rules about mixing with foreigners, and are blessed through it; a story that doesn’t allow us to write God off as racist, as nationalist, as someone who wants the muggles, mudbloods and the magic-folk kept separate.

Naomi and Elimelech and their 2 sons move from Bethlehem – ring any bells? – to Moab to escape a famine. MOAB! Naughty people. What would the neighbours say. Suffice to say things go from bad to worse: Elimelech dies, both sons marry MOAB women… and then die. Naomi, who’s name meant ‘pleasant’, is left alone in MOAB with two MOABITE daughters-in-law. She decides to move home, and Ruth, bravely, goes with her. Namoi changes her name to Mara, meaning ‘bitter’. So far, those who would say God judges by the book and shows no grace may have a point.

they looked just like this

Then everything changes. Boaz, a local land-owner, falls for the MOABITE woman Ruth. He first allows her to glean his field (no euphemism intended); and then (and this is romantic), allows her to gather barley from the sheaves and not the floor. He was way ahead of his time. She woos him with a bit of perfume and a subtle blanket manoevre, and the rest, as they say, is her-story. He marries her – he a faithful Hebrew and she a MOAB WOMAN. And the local people bless her by saying “May she be like Rachel and Leah…”; hang on, as in Jacob’s wives, who founded the nation of Israel? This foreign – no, MOAB - woman?

The Bible keeps us this emphasis on her MOABITE origins, and her welcome into the family. As if the writers are proud of this. Really?! The book then ends with this wonderful promise prayed over Ruth and Boaz’s son. Who was called Obed. Who became the father of Jesse. Who became the father of David. Yes, that David.

This story does not make some of the other stories in Judges go away. It does not make some of them any easier to stomach. But this story, this beautiful, unexpected gem of a story, does show our God in a completely different light. Maybe next time we are feeling a bit jingoistic, a bit nationalist, a bit racist or a bit anti-immigrant – and we seek to justify this Bibilically, as some do – then maybe we need to be a little less Ruthless in our criticism, a little less Ruthless in our judgment; and next we feel bogged down in stories of tribal war and ethnic conflict as we read out family history, maybe this little love-story with epic repercussions for Jesus and his family tree will balance our view of god, as we discover a Ruthless Bible – and indeed a Ruthless God – would be a different story altogether.

censored sensibility

Come-backs are still in full swing at the moment. As teenagers wear dodgy skinny jeans with 80‘s hairdon’ts, grown-ups of a certain age look back nostalgically at their youth and record companies say ‘ker-ching’ and so the bands of the 80′s and 90′s re-form (for better or worse) and stun us with their mediocrity. Quite how man-band Take That (whom I secretly love!) can win Best British Band at The Brits against Mumford & Sons who can tell.

When Jesus stormed the charts back in the day, he blew the current chart-toppers, The Pharisees, out of the water. They were like the X-Factor machine of their day, they had all the marketing bases covered for making sure everyone did the right things and behaved the right way. Namely, conforming. No-one was considered righteous unless they did what the Pharisees did. Which was to hang around each other patting themselves on the back for not being like ‘them’, the others, you know, the hoi polloi, the massed ranks of people. Think X-Factor auditions.

Almost as big a surprise to the ruling elite as The Streets were back in 2001, Arctic Monkeys in 2006 or Mumford & Sons in 2010, Jesus showed a new way, an original way, a much better way. Jesus challenged the Pharisees by saying (among other things) that separation from the tainted masses was not the way to be holy, and was definitely not the way to show love. In fact, for Jesus there were no tainted masses, there were no great unwashed. There were just – people. And he reserved higher condemnation for the hypocritical religious Pharisees than he did for the adulterers or prostitutes or cheating tax collectors.

Jesus took religion out of the white-washed tombs of respectability and plonked it slap-bang (pardon the expression) in the middle of the brothel, the drinking house, the messed-up marriages, the poverty-stricken abandoned widows and the dirty foreigners. So why is it that like the opposite of an indestructible 70′s prog rock band, respectability keeps on making a come-back. The church becomes so respectable, our faith becomes about being respectable. Of course when faith moves into the brothel we want the brothel to be transformed and changed – but not into a WI Knitting Circle.

Reading the story of Joseph (of the Technicolor Dreamcoat, not he of the pregnant fiancée) as part of the e100 Challenge it struck me how we even try to censor and make respectable the characters of the bible and the stories about them. Why, when the Bible doesn’t? The story of  Jacob & Joseph contains multiple wives, surrogate mothers, oppression of slaves and even rape; it contains sibling rivalry so bad it almost ends in murder and (only!) ends in Joseph being sold into slavery. And we expect our children to be well-behaved with this family as a role model?! No wonder Children’s Bible’s are so much smaller. They have to cut so much out.

What designer are you wearing tonight?

Of course we want to be changed and transformed. Of course we want messed up lives to be untangled and hopelessness replaced with hope. But let’s not pretend that that is anything remotely like coating ourselves with a veneer of respectability and hoping for the best. God looked at our Bible characters honestly, he judged them accordingly and guess what – by his grace he loved and nurtured and forgave and moved on with them, not without them.

Maybe this is a particular challenge to church leaders, of all denominations, when we so easily get caught up in being thoughtful intellectuals or organised managers or inspiring leaders and forget the primary calling to be real and to be immersed in our people and the messy lives that entangle us all. Maybe it is a particular challenge to followers of  Jesus who have been around the light so long we have forgotten what it is like to live in the dark and we expect so much of hurt and broken people that we frighten them away with our whispering about their swearing or our sssh’s to unruly children or we simply don’t give them the freedom to bring something new to our community that has become static and respectable.

Jesus went out there and mixed with the uncensored sensibilities of people the religious elite avoided. May we do the same. And let’s stop respectability making another come-back.

This comeback by take That, though respectable, was actually quite good – Ed

herding cats

my hero

From Jack Bauer to Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa to Batman, art and real life show us that flawed heroes are the best heroes. A flawless hero is too distant, too unreal; if we get a sniff of a flawless hero we send the paps round to expose them, whether it’s their affairs, temper tantrums, cellulite or simply mixed motives we love to bring them down. To our level? Or lower?

It’s probably because we know they can’t be real. Because we know ourselves. We may do heroic things, maybe every day – feeding the children, surviving the marriage, managing a smile, or rescuing kittens from burning buildings – but we know our heroic nature battles with our rubbish nature and usually comes out second best. So we need our heroes to be like us. And it is encouraging to know they are.

Maybe it’s just an anti-authority post-modern thing. But if so, the ancient scribblers who wrote down the early Bible stories were pretty post-modern. I’ve been reading Genesis and have reached the part where the grand stories and descriptive narratives of creation and garden and flood and the growth of nations and the beginning of humanity and human nature make way for the particular and specific as we meet a particular man called Abraham. And his temperamental and dysfunctional family.

He is a Biblical hero. One of the fathers of our faith, a patriarch, and rightly so; on a good day he was loyal, faithful, fearless and bold, striking out for this new and barely understood God through thick and thin. And so, a hero. But on a bad day… we don’t have to do much (any) digging to find the flaws. He lied, he was unfaithful to his wife and his God, he was hot-headed and arrogant and made a lot of money on the way. And his children… EastEnders would be proud to have such a family in Walford.

Follow me! Erm, hello?

This new family that Yahweh were certainly not chosen for their respectability, their compliance, their ability to wear hats or fit into Victorian family ideals. In fact I get the feeling that leading this family was a bit like herding cats. No sooner have you got them going one way than they have wandered off.

So why do it? The way some people understand God, he wouldn’t have the patience to herd cats, or even to heroically rescue them from burning buildings. The Old Testament God would just shoot them for going the wrong way, wouldn’t he? Didn’t he love a good smiting,what ever that is?  No. I think a proper reading of Genesis shows us that time and again God looks for excuses to bless, excuses to show grace; time and again instead of choosing compliant robots or even loyal and simple dogs he chooses cats, cats who don’t like to be managed, led or controlled, let alone herded. But he patiently waits, patiently nudges the family back on track when they’ve wandered off.

Hopefully that can be an encouragement to us who, like cats, get bored, wander off and would rather have a snooze. God’s endless patience with Abraham and his family, through Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and David and all the way through Jesus’ disciples and down to us is still… endless. No matter how much leading us is like herding cats.

Miaow.

bible bashing

It’s one of the age-old conundrums of our faith. How do you explain that a book written yonks ago by (allegedly) crusty bearded blokes still speaks to us today? And when we say it speaks, we don’t mean it literally ‘speaks’ out loud; and we don’t mean ‘it’ actually speaks, because there is no life-force or entity that could speak. It is a book, or rather a collection of writings and poetry and story and history, prophecy and metaphors and doodles and epic canvasses. The ‘it’ that speaks is actually God, who speaks through the Bible by his Holy Spirit. Though we call the Bible the Word of God, actually Jesus is the Word of God, revealed through the Bible. Which might seem like a pedantic distinction, but I think an important one. And he doesn’t speak just once – he spoke when he inspired the original writings, and he speaks as we read it afresh.

[That is a complicated opening paragraph. Must shorten it. -Ed]

When some people speak of the Bible, they speak as if God dictated it, as if it is the Bible we worship, that cannot be questioned, wrestled with or challenged; they use hard, command-type words like infallible or inerrant. I can understand this, though I don’t agree. I think it comes down to how hard it is to describe our relationship with this complex collection of revelation (I wrote a bit about this here). Call it a library of community history and that seems a bit weak and we could be accused of being  a bit dodgy and not taking the Bible seriously; call it the Infallible Word of God and we are in danger of Bibliolatry, where the Bible becomes more important than Jesus whom it reveals and lots of Capital Letters appear everywhere, Scaring Everyone into Submission. Which sounds a lot like Islam.

[This paragraph seems a bit wordy. Again. Were you listening? -Ed]

I think the Bible is a fascinating account of the turbulent relationship that God has had with his people; it shows the wrestles and the struggles, as people want him to be their mighty king and deliverer and he wants to be their shepherd; they want him to destroy their enemies, and he wants them to love them; then they want to blend in with other nations, and he calls them to be distinct. They want their freedom, and at the same time his protection; they want free will, and at the same time to be clearly led. They want to worship God but also to know how to live with the myriads of daily issues that come with husbands or wives or children or work or sex or love or money or other people’s gods. They want to know what he says about things, when quite often he says nothing, but asks them a question.

We want a Hayne’s Manual, and he gives us a cuddle; we want a text-book, he buys us an ice-cream; we want a quick fix, he invites us to love people who murder our families.

When being translated in 2000 years time this will make no sense. Must be less oblique and briefer. Is Ezekiel your role-model? -Ed

I am making an effort to read the Bible a bit more this year. I am joining in with the Essential 100 initiative (part of Biblefresh) to help me with it. The kick up the proverbial backside (Proverbs 7.1) is the 400th anniversary of the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible, which is not a translation I have ever particularly enjoyed reading because I do not live in 1611 but 2011, but at least it is a chance to remember to read the Bible! In our church we feel particularly connected to this anniversary because we are named after Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, one of King James’ translators.  And we are trying to read it together, because the Bible was never meant to be read alone, but to be read together in community, where we can talk about it and discuss and say we don’t understand and then wait for God to speak through it.

As Brian McLaren says we don’t want to be under the text like conservatives tend to be, or over it like liberals often are, but in the text…

“…in the conversation, in the story, in the current and the flow, in the predicament, in the Spirit, in the community of people who keep bumping into the living God… loving God, betraying God, losing God and being found again by God.” (A New Kind of Christianity, p125)

Maybe you’d like to do the same.  Let’s not get hung up on what the Bible is or isn’t, but let’s read it, and allow God to speak. Again.