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.

in the beginning…

…was a vast expanse of something because there had to be something but it was just around and there and not doing a lot and all messy and chaotic and out of that God – our god, you know god, God, Yahweh – he brought life from this amorphous mass of stuff not that he was a part of it – he was definitely apart from it – because he wasn’t made and always was and he was there and it was there and he was all mixed up in it and we know that he is in charge and so from that mass of something we don’t understand he made life which we understand a bit more though it is still a mystery and in a way it is like he

b r e a t h e d

and s p o k e

and is like the way a garden comes together after it has been left untended for ages and ages and the weeds grow and you think it can’t possibly be fruitful and then the farmer comes and works on it with a lot of breathing and creating and some resting and at the end of the day (or week) (or season) something beautiful has become of the chaotic mess and we like to tell stories about all that and about the people who were first here and we like to reflect on their lives and how they started so

close to God

and ended up so

far                                       away

and when we read the story we realise that the story isn’t about those people though we give them names like Adam and Eve  or about the places they found themselves like Eden or erm, Ur, or the things they built like the babble tower in Babylon or the floating square box full of animals and it isn’t about how God made all of these things and places and people and real-time 24-style history the story is ultimately and mainly and superbly and undeniably and historically about

god

God

Yahweh

and his character, his ability to plan and for the plans to go wrong and for him to get huffy but not so huffy that he throws it all away because his character as we learn is that there is always another chance another way there is always a blessing to replace and overthrow a curse there is always grace to find and blessing to pour and there is always another human to choose to be a part of the plan and not apart from the plan

tower of babble

and what a wonderful beginning and what crazy stories and what interesting archetypes of people from the good to the bad the farming to the urban the faithful to the sex-crazed the clothed to the naked the punished and the punishing to the blessed and the continually blessing and and the ever-faithful and the

curiously creative

and the immoral and the right-thinking and the stubborn and the hurt and the desperate and the slave and the master and the mother of the murderer and the murdered and the hopeless and the hopeful  and the warrior and the peacemaker and the friend and the enemy and the loyalty of family and good decisions and bad decisions and the promises fulfilled from generation to generation

 

and I have only got to chapter 15 of Genesis.

Phew.

apocalypse (s)now

fight for survival

When was the last time you killed someone? Today? Yesterday? We’ve had snow of such apocalyptic proportions, cutting off communities, blocking food supplies, stirring such rage that surely has forced us into some difficult decisions. Like, where do you get guns from. And who to kill first. After all, we can’t all survive. Tesco’s ain’t full enough for all of us.

You haven’t resorted to this? Why not? I guess I’m relieved. But still. How have you managed to repress the self-protecting pack-hunter hiding in all of us, the predator, who lives in a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest – or at least, the one with the biggest gun – world?

Maybe I’ve watched too much TV. Last year’s Survivors, which begins a new series tonight; Day of the Triffids; 28 Day Later, and so many others, all tell the story of a major catastrophe that leaves humans struggling to survive, mostly because without warm living rooms, mobile phones and an open petrol station we all go native, turn feral and kill each other. Why? Because at their root, humans are selfish.

It used to be preachers who had the monopoly on this story. Humans are evil! Humans are depraved! Humans are full of sin! You will be judged! Now, we don’t need to say anything. Survivors: humans are bad. TV news: humans are bad. Avatar: humans are bad. EastEnders: humans are bad. It really is everywhere. I don’t know many humans who need to be told they are crap. Most of us are fully aware that we feel like that already.Who needs Augustine’s doctrine of original sin when you’ve got the Daily Mail.

grim smiles in the fight for survival

If it was Christian preachers who set us on this path, maybe it needs to be Christians preachers who re-set the balance, who address the balance of a world out of kilter with its creator. Maybe we need to apologise for getting something so horribly wrong. Because if we begin at the beginning, to use Rob Bell’s phrase, we discover that humans are not inherently bad and evil; humans were not created depraved and in need of redemption. God saw what he had made, and it was good. It was good. Not perfect, as in a finished product out of a machine; but good, like fresh apples on a tree. This is Genesis 1 and 2. Things were good. So, the original state of humans: good. The default setting: good.

Yes, things changed in a way that Genesis 3 and the rest of the redemption story tries to explain. And then, at the end in Revelation 21-22, things are fully restored. Good. Good! So perhaps there is a different story of human life that we can tell. Stories that are not all about how humans make things go horribly wrong, but how humans are created to make things go right; that by nature we do not all revert to type and kill to survive, but that our nature is to over-rule the survival-of-the-fittest  instinct and look out for those weaker than ourselves. That has happened countless times in the snow over the last few weeks. People putting themselves out in order to help others; people meeting their neighbours for the first time on order to help them with their shopping or get the car out of the drive.

Stories of hope, stories of human goodness. I know it is not always easy. When in an almost empty-shelved (compared with normal!) Tesco’s on Saturday I was tempted to take more milk than I needed in case it we couldn’t get any more; but that would mean there was none left for anyone else. So I only took one. Big deal! But it’s little things that give us hope.

I know that without Jesus I would be more selfish, more opinionated, more impatient. So maybe Survivors is right. maybe I would kill to survive.  Maybe we all would. Maybe the new secular gospel preachers of sin, hell-fire and death have got a point. Maybe all I have said is wrong.

I hope not. Certainly not throwing Jesus into the snowy mix as well. Its times like this he’s especially relevant, especially challenging. In the midst of the bleak midwinter, in the midst of the thawing apocalypse snow. Anyone want to watch The Day After Tomorrow?

another cold-hearted human

blaming the goat

blame the goat

I am always at it. Blame the goat! You know, that thing we do when we make judgements about people, and always say ‘them’ – that imaginary ‘they’, the third person I remember learning in French that always seemed to be entirely irregular. What third person? Well, there’s you, there’s me and there’s ‘them’, ‘the other’. The goat. And they are always to blame.

When society appears to be falling apart (has it ever not seemed like that?! ask an older person about the war…), we are so quick to blame ‘them’. Whether it is politicians, single-parents, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, Chelsea fans… the dodgy family a few doors down, the farmers, foreigners…Sometimes we can all get a bit Daily Mail and point the finger of blame. Goats, the lot of ‘em.

We like having someone to blame. It makes us feel secure. The problem is labelled and dealt with. Maybe not solved, but there is a door to lay blame at. And it’s not mine. So we can make scapegoats of social workers if there is an abuse going on that wasn’t acted on as we would like, even if life and family intervention is a whole lot more complicated than that allows for; we can blame ‘Muslim terrorists’ for wanting to destroy our way of life, especially if that means we don’t have to hold a mirror to ourselves and ask why.  We can pin the whole blame for Lockerbie on one man, who is now dying of cancer, as if he alone was responsible; we can blame ‘the bankers’ whilst forgetting perhaps it was us who enjoyed the easy credit as much as they allowed it.

The thing is though, with the Jewish-Christian lens we look through, it is much harder for us to point at others and say ‘them’. Instead, we point at ourselves and say ‘we’. Someone once (annoyingly, to be honest) said that when you point one finger at someone, three fingers point back at you. Probably annoying cos I was the one pointing. Anyway… If I am a part of society, and society is producing terrorists, then I am partly to blame. If I am a part of society, and society is producing overweight, under-active teenagers having too much sex (is than an oxymoron?), then I am partly to blame. If I am a part of society and society is producing paedophiles and perpetrators of abuse, then I am partly to blame.

Ouch.

But… but… it’s not me, I didn’t do it, I am a good person, how can it be me? How, indeed. Well, we each may not feel we contribute to things we disapprove of, but we are a part of it, simply by being there. To say otherwise would be to be a grain of sand on the beach and deny you were part of the beach, or a raindrop splashing in a puddle and claiming to be from a different storm. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, whether a literal account of real people or a allegory laden with meaning, points us to this. As humans, we are together, one – we all looked longingly at the tree, we all offered the fruit, we all ate. So there is no them, only us.

Does that make us feel hopeless, or hopeful? Hopeful (I hope) because God does not cruise earth searching for individuals to rescue like some kind of cosmic kerb-crawler, but he drives a huge ocean liner (mixed metaphor!) so full of space and grace and says to us all, as you all share the guilt so you can also all share the grace, you can all be redeemed, you can all come aboard. This is wonderful stuff! Though to many will seem unnecessary, because still theyf blaming other people and feeling better about ourselves. we (oops) will cling to the life-raft o

But we no longer need the scapegoat, which comes from Leviticus 16, when an actual goat took on the sins of the community and was sent to its death. And we no longer need to shoulder them ourselves either. Because God as Jesus came to take that burden from us, to painfully and wholly free us from the guilt our human nature ties us to. But, interestingly and so importantly, not then to remove us from the society of which we are a guilty-but-free part, but sends us back there to disrupt and irritate the guilt, to be light in the dark, flowers in the desert, love in the blame, a peaceful voice amidst the finger-pointing in anger.To be part of the story of the redeeming of creation that his resurrection began.

So the challenge to them us is to live as us, not us and them, however painful and illogical it seems. We are them. They are us. Live deeply and be free. Most of all, free the goat.

(p.s. be part of freeing the goat without needing to keep checking my blog, by clicking on the new ‘subscribe via email’ link on the right- it will let you know when there’s a new post to read so you don’t have to keep checking)