Scripture Through the Lens of the iPod

I know, it is Friday and the pratt from Whitton starts a diatribe about the Bible of all things. My blog; my rules.

Compare these three lists, if you will:

1. Requiem, Faure: "Agnus Dei"

2. Death Magnetic, Metallica: "That Was Just Your Life"

3. Hellbilly Deluxe 2, Rob Zombie: "Jesus Frankenstein"

4. Hypnotize, System of a Down: "Dreaming"

5. Hit, Peter Gabriel: "Steam"

And then:

Isaiah: 42 v 6

Psalms: 139 v 14

1 Corinthians: 13 v 8

Ecclesiastes: 3 v 1

Psalms: 132 v 1

And then:

Breakfast - Alpen: raisins

Lunch - Bacon sandwich: bacon

Dinner - Corn on the cob: the melted butter running up my arm

No, I haven's (quite) lost my mental faculties [that is next week]. As I walked the Dog of All Evil (aka The Mutt Mostly Malevolent or the Canine Concealing of Culpability) I did as I often do and plugged in my gadget of choice and listed to my music of preference. Except that at one point I had a dog on a lead and in the other a bag of warm-yet-stinky guano "du chien". This meant that I couldn't do that which the iPod allows, and to quickly nudge past a less preferred track to a more preferred one. The first of the three lists is the top five played tracks on my iPod (and for which I beg your forgiveness). The poo-bag caused to me listen to tracks on my iPod that I would ordinarily skip past.

As I wandered with the hairy bitch, I asked myself when it was that I last listed to an entire album of music as recorded by a whole single recording artist. An age, my friend. Not since the extinction of the dinosaurs I think. I therefore have a list of preferred songs and not preferred albums. This is fine but it is my opinion that a whole complete album has a flavour, a journey, a story, a beginning and an end - and they are journeys that I miss and many others do too. In so-doing, I become a person who listens to a narrower and narrower selection of the thousands of songs and things that I have stored so that I am in fast danger of listening to the same twenty or thirty tracks over and over again. So I stopped in my tracks and played an entire album that accompanied me for the rest of my walk. I took the first on offer which happened to be "Philadelphia" by Mark Knopfler, and I remembered that which I had forgotten - that I loved the album as a whole.

You may well be able to guess where this is going. The second list is my top five verses from the Bible (the last one because it makes me smile, nothing more). I wonder if we don't always do with the Bible what I do with my iPod, and it may not be our fault, entirely. Many of us own those editions of the Bible that colour lumps of text for specific focus, and many of us are subject to a Lectionary which tells us what to read when. It's great because we get the highlights, the kernal, the epicentre of truths - but if we treated the Bible like that all the time, we fall into the trap of eating our meals in the style of my third list. I love the muesli Alpen and I love raisins but I would find little pleasure in a bowl of raisins. I live and die for a bacon sandwich but feel confident that I would turn my nose up at a bowl of bacon. I think it is fair to say that a corn on the cob a bowl of melted butter does not make. You get the idea. 

With the bible as with my iPod - how much do we miss by homing in on the favourite bits? How few challenges do we miss by relying on the instant fix of the "hit" which we know comes with the preferred rhythm or cadence. Have we missed the haunting instrumental that may go on a bit, or the tough experimental track that breaks free of the bonds of accepted style? I cannot remember the last time that I read a book of the bible from start to end, because I receive my biblical meals in bite-sized flavoursome morsels. So it is that my bible is shrinking faster than the ice-caps and in the end will comprise fewer and fewer words of wisdom and meaning, and I sense that the food I need is not that which I always reach for. 

On Why The Customer is Not Always Right

Courtesy of deedtheinky.com

Sometime is the late 1870s some chap came up with a one liner that, in my modest opinion, has done more to skew the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities than anything else. Indeed, it is the very statement that has caused me most verbal abuse in my adult life, and has turned ordinarily nice folk into slavering demons. 

Apparently, the customer is always right. 

Pish and pother (if you are in possession of the Cloakean Babel Fish, you will know what I meant to type). 

Yesterday's gospel reading (for those of us who do lectionaries and bibles in church life) was from Mark at the time when two of his followers wanted to be up-close and personal and take up habitation in none less than the armpits of the Lord, one on the right and one on the left. They wanted to be the beloved armpit apostles, closest, snuggly, cherished. Jesus told them to get a life and the other disciples simply sucked air through their first-century dentitions (in a sort of ecclesiastical Ena Sharples sort of way). It was a story about mastership and service, that kind of thing. 

In enlightened 21st century western life, the Almighty Dollar (pound, Euro, frogskin, green, dosh, wonga) seems now to buy you not just products, but rightness. The transaction often falls into the following frame:

drip, drip, drip, oh my word I have a leak, I know nothing about plumbing, let me call a plumber, plumber arrives, oh plumber help me I know not what to do, plumber fixes problem utilising training and experience, you left a mark on my skirting board, I am the customer so I am always right, I will canvass for the plumber to pay me money because I have a smudge on my skirting board, you are wrong and I am right because I paid you thirty quid and made you a mug of sweet tea

You know I speak the truth. You may even have been that limpet who got gusset-rotated about the job you are not gifted in performing, but blessed in the right to judge. Yes, you!

Frankly, the customer is not always right, or indeed often right in my experience (and if they were, the skilled trades would be redundant of course)

The situation is clear to me - that the world seems to pursue its rights at a rate ten to one over its pursuit of its responsibilities. I think this is part of what Jesus was thinking about or alluding to in Mark's Gospel. Day-time telly is awash with voting-age progeny-producing adults who can drive a fast car to work but who feel compelled to take the wrong ladder for a job and render themselves as road-kill on the tarmac below. Then they sue their employers for damages. Or the neatly presented business women teetering on shoes with shiny soles and who power-walks across a marble floor on a wet day and slips over - more dosh please. Your fault. Not my fault. Never my fault. In the blame-claim world, my brain and ability to make my own value-judgement is long gone. Atrophy. 

Jesus broadly says "if you want it, it'll cost you" and then "and I doubt you really know how much". The church is danger of fuelling this too - talk of leadership that isn't mitigated with healthy amounts of talk of followership becomes much the same as the call of the disciples to sit at the head-table. Equally, how often, in an original act of service do church-goers then go one to take that servitude and make it a weapon to exert power over another. 

It seems to me, as I sit here at vicarly computer in my vicarly study, there the world is fast losing its heart for generosity in many ways. The relationships born of transaction and contract are now fairly devoid of a common graciousness beyond the clauses of the agreement. Too little love. Survival of the fittest? Maybe now it is survival of the person most right or the person with the greatest authority and power. Maybe even the survival of the person who paid the money. In end, I wonder if Jesus is trying to tell is that it is survival of the one who loves most and takes least. No, I don't mean that either. I don't think that Jesus ever thought it was about survival. 

Cause for a Little Pride and Optimism

 A little heart-warmer for a brisk but beautiful autumn day ...

Recently, a man came to my door. He was a nice bloke, just one in a certain amount of difficulty. He was quick to reassure me that he wasn't at my door for pocket-change, or a sandwich, or even to propagate some wonky proto-Scriptural sentiment. 

Indeed, the man in question claimed to be at my door to offer me, of all things, some feedback. I confess that I wondered where this may be leading, and as I hadn't recently delivered a seminar to middle-management or else to ordinands, such as demand a crisp white A4 sheet for application of like feedback. No, I was (at that moment) mid-holiday, shabby chic and half asleep! Maybe he had seen into the kitchen window and wanted to invite me to show some pride in my appearance, I don't know!

No - he came bearing feedback of something that made my day.

He was, as I have said, in a certain amount of difficulty - difficulty that manifested itself in his attire and demeanor. He had been sitting on the steps that lead to the back door of the church building, looking like a man in difficulty. He told me all about it. Then it happened. The faithful starting arriving for the early Eucharist when not one, not two, but three of the passing ladies didn't give him a wide berth, but went up to him. They asked if he was alright and if there was anything that they could do to help him. He graciously declined and they went on their way. 

The man wanted me to know that those ladies hadn't gone out of their way to avoid him. They didn't look away and pretend he wasn't there. They approached and they asked. He wanted me to know how touched he was by their kindness. They had gently invited him to the service but didn't push the point. They didn't reprimand him for being where he was, but met him there. They made his day. They made him snap out of the mental anguish that he was enduring at that moment and caused him to realise that life had hope, that people were good. He told me all about it and thanked me for my flock and for what they had done to help him through a very dark day. 

He also told me that once he had gathered his thoughts, and when the service had ended, that he went into the church to play some hymns on the piano that we have. He is a concert pianist apparently. Was that ok, he asked me? I should say!

No Vicar glowed with greater pride than I did that day. We rather boldly claim here that we are "the heart of Christ in the heart of Whitton", a claim it seems that we can make with some justification. 

Damascus or Psalm 139

Today, in the Anglican cycle of things at least, we commemorated the conversion of one Saul of Tarsus. Flash bang wallop, one very neat letter writer, jail-bird and Mediterranean rambler.

This day, and the readings to which we were treated in Exciting Holiness this morning (fine book, get a copy), brought to mind a small anxiety I have harboured for a good number of years. 

In the main, there are two types of Christian (in this schema): those termed 'cradle-Christians' and those who did all that getting-to-know the Lord stuff at a later age. Put another way, you get your Psalm 139 disciples or you get your Damascus Road disciples. 

This is, of course, a statement of the blindingly obvious. I accept, too, that people drift in and out of faith as their lives peak and trough and that such elasticity is a good and healthy thing. Christianity, in the main, is not a faith of those 'inside' and those 'outside', and that it one of its most gracious qualities. Toe-dipping, running-away-screaming, coming back when the kids grow up, confessing an old faith on the death bed - all these and so many more are ways that as Christ's disciples, we make sense of that journey.

If only it were that simple. Sadly, it feels (I lean on 'feel' as it might just be me) that there is a spiritual stratification in place, surrounding this specific matter. 

I have lost count of the times when I have seated myself in an Anglican Circle in a large room to dissect my 'story'. Largely throughout theological training, but quite a lot since, I found myself doing the 'going-round-the-circle' thing. How we come to faith is up there with our name and some interesting nonsense about how we lived life before we sat in that room, and spill our guts we do. Then it happens.

Person 1: God spoke to me up when I was a terrible teenager

Person 2: I gave my life to Jesus at 6.42pm on April 11th 1976 and it was raining outside

Me: I have always been a Christian since I was born

Person 4: My dad is a priest and I always went to church

Person 5: I answered God's personal call to me after three decades in the wilderness

Person 6: I was a crack addict until I let God into my heart and here I am

All good, no issues. Unless you are sat there in the room. Confessing a Psalm 139 faith is about the same as "I am only here because I can't be arsed to leave", or "Accidental Christian". Confessing a Damascus Road faith is received triumphantly like a hero returning from the field of battle, scarred and bloodied, but alive (and yes, affirming grunts from the throng are audible). I have never given my life to God simply because I didn't ever need to. There were no days before my faith, I was made like this (fearfully and wonderfully?). Sadly, it seems to be the case that you ain't no-one unless you can name the time and place. 

I am no-one. 

Except who God made me to be, and I am happy at that.