Too Cheeky to Work in Zimbabwe!

The fusion band Freshlyground, formed in South Africa but made up of members from SA, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have had their Zimbabwean work permits cancelled following this Spitting Image style spoof on Robert Mugabe.

Given recent history, I'd have said that they got off lightly.

They cast a fairly wide net, mind. Better moments are the background cameos: Archbishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela (now retired) play dominos in the background while South African President Jacob Zuma seduces a group of women at a table elsewhere in the pub.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, August 24th

The Australians have had an election a bit like our last UK election. With results too close to call, a handful of independents now find themselves with an awful lot of power. Add to this the claim in the news yesterday that the SNP and Scottish Labour – also neck and neck in opinion polls - are having quiet talks about a coalition next time around.

Minority governments and coalitions are given a generally negative slant in the British media. Wouldn’t it be better to have had a clear opinion one way or another – to be able to say that the people had spoken?

Haven’t they? They have, of course. The populace is simply of more than one opinion. And while it may drive the purist in either party nuts, that divided opinion is the raw material of the next election.

Given all that faces any western democracy today in terms of finance, civil society, security and commerce it’s not surprising that there is more than one opinion floating around and that countries will be governed from time to time by a series of unlikely and initially unwilling partnerships.

The Christian tradition has had its share of lessons in the demise of certainty. Consensus was clearer, once, about our role in the larger society. We were even more certain about our own history and about the documents which accounted for Christianity’s emergence. We may try to recreate the circumstances wherein everything was clear but life is different now for many of us.

Working clergy will be ministering in their towns and villages cheek to jowl with people who are different from them – who have a different conception of God - even no conception of God.

We take it for granted, now, that faith works alongside doubt. Certainty is tempered by the experience of difference around us and forced by that experience to be more inclusive of the whole of reality.

What it produces as a result is more and not less.

Risked and hammered by what we thought it was not, it ends up being much more than we started with.

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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:22.11 - halfway along the audio bar.

Holiday Recap: Image One

I'm sitting alone by a creek in the Shuswap region of British Columbia. I'm fond of the people I’ve been walking with – great folks - but I haven't spent any time yet sitting alone beside a stream. I’ve been daydreaming about that and it’s one of the reasons I’m on holiday.

It hits me like a sudden thirst.

I beg off from the group with a promise to meet them later on the trail after I've stolen some time alone.

Somebody has nailed a coffee pot to a cedar tree with an enormous spike.

Who carries a ten-inch spike with them on a jaunt in the woods? Or a hammer, for that matter? It profits the human spirit very little to try and deduce or imagine what was in mind of the man or woman who hammered this great spike into the tree and tied on the coffee pot.

I'm not fond of puzzles.

It's just one of those things.

If it was meant to look ridiculous, then the author of this little grafitto has failed because the act produces much surplus meaning and I cannot help but be thankful.

I see it along the following lines:

The observer is gladdened by this small river of clear cold water rushing down the valley and takes from it a tremendous sense of Here and Now. The creek is the centre piece. Everything about it is movement. It tumbles over rocks and swirls in eddies. It animates the place.

This creek.

Here and Now.

And therein is the problem. The water is rushing quickly downstream - towards the Adams River, Shuswap Lake and, ultimately, the sea.

The words Here and Now and the pointing word This are never completely appropriate when dealing with a river. In the life of a rushing stream here soon becomes there, now becomes then and this becomes that.

Maybe when I was younger I would have enjoyed an unalloyed experience of joy at the rush and flux of things constantly changing.

Bring on yet another new thing!

It’s different in my early fifties. I find that change brings with it the possibility of loss. I wish some things would slow down. I have a harder time keeping up. Children’s lives go on with or without you. Some cardinal events in their lives will take place beyond the bend in the river – on the other side of anywhere you are. You start to dwell on the past. Water under the bridge becomes the phrase one uses to describe events and experiences which are now irretrievably lost and past.

Hence the coffee pot:

Somebody clearly wanted to take a stand.

In order to say something about Here and Now we need a container – something we can dip it into the stream. Finally we can say “let me tell you a story about this, sing you a song about what it’s like right now, show you what I have here.

While we may be part of something moving and changing, we’re lost in it until we find a way of stopping and being contained and dwelling, not on the whole river and the land that it nourishes, but on the single instance – the Here and Now which This small bit of the whole affords us – this pot of water taken from the stream.

My prayers are a container. They gather together a small series of concerns even though there are many other things we could pray about.

Next Sunday’s sermon will be a container. There’s more I’ll want to say but will limit myself to these words of Jesus in light of this community’s life in time and space.

We are, after all, only creatures – limited to a time upon the earth and we must take advantage of the moments of quiet reflection which are offered to us beside the running water and in the midst of all the haste and change.

This may not be what some geezer had in mind when he nailed the coffee pot to the cedar tree beside the stream.

Maybe he thought he was being funny.

Maybe the full import of his actions was not yet clear to him.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
August 11th, 2010

In the news the other day, we were told that civilian deaths in Afghanistan have risen by 31% over the last year.

That’s 31% of what, exactly - of a big number or a little number?

Even with the numbers, how would we go about adding up the lost potential, the sorrow and the shock? How would we express the breaking of relationships, the weight of such tragedies on families? We can’t.

We’re really only talking here about numbers.

We all get added up. Our lives are periodically of interest to statisticians. We are merely data to somebody out there: How long we live, what we earn or how we spend - how fast we drive past a speed camera. A life converted to a number – a blip – a bit of data.

While it’s somebody’s grim task to measure the quantities, the results don’t tell me much about life and its quality.

You know who you’ve lost, over time. You are aware of the space they inhabited and the character they once added to the conversation and the place they occupied at the table. You remember their stories and can almost hear their voice telling them. You honour them with your memory.

If you’re listening to this, this morning, you’re alive. Your life deserves to be seen and observed with the same honour as life in community with all life on the earth. Life, bursting out of the pot and leaning into the light, mingling creatively with the lives of others. Valuable life, with time and opportunities which must not be frittered away and wasted.

Today, our lives are within the embrace of both Grace and human energy. The possibilities are endless. Lives can be willingly risked – even given for others.

I am nobody’s bit of data.

I am not here merely to be counted. I can do more than that. I can be counted upon.

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An audio link is available HERE for a limited time. TFTD begins at 1:23.22 - or about halfway along the audio bar.

Distances

Somebody more modern than me purported not to know what a hundred yards was. I said that it was a hundred metres minus three hundred inches.

Nah! Three hundred inches? What's that?

Look, I said - most men in the UK stand a few inches shy of six feet or seventy-two inches. Take four men like that and lay them end to end. Add a midget.

Subtract that measure from your known measure of a hundred metres and you've got a hundred yards.

I hope it helped.

A Sermon
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 10:38-42

When my daughter was about to be born we cast about for a name.

There were family names and names from literature. Seems to me we even bought a book of “baby names”.

You join up a potential Christian name with a last name to see what sounds right and one of the names which sounded right with the surname Warren was the name Martha.

At supper with my parents one evening I floated the name Martha Warren.

What did they think?

My father objected. It was a name, he thought, which brought with it the association that she would perpetually be doing the dishes, or hoovering or cleaning up while others read or wrote or studied. He hoped his grand-daughter wouldn’t be someone like that. And the negative associations with the name Martha come from this story – of two sisters named Mary and Martha – one who sat with the male disciples at the feet of Jesus and who listened and learned – the other who kept to her kitchen and cooked and cleaned – until finally one evening she took off her apron and threw it to the floor and came storming into the front room where she said:

“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me!”

I know someone who is proud of the fact that she is a Martha. She refers to herself as a Martha. She mentions occasions where she and the other Marthas at her church get together to do what needs to be done. There are jobs around her church which need doing and she is a person of practical bent who can look at a task and imagine a strategy for doing it. When projects are proposed somebody inevitably asks “so how are we going to get this done” and people turn to her to ask her opinion because she’s the sort of person who will know not only how to initiate a task but how to bring it to fruition. What she starts she finishes. She’s that sort of person.

Now, she believes herself to be a facilitator of any number of other ministries in her congregation, a sort of pivot in her church, if you like, around which the various other ministries and activities turn. If she wasn’t at her post then they would not be able to do what they feel called to do.

And of course – she’s not a Martha, then, is she?

Being a Martha in the context of this morning’s reading has nothing to do with being practical or even task-oriented. Martha is not presented here as a practical facilitator of other people’s ministries and activities. What earns her the mild reproach from Jesus is the fact of her jealousy towards her sister – her desire to tear her sister Mary away from what Mary feels called to do – her need to make other people in her own image, her insecurity, her anger and her need to control. Far from being the sort of person who will help someone else achieve and realize her vocation her chief desire seems to be to drag her sister back. And Jesus will have none of it.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

We may imagine, of course, a background to this story which the Gospel writers have no desire to tell us about in any detail but which we have seen acted-out in relationships between people we’ve known – relationships which develop and solidify over time: that of siblings or friends, men and women associated with each other over many years and decades, who grow so close that change or transformation becomes difficult or impossible.

What happens when, in an established marriage or relationship, one of the partners develops an interest? What happens to best friends when one of them falls in love? What happens when a hard drinking or addicted spouse decides the take the cure – gets stronger – no longer needs to be bailed out or gotten out of trouble or constantly supported? What happens when one member of any “deadly duo” decides all of a sudden to undertake some higher education or decides that he wants to go back to Church?

Brothers and sisters, husbands, wives and partners, best friends: we begin to depend, sometimes quite unhealthily, on things not changing and on people remaining for us the people they’ve always been. When they change we don’t understand. We feel abandoned – we invoke the times we were ‘there’ for them – with constancy and evenness. And this is how they repay us? Abandoning us? Moving on?

This story does not end in tragedy. Martha and Mary, along with their brother Lazarus, remain associated with Jesus throughout his ministry. Within the larger circle of the followers of Jesus they will remain key players and their home in Bethany will be a base for ministry. Martha, however, does not get her wish in this particular case and the relationship which develops from this point on will forever contain the fact of Mary’s liberty to be a disciple.

There is a word here for close friends and for those partnered and covenanted in love together – that love must contain liberty and that much of what is called love, if it is not jostled and renewed, can imprison the very people we claim to love. In such a situation we may misunderstand the other person’s claim of liberty as a challenge to us, as loss and lovelessness.

Some of God’s people are, at their very core, practical and earthy people – able to discern the physical need of the moment and make use of what is at hand to make that the possible real – earthy and “hands on” sorts of people. Our food nourishes others, our talent with physical resources provides for the needs of others – clothes them, provisions them and sets them about their tasks.

The name they give us when we’re born, however, doesn’t matter overmuch. We grow and develop as we do – because of what is in us and in response to the world we mingle with. There are always surprises, always a wrench or two thrown into our well-practised habits and solid relationships.

We have a point of faith beyond ourselves – beyond even our well practised and dependable alliances.

In the long term, love will endure change.

A Sermon

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 10:25-37

You’ve heard it said that “familiarity breeds contempt”. Sometimes we know something – a story or a saying - that we’d actually prefer not to hear it again. The story we’re told by parents and grandparents that seems to be a truism – we roll our eyes when we hear it yet again, one more time. I suppose that the term “good Samaritan” provokes a bit of a yawn. So-and-so is a good Samaritan – meaning that he serves on all sorts of committees – a good Samaritan – a do-gooder – someone who might not be a lot of fun in a conversation at a houseparty. Someone like that would end up making everybody feel guilty.

And yes – it’s a story that suffers from overuse – but like many of the parables which Jesus told he is, in fact, answering a question in such a way as to change minds and to change people’s perceptions. To tell us something we didn’t already know and in a dramatic fashion. It’s a shame, then, that the story suffers so from over-use.

A lawyer – or a teacher of the law – depending on your translation asks him a question. There’s something in the tone of voice of the lawyer who addressed Jesus that gets the readers back up from the get-go. Luke tells us that the question was asked to “test Jesus” but we’d have known that from the question itself. The questioner is a lawyer, after all. It’s Jesus who appears to be in the witness booth. The lawyer asks what is necessary to inherit eternal life – a very general question. Jesus asks him what is written in the law and the lawyer comes back with the two great commandments – love of God and love of neighbour. A general answer to a general question but Jesus plays along and tells him that - yes - he has it. Do these two things and you will live. Ah, says the lawyer, thinking that Jesus is guilty of imprecision – “and who exactly is my neighbour”?

There we are – the world is filled with different people. Some are friends and some are not. Tall and short, familiar and unfamiliar, rich and poor. All of them have some sort of status based on their relgion and nationality, whether they pay taxes or don’t, whether they go to church or don’t. They’re thin or fat, black or white, pleasant or unpleasant. Neighbour is a huge category – who, amongst all these people in the world is “my neighbour”.

Because we all have enemies – we may have national enemies who live in the next country over and who have invaded us in living memory. We have people who are guilty of notable crimes and about whom the tabloid newspapers scream popular indignation in three inch high headlines. We have within our borders troublesome sub-communities who live in slums on the edge of town and who are accused of being a vector for crime and disease. And these are just the targets of community lovelessness. As individuals we can name off lists of people who have offended against us and who have never said sorry. There are, it seems, people who are not only difficult to love but who we would be forgiven for not loving.

This is the problem with sweeping laws and pronouncements. Love your neighbour. But who do we have permission “not to love”. To whom does the second part of the two Great Commandments “not” apply? How does this apply in the real world where we must practise discernment – we who have a finite pool of resources and who might end up squandering them on loving the wrong people. This seems to be the import of the question on the lawyer’s part. He is hoping that Jesus will prove himself hopelessly naïve or, even better, that he will name some popular and hated character as the proper object of a faithful Israelite’s love and will bring upon himself scorn and infamy.

Jesus answers this with a story:

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead".

Ah, a victim, the lawyer thinks It will be important to know who this victim is. The victim, however, is just referred to as a man. The setup is not what the lawyer would have hoped. This is the one who must be loved – the neighbour. But is this anonymous person a neighbour? He is someone of my clan, my religion? Is he the person covered by the definition of “neighbour” in the Great Two Commandments? Is he a Roman or a tax collector or a thief or a traitor – a criminal or a foreigner?

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a lonely downhill road which leads through sun-baked wilderness. I have driven it and cannot imagine walking through such a lonely place. The cliffs are peppered with caves. It is a place where men can hide and for centuries have done so. Being waylaid by bandits, beaten, robbed and left for dead is one of those things that can happen to any traveller. Neutral maloccurrence – something that could happen to anybody. It must have been frustrating that the victim of the story – the presumed object of neighbour love has not yet been named and is the victim of quite ordinary violence. We are still in the realm of the anonymous until Jesus goes on with the story.

As the anonymous man lies there helpless and bleeding - a man whose tribe and lineage doesn’t seem worthy of description – there is shuffle of footsteps down the trail and somebody enters the story. This time there is a name given or at least a title. This is a priest from Jerusalem walking down the long seventeen mile hill to Jericho. Without seeming to give it a second thought – the priest changes sides of the road and passes by. A Levite – one of those who assisted the priests with the sacrifices in the temple also shuffles down the path. He too switches sides and gives the injured man a wide berth. It is noteworthy that both the priest and the Levite cross to the other side. Within their communities they are the designated religious leaders. They are people who are held in awe and esteem and who presume to mediate between human beings and their creator. And it’s these men who choose not to see the suffering that is before them. They don’t want to see it. It’s not to be included in their snapshot of the Jericho road. They choose not to engage with the anonymous victim.

Finally a Samaritan – a national enemy – someone from the other side of the tracks – somebody that everyone could reasonably despise, even in polite company comes by and ministers to the man, binding his wounds, placing him on his donkey, provisioning him with a bed at an inn and paying for his keep.

The lawyer’s question is answered but not in the way the lawyer had hoped. He would have hoped that amongst all the needy people in the world some distinction could be made between those who “qualify” and those who do not so that the loving Israelite would be able to judge between those who are worthy of love and those who are not. If Jesus had told a parable about an injured Samaritan then he and the Lawyer could have disputed at great length about whether a Jew was obligated to help a Samaritan but Jesus has an entirely different instrument. It doesn’t measure the worthiness of the object of love. Jesus won’t even name and identify the victim in this story who remains anonymous throughout. The instrument Jesus uses in his story is one which measures the willingness of the subject to be loving and not the object who remains mute and unidentified. Jesus story makes a distinction between those who will love the victim and those who will not.

Because that, ultimately is the choice we need to make. In any time of disaster, in every struggle we have with another human being, in every case of family strife, in every case of blatant discrimination in our schools or workplaces, The meter on the wall is not measuring how loveable the object of love is – whether he or she fits the category of neighbour or, more properly, falls into the category of “neighbour” but how loving the person at the other end of the equation is – how loving the giver of love, care is – how willing he or she is to be and to become “neighbour”.

We can do nothing to choose or change the status of the person who needs help. We inherit situations that are beyond our control. We cannot control which side of a border a needy person falls, or how they speak or who their ancestors were.

What is in our control is not who they are but who we will become to them.

Let the Good Times Roll!

Holidays begin today. Down to London Gatwick this aft, thence to Vancouver tomorrow morning.

It's never been possible...

...to begin one's holidays completely fresh with nothing hanging over one's head. There is always some burden of the heart or the schedule which gets in the way. At least that's the way it works with me. I'm working flat out to get the second of these - that which falls within my control - out of the way, completely and utterly.

As for the first, well...that's life.

My lady wife and I are going out to British Columbia and the end of the week with our young one and meeting up with our slightly older one at the other end. We'll spend some time with the truly old'uns on the other side and will spend a little over a week with them on Saltspring Island. I shall try to behave myself in the presence of my mother's magnificent cooked breakfasts and get up early enough to get some good pictures of the beach.

We're then heading off to the Sorrento Centre (between Kamloops and Salmon Arm - you know where I mean!) in British Columbia for the week of the 18th-24th. Caireen is going to be doing a creative journaling course there. The young man is going to be doing some drama and I'm going to be hiking around the Shuswap country during the day. We've time together as a family in the afternoon. Think Progressive Anglican Butlins with Mass in an outdoor chapel rather than the usual clown shows (although some of the chasubles one sees from time to time might qualify for the latter).

We then top things off with a drive through the Rocky Mountains before flying back to Glasgow from Calgary on the 28th.

So for the next day or two and the remaining tasks - Ora Pro Nobis!

A Sermon
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 5:1-14

Naaman the Syrian general had a problem – one which was an embarrassment all around.

On the one hand he had proved to be very good value to his monarch who appreciated his services.

In ordinary circumstances, he'd have been both feared and envied by those below him on the pecking order. He would have reasonably expected to be seen at the King’s right hand and to have been in the inner circles of the court were it not for a devastating skin disease which caused people to keep their distance. Naaman the Syrian general, it seems, was affected by leprosy – a disease with a terrible social stigma attached to it – and people consequently gave him a very wide berth.

What was his king to do? An intractable problem presents itself and one must imagine the dilemma facing the king. He depends on the skill of men like Naaman – aggressive and opportunistic – able to command loyalty among the troops, able to analyse an enemy’s weakness, able to pick the right moment to pull back and the right moment to strike forward.

Valuable man, Naaman, but the King can’t shake his hand. He can’t have him over for supper. Or have him sit in the royal box at the victory parade. An intractable problem – one that doesn’t admit of any ordinary solutions or strategies - so intractable, in fact, that when a little slave girl in the in the entourage of Naaman's wife says that back home in her own country there’s this prophet who performs miracles and heals the sick, he tells the King who gives it both a first and a second thought. He has no choice. He listens to the little girl. His decision to act seems more forced than faith – more the result of desperation that it is a faithful step into an uncertain future – but whatever it is, it takes place.

And what does he do? He writes a letter to the King of Israel – which is the little girl’s home country - and he tells him that he’s sending him a this leprous general to be cured.

And that’s when the second intractable problem emerges. This time not for the Aramean King but for the Israelite King who reads the letter he’s received several time to glean its meaning. What does this mean that the king of a not always friendly neighbouring country is sending his favourite general – a man with an incurable condition – to the neighbouring country to be cured. This doesn’t seem like a request, it smells like a trap - this is an unfulfillable condition and an unmeetable demand issued by one country to its neighbour.

The Israelite king cries out to his ministers: “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.”

What to do, then? Dig the moats deeper and reinforce the walls! Call up the reserves. Send out the spies. Get the beacon fires ready on all the hilltops so that they can be lit at a moment’s notice to let the army know when the enemy has crossed the frontier. All the automatic processes kick in which countries rely on to protect themselves from threats but at the heart of the nation, in the king’s court, there is anxiety and despair. The king tears his clothes with fear and rage.

You’d hardly notice the little messenger ushered in to corner of the room - a messenger from the prophet Elisha. Why, prophet asks, are there work companies on all the high places adding parapets to the earthworks? Why are there men in armour drilling in formation in the village square? Why are there diplomatic notes being sent to and fro across the borders. And your majesty “…why have you torn your clothes? Let (this Syrian general) come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel”

The king is surrounded by experts – experts in the defense of vital infrastructure, generals in command of troops, diplomats skilled in intrigue. And now the prophet, through the agency of this nameless messenger shifting his weight from one foot to the other and looking aimlessly around at the sweets on the table and the tapestries as he waits for an answer – is counselling a response which seems both faithful and hopelessly naïve. Meet the threat – treat it, instead, as challenge. Let Israel be a source of healing for the nations as it has claimed itself, since Abraham, to be. Simply say “yes” rather than drawing the shutters and calling forth the troops.

There is no record of the conversation which ensued, no “blow by blow” of the king’s decision to follow the prophet’s advice and to embrace and affirm the challenge that is presented to him and to the nation. How he comes to deal with this intractable problem we’re are not told but the very next scene opens with the chariot and the retinue of Naaman the Syrian General clattering up to Elisha’s front door and poor leprous Naaman climbing out and waiting there. And waiting until finally one of the servants appears with instructions to walk over to the river and wash himself.

And now we have a third important man facing a situation standing at a crossroads facing an intractable problem. This time it’s simple human and national pride which stands in the way. He is consumed by anger. A commander of thousands he has left his own country, his servants and underlings not only to be ordered around by a foreign prophet but, in fact, to be handed a few cursory instructions by a foreign prophet’s servant. The instructions sound like a recipe: “Go wash in the Jordan and you will be clean”.

Is he not an important general? Has he not left the greatest country in the world? Has he not just walked past the greatest rivers? Could he not, at least, have been greeted formally and had a solemn prayer? Could not the great prophet of Israel have done something with a little magic to it, could he not have waved his hand about and invoked the deity? He seems ready to turn around and leave until his own servants take of the risk of bringing him to his senses: had the prophet given him a difficult task to perform he would have done it without question – a monster slay or a difficult pilgrimage to accomplish. Why not, then, do something simple. Why throw away such an opportunity in a fit of pique? He goes to the river and washes. He emerges completely restored and makes a confession of faith in Israel’s God.

The voices in this story which provide the sense of the narrative come in from the side, obliquely. They are voices which can, potentially, be ignored. Powerful men are deliberating in the midst of crises and yet it is the voice of a child which provides opportunity, the voice of a prophet which brings the powerful back to first principles and the voice of an underling speaking “out of turn” beside us which speaks to us of common sense that our pride and anger will not allow us to see.

Subtle voices which we will ignore at our peril.

It may be that we need to run out of clear and easy answers before we will rely on them. Perhaps we need to be facing the wall before voices we would never listen to in a million years suddenly start ringing out loud and clear.

Testing the hypothesis -
a recipe
Luke 10:1-20

You've heard the parables about what the Kingdom of God is like, or even better, like unto. All those images of treasures in fields and pearls of great price swirl around in your head. You'd be forgiven for wanting, eventually, to see this 'fleshed out' in the course of ordinary life and discourse.

Where can this phantom thing, variously described as being within you or around you or among you, actually going to take shape?

Forget "like unto". Nobody talks like that anymore.

Well sir, we'd like to give you the opportunity to see it whipped up in front of your very own eyes. Keep it simple, enjoy the company and have fun.

Serves 69 (plus the cook). Benefits many more.

A) Ingredients

Virtually nothing. A call or commission to go forth would be advised. The message that the Kingdom of God has drawn near where the name of Christ is proclaimed is probably essential and should be pinned where clearly visible near your work surface.. This is one of the few recipes with no further ingredients beyond a willingness to stir the pot and an enthusiasm to see the results. Other versions which include such things as sandals, purse and bag are to be avoided at all costs and will make the results cloudy and resemble something bought off the shelf.

B) Method

Assemble your group and then go in in various directions. Disperse widely. Big cities are not necessarily the best option. Everyone goes there. As you mix vigorously you will be surprised at how things come together. Don't be surprised if not all parts of the resulting batter show the same welcome response. Quality of parts rather than uniformity of response is the order of the day.

As your results increase, don't waste time overmuch on the parts of the batter which haven't turned out.

These things happen.

Separate your product. Rejoice in what is good. Dispose of what isn't in a suitable container.

Some likelihood exists of serpents or scorpions crawling onto the work surface. Don't worry. It's nothing that a good whack with a wooden spoon won't solve. Take some authority.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, June 28th, 2010

I went to the funeral last Wednesday of a better man than me.

Now, I don’t rate myself with a number on a scale and then note other peoples’ scores when attending or officiating at their funerals. Sometimes, though, you hear an account of a person’s life and attributes – ringing true to the much or the little you knew them yourself - which makes you wonder how you’ll ever muddle through. You’d certainly never manage that!

It’s not a question of time and relative age, Sure, my generation is only now beginning to feel its aches and pains and is not ready to move on - not by a long shot – but the foundation for what this man had built in his family and ministry and within his own soul was founded at a much younger age than I am now. Those opportunities, even in early middle-age, are now lost to me.

Yes – I attended the funeral of a better man than me.

Jesus said ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’. We are judged, though – justly or unjustly – by others. Sometimes it’s merely enough to stand in the shadow of people who made better use of their gifts than we have. In the light of better lives than ours we feel the sting of our inadequacy.

Now there are, in fact, millions of better people than me. Ask my wife.

Because the better man can never be me, all I can do is to utter a word of thankfulness for the lives of others lived well and look again at the time and the space that are allotted to me.

Some conversations will never take place unless I initiate them. Forgiveness and reconciliation may not happen until this half-good human picks up the telephone. Strangers will not be welcomed in my neighbourhood or church until this bog-standard individual musters up the courage to step outside his small circle and engage with them

It’s not a competition.

In the best of worlds, beautiful lives would provoke our hunger to make more of what we wake up with every morning.



Audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:19.56 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Apparently not a spoof in the Onion

"Dressing for G20 protests is tricky. Look too corporate and you might be paintbombed. Dress like a militant protester, you run the risk of being tear gassed."

The Toronto star has a page on "fashion choices" for those going along to protest at the G20 in Toronto. Does one wear black? Do you bring a facecovering "just in case"? With respect to the peaceful protests being planned this Saturday by the Canadian Labour Congress, their spokesman Jeff Atkinson

"...mused on advice for the protester looking to steer clear of police and militant attention.

“Plaid?” he offered. “I hate to think of people at home in their closet missing the protest because they can’t make a fashion decision.”

An Interview With Tony Jordan 

at the Churches Media Conference

It's midsummer - when Christian concern naturally settles around the Nativity of our Lord.Or so it did, for a while anyway, at this year's Churches Media Conference held at the Hayes Conference Centre near Alfreton in Derbyshire. An interview took place there with the writer of an upcoming four-part series on the Nativity. The series will be presented, helpfully, in a more traditional time-slot this December.

Tony Jordan has had an interesting career - moving from running a market stall in London's East End to writing 250 episodes of East Enders and co-creating Life on Mars - just to name a few of this remarkable gentleman's credentials. The Nativity will run this Christmas with a mix of well known and lesser known actors in the cast.

The interview with Tony Jordan was sufficiently good that it demanded some coverage. There is a link provided at the temporary website of the Churches Media Net to a longer version of this interview (an hour and thirty minutes long), complete with housekeeping matters about seats being available at the front and a pre-interview with the interviewer himself.

What's more, it can only be listened to online.

Which means that those of you with domestic committments will end up getting your heads nipped for sitting glued to the computer with the family around or for coming to bed at an ungodly hour.

I know it's a matter of opinion but I found many of the questions asked at the end fairly pious and a bit trite. The heart of the interview - about the way in which a writer like Jordan comes up with characters for the television shows he writes and how he ended up inheriting the project of the Nativity- was of sufficient grace and moment that it simply "called out" to be topped and tailed and set out in a format which somebody could download and listen to on their way to work.

In a conference which purported to have the Christian presence on and use of New Media as one of its major themes, it would seem that the first lesson is this: if you have a good piece of audio stuffed in some virtual corner the bloggers will want it for their mates to hear.

They could ask.
I'm sure the real Christians among them would ask.

The rest of us will simply steal it - cheeky buggers that we are - top it and tail it and make it something which faithful readers of Raspberry Rabbit (all eleven of them - including Evelyn with the articial leg and the shocking pink lippy - Hi, Evelyn!) - can download onto their Ipods and listen to at their leisure.

There were other bits: Elaine Storkey versus Andrew Copson, the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association? I didn't pinch that. Andrew Copson was twice the evangelist Elaine was. The BHA could have used that audio in one of their recruiting drives. Does Elaine Storkey really believe that Christians invented democracy?

Spinning the Pope - Catholicism in the Spotlight? Charming fellow, that Opus Dei guy, but I kept expecting the albino monk to come swinging in on a rope at any moment with a knife between his teeth. Too much of the Army of God for my taste.

No - Tony Jordan was the star - by a mile!

The interview was conducted by Michael Wakelin the former head of Relgion and Ethics Broadcasting at the BBC.

Note: The entire interview above is worth listening. Jordan talks about the process of developing a character and his time writing for East Enders and, later, developing the character of DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars. The material dealing specifically with The Nativity begins at 19:37 on the Soundcloud bar.

Enjoy!

This is the fourth Churches Media Conference that I’ve attended.

I've been married a little over two years now. My wife looks over the conference schedule and can't see the allure. She imagines that there must be many beautiful young women at the conference, so at our house we simply refer to the conference as "Hot Totty" as in "will my sisters' birthday BBQ in June conflict with Hot Totty this year?"

I try to reassure her that, while the women at Hot Totty are eminently toothsome, they probably have better things to do with their time than interface on any level with complex and aging Scottish Episcopal clergymen whose affections lie elsewhere.

As for the ones who dont, well, they can chase me but they can't catch me.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

We hate to wait. We try to figure out what’s coming down the road. We guess. We make stuff up. There’s a lot of that going on with the budget about to be read out today. Speculation is rife. Opponents are already lining up with things they think they know or believe they’ve figured out.

We’ve been prepared for it, even here in Scotland. The chancellor has told us that this is the ‘unavoidable budget’ – the one where we will pay the price for what’s gone on in the past in order to make what is to come workable and liveable. People in the here and now, however, are the ones who will need to do their part and pay the price.

But you and I know this won’t be the end of the story. We’ll wonder why we’ve been targeted by certain taxes or have to pay the price of cutbacks in our sector. “What makes us special”, we’ll ask. Not everybody will have been won over by this time tomorrow.

A coalition government producing a budget must take enormous risks. These are two very different animals welded together – a Tiger-Lion, if you like, or a Beaver-Duck. We're not privy to all the late night telephone calls between convinced Liberals or convinced Conservatives warning that the pure principles of their Party are being put at risk.

Whether or not you believe we’re living in the sort of age which requires an “emergency budget”, we are all familiar – or will be – with those moments when emergency measures are required in our relationships – when bottoms fall out of things, when the rock rolls down the hill and, all of a sudden, the love we take for granted between ourselves and our spouses, or the religious faith which we ‘ascribe to’ but have never absolutely needed become extremely valuable. Our priorities will change in an instant and our creativity “kick in” when the bad news is known, but we’re pointed back to things we had neglected.

Things we didn’t value at the time.


Audio available for a limited time HERE.
TFTD begins at 1:23.13 - about halfway along the audio bar.

After Dinner Speech
at the SEC General Synod

I missed the General Synod Dinner this year and while the conflicting engagement was both important and enjoyable it would have been good to hear Robin Angus' after dinner speech.

The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church in America was in attendance.

There are some in-jokes which non-Piskies might not get but there is plenty to amuse even outsiders. Dr Patricia Peattie, who is referred to on a number of occasions in the speech, is the outgoing Convenor of the Provincial Standing Committee. She is a retired nurse (and professor of nursing) of the old model who, we must imagine, could have reduced the prickliest of old-fashioned male Consultants to blobs of jelly back in the day. She is a highly organized and intentional lady and David Palmer, her successor, has very big shoes indeed to fill.

Ruth Innes has a copy of Robin's after-dinner speech on her blog and it can be seen HERE. Enjoy.

I will forgive him for mentioning pretty well every Scottish Episcopal blogger except me. Then again, we haven't been introduced.

The Presiding Bishop of TEC
at the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schiori was invited to speak to the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church this afternoon. She was sitting in the pews during the final presentation of the Inter-Church Relations Committee and a presentation by a delegate at the Edinburgh 2010 Mission Conference. At long last she took the podium and spoked about elements of our shared history, the importance of the Baptismal Covenant in the Episcopal Church and in those churches in whose prayer books it appears in some form and the future shape of our shared ministry in the world.

There will be a video version of this appearing on the Scottish Episcopal Church website and Kelvin's blog. In the mean time, you have an audio version of what was said during Bishop Katharine's talk to us this afternoon. Enjoy!



Update: The Convenor of the Information and Communication Board, Kelvin Holdsworth, had the opportunity to interview the PB at General Synod. That interview can be found HERE.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Good morning,

If somebody referred to you as an"inhibited person" you might not be particularly pleased..
True - some of our inhibitions hamper us. They make it difficult for us to be honest with each other or to relate intimately with friends and lovers. They keep us off the dance floor. They keep us from applying for jobs or from raising our voice in support of a cause.

But some of our inhibitions make it possible to disagree without killing each other. We'd be stuffed without a few inhibitions. Extended family gatherings would turn into battle grounds. A loss of inhibitions can even have fatal consequences. A Scottish police chief is concerned about the role alcohol has played in 14 murders committed around the country in the last few months. He worries that drink-fueled violence will escalate during the World Cup which begins tomorrow. A bottle of cheap vodka, after all, goes for about seven pounds fifty. Trouble is only a transaction away.

We see the way in which young people – particularly young men – get dragged into risky or violent behaviour in the midst of drunken peers. One suspects that with a little more self esteem the individual would be strong enough to stand apart from the crowd.

There’s an old saying - “in vino veritas” – which suggests that the truth comes out with a drink or two. A family gathering or a group of close friends can become unglued or fractious because somebody has done or said something untoward under the influence of a few drinks. Again, you suspect that there’s a price being paid for a lack of honesty in the midst of normal sober conversations. The turmoil was there in the soul to start with – darkness, jealousy and frustration. A cork comes out with a few drinks, that’s for sure - but the contents were under pressure anyway. A little more honesty between family and friends in ordinary sober life would not have gone wanting.

We pay a price for not tackling our dragons in the daylight.


Audio available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.15 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.

General Synod Session One Audio Recap

For the last few years I've been asked to put together a little audio recap of the events of General Synod at the end of each session. This has been filtered into the Scottish Episcopal Church website and has, I gather, been a source of joy and information for unnamed persons who like to keep an eye on what's going on. This year it would appear that the SEC website has crashed at the beginning of General Synod so it's being placed here. For my part I've always found the audio recaps a little dry. As you can see from the pictures (above and below) the Bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church look nothing like a cold war era Politburo.





So my little three minute recap and its similarity to reports on tractor production on the evening news of various Soviet satellite countries in the mid-sixties provides the only similarity.

An interview with Jim McRae

Commander Jim McRae, the Development Director of the Mission to Seafarers Scotland has set up a display at General Synod. I interviewed him about the work of the Mission in Scotland and what clergy and lay delegates might do to get on board this very important and active industrial chaplaincy in Scotland.