The Yakult And The Occult

I don't know about you, but I'm semi-permeable.  Sad songs make me sadder, naughty company makes me naughtier, and spending too much time with House or Doctor Who* starts to make me behave and be more like them.  I watch what I listen to, if you see what I mean.  I keep an ear out on what I watch, if that makes sense to you.  I guard my diary and address book against too many hours with people who bring me down or set me up.

Is that you too?

Human beings are semi-permeable.  Easily swayed.  Susceptible to suggestion.  And that works both for bad and for good.

All Hallows' Eve (or Hallowe'en as I understand it's called in Sainsbury's) is when people dress up as all sorts of scary things: witches and vampires and large orange vegetables.  Heavens, this afternoon on the Cheetham Hill Road I saw two people convincingly dressed as pensioners, complete with tartan trollies.  Full marks for imagination, but even with those realistic lines you didn't fool me…  (Also, lots of people are just dressed as witches and vampires because black is so slimming.  We know your game!)

It's also when Christians have Light Parties and other anti-darkness events to make a point about Jesus the light of the world, that "he that is in us is greater than he that is in the world."  It's also a safeguarding exercise, because you can't be in ministry for long without seeing real darkness at work and the effects it has.  Why dabble in darkness - even comedy darkness - when you can bathe in light?  And for that reason, some Christians disdain Harry Potter, and some deter trick-or-treaters with posters or by giving them tracts.  And we all blame America.

I'm hesitant to blame the States for everything, and I think Harry Potter is a good old-fashioned story about sacrifice and bravery (albeit with magical trappings: it could as easily have taken place at a Fame Academy or dance school.  Or Rodbaston Agricultural College).  But I take the point about careless exposure to darkness, and I do think that for some people Hallowe'en is the thin end of a wedge that leads to unhealthy associations with ouija boards, seances and stuff that even the least traditional Christian might furrow a forehead at.

My sense of it all agrees with something Sylvester McCoy (Doctor Who** number 7) said in 1989 in Survival: "You put a cat flap in your house, you never know what'll come in…"

We are semi-permeable, and if the Smiths and Hugh Laurie and Peter Capaldi can infiltrate their way past my defences, then so can the darkness in the world.  Occult?  No thank you.  It comes from an old word meaning "hidden," which gives it a sort of esoteric glamour, a dangerous edge and of course means that people dismiss it at their peril.

Occult?  No.  But Yakult?  Yes.

Yakult is, of course, that protobiotic yoghurt drink of nice, kind bacteria, who live in your stomach and perform beneficial services for your gut.  Hurrah for Yakult!

And there's spiritual Yakult to be had, too.  He's called the Holy Spirit.  He's the one I want permeating me!  He's the one I'd like to see saturating my heart and changing my moods and attitudes and actions and thoughts for the better.  And the promise of God is, of course, that every Christian has this Holy Spirit inside of them, and that when we let him, he'll grow in us the character of Jesus.

It's not all bad, is it?  All Hallow's Eve may be the day when the choice between letting in the light or dabbling in the dark is clearest, but it's there every day.  Paul spends much of his writing imploring us to let the good in, to be filled again and again with the Spirit so that we're proof against the devil's schemes (yes, I believe there's a devil out there) and ready to stand up for the good works God has prepared in advance for us to do.

I'm off to a Light Party, dressed in yellow, mostly because I'm cycling, also because I'm making a point about light.  Don't burgle the house while I'm gone: there's nothing worth stealing.  Before I go I'll be asking God to fill me again with the Holy Spirit: bitterness and anger out, kindness and patience in, curled lips out, open arms in, moaning out, blessing in…

The Holy Spirit is God's Yakult.  And much to be preferred than the occult.







* We'll get to Doctor Who next time.  You'll be hearing from him a lot.
** See what I mean?

The Least Christian Leader

Leaving one church and getting ready to pastor another has led to lots of kind compliments being paid to me.  Thank you all.  More of that another day.  Today I should tell you about one of the best compliments I ever received.

It was a few years ago in the Lakes, helping lead an outdoor pursuits venture for 12-16 year-olds.  Mountains were climbed, lakes crossed, abs seiled and all that.  The gospel was shared, and I sat in on the older lads' dormitory as they fathomed questions of faith and wondered whether they could or should believe in God, trust Jesus, be filled with the Spirit.  All that.  Their other leaders were brilliant: young adults with vim and vigour and verve and other high-scoring Scrabble words.  I rarely had reason to interject.  I may, just once or twice, have raised an eyebrow at the very slightly cut-and-dried faith they were demonstrating, as if to say, "Ah, the brilliance of youthful optimism.  The faith is good, but not as simple as all that."  You try communicating that with just one eyebrow.

Me, eating toast with only one eyebrow

And on the last night, a 16-year old lad tracked me down by the ping pong table.  He was from London and his name began with a J.  He furrowed his brow a little, and asked if I would help him with his faith.  "I think it all makes sense," he said.  "I think I want to follow Jesus.  But I wanted to talk to someone about it… and you seem like the least Christian leader here."

Well.  Boom shake the room, my friends.  The least Christian leader here!  As soon as he said it, he was embarrassed, but I was thrilled.  Thrilled to little skinny ribbons.  The only ordained priest on the venture, and the least Christian leader there!

I did my little Chandler dance (on the inside) and got on with talking to him, listening to him and trying to understand where he was coming from.  It was a productive evening, and the next step for him in rather an exciting journey.

My co-leaders in that dorm did brilliant work with the seven other lads up there.  But one of them - J - needed someone a bit wearier, a bit more sceptical, a bit less part of the culture of Christianity that can emerge on these ventures and in our churches.  It's no reflection on him or them.  It might be a reflection on me!  I was overjoyed to find that we'd accidentally (and God had deliberately) got all the bases covered in that dorm.  I was feeling slightly (if happily) redundant up there, glad that younger people were doing my job, so that if ever I retired, I needn't worry about it all being in good human hands.

When J said "least Christian," I hope what he meant was that he needed to know the faith without the subculture, without the slightly cheesy too-certain caricatures of Christianity that maybe he'd been offered.  He needed someone Christian without being so caught in the tradition that they were in love with the trappings.

There's a brilliant song out there that churches sing, which says:

Father God, I wonder how I managed to exist

Without the knowledge of your parenthood and your loving care.

It's double-edged.  It doesn't just mean, "I don't know how I lived without you."  It also means, "I've forgotten what it was like without this faith," which might just mean, "I've no idea how to communicate it effectively to people any more."  You can get lost in your own sub-culture.

I'm overjoyed to say that I love Jesus, but I can't be doing with church architecture, choral music or Songs of Praise.  People tell me all about church buildings they've seen on holiday as if a vicar must really want to see more flying buttresses and a jolly good nave (not jolly good knave, that'd be me).  I think people swooned when I declared I'd like church to be less like Songs Of Praise.  It's a bit too clean-cut, with apparently middle-class middle-aged people dressed rather too well and singing with rather too much enthusiasm and rather too-wide-open mouths* for me.  I fear that a passing viewer (and passing is what they might well do) may well mistake this sub-culture for Christianity and imagine that they could never belong to it: life too messy, mouth not wide enough, not middle-class or middle-aged enough, not got quite the same capacity to dress up and enunciate.

If you've ever thought that, fear not.  There are lots of us "less Christian" Christians about, for whom life is a bit fuzzy, who've been battered or hurt, or whose CVs might get us thrown off the BBC.  Sidle up to us while the mouths are wide open, and we'll talk about our scepticism and our faith in spite of our scepticism.  Anything to pierce the bubble of respectability which Christ's followers get stuck with on the telly and in the news.

Sidle up to us scruffs with scars, and join us in being the lest Christian Christians in the room - which may well be what Jesus needs to change this world.

And J, I hope you're still doing well out there.  I may use you as a reference for my next job!



*I may change my mind a little since Songs of Praise went to Calais...

Hezekiah's Shrug

Hezekiah was a panda.

Okay, not a real actual panda.

Hezekiah, a good king as kings go in Israel between David and the exile, was many things, but none of them was black and white and furry.

Endangered, though, yes,  Hezekiah had been very ill, sometime back in 2 Kings 20.  But he'd been healed by God, and quite apart from a fresh spring in his step, Hezekiah seemed to think he might be bulletproof.  A little while later in Isaiah 39 we find him showing off his wealth and armoury to envoys from Babylon, a bit pompous, a bit proud, a bit boastful.  With hindsight Hezekiah might not have done that, because Babylon were the very people who, a few years later, piled into Israel and took people off into exile and more or less ended Israel as an ancient nation, certainly as any kind of power.  

But he did it, like a man giving a shady stranger his PIN and mother's maiden name, like a man showing someone with a stripy top and a sack marked swag where the spare key is kept and the size of his plasma telly.  Whoops, as history might say.

And when Isaiah tells him off and passes on the news that God will make the land pay in generations to come for this act of hubris, Hezekiah fails to fall on his knees.  Instead he nods sagely, while thinking on the inside, "Well, at least it won't happen when I'm alive."

He's a panda.  Honestly, those pandas, do they know how much we dote on them, how iconic they are (literally for the World Wildlife Fund) for us in terms of conservation?  Do they think we show endless footage of other animals arriving at zoos?  They're on telly more than Kate Middleton or Alexander Armstrong.  And they're going extinct.  Humankind is putting rather disproportionate effort into encouraging them to reproduce, but will they do it?  

No.  They can't be… bothered.

This panda would rather ride a plastic horse.  Tsk.

They don't give a monkey's that one day they'll be extinct, probably for the same reason as Hezekiah isn't too fussed by the prospect of a future invasion of Israel by those Babylonians.  It won't happen in their lifetime.  Pandas are very very unlikely to go extinct in their own lifetime.  They have no thought for the rest of us and our grief once they've gone.  Ruddy selfish, those pandas.  Stop chewing the 'boo and start doing the do, Yin-Yang and Ju-Jitsu!

Pandas and Hezekiah.  Inconsiderate, see.

It's not as if the rest of us would ever doom future generations to rising tides and temperatures and global warming and things getting politically hot under the collar as wars are fought for water.  It's not as if we're living like there's no tomorrow and ironically making sure that at some point there really will be no tomorrow.  Is it?  Hang on, excuse me while I drive my Chelsea tractor down the corner shop…

Last time I preached on Isaiah 39 and Hezekiah's shrug (sounds like a fresh ailment!) I needed a counterpoint, a contrast, an example of someone who does the opposite, who eschews short-term comfort for long-term reward to someone else.  Surprisingly I chose Jesus.  In the garden.  With a crucifix.  Jesus, declining the short-term-ism of fleeing or calling down angels to save him from the Roman arrest and death.  Jesus, making the future better by bearing the brunt of things today.

A Gallic shrug, yesterday.

And then of course I expanded onto medieval cathedral architects and builders, those people who designed and constructed and carved… but whose cathedrals were so long in the making that they knew they'd never see the finished product.  And they put their shoulders to the wheel nonetheless.  No Hezekiah's shrug for them.  They went to their graves knowing that the benefit of their work would be seen by future generations.

Jesus bled for people that hadn't even been born yet.

Those builders sweated for people who weren't even a twinkle in their father's eye.

And neither Jesus nor the hod carriers had any guarantee that people would look back with any gratitude.  Not so much as a jot.  But they seem to have believed that shoulders weren't for shrugging but for bearing bricks and sins.  And probably having someone kneel on them as he hammered those nails home.

And us?  Psalm 78 invites us to tell the next generation the wonderful works of God.  We can be very good at watching things go to hell in a handbasket (although other means of transport are available), very good at bemoaning and bewailing all sorts of stuff.  It's time to be better in the present and sow some seeds to make a better future, both in mission and emissions, for the whole world and for the soul world.

What can you do?  My film club twinned our toilet six times with villages in the developing world.  My friend took up buying Fair Trade wherever she could for Lent.  I'm going to keep on telling schoolchildren about Jesus.  Don't shrug… shoulder the responsibility… enjoy the possibilities…

Thank you and goodnight.