Easter – features of the future

Recently whilst visiting a school I was in a class which had been given the task of imagining and designing an island. In pairs they had been given a blank sheet of paper and asked to put in the features needed to shape the future of the people living on their imaginary island.   I was fascinated by the way in which all the islands ended up with similar features – mountains, rivers, fields, villages and towns.  All had roads and most had railways, some had an airport and most had docks, some had reservoirs and one had a rubbish dump – but none had wind farms, none had hydroelectric power stations and none had solar panels.  What was common to them all was that they imagined the future in terms of what they had already experienced – their future was a reflection of the past and I suspect that many of us, given the same exercise, would have done the same – imagining the future as a reflection of the past.

To Christians, the Easter story is an invitation – an invitation to become involved in shaping the future – our own and for our society.   An invitation to glimpse what is possible when we allow our imagination to be fed by the possibilities of God and his transforming love; an invitation to re-imagine our future, not as a reflection of the past, but as a new landscape of life and love.

We celebrate Easter this year when the world is experiencing remarkable changes and uncertainties.  The global economy is undergoing a fundamental readjustment, the recession is teasing out the viability of businesses leaving in its wake the unemployment which makes the future so uncertain for millions of people.

We celebrate Easter with the growing spectre of climate change and the continued threat of terrorism contributing to a general texture of uncertainty and, as ever, we celebrate Easter against the backdrop of all the ongoing joys and sorrows of life, from the joys of new birth to the heart rending plight of the Italian earthquake victims.

It is a troubling picture and it is far too simplistic just to say that Easter and its message of hope is ‘the’ answer to all the problems of our times.  The key to understanding Easter is the image of Jesus dying on the cross. The pain and suffering of Jesus tortured to death on the cross is transformed not avoided.  The hope which Christians celebrate today is not about making everything all right again, but how we can re-imagine the future.

As we wrestle with the future, it is understandably tempting and attractive for politicians to offer a future which is a recovery of the past good times, but what’s the sense in that?  More of the same will bring us to exactly where we are now – I think that it is called boom and bust.

It is too easy to jump on a bandwagon of blaming the bankers for all the economic problems we are facing.  We need to remember that they were operating in a system of values which we endorsed as we enjoyed the benefits of a buoyant economy, but those values had no substance, for they were not about shaping the future but exploiting the present.  A target driven world can be a world that sacrifices wisdom for the short term gains and approval of meeting the targets.

So do we really want to go back to that?  Or, if given a blank sheet of paper and asked to re-imagine the world, what features, what values would we draw in to shape the future for our world. The message of Easter invites us to draw in life and love, peace and justice, hope and goodness as foundational features for shaping the future.  These features are not exclusive to Christians – life and love, peace and justice, hope and goodness are universal and a commitment to them would be future shaping.  The Easter story enables us to glimpse that when these things are lived out to the full, then there is a flourishing of life which even death cannot destroy.

Good Friday – what’s good about it?

Over-to-you  BBC Radio Humberside  10th April 2009

I suspect like many children and probably quite a few adults I was always confused about Good Friday – what was ‘good’ about it?  It is the day in the year when we mark the story of Jesus who, having been betrayed by Judas Iscariot, arrested, tried before the ruling powers and condemned to death by the Roman governor, is nailed a cross an left to die in agony.  How can this possible be called ‘good’?

Well, the explanation for why it is called ‘good’ is either that it became known as ‘God’s Friday’ which through usage ended up as ‘Good Friday’, rather like our phrase ‘Goodbye’ has its origin in the phrase ‘God be with you’, or the alternative explanation that it was called ‘Good Friday’ because it is the day on which we remember the powers of Goodness triumphing over the powers of evil.  Either way, the significance of the day is to remember the suffering and death of a young man who offered a new and fresh way of knowing and understanding God.  In churches around the world there will be services to mark the event of Jesus’ death and its meaning.

That battle between good and evil was understood as a very real and spiritual battle in the time of Jesus.  Down the ages and still today for many that spiritual battle rages on – to Christians the victory in that battle was won by Jesus through his death and resurrection, but we are still engaged in ‘mopping up’ operations as units of evil refuse to accept their ultimate defeat.

In our modern world such imagery has less and less hold on our culture.  But we are still very alive to evil and will quickly adopt the phrase to describe those whose acts and behaviour we find unacceptable or which we cannot understand.

Trying to understand evil has been the subject of much philosophy, theology and psychology, but in the end it is a difficult concept to capture.  At its simplest,  evil is the consequence of excluding God – in which case there is a lot of potential for evil around.  Whilst in a more complex analysis, the term evil is adopted to justify the punishment of wrong doers and I think that’s why it is quickly adopted as a term by the tabloid press to describe criminals, even young children, as though the use of this word can capture the complexity of those who resort to violence and perversion.

The reality of evil is however all around us, as we encounter the ways in which human flourishing is undermined by violence, abuse and poverty. Whilst we may use all the force of the law to curb evil, Good Friday reminds us that the only way to overcome evil is for goodness to prevail.  In the face of evil we all need to become do-gooders, lest we become part of the problem ourselves.

Free to protest

Over-to-you.  BBC Radio Humberside 8th April 2009

There just seems to be so much news around at present that there is ever the danger that you miss the really interesting, but less sensational, stories.  This was particularly true yesterday, all the international attention was on President Obama’s visit to Iraq and a story from the Iraqi Appeal Court received little attention.  But the court ruled that the sentence given to c the journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush, had been too severe and it was cut from 3 years in prison to one – which is still a long time for him to ponder the wisdom of his acts.  Zadai claimed that had thrown his shoes, a grave insult in Arab culture, as a protest on behalf of  the Iraqis who had been killed, orphaned or widowed since the US-led invasion of their country and in President Bush’s own words “it is one way to gain attention”.

It  raises the question – how do we gain attention when we feel that everything is going wrong? It comes as we absorb the concerning video footage associated with the death of Ian Tomlinson at last week’s G20 protest, scenes which ask serious questions about police behaviour.  When the powerful stop listening, how do we gain their attention and make them aware of our disquiet?

One of the stories about Jesus, which we read during these days leading up to Good Friday, is about him wreaking havoc in  the Temple, turning over the tables of the money changers.   It is a story of protest, a violent protest and Jesus’ actions were every bit as insulting in Jewish culture as an Arab throwing his shoe. Yet Jesus had found that the powerful had stopped listening and as the story unfolds it has a very modern feel, for the powerful used all the apparatus of their power to resist the truth Jesus was expounding.  The nature of Jesus’ protest against the abuse and corruption of truth becomes increasingly silent and the authority of his protest becomes greater as he offers a contrast to the anger, threats and violence of those who seek his death.

I think that to protest is to exercise our God given freedom to use our minds, to have an opinion and to speak about how we understand truth in this world.  Yet like all freedoms, there has to be responsibility and those who protest have to keep a fine balance between on the one hand making the powerful listen to their views and on the other becoming so forceful that the powerful have an excuse not to listen.  Over the years there have been many protests at the G8 meetings about the way the world economy was being run – they became very violent and the violence ensured that the protesters were not listened to by those with the power to change the economy.  As we now live in the grip of a terrible recession which is wreaking havoc in the lives of so many people, we may well feel that wisdom was actually found to be with the protesters, for it is painfully clear that the powerful who ran our economy  got it very wrong.

You can’t measure prayer

Over-to-you  BBC Radio Humberside  Tuesday 7th April

Yesterday, high above us in space, the European Goce Satellite switched on super-sensitive instruments which will make ultra-fine measurements of the Earth’s gravity.  The purpose of the Goce mission is to study the oceans – to understand better how gravity pulls water and heat around the globe and thus improve our understanding of climate change.  The satellite is an amazing feat of science, technology and engineering which will enable us to understand more about earth our home and the gravity which keeps us on it.

It was a tragic irony that on the day on which these super-sensitive instruments were switched on, miles below the residents in and around  L’Aquila in Italy were woken by the devastating effect of our globe’s most destructive force. The tectonic plates, which relentlessly grind together around Italy, moved suddenly causing an earthquake which brought devastation and destruction to the town and the power of gravity wreaked death and injury to the citizens of that region as buildings and infrastructure collapsed around them.

Our hearts go out to those who are caught up in this devastation – the bereaved, the injured and the homeless and we wrap them in our prayers along with those who continue to search for signs of life amidst the rubble and recover the victims of this natural disaster.

Science enables us to understand more and more about our planet and the life it sustains, with projects such as the Goce satellite extending that knowledge.  Already there are questions about why the scientists were not able to give any warning of this impending disaster as the energy built up under the epicentre of this earthquake.  Yet in the end we live on a living planet with the movement of the continental plates being part of the 4.5 billion year history of our world.  The victims of yesterday’s earthquake are tragic victims of this reality.

There are ever those who want to drive a wedge between science and religion. Artificially introducing conflict where there is none.  Science gives us an understanding of how this world works and how life is sustained; religion gives us an insight into the human dynamics of life, the purpose of life and the preciousness of each and every life.  As we wrap the victims of yesterday’s earthquake in our prayers we can do something which science can never offer, nor should it, we can for a moment become involved in their suffering and grief – we can’t change it, nor can we remove it – but in our prayers we avoid being indifferent to their plight – in prayer we are drawn into it.    That’s what makes us human and God makes possible – an ability to relate to each other in a way that science can never measure, no matter how super-sensitive its instruments may become.