Away With the Manger?

There are some things that often seem more sacred than God. One of these is the ‘children’s favourite’ Christmas carol.  Just as I sang it seventy years ago, and probably my parents sang it nearly a hundred years ago, still today Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without little children singing ‘Away in a manger’ to the delight of their admiring parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts.

Lovely, if you don’t stop and think of the words. But if you do, are we sure we want our children to be singing this kind of thing?

The first line is obscure. Where is this ‘away’ in a manger? The point of the Christmas message is that God has come close to us, so why give the impression that it happened far away? And what’s a ‘manger’ anyway? I suppose most of us know that it is a feeding trough for cattle, but even when I was a child the word didn’t belong in everyday language. To most people, ‘manger’ is just a special name for whatever it was the baby Jesus lay in. And what does ‘no crib for a bed’ mean? Even I as a child had no idea what that meant. What we call it is a cradle or a cot. A ‘crib’ is something you use to cheat in an exam!

Then there’s this ‘look down from the sky’ business. Do we really want children to think that Jesus is up there among the stars and the planets? Even worse, do we want them to think that only up in heaven will they be able to live with Jesus, and even then only if they are ‘fit’ to live with him?

But the worst bit is in the second verse: ‘but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’. What an unnatural baby! I suppose the lesson of this is supposed to be that Jesus, being perfect, never cried because crying is wrong and good children must always be like Jesus and never cry. What sadistic Victorian thought that up?

Perhaps the day will come when parents and teachers will suddenly wake up and realise what an awful song this is to teach to children. In the meantime, we can only hope that the children of today and tomorrow have no idea of what it all means anyway!

Born of the Virgin Mary...

One of my favourite carols has the verse:
Angels and archangels
may have gathered there,
cherubim and seraphim
thronged the air,
but his mother Mary
in her maiden bliss
worshipped the Beloved
with a kiss.

There was a glory, a mystery, about the birth of Jesus - the Creator of the universe in a little baby. The poet Studdert Kennedy uses the striking phrase 'the five little fingers of God'. Paintings portray angels gathered around the stable. Of course they were invisible, or visible only to the imagination, but that humble stable (or wherever it was) shone with the glory of God.

Yet isn't this true of every birth? I have never had the experience myself, but to hold your own new-born child in your arms, especially in the company of the one you love, must be the nearest human beings get to heavenly bliss. Surely the magic of the Christmas story is that it says something significant and wonderful about the birth of a child - any child.

I believe that Jesus was the Son of God in the sense that in him human nature was most completely in tune with the nature of God. In that sense Jesus is 'His only Son, our Lord', but what it really says to me is that God is like Jesus - loving, giving, vulnerable and in the end indestructible because whatever happens love keeps bouncing back.

'In her maiden bliss': I don't believe in the Virgin Birth as a fact. It is the kind of myth that often in the ancient world attached itself to significant people. But birth itself, any birth, is a miracle. And I like to think of Mary, whether married or not, as a young innocent girl knowing for the first time the fearful joy of bringing a new life into the world from her own body.

God came into the world through the womb of Mary, yes. But God constantly comes into the world, not only when a child is born but whenever a human being is attuned to the loving nature of God. God can be born in you and me, men or women, young or old, and the loving, healing, challenging Christ walks the earth again.

... And in Jesus Christ

I suppose the one thing that really defines a Christian is ‘someone whose world view is centred on Jesus’.

Many would like to define it more narrowly: a Christian believes that Jesus is the Son of God; a Christian believes in the Holy Trinity; a Christian believes that Christ died for our sins and physically rose from the dead; a Christian is someone who has had a definite, describable experience of being born again; and so on.

But all these things are controversial. There are Christians who believe in them, Christians who don’t believe in them, and Christians who interpret them in such an unorthodox way that it is hard to say whether they believe in them or not.

Probably the only thing we can say with any confidence is that if you call yourself a ‘Christian’ at all it is because your faith and your view of the world are centred in the person we know as Jesus Christ. There are of course people who have little interest in religion and only call themselves Christians because they are not Muslims or Hindus, but even they assume that their faith ought to be centred in Jesus.

But who is Jesus? There are arguments as to whether we can know much, or even anything, about him at all. The Gospels contradict each other, and scholars argue as to how much of the material in them is eye-witness history and how much is legend, how many of the sayings of Jesus were really said by him and how many were made up by his followers. The ‘Jesus Seminar’ claims to have fairly accurate knowledge, but many are not so sure. Some people even claim that the Christian message was never meant to be taken literally, and Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed at all.

Many people worry about this. How can I follow Jesus if I don’t know what he actually said and did? How can I preach the message of Jesus if I don’t know exactly what he taught?

I find myself getting more and more relaxed about questions like this. The Bible, supplemented and modified by two thousand years of Christian tradition, tells us a story. Many people down through the ages have been excited and inspired by this story. Some have responded to some parts of it, others to other parts. Many different pictures of Jesus have emerged. Whatever you say about Jesus, someone will disagree, but no-one can actually prove that their picture of Jesus is the right one.

My picture of Jesus is of one who had the courage to love unconditionally and to make love the heart of everything. He saw through all the messy complexities and hypocrisies of religion and stuck to the one central principle of love. This made him a social and religious radical, and it was for this that he was condemned by the authorities and executed.

Some orthodox believers will say this is too simplistic, that there are essential doctrines I must believe about Jesus. Some historians will say Jesus wasn’t really quite how I imagine him. But this is the part of the story that excites and inspires me, and it is a big enough challenge for me to live by. What if this great idea of unconditional love as the meaning of everything is not what Jesus of Nazareth actually preached? Well, if it inspires and moves me, does it matter where it came from? And if it makes me a better human being (if only slightly), what does it matter whether I am labelled a ‘Christian’ or not?

Maker of Heaven and Earth

Sitting in our local park the other day, I found myself more than usually moved by the beauty of the river. It is a typical Welsh river, slightly black from natural peat (not, as in the old days, from coal waste), flowing swiftly and smoothly and bubbling over the rocks as if it is glad to be what it is. Here, I thought, is God. I felt I wasn’t contemplating nature and thinking about the God who created it: I was contemplating God. Not a God who made the world a long time ago, but a God who is here in this river now, alive and moving, creating the world anew every moment and rejoicing in it.

As I sat there, a little family of ducks appeared round the bend of the river. Here too was God, expressed in all the countless forms of life, each with its own beauty and its place in the world that has evolved through aeons of time that boggle the mind. Here is the living God.

I don’t find it very inspiring to think of God ‘designing’ this world, as in the hymn that says:

‘Jesus is Lord, creation’s voice proclaims it,

For by by his power each tree and flower was planned and made.’

For a start, that is a rather literal understanding of the idea that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word through which ‘all things were made’. But I find it just as difficult to think of God ‘planning and making’ like a designer with a drawing board. In fact, how much of the universe is ‘planned’ at all? Its development seems to be haphazard: the formation of galaxies, stars and planets; the evolution of life by chance mutations and the survival of the fittest; and the whole mixed-up story of the human race, not to mention each of our individual lives; it all seems to me to be a mixture of the random and the ordered, of untidiness and beauty. Scientists are now saying that there is chaos everywhere, and yet there are patterns even in the chaos. The universe, even if not completely random, is open-ended. The end has not been fixed from the beginning, even assuming that there is an end and a beginning.

To me, to worship God as ‘Maker of heaven and earth’ is not a matter of believing a doctrine. It is a matter of being overwhelmed by the wonder and the mystery of it all: not of thinking about God as a separate being who created the world, but just rejoicing in the world. I love the title of Richard Dawkins’s latest book, even though if it’s anything like The God Delusion I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with its content. The Magic of Reality – that’s what I believe in!

Do I Believe in God?

Do I believe in a Person sitting up in the sky? No, I don't. I don't think Christians are supposed to believe in that anyway. According to traditional Christian belief, God is a Trinity: God above, God among us, and God within us, all One.

Do I believe in Someone who made everything that is and still makes everything happen? I'm not sure. Sometimes I think, and pray, as if this were the case: as if there were a God I could talk to and ask for things, a God who knows what's going on in my life and could arrange things at my request, though He knows better than I what really needs to happen. But this kind of thinking stumbles against the uncomfortable fact that this God is supposed to love everybody and yet makes life so hard for some people that it's difficult to believe he loves them at all. If God answers the prayers of people in danger and miraculously saves their lives, what about all those who are not saved?

Do I believe in God? For want of a better word, yes. I respond to the infinite mystery and wonder of the universe. I can't agree with scientists like Richard Dawkins who think that one day we will understand the universe completely and know that there is no God. The cutting edge of contemporary science is already showing this up for the simplistic fundamentalism that it is. It is simply poor science. The fact that I am conscious, a person, in a world where there are other conscious beings, and where even 'inanimate' matter seems to respond to consciousness - in fact, the very fact that anything exists at all - is a miracle.

But I don't just believe in God with my head. My whole being responds to the divinity that is everywhere and in everything. The beauty of the earth brings tears to my eyes. The vast variety of living things delights and fascinates me. I can't stop myself believing that love is the most important thing in the world. And whatever happens, I feel somehow safe in the universe - illogical perhaps, but I find that the more I believe this the more it proves to be true. I don't know that there is a God, but I think I can say I know God.

I have just read the third chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love. She says almost exactly what I believe about God, and says it beautifully. Well worth reading!

I Believe ... ?

In churches all over the world people stand up every Sunday to recite a Creed: either the Apostles’ Creed or the more elaborate Nicene.

What is the function of these creeds? Historically, they have been devised as a test of orthodoxy. Before being baptised or confirmed, people had to recite these items of belief in order to be accepted as members of the Christian Church. As ‘heresies’ increased, so items were added to the creeds. The Apostle’s Creed, for instance, mentions three human beings: Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate. Pilate certainly didn’t win a place in the creed for his holiness or piety: it was simply that some people claimed that the story of Jesus was a kind of symbolic myth with no historical reality. In order to show that they did not hold this unorthodox idea, prospective members of the Church were made to assert that Jesus was in fact crucified at a particular time in history, ‘under Pontius Pilate’.

When Christianity became the official religion of the European countries, holding the ‘wrong’ beliefs came to be seen as treason. Whether or not you were willing to say the Creed could be literally a matter of life and death. Even today, holding the wrong beliefs can get you excommunicated or ostracised by Christians, though thankfully the Church can no longer get the State to back up its condemnation with penal sanctions.

People today are increasingly uncomfortable with being made to prove they are orthodox. Belief surely has to come from the heart. Some of us feel that the Church should be a fellowship of people who genuinely share the same beliefs and values, a place where we can openly discuss the nature of God and the meaning of life and celebrate the variety of our experience, rather than an institution we are only allowed to belong to if we can either force ourselves or pretend to believe the ‘right’ things.

Perhaps ‘I believe…’ is the wrong thing to say. Sometimes I feel more like saying ‘I feel in my bones that…’. When Thomas, after doubting, cried out to Jesus ‘My Lord and my God!’ it wasn’t a considered theological statement. It was an exclamation of overwhelming joy, an expression of a feeling that was beyond words. In fact, it is not certain that he meant by it what we usually take it to mean.

‘I believe…’ is alright so long as we bear in mind that it is not a matter of believing that (certain statements are factual), but of believing in (a person or a way of life). It is a matter of feeling, and of being prepared to take the risk of living by that feeling. Only then can I truly say ‘I believe…’ – but I can’t say that about all the items in the Apostles’ Creed.

In future blogs I want to explore and express what I really believe. But maybe this thought is enough for now.

We can't go on meeting like this!

In these days when ordained ministers are getting thinner on the ground, the churches of all denominations are encouraging congregations more and more to 'do it themselves'. It is presented in idealistic terms as 'unlocking the hidden talents' of the congregation, or 'whole body worship'. The reality is usually less exciting. Members of the congregation are coerced into taking a reading or a prayer, or getting together in a group to plan a service. Individuals may be urged to get some training and become lay preachers. But, let's face it, many people need a lot of persuading to take part in servives, and even if they consent they do it very nervously, convinced that they can't do it like a 'proper' minister.

What's the answer? To let churches close if they haven't got a trained, ordained minister? To leave them to book anybody, no matter how ignorant or eccentric, who thinks they can preach? This is a problem in some of the smaller Nonconformist chapels, where the question of who leads worship is not regulated by the wider church.

But hang on a minute: what is it we are doing? Why is there this mindset that assumes that in order to worship God we have to 'have a service', and in order to have a service we need someone to 'take' it? It's a mindset that has been nurtured in the churches for generations: the Quakers, and perhaps to some extent the charismatics, are the only ones who have escaped it.

The problem is that, in encouraging lay participation, we are assuming that lay people will learn to do the sort of things ministers do: the ministers are their role model. To lead worship, you have to 'know how' to pray the way ministers do, and preach a sermon the way ministers do. But surely if our faith is real to us we will express it in our way, not someone else's. Somehow we have to break down this clergy-centred mindset and begin to see worship simply as believers, and seekers as well, getting together to celebrate, explore and reinforce their faith and to find the ways in which they can practise it in the world. This could mean forgetting about 'Orders of Service', dispensing with preachers - and with organists for that matter - and just meeting. The clergy must learn that they have their own place, and that lay people have their place alongside them as lay people, not as second-class clergy.

Would it Make any Difference?

As I was shaking hands with people in the vestibule after taking a service recently, an elderly man picked up on something I had said in the sermon and expressed his conviction that quite soon now the scientists would discover that there is definitely a God. As it wasn’t quite the right time to start a deep discussion about theories of science and religion, and I didn’t want to appear dismissive of a thought that was evidently important to him, I simply smiled in a non-committal sort of way.


I may be wrong, but I don’t personally think such a discovery will ever be made. To explain why would need a lot more time and a deep theological discussion. My feeling is that faith and science are two different ways of looking at the same world. There are hints of a connection between them, but their criteria of “evidence” and “proof” are different. Faith is a way of looking at everything, including science, but it can never expect to be proved by science.

What disturbed me more was what the man said next: “They’ll be flocking into the chapels then!” Somehow that seemed even m ore unimaginable than his first statement! Even if the existence of God became an absolute certainty, I cannot believe that thousands of people would suddenly want to come and fill the pews of our Victorian churches and chapels to sing hymns and listen to someone preaching to them from a pulpit. Again, I may be wrong . . .

Even without the “proof” there are already signs of a revival of spirituality. People are eager to talk about the meaning of life and the universe. They meet together to practise meditation, alternative healing, life coaching, personal development and so on, and to discuss religion and issues of peace and justice – all looking for something more than conventional values, materialism and consumer culture. But, apart from some Christian fundamentalists, they are not flocking to church.

For me, as a Christian minister now fairly long in the tooth and still stuck in traditional ways to some extent, this is a disturbing thought. What is it about our way of “doing church” that makes it irrelevant to the real spiritual quest going on today? And why do I think it would still be irrelevant to most people even if they had absolute proof that there is a God?

The Eucharist as an Act of Defiance

A recent experience of an Easter breakfast that included Communion prompted me to think about the implications of Christian worship.

When the early Christians said 'Jesus is Lord' and called him 'King of kings' and 'Son of God' they were making a political statement. Those were titles that belonged to the Roman Emperor. It wasn't just pious religious language, it was an act of defiance: Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, King and Son of God. Of course, they didn't take up arms against the Empire. Instead, they undermined the Empire and its values by living according to the kingdom values of Jesus.

We today live under an empire that is no less powerful and no less cruel than that of the Romans. It is not headed by one particular person, but it has its firm laws that seem impossible to resist. It is the empire of global capitalism. Whenever we try to change anything, we are told that we can't get away from 'the economy' or 'the political realities'. Global capitalism tells us what reality is, no matter what we think the will of God is. And it is a cruel empire. It kills millions of people by malnutrition; it destroys communities; it robs farmers of their land; it locks people up in dangerous, unhealthy factories; it cripples people with debt; it robs children of the chance to grow into the human beings they can be; it inflicts stress and mental illness on the rich and the poor; and it destroys the planet itself.

When we say 'Jesus is Lord' today, it doesn't seem to make any difference. We say it in a context of religion, and it seems quite harmless. Perhaps part of our problem is that there is no one person against whom this statement can be directed. It is the big companies we all have a stake in, the media that shape our thinking, the democratic process that is so often enslaved to superficiality and selfishness - in fact, it is the system as a whole that is the cruel, dictatorial empire, not one ruler.

Which brings me back to the Communion. Not just in our ascriptions of praise to Jesus, but in this central act of the Church, if we take it seriously, we are defying the worldwide empire. It is 'Eucharist', i.e., thanksgiving, enjoying God's gifts not as something we have earned but as free gifts for all to enjoy. It is 'Communion', i.e., sharing, in a world where individual greed, competition and profit-making are the ruling principles. We are telling the world: sharing is what life in God's world is really about.

Of course, to do this we have to make it real. Perhaps we can start by making the Communion a real meal. Why are church suppers and 'bring and share' events never connected with the Eucharist? We can also make it real by making our church fellowship fully inclusive. Jesus sat down and ate with all manner of people. What a powerful witness it would be if we did the same. The tragedy is that the Eucharist has become the very place where we practise the most discrimination: we argue about who is entitled to receive Communion!! Let those of us who are in churches that practise a more open communion make it more open still, a feast free for all, a foretaste of the kingdom of God on earth, a liberated zone where differences of class, culture and wealth have no place, where the empire of the world is undermined.