Et in Arcadia Ego.
Author Archives: Elizaphanian
Carrying our wounds with us
A sermon on John 20.19-end
We have this morning the familiar story of doubting Thomas – which is a story that means a great deal to me personally, as I too have moved in my life from doubt to faith, and I am greatly encouraged that it is Thomas who is privileged to give the climactic statement of this gospel ‘my Lord and my God!’ There is a natural sermon there… but I talked about Richard Dawkins last week!
There is something very important about this story which occasionally gets missed. First, and this is very important, it shows that the incarnation was not an illusion, that it wasn’t just Jesus putting on flesh like we might put on a coat – he really was flesh, and he has raised that flesh up – you could say, what this story tells us is that Jesus wasn’t pretending when he suffered
But there is something else here too, even more important, about the nature of resurrection itself – and it says something about what we have to hope for. Jesus is resurrected and I have a question for you, is he happy? [pause]
Of course he is, he has entered into glory. Now what is crucial is that he shows us what the resurrection body is like – full of mystery of course, but still we know some things – we know that he bears the marks of his crucifixion – he is happy, but he is still wounded.
I feel this is worthy of much reflection, and I would like you to take this image with you home today and ponder it – he is happy, but he is still wounded.
A few thoughts about what this story means for us and our Christian hope of resurrection.
First, we carry our wounds with us.
Second, the wounds are no longer painful but they do define us, we are the sort of people that these things have happened to. Our stories, those things which make us who we are – these are honoured by God.
Finally, the wounds are redeemed and healed – but they are not forgotten.
What this means is that what happens in this life is important – God doesn’t wipe the slate completely clean and begin again (the resurrection is not like the flood at the time of Noah); God takes what we have and changes it without destroying it. God takes the broken pieces and makes something new out of them.
This means that what we do today is of eternal significance. What we do in this world matters for ever. How we treat each other, how we treat our world, our environment – these things are invested with profound meaning. This doesn’t mean that things that go wrong cannot be redeemed – it does mean that just as we carry our own wounds with us, so too those with whom we interact will carry their woundings from us with them, and our world will carry its wounds as well.
I was pondering – should God be gracious enough to me to bring me into the kingdom on the last day – I wonder whether I will still be half-deaf, or whether that part of my nature has so profoundly shaped who I am that I couldn’t have full hearing and still be me. Yet I wouldn’t want to mislead you either. In the Kingdom there will be no hearing aids, there will be no spectacles, there will be no crutches or wheelchairs. Yet we will still be the people formed by such things, of that I am sure.
This is one of the deep mysteries revealed in this story of doubting Thomas. For the story is not just about Jesus but also about ourselves, about what we can hope for – that we will still be who we are – that everything that happens to us in this life will matter forever – that when God redeems us, he heals us – he heals, and he heals us; he will, in deed, raise us from the dead. Amen.
About that Iron Man movie
Food for fuel
This is one of the first symptoms of Peak Oil, and it is starting to impact on people’s awareness. If you want to explore the link more directly have a read of this article by Stuart Staniford, which is excellent.
It’s not going to get any better. Luke 16:19-31 applies.
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Our government is institutionally incompetent.
Tesco is a big red herring (April Synchroblog)
This month’s synchroblog is on the theme of Christianity and Social Justice.
Social justice is undoubtedly a Christian concern – it saturates the Bible, Jesus emphasises it, and the pursuit of it is a necessary constituent part of a faithful life. Over two thousand verses about poverty. And so on and so forth – this is all well and good.
There are various specific ways in which that concern for social justice can be pursued. For me, one aspect came in denouncing Tesco (eg http://elizaphanian.blogspot.com/2008/03/thou-shalt-not-shop-at-tesco-sermon.html). I’m coming to believe that this was – if not quite a mistake, then at least a misapplication of effort. Indeed, perhaps there was even a little spiritual sin involved.
After all Tesco itself is not completely bad – I don’t see much wrong in buying a CD from them for example – my concerns are primarily to do with their food business, in terms of its sustainability, vitality of produce and their treatment of food suppliers. On all these things Tesco seems particularly poor, irresponsible and short-sighted. It seems straightforward to me that shopping at, say, the Co-Op is significantly more supportive of social justice than buying your food at Tesco.
However, the real problem is the underlying system itself, within which it can make sense for a company to be as reckless about social justice as Tesco is. In other words, the problem is about corporate law and the financial markets, who oblige the authorities at Tesco to pursue short term profit margins. (One of the reasons why the co-op, or John Lewis, is much better.)
This system is at the root of much that ails our present world. It is why the peaking of the oil supply will be a catastrophe rather than a bump in the road. It is why global warming will harm more people than it need to. It is why governments are going to war to preserve their way of life. It is why the life in the oceans is denuded, the water available to much of humanity declining, the top soil depleted. There are lots of symptoms telling us that something is wrong, and lots of people objecting to symptoms.
What is the Christian task here – that is, what is the specifically Christian task? Obviously it is a good thing for Christians to be involved in trying to relieve the symptoms, to campaign for social justice, to advocate good environmental stewardship and so on.
Yet I believe the specifically Christian task is a separate one. The ideological system within which the likes of Tesco takes on its role has a specific spiritual root; it is a knotting together of idolatries – of Mammon in particular, but also an excessively high regard for both law and science. All of which are good things, but they have become distorted, elevated above themselves, and consequently they have become life-denying and destructive. As a society and culture we are worshipping false Gods. What we need to do is to proclaim the true God, the one who gives life in response to worship.
In this context, to spend time denouncing Tesco is to waste time that might be better spent digging out the spiritual roots, and teaching people what right worship actually consists in. It is a temptation – to succumb to a desire for control, to engage in a worldly struggle, possibly even a matter of pride – for if you fight an organisation as large and important in British life as Tesco, then some of the importance reflects back on you – and then the real you gets lost, and you become ‘the vicar who is fighting Tesco’, and the gospel is eclipsed.
Hence my present line of thought: Tesco is a big red herring. If Christians are serious about social justice, and right environmental stewardship, then our paramount task is simply this: we must preach the gospel. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
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Other people blogging on this theme today:
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My noble friend.
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I’m a bad roadsweeper!
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Worship begins again.
Falling in love with Frankenstein
This is a sketch for a much longer essay about science fiction. Click ‘full post’ for text.
One of the dominant themes of Modern culture is the Frankenstein conceit – what you might think of as the ‘mad scientist’, or, more profoundly, the Faustian bargain. A man (and it normally is a man) is so consumed by his rational intellectual pursuits that he unwittingly provokes disaster and his own death.
As I see it, this is the way in which humanity’s soul has digested and absorbed the impact of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment project is precisely that which has elevated one element of our human nature falsely above the others; it has insitutionalised asophism; and thus we are in the midst of ecological crisis. The devil has come to collect his due.
Being a fan of sf, especially visually, I am struck by the way in which this theme has been subverted and then overcome within the world of fiction and film. I see this as a creative analogue of the way in which the Enlightenment project has itself been undone from within. (This is, I believe, why there is such an efflorescence of angst-ridden writings from the humourless atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens et al – they are aware in their bones that they are being left behind.)
Three examples of this shift:
1. The Matrix trilogy. The first Matrix was pure Frankenstein – the intellectual products of humanity turn against their creators and destruction follows; human liberty and salvation lie in battling against the machine. However, the second two films explored something more creative – the machine is not monolithic, it has variety (and therefore more dramatic interest of course) – there is a possibility of an alliance between human and mecha.
2. Battlestar Galactica, the new series. Whereas in the original series we are facing highly efficient automata (rational products of Enlightenment) now the cylons are riven with their own competing needs and desires. The Cylons are now just like us; we can even breed with them.
3. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The original Terminator film is a real classic, and a classic description of the Frankenstein – a totally remorseless source of death and destruction ‘it absolutely will not stop until you are dead’. With the films a little first, but now much more with the series, we have much more creative ambiguity. This crystallised for me in the recent episode where Summer Glau starts to learn ballet. A vision of beauty – and whether it is human or mecha falls by the wayside.
(I’ve also been put in mind of this by recently finishing Dan Simmons’ Hyperion cantos, but I’ll write about them separately.)
I believe that what we have in this medium – film and television science fiction – is the creative resolution of the human conflict created by the Western idolatry of reason. As our society moves beyond the Enlightenment, so too does our fiction. Robots who are pure products of reason are no longer very interesting – the robots need to have more to them – and this is simply a mirror for how we see ourselves. In other words, there is more to humanity than the remorseless application of reason.
I find this encouraging and exciting.