Home from Exile: the lost son and the loving father

Why do we love this story so much? It’s one of the most beautifully told in the entire Bible: Luke is the supreme craftsman of the New Testament when it comes to storytelling. Think of the birth narratives or the passion story or the Good Samaritan or the Emmaus Road. 

But no doubt the subject matter has a lot to do with the way we feel about this story. I put it that way deliberately, for the parables are addressed as much to our capacity to feel and imagine as they are to our ability to think. It presents us with so many themes that that resonate within us at a profound level: our love for our parents and children and siblings; our anxiety at the prospect of being distant from those who care for us; our fear of finding ourselves in some kind of exile or estrangement; our longing for whatever home means for us and our lifelong quest to find it. These themes are universal to our human experience: family, kinship, journey, exile, homecoming, welcome, love.

The three parables in this fifteenth chapter of St Luke are all concerned with finding what was lost. The setting is the familiar grumble: ‘this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’ – familiar in the gospels, familiar across two thousand years of Christian history, for it will not do, say the scribes and Pharisees and their plentiful successors, to associate with the wrong sort. In the case of the lost sheep and the lost coin, the pattern is the same: the happy gathering together of friends and neighbours to celebrate: ‘rejoice with me, for I have found what was lost!’ And Jesus’ twice-repeated comment, ‘Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents’.

In the case of the lost son, Luke does not need to elaborate on the story, simply to tell as tenderly as he can of losing and finding, turning away and then turning round, coming home and finding joy. For repentance is metanoia, changing your mind, reorienting yourself, turning to face a different direction. This is the emotional and spiritual drama of the beloved son. His father longs for him not to leave, but go he must and make his own way in the world. Does the father intuit that it will not be for ever? And yet he gives him his share of the inheritance – how final that must have seemed as he stood and watched him disappear over the horizon. How long did it take the son to contemplate turning round? How many days, months, years are collapsed into that telling phrase ‘But when he came to himself’? And then, how much time had to elapse before he climbed that last hill (why do I always imagine the return journey being uphill?) and there was his father running to meet him?

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‘Home is where we start from’ said the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He meant our mother’s womb, for however painful our early lives may have been, whatever loss we have known, whatever damage we have suffered, the womb was our original place of safety. Our mother was once our world. And if we were born well and had good enough parenting, the world in turn became our mother and we were at home as children of the world. Some of you will remember the 1950s advert for children’s shoes. ‘Start-rite and they’ll walk happily ever after.’ Being born, growing up, becoming an adult, starting work, every threshold we cross on the human journey is a starting-out, a fresh beginning. I am learning that in this, to me, still quite new life-stage called retirement. Inevitably, what we knew before, if it was good, takes on the aspect of what was familiar and trusted and safe, like the home we started out from. 

Yet the more we travel through life, the more we are aware that exile is a fact of human existence. I don’t mean that it’s the whole story, or that we always experience it as sharply as the bitter cry of Psalm 137. With Jeremiah (but this takes time), we learn to negotiate it, befriend it, find ourselves at home in what we would once have called a strange land. But that only serves to underline what becomes increasingly clear to us as life goes on, that ‘here we have no lasting city, but we look for the one that is to come’ (Hebrews 13.14). We long for a place of rest. We long to be held and loved. We long for home. 

It’s not primarily a matter of geography, but of the spirit. The ‘distant country’ of the prodigal may not have been further than the town across the hill, just far enough to be out of sight, but father and son both knew they were separated by a great gulf that only metanoia could bridge. And this is the point of the parable, of course, the greatness of spirit in both the father and his prodigal son that was able to cross that bridge and come home. And yes, for there was a coming home for the father too who had been in his own exile ever since his beloved boy had left. Compare them both with the meanness of the older son who, when the others rejoiced at this marvellous homecoming, refused to have anything to do with either of them. Always at home with his father, yet never at home, for ever in the far country of self-righteousness and surliness and moral rectitude. 

One more point about home as the place we start from. We must understand that what the younger son came back to was not the same as the home he set out from. His relationship with his father had changed, and with his elder brother too. He no longer had his inheritance. His experience of estrangement and reconciliation had shaped him in ways that nothing else could have done. Home had changed and he had changed and they had changed. He, they, all had to learn to inhabit this new place they all called home. The famous words of T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets were true for all of them but especially for the one who had travelled furthest: ‘we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’. We may think we are going back. But we never are. And like the cherubim and the flaming sword that guarded the way back to Eden at the end of the Genesis story, it’s an illusion to think we ever can. The only way to travel is onwards. Which, once we understand it, takes real strength and courage. It calls upon the deepest resources of faith and hope we can ever summon within us. 

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How does this story of the prodigal son speak to us?

The point of the parable is of course so that we may learn what kind of God Jesus is pointing us to. It’s not so much about the prodigal son as the tender father who longs to find his beloved child once again and goes running to meet him when he returns. We don’t need to hear the words we heard in those earlier stories, ‘rejoice with me, for I have found what was lost’. We can see for ourselves the beautiful truth that there can never be more joy in heaven or on earth than when in some state of alienation or exile, we find ourselves once more, experience that change of mind and heart called metanoia, and come home to the God who looks for us because he loves us. This is spiritual work, heart-work if you like, that I need to do all my life if I want to be true to my Christian faith. And in every way I can, to reflect this divine way of being in all my human relationships, reaching out in compassion and tenderness to all whose paths cross mine, as God reaches out to me. And finding my true self as well, coming home to who and what I am, fearfully and wonderfully made by the God welcomes me and loves me. 

I have preached this text all my life. I don’t underestimate how hard it is in practice. But I think we need to hear what this story says to us collectively too. I mean our churches and faith communities especially. I believe that the ideas of home and hospitality are intimately linked. If home means space for us to find ourselves and flourish in, hospitality means creating space for others. When the loving father made space for his returning son and gave him a seat at the feast, he was doing what God did in creation, stepping back and giving space for creation to come into being and exist, and within it, for humanity to live in his image. Creation is always an act of love. Redemption in the parable means recognising how that movement of love belongs to the centre of all life where God is perpetually looking to mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, welcome us home, place us at his table, feed us at his banquet. This is the invitation we need to hear when we are beginning to find ourselves, so to speak, alienated and exiled by a virus that is instilling fear in the land we think of as home and a place of safety. If we are going to find God in this strange land of the Coronavirus, it is going to be in the acts of solidarity, kindness and care we offer to one another, and especially to those who are most vulnerable in our midst.

Are we capable of this kind of hospitality? The thing about love is that it doesn’t prescribe boundaries, draw up tests of worthiness. Only prejudice does that, precisely what the Pharisees and scribes were doing when they complained about how Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them. The hardest truth about love is that it is a sea without a shore, a sun without a sphere, as all-present and all-pervasive as God himself. This is what the elder son in the parable could not bear. Love that is too generous, kindness that is too profligate, what kind of corrupt morality would that lead to! 

There are some poems that have meant everything to me in my years of preaching. This is probably the last time I’ll have the opportunity to quote one of them. Perhaps it is George Herbert’s greatest. I think it was inspired by our parable. It speaks to me about coming home to God, coming home to others, coming home to myself. 

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                             If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

                             Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

                             I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

                             Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

                             My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. 

                             So I did sit and eat. 

Luke 15. 11-end

Holy Week at Southwark Address 2: Crucified by Religion

Religion should be a force for good in human life. It should ennoble us, give us stature and dignity, inspire and equip us to become the men and women God made us to be in his own image and likeness in the world. It should make us just and compassionate and kind. Above all it should be a liberating power in life and in society, for the truth should make us free. This is why we come to places like this cathedral, where through worship and prayer we glimpse how we could become better versions of ourselves, more whole. 

But what if religion goes bad, becomes instead a force that diminishes us, oppresses us, narrows our perspective, makes us domineering, judgmental or cruel? What if religion becomes a persecuting force that instead of imparting freedom starts denying it to its adherents or still more to those who follow different paths? What if it crucifies those who do not conform to its principles? All this can happen when religion turns in on itself, starts insisting on its own literal truth, becomes a rigid system that diverts it from being a means to a greater good into serving its distorted end? I’ve been reading a book called Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Jungian Psychology*. No-one needs to be persuaded that dark religion is real enough in our world today. In my mind has been a famous poem of William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and Experience: 

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

This Holy Week I’m exploring the different “worlds” in which Jesus is crucified. Yesterday we reflected on the city that Jesus arrives at on Palm Sunday. Tonight’s passage places us in the garden where Jesus has just been arrested, and straight away takes us into the first trial he must face, his interrogation by the religious authorities represented by Annas, and Caiaphas his son-in-law who was high priest at that time. 

Jesus is inside being asked, says John, “about his disciples and about his teaching”. At precisely the same moment, Peter is outside, one of the disciples the high-priest wants to know about, outside warming himself by the fire and denying that he knows anything about Jesus. Inside the religious organisation levels accusations against the Son of God; outside, personal faith fails comprehensively. It is not a good night for religion. 

We have come across Caiaphas earlier in St John’s Gospel. After the raising of Lazarus, he and the pharisees are concerned about Jesus’ growing influence: “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” You can hear the anxiety. This man must be guarded against, otherwise Israel’s sacred institutions are at risk. And Caiaphas, the spokesman of organised religion, is clear about the order of priorities. The shrine comes first, then the people. And he makes the kind of judgment institutional leaders often make when stability is put at risk. There must be a sacrificial victim. “Better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is Jesus’ death-sentence. And it is organised religion that signs it. 

We need to understand what “religion” is up to here. By themselves, the religious authorities had no power to put Jesus to death. Nor would the Romans be interested in the theological niceties of his claim to be the Son of God. Caiaphas had to demonstrate that Jesus was a threat to good civil order, that he subverted the authority of the Emperor himself. When it comes to public affairs in Judaea under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, this is how we need to read the passion narrative. Jesus dies as the political victim, a prisoner of conscience you might say. And if the priests and pharisees could lay responsibility squarely on Pilate and the empire he represents, so much the better. Religion must not have blood on its hands. 

I’m saying that before Jesus becomes the victim of politics, he is the victim of religion. All the gospels paint a picture of religious controversy surrounding Jesus from the very outset, arguments and debates that erupt into outright hostility. There is an ominous hint early on, when he has thrown the money-changers out of the temple. He is asked by what authority he does this. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” he replies, a highly enigmatic response calculated to baffle his audience. From then on, he is a watched man. And he himself is careful not to entrust himself to anyone, says John, for his hour has not yet come. And although in St John, Jesus frequents the temple more than in any other gospel, there is a wariness after this episode that Jesus knows people will not forget. He loves the native faith of his upbringing, practises it with a devotion unmatched in any other adherent, we can be sure. He is a loyal son of Abraham. And yet he is increasingly at odds with it, or rather, with what it has become. I think we can say that to Jesus in all four gospels, the temple represents both the best and the worst of organised religion. It symbolises the potential for divine transcendence but also the hardening of humans’ best instincts for kindness, charity and justice. When religion goes sclerotic, things can only end badly.

There is something deeply paradoxical about saying that religion crucified Jesus, that he was a victim of a dysfunctional way of believing. The paradox is magnified by the realisation that in history, some of the worst crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in his very name. Think of the Crusades and the slaughter of millions of Moslems. Think of the Albigensians, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion in Europe, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, all persecuting believers who wanted to follow Christ in their own way. Think of the German national churches that were complicit in the Nazi holocaust. You think this is all a matter of history in far-off places? Ask many women to tell you how they have experienced the church. Ask people of colour. Ask your LGBT friends. Ask the victims of clergy who have abused children. Some of these people will say that they too have been crucified. Ask yourselves whether dark religion is really a thing of the past, even among Christians. 

Please don’t think that I’m hostile to organised religion. Far from it. You can’t be a dean for twenty years without believing in the potential of institutions like cathedrals to do very great good. When institutions function well, when their leaders behave justly, when their members are treated fairly, when they exhibit justice and compassion in the public square, then their power to change the world is great indeed. If God loves humanity, then he must love human institutions too, for we cannot organise ourselves as societies and communities without them. 

And as I read the Hebrew Bible, I’m struck by how much it invests in the temple as an institution. When Solomon dedicated the temple he had built, he uttered a prayer that was as comprehensive as the world itself, beseeching the Almighty to make it a focus for God’s love, blessing, forgiveness and reconciliation. And when it was rebuilt after the exile, the new temple was to be called “a house of prayer for all peoples”. The temple was to be nothing less than a sacrament of Yahweh’s holiness, his sacred presence in the midst of the people he had chosen as his own. Which is why the prophets were scandalised when it failed to live up to that noble vision, why Jesus protests so vehemently at the way the authorities had poured the poison of injustice and corruption into its soul. 

How can a diseased institution be healed? How can organised religion in its many global manifestations be redeemed from the long shadow it casts? The answer, I think, lies precisely in the cross that it is capable of wielding so destructively. If we weaponise the cross, then its potential to cause damage to the human race is limitless. When the cross becomes a force with which to oppress others (the literal meaning of the word crusader), it reverts to its original function in the Roman state as an ugly instrument of cruelty. 

But St John’s image of the crucifixion is the direct antithesis of this. It is true, as we shall see on Good Friday, that in the Fourth Gospel, the cross is the great work Jesus has come into the world to complete. It is true that the cross is the throne where he reigns gloriously as king. It is true that the cross expresses God’s ultimate victory over all that would resist his reign of truth. All this is encapsulated in the last word Jesus speaks from the cross in St John: not a whisper of resignation but a cry of triumph. Tetelestai! “It is accomplished!” 

But all this has to be understood in the way John intends it. For him, the spirit of the cross lies in the act Jesus has performed for his disciples in the upper room the night before his death. In taking the towel, stooping down and washing their feet, Jesus takes the form of a slave, as St Paul puts it in one of his letters. “He emptied himself” says that famous passage, made the supreme sacrifice as we say of those who have laid down their lives for their friends. In that act of self-giving, kenosis, you have the most profound meaning that the cross carries. That is to say, it is the embodiment of love: the love that has nothing to give but itself, is empty-handed but for its infinite embrace of us all, the love that is capable of being endlessly refused and rejected and hurt, yet for all that is patient and kind, will wait an eternity if that is how long it takes to win the creation back to its Creator and reconcile all things to the God who out of love gave it its capacity to exist and be free. 

In Holy Week the cross faces us with all our flaws and failures and ambivalences. We know that it is the power of God for salvation, that if we walk in its way it will give us the strength to face our life-task and learn to live out of this love that is so precarious and vulnerable. And if institutional religion once crucified Jesus and still does, then it too needs to turn itself back to the cross and consider what it means to live in its kindly light. I believe that it is vastly more important that we cultivate being a cross-shaped church than a mission-shaped church. For a church that turns its back on triumphalism, knows its own vulnerabilities, glimpses how the love and forgiveness of the cross are the most transformative power the world has ever seen, and lives out these realities with the conviction that nothing could matter more - such a church will in its very nature be shaped as a sacrament of divine love. Such a church that lives and breathes the events of Holy Week will be the best invitation there could be for the human family to discover how “love is that liquor sweet and most divine / which my God feels as blood, and I as wine” as George Herbert puts it. 

Religion crucified the Lord of Glory. But his cross has borne its griefs and carried its sorrows. It can heal the church, renew it and set it free to become an agent of self-giving love in the world. That needs to be part of our praying through Holy Week as we bring to the cross our world, our church and our own deepest selves. 

John 18.12-14, 19-24

*By Didier, G. J. & Solc, V. 

The Cup of Pain and Mercy

This is the second in our Lenten series of sermons on the Passion Narrative in St Mark’s Gospel, Christ our Passover. Today we find Jesus in the upper room eating the Passover meal with his disciples, and afterwards, in the garden of Gethsemane where, as he faces his last ordeal, he prays to his Father. This part of the story is framed by two of Jesus’ most portentous sayings. Last week’s passage ended: ‘the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born’. Now, the same word shatters the silent agony of Gethsemane, when the disciples are heavy with sleep. ‘Arise, let us be going. Behold, my betrayer is at hand.’

We heard last week how at supper, Jesus foretells that one of his friends will betray him. This word has already featured in Mark’s Gospel near the beginning, when Judas Iscariot is introduced as a disciple. Literally it means ‘hand over’. It is not by itself a sinister idea: in Greek, paradosis simply means that which is ‘delivered’ or ‘handed on’, the same as the Latin traditio: the church’s ‘tradition’ is what is received from others and passed on to the next generation. In St Paul’s own account of the last supper, he uses the same word: ‘I received from the Lord what I am handing on to you’.

However, in the passion narrative, two things give this innocent word a darker nuance. The first is that it is now carrying the sense of Jesus being passed over from one kind of power to another. Up to now, he has been obedient to his Father’s purpose as the one announced in his baptism and then his transfiguration as God’s Son, the beloved. In his freely-chosen submission to God, he lives out the prayer he has taught his followers: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’. But now he is handed over to a different authority, the ‘principalities and powers’ of this age who have quite other purposes in mind for the Son of Man. He becomes the passive victim, no longer the agent who goes around doing good, but now one who is ‘done to’ by others. And the first act of these others, as we shall learn next week, is to arrest him, not with the weapons of truth and justice but with violence, seized by bandits who are armed with swords and clubs.

But there is a bigger context here. For St Mark sees paradosis, this ‘handing over’ as nothing less than the act of God himself. Three times in the gospel Jesus has foretold that the Son of Man ‘must undergo great suffering, and be rejected… and after three days rise again.’ Why this necessity? This is the great mystery the Passion Narrative draws us into. The sheer length and detail of the story in all four gospels tells us that the evangelists saw the crucifixion as inescapably central to the gospel. It was not an accident. It was not mischance. It was intended all along within God’s purpose of redemption. ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ says Jesus earlier. In the upper room, the cup of wine that is ‘my blood of the covenant poured out for many’ is the way to the promised future he has taught his disciples to pray for. ‘Your kingdom come.’ ‘I shall never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ In the gospels, without the cross, there can be no kingdom, no future when God’s passover people will be freed from all that enslaves them. He must suffer. Es muss sein.

This cup of destiny features in both parts of today’s text. At the last supper, the cup of wine, along with the broken bread, is a living symbol of a death that is like the passover lamb. It heralds the day of salvation in which a redeemed people ‘pass over’ from death to life. It is both a memory and a future promise. It looks back with gratitude for a redemption that has been won, and looks forward to the kingdom of peace, that messianic banquet where people will sit and feast in the presence of God himself. At the passover meal, the cup is a symbol of a people’s destiny. And this is the destiny Jesus takes upon himself as the true Israelite looking forward to the long-promised day when God acts, and he drinks it anew in his kingdom.

And the same is true in the garden. After singing the passover hallel psalms of redemption, they go to a place whose name means ‘pressure’, Gethsemane where olives grew and their oil was crushed out of them. Here the life of Jesus begins to be pressed out of him as he faces the inevitable end that he has spoken about for so long. ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I will but what you will’. I said just now that for Mark, for Jesus, there is no question but that the passion is intended by God all along. And this is both the reason for his agonised prayer and the answer to it. Jesus does not dispute who it is who holds out this cup to him. Did he have in his mind Psalm 75: ‘In the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed’. These are the grapes that are crushed in the vineyard of the wrath of God. ‘He will pour a draught from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.’

Can this be what his Father is holding out to him commanding him to drink it and die? No wonder he begs God to take it away. St Mark will tell of how on the cross, Jesus prays Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, ‘my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Gethsemane is the first stage of a terrible godforsakenness. Jesus takes upon himself the fate of the wicked of the earth from whom God turns his face away. They and he have no choice but to drink. As St Paul says, Christ became a curse for us. It is the hour of darkness. Nevertheless, in the midst of this mental and spiritual agony, Jesus’ obedience does not waver. He hears the echo of his own words: he must undergo this. ‘Not what I will but what you will.’ Once more it is the language of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’. What he prays, and teaches us to pray, he himself lives out in his steadfast obedience. If ever the words of this prayer were fulfilled, it is here in Gethsemane: ‘lead us not into temptation’, or rather, ‘save us from the time of trial’, peirasmos, that ordeal at the end of days that makes or breaks the human sufferer.

In Gethsemane, Jesus tells his disciples: ‘sit here while I pray’. I see in this an echo of the story in Genesis that the evangelists will have had in mind as they told of the passion of Jesus. When God commands Abraham to take his beloved child Isaac and sacrifice him on a mountain far away, he tells his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Here is Jesus walking away from his young men, his disciples with only his trusted intimates. Does he hope against hope, does he pray that like Isaac, he will avert the fire and the knife while a ram caught in a thicket is offered instead? Here in Gethsemane, he learns that there is no escape. He too is a Son like Isaac, an only Son of a Father’s love yet that makes a terrible claim upon him. He too must ascend a mountain, Golgotha, be offered on that altar and submit to the will of the Father who requires this awful act of obedience.

So the cup means both pain and mercy. In being ‘handed over’ by God and man, by his submission to his Father’s will, by drinking of the foaming wine and becoming a curse, by his cry of despair in the darkness, by all that he endured, we are ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. Because he does not refuse the cup the Father offers him, it passes from us. And yet, a cup is still held out to us. We remember it at every eucharist. Only now, it is gift. It is salvation. It is life. It is the promise of the kingdom. And even when the cost of walking the way of the cross is that we shall undergo our own Gethsemane ordeals, we know that they are endurable because Jesus has walked this via dolorosa before us and transformed the cup of destiny. George Herbert gives us the words in a meditation called ‘The Agonie’. It looks on the cross as the place where the cup of pain and mercy is filled to the brim and offered.

Love is that liquor, sweet and most divine
Which my God tastes as blood, but I as wine.

Durham Cathedral, Lent 2, 1 March 2015 (Mark 14.22-42)

Bishop Stephen Sykes: In Memoriam

As preachers in this Cathedral know, Stephen was a keen listener to sermons. He could be exacting too. After the service, you could expect comment on your handling of a biblical text, the rigour of your argument or lack of it, the citations you made or might have made. He would always thank the preacher and offer encouragement. But he could be direct in his dissent. He once told me over coffee after a service: ‘Michael, that was the most profoundly unhelpful sermon I’ve heard in years.’ Nevetheless Stephen asked me to preach at this service. This preacher is keenly aware that a decade of homiletic scrutiny is not over yet. 

In a beautiful essay on Thomas Cranmer, Stephen wrote about how his communion rite was an invitation to a pilgrimage that would ‘pattern and structure human experience as a whole. Cranmer’s liturgies amount to a map of the heart as topos, a map for pilgrimage from the depths to the heights. It is a pilgrimage with God who is struggling with the heart, addressing comfortable words to it, pouring in the grace of his Holy Spirit to lift it up, melting it and remaking it…not a disembodied mental process but one linking mind and guts.’ That captures Stephen’s life. In those words you can hear the thought and language of a lifelong love affair with Anglicanism, the spiritual insights learned from its liturgy and theologians and poets. He was a man whom, to steal a line from a famous war poem, the Church of England ‘bore, shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam’. One of his generation’s best theologians, his Christian identity never lost its practical, visceral dimension. Faith was something deeply felt in the heart, the emotions, the affect – ideas as important to him as the cognitive language of mind and thought.Those of us who heard him preach Holy Week in this Cathedral a few years ago in a series of addresses based on George Herbert’s poems will never forget it. His Good Friday address on St John’s tetelestai, ‘it is finished’, was one of the most moving sermons I have ever heard here or anywhere. He preached in the spirit of Beethoven composing the Missa Solemnis: ‘from the heart – may it go to the heart’. You could tell by the catch in his voice that he was close to tears. 

This rich, complex inwardness constituted Stephen’s career in public ministry. There is a symmetry in his curriculum vitae. He started out as Dean of Chapel in his alma mater, St John’s College Cambridge. There he inhabited both church and academy as an emerging theologian whose day job had at its heart the daily worship of a chapel community and the pastoral care of a college. He developed a love for students that never left him even at the very end of his life, and to which they responded with huge affection. He ended his career as Principal of another St John’s College, our neighbours here in Durham, where once again the quotidian concerns of student life were married to his continuing intellectual vocation as a Christian thinker, teacher and writer in the Department of Theology and Religion in this University. In between, his successive professorships in Durham and Cambridge consolidated his reputation as a theologian of international significance, as his steady stream of influential writings testified. But then came the bishopric of Ely where he spent nearly a decade. Was this to lay aside the role of a theologian for the sake of leadership in the Church of England? He would not have put it that way. He would have said that it is the calling of every theologian to understand his or her role as essentially ecclesial in character, as a vocation within the church which it is the privilege of theology to serve as faith seeks understanding. Indeed, he would have gone further and said that theology’s audience is not the church only, but the human community in its all its diversity. He looked for a theology that is genuinely ecumenical and public and has something to say to the dilemmas modernity puts to a society prepared to listen, reflect and examine the assumptions of its thought. This was the direction he took in his chairmanship of the Doctrine Commission: not that the church theologises to itself, but that its voice is heard in the public arenas of our time and, as the well-worn phrase has it, speaks truth to power. 

Stephen’s last book Power and Christian Theology reflects his breadth of outlook and the range of his thinking. The final chapter is about leadership in the church, especially the role of the bishop. Drawing on Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux, he examines the tensions between rule and service, loving your office and remaining humble, zeal for holiness and accepting human shortcomings in yourself and others, and between deference to leaders and affection for them. He concludes: ‘Although [public leadership] is a necessity which we deeply desire to the point of wanting to idolize our leaders, we have also succumbed to the habit of suspicion and mistrust. Both instincts are unjust to the men and women whose real talents are exercised in God’s service. Their powers are best employed when they are recognised by them and by us as genuine and proper, not as a substitute for service or love, but as an expression of them.’ He does not say so, but I doubt he could have written in this way unless from within he lived experience, drawing on the memory of his years as a diocesan bishop. He was writing about his own aspiration as a bishop. Service and love allied to clear thinking and purposeful activity informed by discipleship: that holistic, humane linkage is typical of Stephen’s life. 

All his days Stephen made it his goal to live the gospel and allow the cross and resurrection to interpret the changes and chances of human living. The name Stephanos means crown.  When I preached at Stephen and Joy’s golden wedding two years ago, I quoted a poem by his beloved George Herbert that happily unites their two names in one line. 

My joy, my life, my crown!
My heart was meaning all the day,
Somewhat it fain would say
And still it runneth, muttering up and down
With only this, My joy, my life, my crown.

The poet wants to sing his best hymn in praise of God, indeed he wants to be that hymn. He has the words, the rhyme, the metre but has not yet found the spirit.  He knows that life is meant for us to worship God ‘my joy, my life, my crown’.  But how is he to live the truth of his own song? In the end he finds the way. 

Whereas if the heart be moved
Although the verse be somewhat scant, 
God doth supply the want.
And when the heart says, sighing to be approved,
O could I love! And stops: God writeth, Loved.  

To know we are cherished melts and remakes the heart, calms its unquietness, lifts it up to sing. ‘God so loved’ is the best of all comfortable words. ‘God writeth, Loved.’ When we know we are loved, death has lost its sting. It is swallowed up in victory. It no longer has the power to hurt us that it once did. Like Martha, we affirm our faith and hope in the risen Jesus. Our lives are hid with Christ in God: Stephen’s, and ours, and the company of all who have trusted in him. Today we honour the memory of a man beloved by family and friends, a great scholar, a good man, a loyal disciple, a seeker-after-truth, and a faithful priest and bishop. And now, here, while we are still in this vale of soul-making, as we give thanks for his life, we sit and eat with him at this eucharistic feast where, living and departed, Love bids us welcome.

Durham Cathedral, 10 October 2014. 

1 Corinthians 15; John 11.17-27

Ant-wisdom and Bird-wisdom: Practically Human in Life and Ministry

Introduction

Many of you will know William Blake’s famous water colour of Babylon’s 6^th century king Nebuchadnezzar.  He has been reduced to the status of an animal prowling around on all fours, his face half human, half beast.  (In fact, this condition known as lycanthropy afflicted his son Nabonidus, but the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible attributes it to Nebuchadnezzar on account of his legendary arrogance.)  The message is that power, when it is driven by hubris, has a corroding effect on the character of the perpetrator.  In this condition of abasement, conscience and rationality are forfeited.  A person is driven by their appetites; or as we say, they are at the mercy of their animal instincts. In the church where I was an incumbent, there was a series of four corbels in the south aisle that charted the decay of a human soul, a kind of rake’s progress except that the besetting sin in his case was greed. A noble face in the first corbel began to be distorted and show animal features in the second. By the third grotesque it was clear where he was going, and by the fourth he had become fully pig-like. It was like a medieval version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with its secret picture that accurately depicts the erosion of a human soul. The message is: you become like the gods you worship, or as Seneca said, to honour the gods, it is enough to imitate them. ‘Human beings are like beasts that have no understanding’ says one of the wisdom psalms.

Let me jump a few centuries to the 21^st.  A few years ago in the Cathedral, we held a controversial exhibition of sculptures by the South African artist Jane Alexander. Her work is her response to apartheid and oppression, and it depicts human beings not in the nobility of fulfilling their humanity, but in the tragedy of failing to realise it: falling short, we could say in the language of the Letter to the Romans.  They were troubling pieces of human beings and animals in various states of disfigurement and distortion, and we were advised not to allow children into the exhibition unsupervised. The message was that the ‘dominion’ given to humanity in creation has become corrupted, so that all relationships are susceptible to being skewed, whether within societies and collectives, in the interpersonal sphere, or towards the natural order. 

Alexander talks about ‘humanimals’, partly in the good sense of wanting to place human beings within the created order of fauna (where animals as often as not judge us by their behaviour), but also in this debased sense of human ‘bestiality’ driven by the id, breaking the boundaries of civilised existence, wreaking havoc across a divinely-ordered world.  As a theologian, my take on her work was that it was an interpretation of the fall, rather in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy where sin becomes visibly expressed in the bodies and bearing of its practitioners. In Jane Alexander’s masks and deceptions, like Dante, in the bizarre contortions of her figures we see not only how other people are but also how we ourselves are, both as oppressors and as victims.  Exhibiting these pieces in a sacred space pointedly raised questions about the nature of humanity, both in the state of destructiveness and collapse, and by implication as potentially redeemed by divine grace.

The theological issue here is what it means to be created as (or in?) the image of God. Whatever that is, and there is a large literature that discusses it, we can agree that becoming wise and therefore more fully human leads to the divine image in us being restored, those distortions and contortions imagined in art and sculpture being gently bent back (which is what the word ‘religion means’ into their proper human shape. So let us turn to the conference theme Being Human, Being Wise. I have been asked to give this address under the title ‘Practically Human in Life and Ministry’. I like the meanings cunningly elided in the word ‘practically’.  It partly means being practical about wisdom, asking how being wise makes a difference to ordinary life. But it also smuggles in the idea of an ‘almost’, of having potential and being on the way to realising it. The thing about wisdom in the Bible, as I am sure you have heard earlier in this conference, is that its scope is as wide and deep as human life. It plumbs the depths of the riddles of existence: why is there suffering, why are we mortal, what purpose exists in the universe? The great wisdom texts of Job, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms engage with these questions at a profound level, disturbingly so for some people who would prefer their faith not to be troubled by these complex and elusive dilemmas. But biblical wisdom also has as much to say about chronos as it does about kairos – ordinary time as well as the ecstasies and the agonies of human life. And it is aspects of our ordinary days that I want to focus on today.

In 2008 I wrote a little book called Wisdom and Ministry: the call to leadership. For those who have not read it, it tries to make links between the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible and Christian ministry today. It partly does this by exploring the ‘big’ themes in the classical wisdom writings such as Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and the wisdom psalms. But it also takes as exemplars key characters in the ‘narrated wisdom’ of the Old Testament: stories like Joseph, David, Solomon and Daniel that everyone agrees are among the best in the Bible.

Perhaps it’s worth saying why I wrote the book at all.  There is no limit to the books on ministry, and I did not want to add to them without having something distinctive to say.  That ‘something’ was to try and address a deficit I detected in the biblical models the church draws on in its discourse about ministry.  If you look at the Anglican ordinal, you will find its recommended readings from the Hebrew Bible peppered with the calls of prophets. Deacons get Samuel, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Priests get Second and Third Isaiah and Jeremiah. Bishops have Second and Third Isaiah and Ezekiel. I spoke in the General Synod debate about this when the new texts for ordinal were being discussed. Why is vocation to ordination in the Church of England presumed to be like being called as a Hebrew prophet? There is a lot to be said for prophets of course: ‘O that all the Lord’s people were prophets’ says Moses.  But I do not think Anglican parish ministry is very like being an Isaiah, a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, at least most of the time.  If we model it on that presumption, I think we shall be misleading ordinands about what it is they undertaking.  Indeed, I think it raises expectations that are not helpful. 

However, there is another influential group of writers in the Hebrew Bible waiting in the wings for us to take them seriously in the context of ministry.  These are the wise of Israel who have left us such a rich deposit of texts.  Every ancient near eastern society had its wise. They seem to have had a special role in equipping young men for leadership, especially in the royal court. The Old Testament has even taken over a long section of an ancient Egyptian text called The Wisdom of Amenemope almost word for word in a passage in the Book of Proverbs. This illustrates how cosmopolitan wisdom was in antiquity. So I asked in the Synod: why has this tradition not been recognised as a source for ordination readings?  I decided to test the viability of this idea out for myself, as I was invited to give the ordination retreat addresses in Durham soon afterwards. The retreat was entirely based on wisdom texts from the Old Testament. That was the seed of my book. For me, coming to the end of my full-time ministerial career, if I have learned one thing since being ordained 38 years ago, it is that what is needed in the church’s leaders, in any leaders, but especially among the ordained, is wisdom.

It is tempting to stay with these marvellous texts. However, with this literature as our starting point, I want to go beyond them in reflecting with you on two aspects of practical wisdom today. I wish I could have explored ten more: the scope of wisdom is so all-embracing. In particular, I wish I could have explored how wisdom can inform our interpersonal pastoral practice, though some of this is in my book. I want to focus on these particular areas because both of them touch our lives all the time, yet the questions wisdom puts to them are not always as much noticed as they should be if we are to be ‘practically human’ in our ministerial roles and our personal lives. These two ‘wisdoms’ are themes distinctive to our modern world which I have been reflecting on recently and would like to share with you. Perhaps what I can offer are two worked examples of practical wisdom that may help us apply sound wisdom principles to other aspects of life so that we become wiser in our thinking, our practice and our behaviours.

So that you have the road map, here are my two themes: organisational wisdom and digital wisdom. Having begun this lecture on an animal theme, I’d like to offer two images to represent each of these, drawn straight out of the wisdom literature: the ant and the bird. They can be our non-human travelling companions, and help us, say our texts, learn about practical wisdom. There is ant-wisdom, and there is bird-wisdom. I doubt if these are very different: each may turn out to be an aspect of the other. So let’s look at them in turn. 

 

Organisational Wisdom: the Ant

The first is organisational wisdom. Perhaps I should explain why I have taken this as my first worked example. For 26 years my day job has been in cathedrals, and for 18 of those as a dean in two places. When you are directing and caring for the life of a cathedral, especially a large one like Durham, you find yourself searching for models to help you understand what kind of organisation you are leading.  A cathedral is of course a religious foundation.  But it is also an educational institution; a leisure destination; it is heritage and parkland; a concert hall and exhibition gallery; a museum; and not least, a retail and catering outlet. In all these, finance plays a large part. So we are a small to medium-sized enterprise, a business with a turnover of several million pounds. Now, I do not baulk at the thought that Durham Cathedral is a business. We have no choice about that. So the important question is: how do we make sure that it is a good business? And by ‘good’, I don’t only mean successful.  I mean a virtuous, ethical business which a Christian church can be proud of. And this is one place among many where organisational wisdom is not simply desirable but essential.

What do I mean by organisational wisdom? It certainly includes paying attention to the sound principles of ‘economy’, oikonomia, literally ‘household management’ about which proverbial wisdom has so much to say. The virtues of time-wisdom (as my colleague Stephen Cherry calls it in one of his books), leading and managing people well, keeping your word, using your resources prudently, planning for the future, responding with agility to crises: all of these are reckoned to be essential in the Hebrew Bible’s assessment of practical wisdom if your enterprise is going to flourish.

The locus classicus is the 6^th chapter of Proverbs with its admonition to the lazy to imitate the ant:

           Go to the ant, you sluggard. (NRSV has lazybones but that lets us off too jokily when the author is deadly serious; and anyway, the word sluggard is marvellously onomatopoeic of the idle man or woman who is an addict to somnolence and sleep, lying prostrate, bloated by lack of application and effort, turning on their bed like a door turns on its hinges as Proverbs says in another place.) Go to the ant; consider its ways and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest.

And then the unforgettable portrait of the sluggard:

            How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a thief, and want, like an armed robber.

So ant-wisdom embodies the virtues of good organisation, planning for the future, working collaboratively and knowing how to read the signs of the times. The opposite is sluggard-folly, not just laziness but making everything vague and ambiguous, not to say pointing the finger when things go wrong which in the end will subvert the structure and bring it crashing down. This is a familiar theme of wisdom literature in its many manifestations: consider how well-ordered the natural world is. It is that way because a well-ordered God has made it. So emulate this well-ordered state, and you will find that it transforms your organisation.

Of course, reflective wisdom looked into the heart of creation and found it more complex, more elusive and more baffling than Proverbs seems to think. This is what makes Job and Ecclesiastes the masterpieces of Old Testament wisdom. But that is not to undermine the value of practical wisdom, any more than quantum theory undermines Einsteinian or even Newtonian physics. It depends what job you need them to do.  In one way, precepts like those in Proverbs simply state the obvious. But the obvious, stated in a larger context gives them a particular range and depth. The 6^th century Rule of St Benedict is another example of how the profound and the practical live easily side by side as they do in Proverbs. The most-read parts of the Rule focus on the Christian life, what obedience means, the various degrees or steps of humility, living the religious life together in community and so on. But much of it, given no less emphasis in the cyclical reading of the Rule in Benedictine communities, focuses on how to order the liturgy, when to say which psalms, managing the convent’s finances, stewardship of kitchen implements and garden tools, and looking after your clothes. What transfigures those workaday instructions is the context they are placed in which is wisdom, virtue and discipleship. ‘Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine’ says George Herbert in the well-known words. The message is: calibrate your organisation according to wisdom and virtue, and it will change everything.

This is where I have concerns about the relentless ascendancy of organisational and management language and practice in the church. You cannot lead any organisation these days without finding yourself speaking about strategic objectives, KPIs (key performance indicators), USP (unique selling points), key messages and outputs for niche markets & target audiences and so on. As well as being a Cathedral dean, I am a governor of a school and a university, the president of a Durham charity, and the titular head of house of a Durham college. Whether the business is religion, education, arts and leisure or healthcare, the discourse is the same. And so is the tension, which sometimes feels like a widening gulf, between practitioners and administrators: those whose job it is to (jargon alert) deliver the core business and those tasked with resourcing and administering it.

I don’t want to make cheap jibes about people who work hard to keep the wheels on our sometimes fragile institutions. They need our respect and gratitude. However, I have a hunch that the processes we follow and the language we use to talk about them ought to be consistent with those institutions’ values. In the case of a Christian organisation like a cathedral, we should expect theology, religious practice and organisational behaviour to inform one another. In my shorthand, religious values should make an organisation wise, to the extent that its behaviours might be nuanced differently from those of other organisations. For example, in our governance and leadership roles as a Cathedral Chapter, it is tempting to map our functions on to those of a board of charity trustees with the Dean as Chair. In our management roles we might think of ourselves as a senior team with the Dean as CEO.  But the reality, both in Christian history and in the Cathedrals Measure that underlies our statutes, is that our roles don’t fall easily into either of those familiar organisational models. What a Chapter is required to exercise is oversight, what the tradition calls episcope, and that is shaped not just by systems theory or good organisational practice but by Christian theological reflection in an ecclesial context. 

Here are two more examples of organisational life. When it comes to setting objectives, we should not so lock ourselves into a rigid planning mentality that there is no space for the manoeuvrability, agility and spontaneity that are needed when circumstances change, or new opportunities arise, and we want to respond quickly to what God may be doing in an unforeseen way. Similarly in our employment practice, where we are subject to the law like any other employer, we should try to resist going straight into adversarial procedures – grievances, complaints, disciplinaries etc.) without first trying, as the gospel urges us to, to make friends with our adversary quickly, to resolve issues through face to face meeting and personal conversation. I am not being naïve here: often, informal personal  approaches will not work, and this is when we should not be afraid of formal processes as a way of caring for and protecting the interests of both employee and employer. We should not too quickly sacrifice the interpersonal for the structural. And this, it seems to me, is how theological wisdom-shaped values can make a difference, allowing what we do to be illuminated by how we do it.  

What am I saying here? Not at all that an institution, least of all a Christian one, should be inefficient, unprofessional, casual about financial discipline, careless about sound stewardship and planning. I like good institutions, and I like good organised religion precisely because at their best, organisations not only harness human energies, creativity and skills but also discipline them, give them shape so that they work for the betterment of us all.  This is what Proverbs admires in its ant-wisdom. But an ant colony is more than an organisation. It is a true organism with its own self-generating life and wholeness, a community of living things whose task is to express what Bonhoeffer called ‘life together’. There is a danger that organisations lose their grasp of this insight, mutate into impersonal, mechanistic principalities and powers, take on a kind of demonic persona which, unchecked, ends up by suppressing what is wise, humane and life-giving in communities and relationships. Honora O’Neill’s Reith Lectures of a decade ago offered timely warnings against micro-management and the culture of mistrust it creates. If I read the poetry of William Blake aright, this dehumanising tendency of institutions was the aspect of the industrial revolution he most hated. Its destructiveness is chillingly chronicled a generation later by Charles Dickens in his novel Dombey and Son where the construction of the railway becomes a metaphor of the suppression of love, intimacy and humanity in Dombey’s soul. In his late great work Bleak House, the dead hand of remorseless process, this time in the Court of Chancery, ends up with legal costs wiping out the entire value of the estate whose succession it has been engaged for generations trying to determine. I have sat in meetings that have felt like ‘Jarndyce versus Jarndyce’ and nearly lost the will to live.

You are all engaged in pastoral practice of various kinds, as am I. We can perhaps translate organisational wisdom into an important pastoral principle which perhaps does not get stated as often as it should.  It is this: that organisations and structures need and deserve pastoral care every bit as much as individual people. In particular, the tasks of caring for the whole church, or our local expression of it, cannot be made less of a priority than exercising pastoral ministry towards individuals. This is a familiar tension for anyone leading or managing in every organisation. When someone has to be disciplined, made redundant or dismissed, the cry goes up: ‘you only care about the organisation, not the people’.  So in the church and in other person-centered organisations, senior teams agonise about applying difficult processes to individuals in case that should appear (as it is often presented) as a lack of pastoral care for them personally. On the other hand, too many benign institutions, churches among them, refuse to take necessary action against employees because it may damage the organisation. And this is often a form of cowardice. How the church negotiates this difficult boundary between being over-forgiving and unduly rigorous is an important aspect of its wisdom, and its corporate mental and spiritual health.

Here is a current example. I am told that the Church of England is now going to require every candidate for the episcopate to answer a questionnaire on his (and one day her) sexual history. This exercise is to be supervised by a current bishop and reported to the Archbishop of the province. This is meant to ensure that bishops are monogamous, and if they are single, or are gay and in civil partnerships, that they are celibate. I am sure we all understand the anxieties that are driving this process, not all of them fuelled by debates in England.  But I want to ask whether this presumption of suspicion about clergy who will already be senior leaders in the church, and the intrusive way it sounds as though it will be enacted, is the way to raise confidence? I hardly think so. It worries me that the church is becoming such a low-trust organisation.

How much of accepted pastoral practice is transferrable from individual to collective pastoral care, I wonder?  I am thinking of client-led approaches to the talking therapies of counselling and psychotherapy, for example, where the primary task is to listen attentively, learn the person’s story, understand the context and try to offer interpretation that will help both the direction the narrative takes and the language used about it. How do we listen to the ‘story’ an institution tells and allow it to inform our pastoral response? In the words of our conference title, how does an organisation not only become wise but also more human? I have been struck by a book from the 1980s by James Hopewell, Congregation: Story and Structure. Informed by both social anthropology and theology, it argued that local churches have their own distinct narratives that need to be understood before any effective ministry can be offered in them. He linked this with the angels of the seven churches in the Apocalypse, which he took to mean that churches, like all organisations, have their own ‘personality types’ which we should not ignore, their own ‘grain’ that needs to be well-understood if effective ministry is to take place within them. Insofar as wisdom means insight, understanding, seeing into the life of things, this could be a question we could usefully discuss.

 

Digital Wisdom: the Bird

The second aspect of practical wisdom I want to explore is digital wisdom. Like the organisations we belong to, the digital world brings us into structures and networks that far transcend our own intimate relationships. The difference is that it does this without our always being fully conscious of it. There is a wisdom text in the 10^th chapter of Qoheleth that is made for the Twitter age. ‘Do not curse the king, even in your thoughts, or curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, or some winged creature may tell the matter.’ So bird-wisdom means being careful what we disclose, where, and to whom. Even where I think I am most alone, most anonymous, reckon I am seen by no-one and leave no traces, some little creature with wings can exploit my laptop, my phone, my tablet and give me away.

Our need for digital wisdom is not simply important, but urgent. Ours is the first generation to be living with the real and complex changes that are happening to us as a result of almost universal electronic connectivity. That the invention of the internet has brought us huge benefits is something I do not need to argue today. Access to information on a scale undreamed-of to any previous generation is an asset without price. But neither do I need to remind you of its dark side. The well-publicised exploitation of the web to fuel ideological extremism, terrorism, violence and pornography is well known. We don’t need anyone to tell us not to venture into places with big red ‘keep out’ signs. If we go there and come to harm, we have only ourselves to blame.

But there are less visible hazards out there too. I am thinking of the threats posed to personal privacy and security through digital surveillance, something we have heard a lot about in recent weeks. Not only are smartphones sophisticated tracking devices, but we leave indelible traces in cyberspace through our emails, our visits to websites and the content we share through social networking sites. We are right to worry about the as-yet unforeseen consequences of this for politics and society in the 21^st century. And it should make us think very carefully about how we behave in a world where there are no secrets, where everything is in principle open, public and disclosed. This is where bird-wisdom comes in: be careful what you say when you think you are on your own. Someone is probably listening.

In the history of ideas, it may turn out that whenever any new invention or discovery leads to an intellectual revolution and significantly shifts a culture into new ways of thought, the risks are greatest in the first and second generations. It was in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons that the cold war posed a particular threat.  The mechanisation of labour that the industrial revolution ushered in is another example of the inevitable time-lag in realising the threats it brought as well as the opportunities. The inventions of printing and photography may other instances. Technology always accelerates away from our ability not only to use it responsibly and manage it safely, but even more importantly, to give it shape and discipline by placing it a landscape of values and ethics. 

Wisdom has a special emphasis on the care, nurture and protection of the vulnerable. Among these are the young. Their formation and upbringing is a major, perhaps the major preoccupation of this kind of reflective biblical literature. In the first few chapters of Proverbs, the writer develops the imagery of a young man walking along the street trying to find his way through life. From houses on either side, two ladies call out to him and attempt to entice him into their homes. The one is Lady Wisdom, who promises a life-giving banquet of bread and wine, an environment in which to flourish and grow as a human being. The other is Dame Folly.  She also offers a feast of a kind to delight the senses and promises immediate and easy rewards. But her way leads inevitably to corruption and death. The trouble is, they both sound plausible to a young man who is easily led. These chapters tell us what the purpose of Proverbs is: to educate the young by informing their hearts and consciences and minds. This it does partly by encouragement and promise, partly by warning.  How we protect young people in the largely ungoverned environment of the internet, how to steer them towards Lady Wisdom rather than Dame Folly, is already a very major concern to policy-makers and parents alike. At the same time as the web builds up and plants, it also destroys and overthrows.

I need to declare at this point that I am an enthusiastic user of social media, especially tweeting and blogging. The little tweeting bird Ecclesiastes warns us about is my symbol of the gifts and dangers of social media. I have been reading about a book I have not yet seen called The Psychodynamics of Social Media by Aaron Balick. He argues that a tweet is more like a thought than a statement, and yet, as we have seen when things de-rail in spectacularly public ways, it is also a statement that has legal existence and carries consequences, specifically libel; and if not that, then outcomes that can damage reputations, including your own, for good. We are not used to a world where thinking aloud can put us at risk; but as psychologists recognise, it is the way in which the instant feedback of social media acts as a kind of addictive intoxicant that raises the stakes alarmingly. It does this because it privileges the instant over the longer-term: this minute over the next half-hour let alone tomorrow or next week. Add to that the disinhibiting aspects of being, as we imagine, alone with our computer.  As Ecclesiastes says, a little bird is waiting to carry messages far and wide.

Earlier this year, I encountered this worrying aspect of social media for myself. Having married into a Sunderland-supporting family 40 years ago, I was concerned, with many others, about the appointment of their new manager Paolo di Canio. As you know, he had proclaimed himself as ‘not a racist but a fascist’, had given a notorious fascist salute at a match in Italy, and proudly wore a tattoo honouring Mussolini. I wrote an open letter on my blog asking him to clarify his position. I don’t say that the blog ‘went viral’ but it was picked up by the national and local media and evidently put him under some pressure. His helpful clarification came the next day. So in a sense, the story is over. All the nationals welcomed it, some of them making uncalled-for flattering comments such as ‘the Dean hitched up his cassock, took aim, and scored spectacular goal’. I had a lot of grateful emails and tweets from supporters. 

But the unpleasant surprise was how much digital vitriol was flung in my face, this too mainly from fans. How dare the church interfere in something it knows nothing about. How dare I take on the role of the North East’s thought-police. How dare I assume that the club’s fans weren’t able to think for themselves. And so on. If you read the blog, I dare say some of this stuff is still there in the comments. I didn’t respond to the abuse, but I did try to engage in dialogue with the more measured critics. I said that all I was doing was to point to what di Canio had said and done on the record and, given the vast influence football has on the young, this was a matter of public interest. I mentioned my own German-Jewish ancestry, with my particular awareness of the fascism poses to the world. Some of this has become an intelligent debate about football, politics and faith and of course I welcome this. If you follower The Secret Footballer in the Guardian, or have read the book, you will find that there is at least one thoughtful Premier League player somewhere who asks himself these kinds of questions, and this evidence of reflective football is most welcome.

I am telling you this because the boundary between the supposedly safe internet domains we tend to inhabit and the places of hatred, abuse, trolling and bullying is gossamer thin. Touch it, and it is as if the entire web trembles. I am not saying that sometimes, social responsibility may need to take us close to a dangerous edge: there are always risks in trying to do something good. ‘Evil happens when good men and women do nothing’ said Edmund Burke famously. But I have learned that even a relatively blunt tool like a personal blog can get caught in an undertow that can quickly drag you away from the safety of the shore into very turbulent waters indeed.

We need, says Balick, to become acutely self-aware in our use of social media, to retain our sense of individual responsibility and educate our consciences rather than lose our own identities to the digital black hole. The internet is very much a place where we are in danger of gaining the whole world and losing our own souls, our deepest selves. So where is digital wisdom to be found? Last year I wrote another blog called The Responsible Tweeter. This was an attempt to frame some basic principles of good tweeting, not only how to get the best out of 140 characters, but to draw proper boundaries around the use of a tool which, because it is so powerful, also poses significant risks. It seems to me that we simply have to know not only what is legal and what isn’t, and what is ethical and what isn’t, but what is wholesome, life-affirming and wise. I love Twitter for its elegant miniaturism, how so much can be said in so little.  This is wholly in the spirit of wisdom literature: most of Proverbs could be encapsulated in tweets, as could the Beatitudes and many other sayings of Jesus. Like photography, the discipline puts a frame round the content and powerfully focuses its point. But this can be for good or ill – and for interesting or boring. So I thought I would try my hand at twelve principles or commandments of Tweeting.  Others have offered good online guides to Twitter that contain many or all of these.  However I’ve encapsulated each principle in 140 characters or less so they can be lifted out of the blog and tweeted self-referentially in the very medium for which they are, not so much a set of imperatives as a series of hints and nudges. The emphasis is on the positive: mostly 'dos', a few 'don'ts'.  And while they were written for a particular form of social networking, most of the principles can I think be transferred to any other.

Here then are twelve precepts.

1        Be judicious. Powerful tools need careful handling. You are on a public stage.  Apply the same criteria as you would to any public medium.
2        Be chaste. Promiscuous tweeting suggests addiction. Only press ‘send’ when you have something to say. If not stay silent.
3        Be courteous. Don’t disparage or insult others (you risk libel as in any print medium). In dissent, be questioning rather than assertive.
4        Be disciplined. 140 characters impose a verbal boundary. Stick to it and don't sprawl lazily across multiple tweets on the same topic.
5        Be conversational. The art of tweeting is to engage with others, not hurl speeches into the void. Invite responses and give them.
6        Be interesting. Life is not all information, observation, profundity or humour, but don’t bore followers with trivia. Try to be original. 
7        Be tentative. The question-mark is a great way of turning bald statement into an invitation to explore. Better to travel than stand still.
8        Be communitarian. Social media are at their best in creating online communities and relationships. It is good not to be alone. Join in.
9        Be discreet. Don't break confidences, substitute for meeting, hold private conversations publicly or disclose improperly. Keep boundaries.
10      Be self-aware. Twitter can raise awareness, affirm spiritual and humane values and inspire others. Serve wisdom, truth, goodness, justice and wholeness.
11      Be generous. Share your own good things: stories, photos, blogs etc., and others' too.  Retweet/favourite the best. But don't self-promote.
12      Be relaxed. Don't obsess about follower numbers (sins of pride or envy). Small communities are often the best. Learn, grow, chuckle, enjoy. 

 

Conclusion
 

I raised the question: are ant-wisdom and bird-wisdom different? Probably not. Both have to do with the practice of wisdom in life as it is lived in public, exposed, collective ways. The larger, ‘macro’ worlds we inhabit, both organisational and digital, need to be redeemed, and become wise and humane, something that can come about when they are populated by wise individuals. At the same time, we as persons inhabiting our ‘micro’ worlds can individually grow and flourish and become better human beings and better disciples as benign macro worlds help shape personal character and identity.

I have not given as much time to working out the exegesis of the relevant wisdom texts as I would have liked. However, I am sure it can be done, and indeed, if there is enough encouragement, I would love to develop some of these ideas in a future book. Today, I do not claim more than perhaps to have sown a few seeds that may bear fruit in our reflection and discussion. I am looking forward to hearing what you have to say in response, and hope that under God, we shall all become wiser for having been together here this week and tackled these elusive but vital aspects of being healthy, virtuous and wise within a healthy, virtuous and wise church.

At the Conference of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT),
York University, July 2013