Month: September 2014

A Journey of the Mind to Ancient Antioch

by

A reflection on Acts 11:19-26 for Diocese of Salisbury staff prayers.

Try to imagine the world of Antioch as the refugee disciples in our reading would have known it. Antioch was the third largest city of the contemporary Empire, after only Rome and Alexandria and it was, by ancient standards, enormous, with a population of around half a million. Situated just inland from the great bend in the Mediterranean coast, near what is now the Turkish-Syrian border, Antioch’s roads ran to Asia Minor, and on to Greece and Italy; to Syria, Judaea, and on to Egypt; and to Mesopotamia and then beyond the boundaries of the Roman world to the Parthian Empire that was the forerunner of modern Iran.

Taken by the Romans in 64 BC, Antioch was favoured by them for its wealth and strategic location and the city, already large, was granted new public buildings and even a visit by Julius Caesar. It was famous for its opulence, obsession with fashion and devotion to pleasure.

By this time Antioch’s Jewish community would have been large and centuries old, and part of the kaleidoscope of ethnicities and faiths one might expect in a major metropolis of the Empire. That good road link would have ensured a steady stream of pilgrims to and preachers from Jerusalem.

Into this world came refugees from the very first persecution of Christians, which followed the martyrdom of St Stephen. Precise dating of events in the Acts is always difficult, but given that Paul and Barnabas are already part of the Christian story, we are probably talking about the mid 30s.

From today’s reading, these refugees seem mainly to have been sheltered and possibly rather sectarian Jewish Christians, native to the Holy Land. How strange the thronging pagan crowds of Antioch must have seemed to sheltered Torah scholars who had lived entirely in the world of pious Jerusalem Jews, or those who flitted between preaching in the small towns of Judaea and fasting in the desert. What did they make of the parading high-class whores and the wealthy businessmen arrayed like peacocks, one wonders?

Read more

Praying for Ian Paisley’s Soul

by

Crossposted to Slugger O’Toole…

I have prayed for the happy repose of the soul of Ian Paisley. Initially almost to make him turn in his grave, but then with sincerity. The Book of Common Prayer says that Christ died as a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”. Note the sins of the whole world – Christ’s death atoned for my sins, for your sins, for Ian Paisley’s sins.

Paisley’s sins? In my book, they were grievous.

Would The Troubles have happened without Paisley? Almost certainly, in some form or other. Would they have been as bad without him? It’s difficult not to believe that many people in their graves would still be alive today if he’d ended up the pastor an independent Baptist Church in North Wales.

As the Northern Ireland of Craigavon and Brookeborough became untenable in the late 1960s, that booming voice with its hypnotically rhythmic, staccato, delivery was everywhere. Denouncing O’Neill and his successors as ‘lundies’, or traitors; weaving grand conspiracy theories about Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics, and implying that any amelioration of the anti-Catholic bigotry of the old Stormont state would only empower the conspiracy; popping up in Nationalist strongholds to start riots around marches and flags. Later, as The Troubles got worse, so did he.

His main object was always to destroy the Ulster Unionist Party and its old establishment hierarchy, whatever the cost to his country and his own community, so he could become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He never had the slightest idea of what he would do if he achieved it. It was a suitably limited aim for a man made big only by the Fisher-Price scale of Northern Ireland.

Read more

Jesus Went to Birmingham. Did the People Let Him Die?

by

image

Every Eucharistic service, in whatever Christian tradition, is a recreation of the Last Supper. I’m at a work conference in Birmingham at the moment, staying in a hotel bang opposite the Cathedral, so I joined the 8 a.m. congregation there today for the service that I was taught, unfairly, to call Muddled Matins and Holy Confusion.

We were 12 congregants, like the apostles, gathered around the altar where the priest played the role of Christ. In Christ, we are always being made new: the priest was a woman. For two millennia it would have been a vanishingly rare event, although not as unheard of as the sceptics admit. Now, at least in the churches which emerged from the Reformation, it is commonplace. That should not deflect us from how wonderful and glorious and new it all is. The Holy Spirit continues to renew His Church.

How could we have been so blind, for so long, to the truth expressed so plainly in Scripture by St. Paul barely two decades after the Resurrection? There is no longer male nor female, for we are all one in Christ. To say that a woman cannot represent Christ at the altar is, to my mind, dangerously close to saying that God did not so much become man in Christ, but male.

And we 12 whom the priest fed with Christ’s body and blood were a reflection in miniature of the final heavenly banquet, where people from every tribe and nation will gather. We were young and old; men and women; black, white and Asian. Some were in good suits on the way to an office job that doubtless paid for a comfortable bourgeois life; some were obviously very poor to the point were they could have been sleeping rough. All of us equal in God’s eyes, all of us citizens of the family of holy screw ups we call the Church.

The sun streamed through that magnificent east window depicting the Ascension, Christ triumphant over death and going ahead of His people to prepare a place for them in Heaven. In the glorious silence between the words, the sounds of a vibrant city waking up to glorious September sunshine percolated through the walls.

Read more

Two Ceasefires and A Coming Out: A Memoir

by

Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

I’ve been thinking about coming out. There have been a few horror stories doing the rounds recently: Vicky Beeching’s harrowing life and those of Lyra McKee’s friends. It’s made me think about how it was for me, all those years ago. If I’m honest, it was a banal tale set against a bizarre backdrop.

Maybe it’s just because I’m home, for the first significant amount of time since Chris died, sleeping in the room where I came out to my Mum, and this all happening on the 20th anniversary of the first IRA ceasefires, but I can’t pull the threads of my coming out from the tapestry of mid 1990s Belfast into which they were woven.

1994 is starting to be a long time ago. It was just before the internet arrived; it was a year that started with the last whites-only government in Africa still in office, if only marginally in power. John Major was the Prime Minister, and his government was consumed with moral panic about illegal acid house raves. It seems like a different world, with the tiny details often being the most dramatically different. There were more pubs and fewer pawn shops. Newsagents near schools were wreathed in the fug of chainsmoking Sixth Formers at 4 p.m. There was no Tesco or Sainsbury’s in Belfast, only local supermarkets like Stewart’s.

In Northern Ireland, 1 September 1994 was a great watershed. It is still the most logical point at which to divide recent history into a ‘now’ and a ‘then’. Before, The Troubles simply were and, to my generation, always had been. My memories are of an endless succession of road blocks and traffic jams; of young men in uniform in patrol, with English accents and heavy weapons which would be aimed at you, following you down a street; of dead people on the news and footage of haggard young women in black crying at funerals; of heavy wood beams put across the front door at night, to buy possibly vital seconds in case an assassination squad broke it down with a sledgehammer; of an acute awareness of where was ‘safe’ and where was ‘dodgy’.

Read more