March 15, 2009 • 3:15 pm Comments Off
You can follow Terry Pratchett on Twitter, by the way. Go to https://twitter.com/terryandrob. A post at (!) 2:31 AM Mar 12th tells us that Unseen Academicals is the next Discworld novel, due to be published in October. Essential reading for anyone like me who dabbles in academia and turns up in Cambridge regularly.
Filed under: Thoughts for the Day, Terry Pratchett
April 5, 2012 • 8:16 am Comments Off
Who else enjoys reading Terry Pratchett? I have to admit that after a hard day’s bishopping, I do enjoy curling up with one of his Discworld novels with their ever rolling stream of wit and surprising thoughtfulness.
In one of them he invented the phrase ‘The Trousers of Time’ to describe how when we make a significant choice, it is as if we opt to go down one leg of the trousers of time, rather than the other – which he imagines as also having its own alternative reality.
Some choices are more significant than others. Pratchett’s of course are mostly silly ones, and designedly so. But in a similarly titled book ‘The Trousers of Reality’, business coach Barry Evans uses the same image to more serious intent. He observes how even good business ideas become commercialised and even weaponized – promoted by their adherents to the detriment of others. Collaboration and integration might produce a better result, but not a better profit. Why do we do it to ourselves, Evans wonders. The aggression and stress is good for no-one. So, he says, let’s choose the trouser leg of our common humanity – which is the real reality of life – and find better, fairer ways of moving forward.
This is of course the very choice that Jesus made and invites us to make on this Maundy Thursday – except that he knows all too well how costly the choice is and what must be confronted if we are to make it. This is where the towel comes in. The basic trouser-leg choice is whether we are to live our life for ourselves, or for others. The towel is the symbol and acted parable of Jesus’ very real, very deliberate self-stripping, laying aside his majesty, giving himself in humility, serving others en route to his final self-sacrifice on the Cross.
Do you remember when, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan allows himself to be killed, he knows that by using his power and authority to absorb evil not replicate it, he turns the evil on its head and it starts to work backwards. The trousers of time. God in Jesus has opened up again the leg of life in the most surprising way.
This is why Jesus asks his disciples to do as he has done. Why his new commandment is that they love one another, as he has loved them.
How can we make that choice? Our whole human nature seems to pull us away from it, down the leg of competition and conflict, alternatively lashing out and nursing our wounds. I am no shakes as a psychologist but I see here, in myself and others, an inner child or self that is still looking for love, still reacting in childish ways to the challenges of adult life.
It is significant then, that when Jesus goes on to talk about us loving one another he says ‘as I have loved you’. He knows the love of the Father, so he is free to love us to the end. If we can know his love and remain in it, we too will be free to love to the end.
And at this point it is quite simply a choice. Our inner child may want to sit around for ever waiting for ever more signs of God’s love, good feelings and affirmation. I hope we all find some of these, but feelings will never be enough to provide the foundation we need for the future.
At some point we have to use an adult will and have faith, choose life, choose to live life not for ourselves but others. Not everyone will, but as Jesus washes the feet of his disciples he is praying that they will, and I am praying that you will, and will keep on doing so, and drawing others into that same choice – down the right leg of the trousers.
Oakington Parish Church, 5th April 2012
Filed under: Uncategorized, Pratchett, Trousers of Time; Maundy Thursday; sermon
June 15, 2011 • 12:42 pm 1
I thought readers of this blog might be interested to read these comments of the Bishop of Exeter, which are taken from the C of E website:
The Bishop of Exeter the Rt Revd Michael Langrish took part in a BBC2 Newsnight debate on Monday June 13 following the BBC programme ‘Choosing to Die’ presented by Sir Terry Pratchett. His main comments from the debate are below:
"I did not change my mind (after seeing the programme) but my expectations changed. I expected I would disagree with the outcome and expected to welcome the film as a contribution to a really important debate but the more I watched it the more concerned and indeed disturbed I became by it. It was very one-sided, a nod to hospice care but no showing the alternative ending, no indication that the two principals Peter and Andrew needn’t have been living the life they were leading and right at the end I questioned the whole ethical basis of programme. I felt that Peter and indeed his wife and perhaps Terry Pratchett as well had been caught up and become trapped in the storyline of programme. I felt there was a deeply coercive atmosphere in room in the end and I felt quite emotionally blackmailed by it."
"I think Terry makes a very important distinction talking about the dignity of life – (I prefer dignity to sanctity) – dignity is about what gives worth to every human life. It has to bear on every life not just on a few and my problem here with the emphasis on choice, is that it is alright for us here who have a choice. But take someone like my daughter whose experience of life is having others making choices for her, she’s just had her house sold around her with very little choice; it leaves you with a poor sense of self esteem and self worth. What for me gives dignity of life is to say, each of us has a value for what we are not what we do, it’s not an instrumental thing and we also find our value in a network of social and community relationships. I want so see much more emphasis on supporting people in living rather than assisting them in dying."
"One of the things that really worried me was right at the end (I realise we probably saw an edited version) Peter lifted the glass of poison and said ‘when do I take it?’. I think many doctors, priests, counsellors who had been present at that point would have thought hang on, there’s a moment of hesitation here. And the answer was do whatever you want …."
"On the whole I think the law is clear and the guidelines do broadly work. At present suicide is not a crime but it is not a right. The law still enshrines that sense of the intrinsic value of life. But the law ultimately is not there to constrain individual choice. It’s there to constrain third party action and complicity in another person’s death. That remains illegal, there maybe ameliorating circumstances that can be taken in to account. But the law remains clear and is there to protect the vulnerable. It seems to me the very basis of English law is there to do two things. It is there to protect the vulnerable in society and should give expression to the deepest values that our society holds."
"I would want to talk about good dying and would love to challenge BBC to do a similar documentary tracking someone like the cabbie through to a good death."
See also the Protecting Life area of our website
Filed under: Uncategorized
July 3, 2010 • 8:00 pm Comments Off
Luke 4.14-30: Jesus Begins His Public Ministry
14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15 He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. 16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.
23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your home town what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ ”
24 “I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his home town. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
As far as we know, Jesus never served a curacy in the Church of England, though I am waiting for Dan Brown’s next novel with bated breath just in case new evidence has emerged. Jesus did, however, have a public ministry like you, and that ministry had a public beginning, just as yours has. The Spirit of God was seen to descend on him at his baptism, and then that same Spirit drove him into what I suppose we can call his ordination retreat. (A feature of the Spirit in the New Testament is that he helps all the right things to happen, but not necessarily in what we might think is the right order: this is the Morecombe-Wise doctrine of pneumatology with which I am sure you are familiar by now.)
And then Jesus has to start preaching and teaching, just like you, and we have just heard the account of his first recorded sermon from Luke chapter 4. It is one of those “I wish I was there” moments. Tickets will be available to go and listen for yourself just as soon as I have perfected my time machine, but until then we are as ever grateful to God for the Holy Scriptures which bring it so vividly to life for us.
By now you’ll realise that my own sermon training means that I find it hard not to think in threes, so I want to open up three features of this episode for you, which to my mind have a lot to say about our own public ministry as well as that of Jesus.
First, Jesus goes to church. He teaches in the synagogues, and specifically teaches here in the synagogue of his home town of Nazareth. Just as he does not abrogate the Law and does not stop going to the Temple, so he does not back out of bowling up at his local synagogue either. For Nazareth it was the place of prayer where local people could gather locally to bring the whole needs of their locality to God.
So too it is not possible for me to ordain you today other than to a title, to a particular place and a particular group of people; and I suggest that the first call on you as an ordained minister is to be a person of prayer in that place and gather others round you to pray with you for it and its people. The historic holy houses of that place will be obvious and natural places for such prayer, though not the only places – a truth to which we shall return. Those old inherited buildings are not to be scorned: they are places where generations have commended in love their loved ones into the love of God in life and in death, in sorrow and in joy; and it is a substantial privilege for us to be those who are trusted to minister to them there. They are the places too where generations of Christians have met together to grow in their love of God and of each other and become the body of Christ, sharing in his work. So, in church and out of church, we are first of all to be people of prayer in the place to which God has sent us, gathering round us others who will share in prayer and ministry too.
Secondly, Jesus unrolls the scroll and opens the Scriptures. The members of the other Abrahamic faith communities are called “The People of the Book” by Muslims, and ours is no ordinary book. Our Scriptures are both our words about God and God’s word to us. Jesus himself was soaked in and formed by the written word of God and it is a poor theology which lets daylight show between that and the incarnate word of God – or indeed the word of God through the Spirit now, to which both bear witness, and to which we will also return. The magic books of a Harry Potter story or a Terry Pratchett novel have letters that come alive; this book is more than magic, and in its letters are life itself, the life of God. Perhaps ever copy should not just say Holy Bible on the front in a sober typeface, but Handle with Care in letters of fire.
So unsurprisingly it is the Scriptures which will be placed in your hands later today as the sign of your authority as a minister, because all our authority depends utterly on God and his word. Canon Law requires a large reading Bible to be available in every church and another of convenient size to be in the pulpit for the preacher. Our liturgies are shot through with Scripture and give the public reading and exposition of it prime place. So the second call on each of us as ministers is to be people of the book, people who open the Scriptures, are open to their word, and open them to others too.
Thirdly, Jesus does not only read the Scriptures to those in the synagogue but proclaims that they are to be fulfilled in their hearing; that the Spirit to which the Scriptures bear witness is going to alive and effective not just then but now, not just in worship but in the worldly realities of poverty, imprisonment, illness and oppression. I can see the TV programme now: “Spiritwatch”, with Ms Humble or Mr Oddy following with whispered awe the transforming work of God, moment by moment, day by day.
So at heart of your ordination is the great prayer for the coming of the Spirit, the Veni Creator and at the heart of the ordination prayer itself my petition is, “Send down your Spirit.” Then in the power of that Spirit our prayer is and will be valid, and the scriptures will be open, and the Spirit will be at work not just in our churches old or new but in our schools and our shops, in our houses and hospitals, in our inns and our institutes. God did not so love the church that he sent his only Son to us, but he so loved the world. So in God’s name we go out into that world to share his love and call those we meet into his kingdom, even as Jesus himself did. So the third call on us is to be people of the Spirit, people blown away by God and blown out in his mission to redeem the world.
I could have ended the reading from Luke 4 at this point, but faithfulness to the word means reading to the end of the passage, so we cannot avoid facing the reality at this point that this awesome message and mission of Jesus was not exactly received with acclamation by the people of God in his place. The narrative is a bit confusing: the congregation seem at first to applaud him – the NIV text says that “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips” – but a few moments later they are trying to throw him off a cliff. The clue to understanding what’s going on might be that the underlying Greek text does not say that they were amazed at his gracious words but at his words of grace. And that, at least according to Tom Wright whose Greek is a lot better than mine, could also mean words about the grace of God, and in particular the free saving grace of God shown to Jews and Gentiles alike – a difficult message perhaps for a Jewish community gathered in a Gentile area like Galilee, and often a difficult message now. Similarly the words translated “spoke well of” and “amazed” can have negative force as well as positive – “everyone started talking about him and was staggered at his words about grace.”
But whatever the precise exegesis, the thrust is clear. Something Jesus said took the congregation out of their comfort zone, seemed to be opening up God’s grace and God’s kingdom in a way that went well beyond what they had become used to. And it will be very surprising if your own proclamation of God’s grace – which still goes way beyond our boundaries and expectations – will not sometimes have the same effect, precisely because we have taken God’s word at its word, we have prayed for the Spirit to come, and we have opened ourselves to its life-giving power for today. We do not ourselves set out to provoke or disturb, but we are not blind either to the fact that the very act of blessing, proclaiming God’s grace, can itself disturb, whether we do it from the pulpit or in our pastoral conversations. But proclaim it we must; blessing is what we are about.
And that leads us to my final point. Although your ministry may in some ways be like that of Jesus, you are not Jesus. Rather, you are the people of Jesus the Christ, commonly called Christians. In doing everything we have talked about you will not be doing it for yourself, but for him; you will not be offering yourself or relying on yourself, but on him; and if your ministry has an effect, it will be his effect not one you have either looked for or not looked for. And because it is in his service that you are faithfully ministering, it is he who will also sustain you and save you when the going in it gets tough. As you bless others, so he will bless you. In the beginning – Jesus. At the end – Jesus. He is our Alpha and Omega, and in him we place our trust. Amen.
+ David
3rd July 2010
The Feast of St Thomas
and the second anniversary of my own ordination to the episcopate
Filed under: Sermons and Talks
October 31, 2009 • 5:41 pm Comments Off
Ely Cathedral was full of life again today – what a great place it is, and so much going on – this time for the admission and licensing of this year’s crop of Licensed Lay Ministers, or Readers as they are called. Please give thanks and pray for
A good congregation was undeterred when the Halloween gremlins struck first at the PA system then at the organ (which started a ‘cypher’) and we finished in fine style sending off our new LLMs at the West Door, Bibles in hand, to preach God’s word and show his love to a world in need.
Inevitably, I was asked to say a few words:
LLM Admission Service Sermon 2009
I’ve just been reading Terry Pratchett’s latest novel, Unseen Academicals. It’s about football, except that since the main thing about football is that it’s not just about football, it’s really a book about life. The central character is a goblin-like orc, and the main thing about him is that even though he is a really good one, everyone would rather he was dead – until he helps his team win after all.
I’ve probably confused you by now – but I was hoping that talk of football and teams can help you remember a bit of what it was like in your playground days, and people were picking teams, and either they wanted you in theirs – or didn’t. Or how groups of friends would get together, and you were either in – or “it”. The last time I spoke here in the cathedral was to schoolchildren who had just written their hopes and burdens on shapes we made into an altar frontal. One of the biggest burdens? That all their friends would walk away. When I was a mixed infant, the usual way to get a game going was for a group of lads to link arms and start a chant, "Anybody wanna play cowboys and indians – no lasses." That’s more than half you left out for a start.
Life is cruel, society is cruel, we can be cruel – and it’s not how God intends things to be; which is why Isaiah has those strange words about eunuchs in today’s Old Testament lesson for the eve of All Sants – not what you would have expected. The point is that when God’s kingdom comes, everyone will be counted in. Even eunuchs; if they existed, even orcs; even lasses. Saints will come in all sorts and sizes. Pretty well by definition, there will be no second-class citizens in heaven.
This was the sort of society that Jesus started to build around him here on earth. We could say that this, just this, was what he meant when he said the kingdom of heaven was coming among us. We could say too that the Sermon on the Mount is the archetypal description of that society, which is made up of the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the thirsty, the merciful, the pure in heart, the persecuted. Suddenly those who are outsiders are called in; those who no-one loves are the beloved; those whose heavenly dreams lie in the dust find heaven among them. I wonder if that dream, a dream which was no dream but the totally real transfiguring of earth by heaven in the earthly life of the heavenly man Jesus, I wonder if that dream can touch your heart now, and reignite the you deep within you, the image of God within all of us, the vocation to be of God and for God, the vocation to minister in his name?
Filed under: ministry, Ely Diocese, LLMs, Readers
April 1, 2009 • 3:24 pm Comments Off
In his essay, "Turtles All the Way", Terry Pratchett says "we seem to have a turtle-shaped hole in our consciousness". His writing is full of allusions and this looks back to St Augustine in his Confessions, “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee”, often presented by preachers as a “God-shaped hole”.
The Great A’Tuin, the turtle on which Discworld rests, swims through the void and needs no support: swimming is what turtles do (see Small Gods). But it is hard to avoid the question, what does the turtle rest on, and here Pratchett is referring to the well-worn scientific anecdote that for instance opens Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
“Turtles all the way down” has its own Wikipedia entry. The 
illustration is used in more than one way in scientific discussion, but for me the key debate is about whether an infinite-regress idea of existence and ethics, and the Christian alternative, are (a) coherent and (b) satisfying. Last night’s good and cheekily-named TV programme on maths Alan and Marcus Go Forth and Multiply ended with the presentation of the universe as a bounded but infinite 4-dimensional doughnut or torus. That’s one sort of infinite regression that is coherent (which is not the same as to say it’s true …). And many religious world-views have cyclical elements to them. So at least in these limited senses I have to answer yes to (a) and (b).
But I’m left with the hole. “In the beginning” has enormous resonance for me, and Genesis looks to have been written as a Book of Origins to respond to just such a hole in the hearts of the earliest compilers of the scriptures. So the option of a creator and a beginning is certainly satisfying too, and if we remember (as Rowan Williams reminds us) that God is not an existing object but the ground of existence (or for Alan and Marcus, God is the maths?), then I reckon it is coherent as well.
So we’re left with the ethics. And here my choice is clear. Infinite regresses are not very good as sources of meaning, purpose and value. They keep on going down, but have nothing in particular to go down to. I reckon we need something more personal and more purposeful than they can offer, if those key elements of our own experience and identity are to be more than illusion.
I’m not sure that all this is much more than doodling. But perhaps churches that go cafe-style should have whiteboard tables in them, just like the Oxford Maths Dept cafe, so that we can do more doodling.
Filed under: Thoughts for the Day, Marcus du Sautoy, Maths, science, Terry Pratchett, turtles
March 15, 2009 • 9:01 am Comments Off
Pratchett’s reflections on his 2007 diagnosis of Alzheimer’s have caught our imagination. "I’ve decided I’m not going to go down without a fight. For me, this really is a matter of life and death. This damn disease is not going to go away, it’s only going to get worse. There is a war being fought out there and maybe it’s time to go and join the troops." But in the words of his famous blurb, “Terry was born in 1948 and is still not dead.”
So read his latest book, if you haven’t caught up with it yet. Making Money, has proved surprisingly topical. The hero Moist von Lipwig solves Discworld’s banking problems by printing money and persuading everyone to believe in it … To find out more, read the LICC article by Pete Hartwell, – or the book, even.
Filed under: Thoughts for the Day, Discoworld, Terry Pratchett
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