On Christmas plans….

What plans do you have for Christmas? Perhaps you have a particular present in mind for that special one (or have been thus instructed). But you’re leaving the actual purchase to the last minute (Christmas eve would be ideal). Imagine though. You turn up at a suitable retail outlet only to discover that they’ve sold out! You would just have to switch to plan B. Or perhaps you have a Christmas journey planned. The tickets have been bought, the hotel booked. Imagine though. You turn up on time at your favourite local airport to discover all flights have been grounded by a software glitch somewhere in Austria! No doubt about it. Plan B again. Such things don’t happen to us often. But the plans we make often depend on lots of other people and things over which we have absolutely no control. Lots of moving parts that we need to run smoothly. Usually they do, occasionally they don’t. And on those occasions when Plan A doesn’t work out, plan B has to be pressed into service. Some people seem to think about the first Christmas (i.e. the birth of Jesus – although that wasn’t any kind of Christmas) as a sort of divine plan B.

Why might such a thought occur to anyone? Because before any of the “Christmas” events transpired there was a whole series of happenings and history that had unfolded over the preceding centuries. Some of the players in this history thought they had a handle on what was going on, and indeed that they were central to God’s big plan. That a big plan was needed was clear from almost the beginning. Things were just not as they were intended to be, and that applied to people too (you’ll find the reason for this laid out in Genesis chapter 3). With a devastating flood and the destruction of the tower at Babel, things seemed to go from bad to worse to confused. But then, from around Genesis 12 (actually the hints are right there in what appears to be the unmitigated disaster of Genesis 3), a coherent strategy emerges. This involved the God who made everything calling an obscure man named Abram out of idolatry (i.e. the worship of things that are not God) and making extravagant promises about blessing coming to everyone on earth through him and his descendents. Gradually, from that man (eventually renamed Abraham), who took God’s promises seriously and trusted the God who made them, a people emerged and came to prominence. Not that it was all plain sailing. From a human point of view it seemed to take a long time and a circuitous route. And once or twice the whole thing seemed to be on the verge of complete collapse. At the time when Abraham’s descendents were numerically strong enough to be called a nation, they actually had to be rescued from slavery and oppression while residing far from the place they had been promised. Their whole rescue experience, in both symbol and reality, turned on God being faithful to His original promise even in the teeth of their consistent failure to live like Abraham (ie trusting God). But their very failure to be the people they were supposed to be pointed to a basic flaw within them that they shared with rest of humanity (the same flaw that affects all of us today). They were no more or less flawed than anyone else; in this respect they were representative of us all.

Eventually it looked like God had given up on them. Although they owed Him everything, they kept playing fast and loose with His, although He was constantly proving Himself true to that original promise. They even returned to the sort of idolatry that their ancestor had been rescued from. Eventually everything appeared to fall apart. It looked as though, like so many other ancient cultures, they were to be washed away by successive waves of history. So if ancient Israel, for that’s who we’re thinking about, was plan A, and it was through Israel the rest of us were to be blessed, the plan appeared to be in big trouble. The whole of the Old Testament of the Bible is their story. It is a story of repeating patterns, and of a promise which, while often forgotten, was never quite erased.

Out of the ruins something (someone!) long promised eventually arrived. His coming wasn’t new in the sense of something different (i.e. plan B because plan A hadn’t worked) because it fell precisely into those patterns and expectations set up by the whole of the Old Testament, something many of the writers of the New Testament go out of their way to demonstrate from Mark to Revelation. But it was new in the sense that when it happened it was simply not what was being looked for, to the extent that many, both at the time of the promised One’s arrival and since, completely miss what’s going on. All that had happened in Israel’s history, what appeared to be wasted time and effort, turned out to precisely illustrate what was about to happen and more besides. It all turned out to be part of one big plan (A).

Israel’s experience, real and excruciating as it was, actually served to reveal the magnitude of the problem. That was necessary because human beings don’t generally understand just how awful their natural predicament is and therefore the magnitude of the solution that is required. It turns out that promises, encouragements, rules, religious systems, all of which work from the outside of a person, can’t ultimately fix the problem, which for all of us, for all of time, has been on the inside (the unfixed flaw mentioned above). But it’s almost as though part of plan A was to illustrate that problem in detail, and how not to sort it, before the actual solution was presented.

Here’s the big difference between God’s plans and ours. We often need plan B because we don’t have the power to deliver plan A. There are always things outwith our control that can (and sometimes do) interfere. But the thing about God is there is nothing outwith His control or beyond His power. So there was never going to be anything to interfere with, or thwart, plan A even if looked to human eyes as though there was. Something amazing is happening when Jesus is born in Bethlehem. His birth isn’t a sign of the failure of plan A and the need for something new (plan B). It’s actually the next part of the unfolding plan, brining us closer to the crux of plan A.

I hope you Christmas plans work out. God's plan certainly is.

Life in the Pandemic V: Trump and the tragedy of the closed Bible.

You may perhaps have seen the video or the photographs. On Tuesday 2^nd June, President Trump emerged from the White House and walked with his usual large entourage to the nearby St John’s Episcopal Church. He was then photographed awkwardly holding a Bible. Not his own Bible we learned, but “a Bible”. It was, at all times, a closed Bible. At a the very least this stands out as a striking metaphor; it may also provide a key to understanding a number of facets of the Trump era. It appears that the Bible is a closed book to Donald Trump.

We don’t just have those images to go on. Although President Trump has claimed on a number of occasions that the Bible is his favourite book (indeed that it is better than his own book “The Art of the Deal”), he has in the past been unable or unwilling to say which particular verse, or passage, or even testament he liked, claiming it was a personal matter. He was more forthcoming in January 2016. In a speech at Liberty University, he actually did pick a particular verse, reportedly saying "2 Corinthians, 3:17, that's the whole ballgame." If you have a Bible to hand, open it and read the verse in context (always a good idea). Having done exactly that, this pick strikes me as an exercise in random association rather than exegesis.

What is more telling is his record in business and politics. This allows an assessment as to the closeness of the mapping between the manner of life and values described in the Bible, and those exhibited by the Donald. Even restricting the evidence to the recent past, the record is not encouraging. It was an unguarded moment, caught on the infamous Access Holywood tape, that revealed a profoundly unbiblical (not to say disturbing) attitude to women and sex. His attitude to other human beings in general falls well short of what one would expect someone heavily influenced by Scripture to exhibit. At a rally in Huntsville Alabama, on Sept 22^nd 2017, he stirred up the crown by attacking NFL players who protested during the US national anthem (he accused them of “disrespecting the flag”) using the term “son of a bitch”. Note that what they were doing was neither illegal or disrespectful. One suspects that this language is tame compared to how Trump talks about friends and foes in private. To be fair, it would be naïve to expect any prominent politician, US president or otherwise, to be linguistically gentle with their political opponents. Other US presidents have undoubtedly used choice language at various times, but not with the brash cynicism and relish of President Trump, and rarely in public. Whatever the influences on his choice of language, about people or other subjects, it’s not the Bible.

But this is all vanishingly unimportant compared to the other major characteristic of Donald’s time in power  – his total disregard, and apparent undisguised contempt for, truth. From arguing the toss about the trivial matter (to most) of how many people turned up to his inauguration, via the more serious issue of persistent and repeated falsehoods about the US economy to potentially deadly attempted deceptions about the pandemic in the US, the abuse of truth has become the hallmark of his presidency. It is so common-place, that it has become part of a new normal. It has spawned a vast fact-checking industry, which provides publicly accessible databases, where one can search for his lies by topic or source, or filter by time period. The rate at which he has thrown off false or misleading claims since the beginning of his presidency is currently 15.6 per day, cumulatively 19, 127 as of the 29^th May, 2020. Again to be fair, some of these will be matters of interpretation and context, and the number may be inflated to a degree by anti-Trump political bias. But it is clear that there is evidence of a commitment to falsehood here, not just an occasional slip. Deception and obfuscation have become matters of policy.

Of course it is generally held that all politicians are liars. There’s the old joke about how you know when a politician is lying – his lips move. But until recently actually telling a bald-faced, slam-dunk lie could be a career ending move. Famously in the House of Commons because all members are “honourable” members, it is unparliamentary language to call someone a liar (or a blackguard, guttersnipe, stoolpigeon or traitor). This led to the use of the Churchillian “terminological inexactitude” (first used in 1906 in a slightly different way), as a suitable euphemism. Yet it remains the case that politicians of all parties were careful in what they said, and were sometimes careful to say nothing at all. They knew the seriousness of being caught out being flatly dishonest. Even though Tony Blair arguably did not lie in the run up to the Iraq war, he is still marked by large sections of the UK population as being slippery and shifty and therefore not trustworthy. But in further contrast to Trump, you would never catch Blair (whose Government famously did not “do God”) holding a Bible at a photo-op. Or Gordon Brown (who was raised in a manse) or Tim Farron (who is open about his Christianity). Trump holds the Bible up and proclaims it is his favourite book, and resorts to lies at an alarming rate as a matter of policy and strategy. His is an approach that is starkly different to anything we’ve seen before.

If you think President Trump is a stupid man, you will be tempted to put his behaviour down to his stupidity, and his preference to fantasy over reality. But there is a calculated and brazen quality to the depth and breadth of what he says and how he says it. And I don’t think he is stupid. Which in a way makes the situation much more serious. It also means he is much more culpable for his abuse of truth, which is where we come back to the Bible. You will find leaders who lie in the Bible. That’s because it is, in part, a record of real people and their lives. And most real people, you and me included, have a problem with truth. Abraham is a famous Bible liar (he told the same lie twice with potentially disastrous consequences). David is another one who lied and schemed to get his hands on another man’s wife, with disastrous consequences for him, his family and his nation. But their lies also brought shame, and in David’s case clearly recorded (and quite possibly public) repentance (just read Psalm 51). They knew their lies were a problem, not a solution.

The solution for Abraham, David and countless others right down to today, is to respond to God and His word. Sooner or later President Trump will learn the same lesson. He could learn it from the pages of his Bible (and perhaps, like David, repent), but he’d have to open it first.

Christmas Reflections III - Even angels can learn...

There was stuff going on that first Christmas that was normal and ordinary, and then there was the other stuff. The stuff that was neither normal nor ordinary. We sometimes patronise the characters in the Christmas story as primitives who didn’t know what we know. That’s why they could believe promises that clearly were not believable. So writers like Luke concoct stories that we know can’t be true and therefore are at best mythology, rather than history. The problem is, this isn’t what they claim to be doing, and it’s not how it reads. Luke claims that he is setting out to investigate what happened and then compile an orderly account so that we may have "certainty". And his writing seems to be largely like the reporting of ordinary human responses to extraordinary events. 

Take the characters in Luke 1 blogged about previously. You don’t need to know a lot about the finer points of gynaecology, embryology and development biology to know where babies come from, and what is necessary to make them. And Zechariah and Elisabeth on the one hand, and Mary on the other, were pretty clear on both topics. Zechariah is promised a child, something that he’s wanted for years, and promised it by an impeccable source. As discussed previously, he gets himself into hot water by making it clear he is not convinced, no matter where the information comes from. This is a story that  reads like Bible, not Hollywood. Mary receives disconcerting news in a disconcerting way, and she responds with a question, which prompts a very interesting response that I’ll return to. But first, what might seem like a digression.

A couple of thousand years before the events recorded in Luke Ch1, three men appeared out of the heat haze near Abraham’s camp at a place called Mamre (you’ll find the story in Genesis 18; you’ll find Mamre just to the north of Hebron). One of the “men”, it turns out, was God himself; the other two were probably angels. A conversation ensued with Abraham, while his wife Sarah listened in the background. It’s in this conversation that God promises Abraham that Sarah will have a child, even though (spookily like Zechariah and Elisabeth) Abraham and Sarah were well on the elderly side of old. Sarah chuckles at this promise; after all it’s clearly preposterous. Like New Testament characters, Old Testament characters are not stupid; they know about making babies. God’s response is to challenge Sarah’s lack of belief by posing a question – “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”. And, of course, it turns out that delivering on promises about miracle babies if not too hard, because a child, Isaac, duly appears. This is a story Zechariah would have been familiar with, and this is perhaps one reason why Gabriel is fairly sniffy with him when he doesn’t respond appropriately to a similar promise given to him and Elisabeth. Their child would be miraculous but not unique.

Speaking of Gabriel, I’ve always wondered if he was one of the two angels with God at Mamre. He’s not named of course.  If he was there, this makes his response to Mary’s question intriguing. Because while Mary is clearly willing to accept what he tells her, she also has questions, precisely because, like Sarah, she’s knows where babies come from. Famously, Gabriel tells Mary that something entirely unique is going to happen in her to bring about her pregnancy. But he adds something else. This time it is not a question like the one posed to Abraham. It’s a statement: nothing is impossible with God. Had Gabriel been here before? Had he heard a similar promise, observed a human, and sceptical, reaction to it? Did he hear the question that God responded with? He had certainly seen the promise realised. So perhaps he has learned something. With confidence, confidence borne of experience rather than belief, he’s able to reassure Mary. Possibly.  I’m speculating of course.

The rest, as they say, really is history. Maybe angels can observe, listen, watch and learn. Maybe we should learn from them.