Economic crisis and what to do about it

This little animation (complete with Australian accent) is a great summary of one narrative gaining steam in certain circles. It outlines an analysis of economy, energy and environment that draws a picture of three converging crises as shaping the coming decades in quite dramatic ways that are likely to take the form of a global sustained Greater Depression, complete with economic deflation, energy supply constraints and political instability. As a positive response it suggests re-localisation, social resilience, trust building, and power-down innovation (such a permaculture). This is what the Transition Movement is all about and this animation is in many ways one accessible and cogent expression of that movement.

I am very attracted to certain elements of this account. I accept that there are grave threats in these systems (though I would characterise some of them differently) and that they could interact in complex ways. I also agree that rebuilding local communities of trust is a critical part of a health response to our present predicament. Where I'm perhaps most hesitant about an account like this is that I feel it is somewhat naïve about the likelihood of larger political events overwhelming merely local efforts. That is, very often such localism involves an explicit ignoring of national and international entities as doomed to fail anyway. I think that while such entities gain their legitimacy through acts of collective imagination (and so a widespread adoption of re-localist principles would indeed see them hollowed of clout), the path from here to there is never going to be smooth. Government and corporate powers hold sufficient cards to make life very difficult for localist movements if and when they are perceived as growing to a point where they might begin undermining their legitimacy. And even beyond such deliberate opposition, the capacity of a globalised economy and wounded ecological order to deliver sudden and catastrophic blows to a local community is easily underestimated.

So let's get serious about nurturing local communities of trust, about adjusting our expectations away from high energy consumption, about building resilience into our economic and social systems. But let's not take our eye off the ball of the macro-scale political and economic order or abandon the field to the plutocrats, deniers and techno-optimists.

Corporate failure: more than a few bad apples

With all the current discussion about News International and its parent company News Corp, many pixels are being devoted to a discussion of just how things went so wrong. After a string of recent revelations, the claim, maintained by News executives for years, that it was one (or then a few) bad apple(s) in an otherwise honest company now appears as either deluded, deceitful or the result of seriously deficient oversight. Since it is nearly always better to assume incompetence rather than conspiracy, at best Tuesday's parliamentary inquiry revealed a string of failed leaders - spanning media editors, senior corporate executives, police and politicians - who remained dangerously out of touch with what was going on around them. At worst, collusion, corruption and cover up on an industrial scale dwarf the significance of the original criminal data acquisition. Whatever the true nature of the rot, it goes beyond a couple of apples, whether at the top or bottom of the pile.

When confronted with misdeeds on this scale, a common reaction (which I notice in my own instincts) is to seek to put a face on the problem, a single individual who can be held ultimately responsible. We want the buck to stop somewhere. The legal pursuit of the questions of who knew what when is important and such investigations are likely to take some time. In the meantime, an impatient public desires visible signs of justice. If we cannot get convictions just yet, we will settle for resignations.

We so desperately want to be able to find someone to blame, some focus for our fury at the damage caused by a system of corruption in which media, police and politicians were too close and saw their own good in terms of a small circle than the national interest they claimed to be representing. We want to know that our violated trust is being taken seriously. Resignations serve as symbolic steps in this direction; they speak to a collective desire to start again and are a metaphor of what it looks like for an organisation to repent.

But there are deeper questions at stake. Individuals did indeed commit crimes and moral failures (either of commission or omission). Many participated in looking the other way, being willfully blind to what was going on because it was more convenient to maintain deniability (or perhaps they continue to mislead political authorities). But to leave the analysis at the level of individuals fails to take account of the dynamics that can exist at a supra-individual level. The whole can often be greater than the sum of the parts. If the only lessons we take away from this saga involve the need for greater personal integrity, we miss the opportunity to ask how the very structures might have served to sideline, subvert or dilute integrity.

There are individual failures, but also failures of structure, failures of collective imagination. They are failures of systems that are based on seeking the wrong kinds of inclusion, systems that punish those who speak up while rewarding those who conform without questioning the quality of what is shared. Whether a for-profit corporation can simulatenously claim to be serving its shareholders and the common good is an interesting question, as is whether a political system in which an MP is required to win more votes than any other candidate every five years encourages a myopic and image-driven politics.

When a corporation is accountable to its shareholders' interests and those interests are understood in narrow financial terms (as they usually are), then the only place that ethical considerations enter into it is the impulse to avoid anything unethical insofar as it hurts the bottom line. Therefore, the recent fall in News Corp shares is the real crime Rupert and his various officers have committed.

But of course that way madness lies, and the reaction of the public to this scandal is partly media-driven hysteria (the very same hysteria that News have used to successfully to drive sales) and partly genuine moral outrage that speaks to a standard other than the bottom line. There is more to living well than making a profit and there is more to a flourishing nation (or world) than a growing GDP. Therefore, there must be more to a healthy company than a rising share price. Let us resist the colonisation of our ethical thought by cost-benefit risk analysis that seeks to put a price on everything. The language of money cannot adequately translate the full complexity and richness of our moral existence and to rely on it to do so is to abdicate our responsibility for pursuing good and shunning evil.

Amidst the repeated failure of not just scattered individuals but of our most trusted social institutions - of corporations and parliaments, banks and police, sensationalist newspapers and a reading public that buys them - it may be worth considering again the apostle Paul's exhortation to his readers in Rome, who were at the heart of a vast empire with powerful cultural incentives to fit in: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds (Romans 12.2 NRSV). This is addressed not simply to the individual believers, but to the church as a whole. It is an invitation to a way of corporate existence based on the good news of God's mercies (verse 1). The church, of course, is not immune from moral failure. Yet the good news here is an invitation to discover anew a source of belonging that does not require us to narrow our moral vision lest we stick out, but which gives us permission to find fresh ways of thinking and seeing amidst a culture that has lost its way. The church has no monopoly on wisdom, has not cornered the market in corporate governance or collective integrity. Yet in its practices of humility, confession, forgiveness and love of neighbour to the glory of God, in its memory of Jesus accepting the outcast and breaking bread with the traitor, in its grasp of the promise of a Spirit who leads into both honesty and new begingings, it has something that is genuinely different and worth rediscovering and sharing by each generation.

News of the World 0; Guardian 1

Extraordinary. The world's most read (and most loathed?) English-language newspaper, in existence for 167 years, is to cease publication this Sunday after the rapidly developing events of the last couple of days. Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist tabloid News of the World has faced escalating revelations of wicked and illegal behaviour, including hacking the phones of up to four thousand people - royalty, politicians, celebrities, murder and terrorism victims and their families, soldiers killed in Afghanistan and those of their relatives - as well as interfering in police investigations, paying police for information, lying under oath and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rest of this list) hacking the phones of those involved in the investigations into their own misdeeds.*
*I would provide links to each of these, but it would take all day. There is extensive coverage here and just about everywhere.

Credit must go to the years of investigative work by Nick Davies at the Guardian, who kept following the story despite threats from NotW and scorn or lack of interest from many other mainstream media sources.

The fallout will continue for some time. There will be retrials, public inquiries, reform of how the media are (self-)regulated, questions about how one of the editors at the heart of the scandal ended up working for the Prime Minister, reviews in the role of police corruption and very serious questions (hopefully) about the BSkyB takeover that looked set to give Murdoch even more control over British media (and which ought to be rejected on media plurality grounds alone).
UK voters can sign a petition against the takeover and/or contact your MP.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of bad journalism, nor that Murdoch will be likely to change his ways, or lose his malign influence on the politics of too many continents. A publication like NotW doesn't get to where it was without an extensive public willing to pay good money to read gossip and slander. Those malformed desires will not disappear overnight. Other publications will quickly fill the void.

Nonetheless, perhaps this whole episode is a chance for us to stop momentarily and consider what really counts as news, and whom we trust to tell us about it.

Let us also remember that the self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude offered by the gutter tabloid press at the failings and foibles of the famous is all too easily replaced with self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude at the humiliation of that very press's flagship. So let us not rejoice at a black eye for Murdoch, but mourn for our own myopic moral vision that all too often secretly wishes to be kept in the dark.

"And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed."

- John 3.19-20 (NRSV).

Things may unfold faster than you think

Nicole Foss, one of the authors at The Automatic Earth, on the triple challenges of economy, energy and environment (especially climate in this case). She sees energy as the most significant driver of where industrial civilisation heads next, though economics is the way that it will manifest itself with most speed and violence in a debt-driven economy. Her analysis of the effects of peak oil as being an exacerbation and acceleration of economic swings is an important corrective to those who imagine that peak oil simply means ever increasing price spikes. I think she underestimates the long term significance of climate, but her points about resilient communities of trust and the importance of forward thinking prudence in order to avoid toxic and violent responses are well made. Whether she is right about deflation as the way in which the next financial crisis (the continuation of the present financial crisis, depending how you look at it) is above my pay grade (which, given that it is almost zero, isn't saying much).

In short, she thinks it is very important to get out of debt as soon as possible, to prepare mentally for a different and more difficult world within the next few years and to invest in local relationships of trust. As a Christian, I don't see much to disagree with in this advice.

On imagining the future: Human action is reaction

"Come now you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.' Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, will live and do this or that.' As it is, you in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin."

- James 4.13-17 (NRSV).

If making confident assertions of the likely course of my personal life is arrogance that ignores the fact that I am not in control, then expanding such claims to society as a whole seems sheer hubris.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that this passage from James doesn't rule out all expectations of the future playing a role in decision-making. It is not that Christians are forbidden from considering the future or making plans based on such considerations, but that all our plans must be written in pencil, not ink. This requires a certain chastisement of imagination, or perhaps better, imagination's acknowledgement that it is imagination. The future is uncertain; it is an arrogant boast to confuse pictures of a possible future with our desires for the future and assume that we can (or must) ensure the realisation of those desires.

The future is not ours to seize and shape, but God's to give and take. Our role is humble receptivity, trusting thankfulness, loving perception and hopeful prayer.

Does this stance foster passivity, a resignation in the face of suffering and so a complicity in failure to secure liberation for the oppressed? It can and all too often has. But it need not. And a thorough account of human action will be more open, more honest, more creative and more effective for taking the priority of divine grace more seriously. God initiates, we respond. Human action is reaction. That is the lesson of James.

This does not require passivity, rather an openness to the unfolding possibilities of loving God and neighbour, an openness in which we take seriously our situation and take just as seriously the Spirit's power to breathe new life into hearts of stone.

Each of us is thrown into a concrete historical situation that is neither of our choosing nor our fashioning, born within a family and culture that we can only receive. Rejection or reformation are, of course, forms of reception. We do not begin with a blank slate, even if we wish to shatter or erase what is written. We are born amidst a broken glory. Unbidden, we both rejoice and suffer as a result. Our world, our selves and our time are not creatures of our will, to be made into whatever image we desire. We receive them. And we receive them as the gift of God despite the flaws evident in them, giving thanks for what is good, trusting that what is not is not beyond redemption.

No deficiency in my self or my shared world or the span of time for my life is excluded from this trusting acceptance because at the heart of the world, self and time which I receive lies Christ, who is the hope of healing, of new life in the deadest of ends, of space to breathe.

And so the gift received is my life: my self, my world and the time of the former amidst the latter. And the hidden centre of that gift is Christ, who is the image of my true self, the founding principle of creation and the alpha and omega of time. Human action begins in humble receptivity towards and trusting thanksgiving for that gift.

Yet I am also called to account for what becomes of my self, my world and my time. The gift brings responsibility. Not only is the gift to be received, but understood, entered into and explored. The gift invites not mere submission of the will, but the delight of the heart, the joyful harmonising of the affects. Coming to know this gift involves not simply the intellect but crucially love. Only a participation in God's passionate concern for his creation (whether or not this is how we conceive it) enables us to see what is actually around us. The dispassionate observation of objective inquiry is frequently a necessary step in this process, but it is a limiting of focus that occurs within a broader framework of care. We learn about the world and ourselves and the time available to us because we care what happens, who we are to become. We are responsible for the gifts we have received.

And having become responsible, we therefore care about possible futures, about paths that open before us, about the destiny of the good things entrusted to us. We face future prospects because we cannot do otherwise without closing our hearts and hands. And faithful imagination requires the abandonment of false hopes, as well as the rejection of myopic assumptions that things must remain as they are. The pursuit of responsible care for the gifts we have received may require of us the rejection of utopian fantasies, but also the questioning of the status quo. What we may hope for along the way is neither ease nor comfort, but that the road we walk will not, ultimately, be a dead end, that our labours of love will not be in vain.

The future is not ours to seize and shape, but God's to give and take. Our role is humble receptivity, trusting thankfulness, loving perception and hopeful prayer.

The path of faith, hope and love - that is, the path of true human action in the way of the crucified and risen Christ - is narrow, dangerous and often not immediately perceptible. It can only be walked with prayerful dependence and an ongoing openness to correction and further guidance. But it is a journey into life.

Never trust a businessman: who said this?

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

- quoted in Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: An argument for hope
(Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010), 220.

Without using a search engine, have a stab at the author of this quote.

Discounting the future

Nicole Foss (a.k.a. Stoneleigh) nicely summarises the effects of crises, instability and uncertainty on human ethical deliberation: our horizons shrink. This is true of both temporal and relational horizon. Nicole has written before about the shrinking relational horizon in times of difficulty (when the chips are down, you stick with those you know and mistrust strangers and those who are other to you) and this recent post points out that much of human history has been lived from hand to mouth, with immediate concerns dominating our time, effort and thinking. When you're worried about where your next meal will come from (or, slightly less pressingly, worried about where your next pay packet is going to come from), you're much less likely to be able to reflect coherently upon or plan for longer term threats and opportunities. Practical and moral vision is narrowed and shortened in order to focus upon the immediate. This is one of the reasons that ecological concerns decline during recessions.

It is also why my expectation of growing economic and social disruptions over the next few decades signals bad news for our collective ability to respond well to the longer term threats our society faces. Human reactions to increasing perceptions of threat constitute a complex series of feedback cycles, both positive and negative, rendering linear trends hyperbolic. This is why specific forecasting has such a bad track record and why "bumpy" is about the level of specificity I'm willing to commit myself to in describing the coming decades.

Some human reactions make crises worse than they need to be. Food shortages can lead to hoarding behaviour that exacerbates the problem for those with least access to food. First order problems (e.g. hunger) can lead to second order problems (e.g. riots) that drain resources from addressing the primary problem.

Other human reactions can mitigate the worst of crises. Co-operation, trust and sharing can spread the burden of a situation upon more shoulders, making it lighter for everyone. Sudden shocks to the status quo can sometimes awaken the moral imagination to envisage a new way of life (or the renewal of old ways).

Which kind of feedback is likely to dominate? It is very difficult to know, and may well differ from place to place. How is it possible to create the conditions now under which communities of trust and co-operation can flourish during times of crisis? How can such communities maintain an openness to outsiders and strangers? And what kinds of communities of trust are able to face immediate challenges without discounting the future?

What shall we do? Twelve responses to converging crises

Responding to contemporary converging crises
Human society faces a series of converging crises in our economy, energy and ecology. It is very difficult to know exactly how these will interact and pan out. The depth and breadth of the problems can be overwhelming. Recently, a Christian friend asked me for personal advice as to what he can and should do to take these matters seriously. I made the following suggestions (what have I missed? Or how would you improve this list?):

1. Give thanks for the good world. There is so much going wrong with the world and yet it remains a good gift of the Creator. It is right to grieve, but a healthy grief requires the nurturing of our wonder and appreciation for the goodness of the creation that our actions are degrading.

2. Repent of the patterns of consumption and acquisition that lie behind so much of our destructiveness. Billions are spent every year in a largely successful effort to corrupt our desires, convincing us to covet the cornucopia of stuff that pours out of the world's factories. Learning contentment is at the heart of a good response, since it frees us from feeling the need to protect our toys or way of life and so enables us to focus on what is important and worth preserving (the glory of God, the welfare of our neighbour, communities of trust, the richness of God's creation, and so on). This may not end up "saving civilisation", but it helps us keep our heads when all around us are losing theirs.

3. Stay rooted in the gospel of grace, hope, peace and joy that celebrates Christ's death and resurrection so that you are free to grieve, yearn, groan and lament, that is, to pray. The temptation is to look away or harden our heart to the damage and the danger because it hurts too much.

4. Reject false hopes. We are not going to make it out of this place alive, either personally or as a society. The goal is not to secure immortality, but to love, trust and hope. Society is likely to change significantly or even radically during our lifetimes. The myths of endless growth, progress and individualism are likely to be unmasked for the illusions that they are (though this will be resisted because people hate to lose their dreams, far less to admit that their dreams were actually a nightmare). New illusions are likely to replace them. Survival is not your highest goal. Self-protection is a secondary consideration.

5. Assess your life and habitual patterns to see where your ecological footprint can be significantly reduced: eating less meat, flying less frequently or not at all, driving less or not at all, switching to a renewable energy provider, investing in insulation and local power generation, avoiding all unnecessary purchases and buying responsibly (e.g. food that hasn't been strip mining the soil, local products, durable products, and so on).

6. Invest in communities of trust. If and when things get difficult or there are significant disruptions to "normal", then people tend to distrust strangers, but to keep their friends closer. Get to know your neighbours and people in your local community. Strengthen your ties to a local church.

7. Engage organisations seeking to transition to a more resilient and less destructive society (such as the Transition Network, concerning which I'll have more to say soon).

8. Get out of debt, as far as possible. Debt is a bet that the future is going to be more prosperous than the present so that I can incur debt now and will have plenty to pay it off later. This assumption is becoming increasingly dangerous. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another (Romans 12.8).

9. Petition governments and corporations as citizens, not simply consumers. The roots of our problems are far larger and more systemic than consumer choice or personal greed. Structural changes are required to reduce the damage we are doing. Here is a good example of a letter to banks that briefly makes the case for disinvestment in fossil fuel projects on both ethical and business grounds. Such engagement may begin with petitions or letters, but it certainly needn't end there. Civil disobedience has a noble history in reforming unjust laws and practices.

10. Learn to garden or some other useful skill that you can share with others and which keeps you grounded in the material basis of our existence.

11. Keep learning more about the world and its problems and opportunities. We live in a novel period historically and we currently have the benefit of a large and growing body of research into these matters. Having some idea of the major threats and what they might mean for you, your community, your society and the world helps to orient your practical reason and will make you a more responsible citizen and neighbour.

12. Proclaim the good news, using every means you have, that Jesus is the true and living way, the dawn from on high that has broken upon us who live under the shadow of death and ecological disruption, and which guides our feet in the way of peace.

Media as a dangerous drug

"In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards."

- Charlie Brooker

I've been following Brooker's column over the last few months and enjoy his wit and insight, even if he does get a little silly sometimes.

My question for the day is, which media do you rely on for your information? Which sources do you regularly turn to? Are there any that you trust, or at least distrust less, or are you egalitarian in your cynicism? Are there any that you have lost respect for?

Life out of control

"In a culture of fear we must take great care not to assume that our attempts to become invulnerable to threat are necessarily consistent with God's purposes. In fact, as I will argue below, divine providence, rightly understood, teaches us to trust in God's future so that we may release our desire for control."

- Scott Bader-Sayer, Following Jesus in a culture of fear
(Grand Rapids, Mi.; Brazos, 2007), 123.

Do you sometimes feel your life is out of control? Do you always want to be "on top of things"? Is your primary concern to ensure that you and those you love are safe?

There is great liberation in acknowledging that life is always lived out of control. I am not able to ensure the removal of all risk and threat. In fact, sometimes situations of danger and uncertainty are precisely the opportunities for new paths forward. Vulnerability is not only being open to pain and loss, but also being open to new life.

Of course, the opposite temptation is to abdicate responsibility, to go with the flow and be a puppet of whatever forces you don't want to look at.

Freed to love: why (rich) Christians need to think about climate change

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

Galatians 5.13-14.

Freedom is ordered towards love; we are free in order that we might love, and in love become slaves to one another. Christian liberty is the freedom to do good to my neighbour. Central amongst the goods I might do for my neighbour is echoing the divine call to enter into this very freedom to love. And so part of my free service will be inviting my brothers and sisters into the service of those around them: "Let us serve our neighbours and do good to everyone, especially to the household of faith!"

Yet this service is not exhausted by issuing such an invitation. There are many other ways of serving one another as well as proclaiming the good news of freedom in Christ. To be of service to my neighbours, some of the good things I can do will require more specific knowledge of my neighbours and their condition and context. Do they need food? Do they need to learn how to fish for themselves? Do they need to have their fish stocks protected from illegal fishing? Do they need medical aid? Do they need a healthcare system that delivers better care? Do they need a friend they can trust? Do they need a society in which trust is prized and protected? What fear or guilt is oppressing them? Is a fearful society confusing their ability to discriminate between threats? Are they a victim of crime? Is corruption undermining the rule of law in their community? Are they addicted to self-destructive behaviours? Does their society encourage them towards the idolatry of greed? Towards superficiality of judgement? Does their lifestyle (and that of their society) contribute to reducing the freedom of others to love and serve?

The answers to these questions will not be easy or simple. They will not be found only by studying the scriptures (though that will of course be part of it!). To love our neighbour, we have to pay close attention to the world and how it works, including the disputed areas.

At stake is the relation of knowledge to ethics. Saint Paul prayed that the Philippians’ love would "overflow more and more in knowledge and depth of insight" - knowledge of God and the good news of Jesus, yes, but also knowledge of one another and the world in which they are called to love. We cannot love our neighbours without some attempt at understanding them, their history and gifts, their situation and the world which we share, including its threats and possibilities.

For example, Christians amongst areas ravaged by AIDS will need to come to an opinion about whether HIV leads to AIDS or not (this is hotly contested in parts of Africa, and there are campaigns against the use of retro-viral drugs, and shoddy pseudo-scientists throwing mud into the air). Christian parents will need to come to an opinion about the benefits and costs of immunisation (where again, confusing signals have often been sent by the media based on poor scientific work). And Christians with influence in energy, in public policy, or those with carbon-intensive lifestyles and with global neighbours who live in drought or flood-prone areas will sooner or later have to have some kind of opinion on climatology and carbon.

Not every Christian is able or obliged to answer every conceivable question about how to love our neighbours, or to evaluate the variety of threats and opportunities we focus upon. But Christians do need to think carefully about which sources of knowledge are trustworthy, and what we do with that knowledge. Will we trust the IPCC and the national scientific bodies of thirty-two nations when they tell us they have over 90% confidence that human activities (particularly those in developed nations) are significantly contributing to changes with very serious negative effects now and increasingly into future decades (particularly on the world's poorest peoples)?

God doesn’t give us an exhaustive list of who we are to trust and how far. But that doesn’t mean the question is morally irrelevant or that refraining from the discussion is the best use of Christian freedom to love. This may not be the only or the greatest moral issue of our time, but it is a very significant one.

Christian freedom does not mean that we are released from the responsibility to consider carefully the effect that our habits, actions and beliefs have on those around us. Quite the opposite: we are liberated from the intolerable burden of having to save ourselves or our world, and given many opportunities to do all kinds of good. Let us use our freedom in order to love.

Departing from fear

“The path out of fear is not power but trust, not strength but vulnerability before God.”

Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, 12.

Is it actually possible to fear not? So often, we think that the way to not be afraid is make ourselves stronger, become more secure through the acquisition of more resources, more money for a rainy day, or by hitting our enemies before they can hit us, or hitting them back harder than they hit us. Only when we have either removed the threat, or made ourselves impervious to it, can we let our guard down and cease our anxiety.

But a world where everyone is gathering more goodies lest they miss out is a world that is condemned to perpetual fear of our neighbour, and, increasingly, fear of the world itself that strains and groans under the demands we make of it. The only true and living path out of fear is trust. Trust in the God who provides abundantly. There is enough, and more. We can cease our desperate grasping and learn contentment.

But the path out of fear is not simply trust in God; we must also learn to trust our neighbour. This is a qualified trust, since trust has to be earned, or built, or grow. It is not simply bestowed unilaterally. Thus, I am not advocating a utopian vision that would recommend you leave your doors unlocked. Nonetheless, the way out of fear is showing yourself to be trustworthy and that you are willing to give some small sign of trust to your neighbour. Trust is built slowly as it is given and received. And fear is banished not by banishing enemies, but by loving them.

Of course, this is only possible through trusting the one who raised Jesus from the deadly hatred of his enemies. It is trust in this God that makes the attempt to love even a recalcitrant enemy thinkable. In this way, we make ourselves vulnerable to God, risking ourselves on his promise. We put him to the test, not in an empty show of self-aggrandisement, like throwing ourselves off a tall building to see if he sends an angel to catch us. No, we test him in the same way that Jesus did: through obedience, through not allowing fear to stop us loving our neighbour.
Eight points for guessing the country. Fifteen for the location.

GetTogether for reconciliation

Last night Jessica and I hosted a GetUp GetTogether for reconciliation in our flat. Thirteen people from the local community (only two of whom we'd met before) came along to hear each other's experiences and think about reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, especially as it relates to our local area. This gathering was one of around 350 across the country (see image for locations) organised by GetUp under the theme "From little things, big things grow".*

Quite apart from the content of the discussion (which was surprisingly high quality, given that most of us didn't know each other), I found the evening a fascinating exercise in community building. Again, I was struck by how hospitality is a key part of planting trust. I think it is rare for Sydneysiders (not sure whether this is true of urban Westerners more generally) to have strangers into their home. Sharing our spaces is part of sharing our lives.

Speaking of which, one of the Indigenous Australians who came along invited us all to a follow up event to be held at his local art gallery.

New single released
*From little things, big things grow is also the title of a new single released last week by GetUp in partnership with Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins and many more (and featuring Kevin Rudd). It debuted last week at #4 and you can spend $1.69 to buy it and help it get to #1. You might be able to guess that the idea was partially inspired by "Yes we can". All the lyrics come from Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations and responses made on the day by Indigenous Australians (plus a little at the end from Paul Keating's famous 1992 Redfern speech).
Before someone tries to score points for saying there are only twelve people in the photo, one member of the group had to leave early.

"In my Father's house": further reflections on John 14

A few weeks ago, I said I would post some thoughts on the following teaching of Jesus:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.                      - John 14.1-4

Having discussed Wright's reading of this famous passage in my introductory remarks, I'd like to tentatively offer a suggestion of my own. Where does God dwell? Heaven? The Temple? In Christ? The new heavens and earth? Yes, these are all true (in different senses), yet just a few verses later, another "location" is discussed.

Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them."

- John 14.23

Jesus speaks of coming with the Father to those who love and obey him and making their home with them. "My Father's house" might therefore be a reference to the indwelling divine presence amongst the loving and obedient community of disciples. How is this achieved? Through the sending of the Spirit of truth – the Paraclete ("Advocate", or perhaps "Helper"): 

"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in [or "amongst"] you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you."

- John 14.15-18

Thus, before we get to verse 23, if we were to ask where the Father "dwells" (what is his "house"), while the Jews might have said "the Temple", Jesus would have said "in me!" (14.10; cf. 2.19-21). The Father dwells in Jesus, and Jesus in the Father. In verse 23 we get a new movement: by the Spirit, both Father and Son dwell in the disciples (14.23), and so this community is also the home of God. Of course, the whole sequence can also be reversed: the disciples dwell in Jesus (by keeping his new commandment of love), and Jesus dwells in the Father.

Thus, could it be that the preparatory departure of which Jesus speaks in verses 2-3 is his death (and/or ascension), and that the return mentioned in verse 3 is not what is usually called "the second coming" (cf. John 21.22?) but is the arrival of the Spirit? If Jesus "goes" to the Father (verses 5-6), he (along with the Father) "returns" to his disciples through the presence of the Spirit. In the light of 14.23, if we ask where the post-Easter Jesus is, it seems he (and the Father) are with those who love him. Therefore, there are "many rooms" to his Father's "house" because there are many who do and will love Jesus. This is meant to be reassuring to the disciples: there is plenty of "room" in the church, always more space in the community of those who love and obey Jesus.

And what does it mean for the disciples to receive the Spirit of truth? On the one hand, it means a continuation of their love for Jesus by obeying his new commandment to love one another (John 13.34-35). On the other hand, it means that Jesus and the Father are not absent from the community. The disciples are not left as "orphans" because Jesus' Father becomes their Father (cf. 20.17), and neither Jesus nor his Father are absent from a community guided by the Spirit of truth into the love shared between the Son and Father. This will be how Jesus reveals himself to the disciples (though not to the world: v.22): through the very "ordinary" (though actually totally divine) experience of love. If they love one another, then this experience of community is itself the proof and the taste of being included in the divine life of self-giving love. They have been welcomed into the Father's house when they welcome one another in love. They know that Father, Son and Spirit are with and in them when they are with and in one another. And this, unsurprisingly, is where Jesus then goes in chapter 15.

In sum, I am convinced that John 14 doesn't teach the common Christian misconception of going-to-heaven-when-you-die in any straightforward sense (for more on this, see my earlier series). Jesus is reassuring his disciples that the impending violence, betrayal, confusion and bereavement of the next few hours will not leave them at a loss. Though Jesus is going, the Spirit is coming, and with him the common life of love with Jesus experienced by the disciples will continue.