Steve Taylor, the American Christian singer and satirist most known for his songs I want to be a clone and I blew up the clinic real good sings in the song Harder to believe than not to.

“Shivering with doubts that were left unattended, so you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.  Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few, it’s harder to believe than not to.”

The song, from his I Predict 1990 album, is a sharp change from the other tracks and takes its title from the writing of Flannery O’Connor.  Those lines have stuck with me for twenty something years.  Sometimes they have provided me with comfort, sometimes they have provided me with an excuse.  Believing that the path I’ve chosen to walk is hard with difficult consequences.  And sometimes it is too hard, hence the excuse.

A second conistsent refrain in my life are the word Jesus says to Thomas in John 20 “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” I’m someone who struggles with a lack of tangibility.  I need to see something myself to believe it.  This struggle manifests both in my journey and in my ability to build flatpack furniture (the only time Sarah and I argue is when we do do DIY – until I work out how to do it for myself, I will not listen to her, even though she knows better.  We no longer do it together.  It’s just not worth it).  From the point of view of tangibility, I have no idea what a personal relationship with Jesus even remotely looks like.  I’ve been thinking about that for a long time too.  This week I’m going to try and get those thoughts in order.

Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’m off for a walk as I’m in Prague and it is spring time.

A confession to begin with: the subject of the Resurrection is not something I have actively thought about in some time. To be honest, I’ve not actively thought about a lot of things recently. I have two small children, three year old Joel and one year old Simon. While they bring me endless amounts of delight, they have not exactly added to my intellect (although thanks to Joel I now know way more about diggers, cranes and suction excavators than I would ever have expected to). A consequence of all of this is that I have got very lazy with my time. Time to myself is invariably consumed by the medium that requires the smallest amount of my energy. There is plenty of crap television and crappier internet to swallow that time. Increasingly my indulgence of this has led to an uncomfortable existence. I’m not so naïve that spending an evening watching Barcelona v Chelsea this evening or perusing the back catalogue of www.theoatmeal.com is in itself a bad thing, but I’ve been looking to change my default setting.

On leaving New Zealand in 2001 I drifted in and out of a few churches in Edinburgh and Oxford. In 2003, on realising that I needed to a more substantial commitment, I joined the Home community in Oxford (www.home-online.org). This Easter Sunday we gathered for breakfast and an Easter service. During the service we were tasked with writing down on a paper leaf our hopes and dreams for this new season. The leaves would then be used to ‘foliate’ a bare tree in the grounds of the vicarage. Not being able to come up with a specific hope or dream and, after a few minutes of empty thoughts followed by a moments panic when I realised a) that I was running out of time and b) that Simon was about to draw on the (brand new) carpet, I scrawled down the word ‘Action’. I guess I could have equally written down the word ‘discomfort’. What I’m wanting for is to be pro-active with my world, to actively engage both my brain and my body, to challenge my status quo. Perhaps it was an answer to that prayer that later that day an email from Jo arrived asking me to blog on the subject of the resurrection.

For reasons of culture, history and convenience I wear the ‘Christian’ label but I seem to have forgotten the ‘Christ’ in Christian. So in this post Easter period, what I hope to explore is the Resurrection of Jesus within my consciousness. So if Jesus rose from the dead and is present in this world, how do I relate to that and what are the implications for my life?

Here are the lyrics..

We were blessed by the minister who practiced what he preached
We were blessed by the poor man who said that heaven was within reach
We were blessed by the girl selling roses who showed us how to live
We were blessed by the neglected child who knew how to forgive

We were blessed by the battered woman who didn’t seek revenge
We were blessed by the warrior who didn’t need to win
We were blessed by the blind man who could see for miles and miles
We were blessed by the fighter who didn’t fight for the prize

We were blessed by the mother who gave up the child
We were blessed by the soldier who gave up his life
We were blessed by the teacher who didn’t have a degree
We were blessed by the prisoner who knew how to be free

We were blessed
Yeah, we were blessed

We were blessed by the mystic who turned water into wine
We were blessed by the watchmaker who gave up his time
We were blessed by the wounded man who felt no pain
We were blessed by the wayfaring stranger who knew our name

We were blessed by the homeless man who showed us the way home
We were blessed by the hungry man who filled us with love
By the little innocent baby who taught us the truth
We were blessed by the forlorn, foresaken, and abused

We were blessed
Yeah, we were blessed
Yeah, we were blessed
We were blessed.

The country has made strong economic progress in recent years but there are still around two million people who cannot be sure of eating every day.  The northern regions of Ghana are considerably poorer than the coastal and central regions and a large part of the northern population is dependent on farming and small-scale, “informal” activities like market trading.  Poverty is greater, incomes are lower and the climate is harsher than in most other parts of the country.

In Ghana, in common with most developing countries, life is harder for women, who are responsible for home, family and work. Amongst women, widows have a particularly difficult time, especially in the north, where tradition and poverty combine to produce a life which is precarious, lonely and often overwhelmingly challenging.  Feeding the family is a daily challenge; buying a notebook and pencil for a little girl’s schooling may well be impossible.  Widows in the north are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

Dorcas works with four widows’ groups in the towns of Nalerigu and Tamale and the villages of Moglaa and Janchegu.  There are around 250 widows in the current groups, the majority of whom have children. The overall aim is to ensure that the widows’ groups remain strong and that the widows are able to support their families all year round.  The work is divided into project areas which cover practical matters such as providing tools for work, agricultural support, micro-loans for business use, school supplies, mosquito nets and help for the village women who make shea butter.  Dorcas is very small but very practical.

Some of the widows in Nalerigu have made a plea for help to keep their academically able young people in school.  Many young people leave school at fifteen or sixteen to go to the big cities to the south (such as Kumasi and Accra) to try to earn money to put themselves through High School.  This is usually a poor choice which can result in teenage pregnancy, exploitation and poverty.  As a church, Home has chosen to help establish a small scholarship fund to help keep these young people at home with their widowed mothers.  They will be able to start their adult life with a High School diploma and more life chances than their parents had.

This partnership between Home and the Dorcas Foundation will mean that Home’s members will learn about life in northern Ghana, while making a real difference to the lives of young people in a small town thousands of miles away.

Palm Sunday : Gathering at 5pm (at St Albans) for final ‘Falling Down’ cycle gathering (‘Open Source’) + Palm Sunday prayers

Good Friday : Stations of the Cross + Eucharist – 2pm at St Albans (no kids ministry but creche toys for the little ones)

Easter Day : Bring and share breakfast + eucharist – from 845am at Matt & Pippa’s

Would be great to see you at any or all of these gatherings.

‘When I am weak, then am I strong’    2 Cor: 12.10      – the experience of failure

In our Lenten theme, ‘Falling Down,’ Paul is writing to the Corinthians about his ‘thorn in the flesh’; an unspecified disability which turns out to be a good thing insofar as it keeps him aware of his need of God. Similar thoughts are also expressed about Jesus himself in the passage from Hebrews we have just heard. ‘Although he was a Son, he learnt obedience through what he suffered’.

Paul’s statement is a paradox. Someone cannot be both weak and strong. We should perhaps let a paradox remain a mystery and not try to resolve it. And yet that is what the author of Hebrews has done. Suffering is justified if we learn something worthwhile from it, and no lesson is more essential than obedience to God.

It may sound easy to obey God but actually it isn’t. Over the Christian centuries, the Church’s task has often gone horribly astray. The long history of coercion, of variations on ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, has left a legacy of which this egalitarian age heartily disapproves. It’s therefore worth reminding ourselves what obedience to God can really look like. A patient, confident searching and enquiring mind, in which fear is met with kindness, respect is met with intimacy, and adoration leads to tough realism and creative vitality.

The remarkable thing about Christian history however is that cruelty in the Church has never had the last word: and for this we can thank the witness of Jeremiah –

‘I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

This personal knowledge has always trumped fear. We may want to argue about what precisely God’s law says, but that it exists… that we can intuit right and wrong and feel passionate about it… this is what makes us fully human and defines our freedom.

In John’s gospel, Jesus also engages with the paradox of a strength that lies concealed within weakness. His thoughts take flight with urgency and splendour. We learn that a whole field of wheat emerges from scattered grain: that a timeless life awaits those who conquer their material desires: that obedience unto death is honoured by God’s friendship. And at this point God Himself cannot resist joining in. ‘Yes’, he says, ‘and it will be Yes and Yes and Yes again!’

The theme I have been asked to address today is the experience of failure. If weakness is perhaps a personal quality, failure is a social one. We fail by standards that society has given us. This failure in the eyes of others then reflects back upon the individual in the form of shame, which is a specific and often devastating kind of weakness, one that weakens us further. The Church has, by and large, kept a certain distance from society in order to maintain its own criteria for success. While our government focuses on economic growth, the Church, if it is doing its job, is obedient to God. What do failure and success look like when we Christians are being obedient?  I will take three examples.

Firstly, we can decide not to care whether we succeed by the world’s standards. Rising above success and failure appeals especially to young people, faced for the first time with the complexities of adult life. One may read the effect of Paul’s paradox in this way. He takes contraries that normally do battle over time and throws them into the same present moment. The result is an attitude to life that is unconcerned and carefree. Here is Bob Dylan in his song, Love Minus Zero/ No Limit.

My love she speaks like silence         Without ideals or violence            She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful   Yet she’s true like ice, like fire

Some speak of the future                                                                      My love she speaks softly                   She knows there’s no success like failure             And that failure’s no success at all

The paradoxes queue up: speaking like silence, true as both ice and fire, there’s no success like failure. Sensibly, Dylan also opts out of the paradox: of course, we all know that failure is not success. One can seem too clever.

It is easy to make of Dylan’s unconcern a cool pose, but it is actually the hard won outcome of experience: indeed it looks more like resilience.  When he was asked by a journalist what he meant by ‘there’s no success like failure’, he replied

‘When you’ve tried to write this story about me, if you’re any good you’ll feel you’ve failed. But when you’ve tried and failed, and tried and failed – then you’ll have something.’

I sometimes wish that those who speak for the Church would take this advice.

A collective transcendence of success and failure is crucial to its reputation. Whatever opinion we may hold in the ticklish debate over gay marriage, we must agree that the Church has once again been caught appearing to exclude and to shame.

My second example departs from another paradox, that of the playwright Samuel Beckett, who wrote

Ever tried, ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again, fail better.

In obeying God, what might it mean not to turn failure into success, but to fail better? In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we encounter the following verse passage.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,                               who, though he was in the form of a God,   did not regard equality with God    as something to be exploited,             but emptied himself…

This self-emptying of God, which we are asked to imitate, is a different way of thinking about weakness and strength, failure and success, and obedience to God. When we are weak in the normal course of things, we regret it and we pity ourselves: we put ourselves to bed and ignore the phone. When we fail, we take our shame where it cannot be seen. These are setbacks and tragedies that befall us. But self-emptying is not like that. It is voluntary. It is weakness chosen from a position of strength. I suppose the common word for self-emptying is humility, but it can be difficult to adopt humility: it too often comes across as a way of manipulating more attention and power for ourselves. So I prefer to use other practical examples. Not interrupting when someone is talking too much…queuing for food when hungry…letting a car into a slow traffic stream…waiting for an important result…picking up litter.

What is it about such behaviour that brings us closer to God? As I have said, it is important to distinguish real self-emptying from the self-conscious and self-advancing kind. Another biblical concept can help us here. It is the word usually translated as ‘stumbling block’. In the Greek of the New Testament, it is ‘skandalon’ from which we get our word ‘scandal’ – an event so unusual and so wrong that it seems to trip us up and hopefully, make us think again. In Luke’s gospel, when Simeon greets the Christ child and his parents in the Temple at Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit reveals to him that Jesus is a living embodiment of the skandalon. I quote –

The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling  and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many shall be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

Here is yet another paradox. Jesus is the stumbling block. When we trip up, when we fail, when we make an idiot of ourselves, it is Jesus who shows us what we’ve done: Jesus who helps us slowly to recover and try again. When we are furious with ourselves for not succeeding, it is Jesus who attends, shrugs, laughs, waits for us to see the funny side. When we blame others unfairly, it is Jesus who wags a finger and whispers ‘Aha! That’s not going to work, is it?’ Jesus as skandalon is conscience, the practical mechanism of obedience to God.

We have thought about rising above failure; and we have revealed the hidden functioning of Christ at every point of failure. My third example of obedience to God takes me to my own work as a counselling psychologist. In the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, we come across the following –

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

‘Desires’ I think can be left to speak for themselves. A larger telly, a bigger car – these can be obvious distractions from obedience to God: but what about devices? ‘The devices of our hearts’ sounds remarkably like psychology to me.

What is it that prevents us from being obedient to God? How do we manage to ignore his generous concern for us? How do we unlearn our lessons? To answer these questions, we have to start with the threat that weakness and failure pose to our very existence. There is actually no rising above them, no certain hope of recovery. Because, by and large, we find this unbearable to think about, we resort to a convenient thought mechanism which goes like this. ‘I don’t want it to be like that, so I’m going to choose to believe that it isn’t like that. I’m going to wrap myself up in this belief and repel all arguments to the contrary’. The mechanism is called wish fulfilment.

It is very important to distinguish wish fulfilment from religious faith. Wish fulfilment ultimately lacks resilience. It cannot survive failure because its source is in the self’s desperate need to survive. As a result, it has found all sorts of cunning ways to keep going. A wish fulfilling church will always feel a bit anxious about its obedience to God. Is it doing enough? Will it merit success? It comforts itself with extra liturgy: its clergy overwork: it starts a righteous crusade. Such a church will struggle to recognise how far it has drifted from God because it has usurped his role, becoming the source of its own judgment and its own mercy.

For many people, including myself, what we choose to call religious faith actually begins as wish fulfilment and only slowly takes on the quality of true obedience to God. It does this through encounters with Jesus as skandalon, meeting failure and weakness head-on: all those times when we do not expect to survive and then find, thank God, that we have. Religious faith is sourced outside the self: obedience to God has true bounce-back-ability. It dispels anxiety. It instils patience. It is pleasantly surprised by success.