Today’s News in Limerick Form, #4

A face from the Old Middle East
in the lid of a breakfast-time feast?
Is he saying, I ponder,
to this family in Rhondda:
“Beware of the Pharisees’ yeast”?

Intelligent life?

So the boffins have been using computer simulations to estimate the chances of intelligent life arising on some of the 330 exoplanets so far discovered.

While researchers often come up with overall estimates of the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe, it is a process fraught with guesswork; recent guesses put the number anywhere between a million and less than one.

“It’s a process of quantifying our ignorance,” said Duncan Forgan, the University of Edinburgh researcher who carried out the work.

Less than one form of intelligent life in the universe? Quantifying our ignorance? Well, I had my suspicions…

Today’s News in limerick form, #3

“Go Jade, we have made our decision:
save Royaume-Uni from derision!”
But despite all those votes,
can a song with six notes
really go on to win Eurovision?

Today’s News in limerick form, #2

“The manner in which Jesus died
was brutal, it can’t be denied.
To Gentiles it’s foolish -
to Sussex folk, ghoulish.
So… let’s not preach Christ crucified.”

Actually, this news needs a bit more comment. I mean, I can understand – sort of – the nervousness of the church concerned that their sculpture of the crucified Christ might be just so stark that it puts people off, and their impulse that an empty cross might direct people more towards resurrection hope. Part of me is sympathetic to the concern not to “put people off” by having such a “scary” sculpture in the equivalent of the shop window.

But… well, part of me says no, if we are to recognise the depth of God’s love for us then we must allow it to confront us in the fulness of Good Friday’s agony.

The first time I visited Rome and the Vatican was as a teenager. I don’t remember much about the visit, but I do recall the one piece of artwork that struck me more deeply and immediately than any other, from the busts to the Sistine ceiling. It was a small and simple desktop crucifix – wrought iron I think, certainly not gold or silver – upon which the figure of Christ was seen not hanging serenely but jutting his chest forward in agony.

I’d go so far as to say that the image was formative for me. I was strongly reminded of it years later in ministerial training, when I encountered some very similar renditions in the set of images “The Christ We Share”.

An image of Jesus on the cross may well be unpleasant. It may well send shivers down the spine – indeed it surely should. But where will such an image testify more strongly to the truth it depicts: at a church, or in a museum?

Today’s News in limerick form, #1

He’s old, yet he’s young. Big hair too.
His vehicle is boxy and blue.
Change of actor again
in two thousand and ten -
but all I can say is: er, Who?

“To the ends of the earth, not to the end of our tethers”

Simon Barrow of Ekklesia writes on the missiological aspect of the current strife in the Anglican Communion. We’ve been here before, he says – as early as the first century CE and the angst between Peter and Paul, between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians:

What does all this have to teach us today? Well, it might suggest to us that Jerusalem isn’t always right – or wrong! It might make us ponder the idea that if we take the Bible seriously, then scriptural precedent… should not become an obstacle to the Good News and to God’s gracious work among those we may have come to think of as unclean or unworthy. The mission of Acts is to the ends of the earth, not to the end of our tethers.

Clerical dress

Well I’ve never seen a bishop’s mitre that looks like this before.

I can see how the chin-strap might come in handy, but I wonder whether it’s just a little too Jean-Paul Gaultier for the Church of England.

Full story here.

An anointed State?

In ancient Jerusalem the dominant description of reality revolved around the conviction that (a) the temple is YHWH’s permanent residence; (b) the monarchy is YHWH’s chosen agent; and therefore (c) the city is safe from and immune to the threats of history. Mutatis mutandis, the dominant description of reality in U.S. society is that (a) democratic capitalism is the wave of the future that is sure to produce peace and prosperity; (b) the United States is God’s chosen agent in the spread of the gospel of democratic capitalism; and (c) the United States is by divine assurance immune to the threats of history. In both ancient Israel and the current sense of self in the United States, there is a theologically rooted exceptionalism that imagines privilege and entitlement of idolatrous proportion… We have, in the U.S. church, spent a very long time ceding over our evangelical voice to accommodation, to an alliance with U.S. exceptionalism and a timid refusal to say what we know most deeply. [W. Brueggemann, The Word Militant (Fortress Press 2007), 18]

Brueggemann writes in and to the contemporary U.S. situation; I as a Briton would be the first to add that his critique applies no less strongly to British colonialism and empire of recent centuries.

Praying…

“If you believe and I believe, and we together pray,
The Holy Spirit must come down and set Zimbabwe free…”

(traditional Zimbabwean hymn dating from the War of Independence)

Obiter dictum

BBC News reports that a man has been convicted of assaulting two cousins, one of whom had founded a “Jedi church”, while they were playing with light sabres in their garden. The villain posed as Darth Vader (well, he wore a bin bag), jumped over the wall and whacked the victims with a crutch.

Earlier, when [the accused] failed to arrive on time, District Judge Andrew Shaw issued an arrest warrant, adding: “I hope the force will soon be with him.”

Classic. Who says judges don’t do pop culture?