Tag: society

Fill your hearts with joy and gladness

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Fill your hearts with joy and gladness” by Timothy Dudley-Smith.  This is put in the ‘harvest thanksgiving’ section of the hymn book, so I thought the start of September, the ‘Creation season’ in the Church, would be a suitable time for it.

The hymn as a whole is based on Psalm 147 which in the NRSV Bible is subtitled “Praise for God’s care for Jerusalem”.  It’s really only the third verse that is about harvest and all that’s needed for a successful one: “Praise the Lord for times and seasons, cloud and sunshine, wind and rain … grass upon the mountain pastures, golden valleys thick with grain”.  The first verse does also have a creation aspect as it praises God as creator of the “starry heavens”.

The second verse is more about the fact that this creator God has a relationship with people. “Wounded souls his comfort know; those who fear him find his mercies, peace for pain and joy for woe; humble hearts are high exalted, human pride and power laid low”. The last verse reminds us that peace and prosperity are dependent upon society following God’s laws and walking in his ways. In fact this psalm, and much of the Bible, is addressed to all God’s people rather than to the individual. The modern ‘Western’ reading of the Bible as an instruction manual for individuals misses much of the point that it requires the whole of a society to buy in to a religious or political philosophy of the common good, for it to flourish.  The ‘prosperity gospel’ (believe in Christ and follow his teaching, and you’ll become wealthy) makes sense at a societal level, and if wealth is understood in a much wider sense than mere monetary value, but not at the level of the individual.

The Bible in a Year – 5 September

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

Please excuse the delay in publishing the notes for the end of Daniel and all of Ezra, with only brief comments, as I was on holiday for a week and only making short notes to be typed up later.

5 September. Ezra chapters 6-7

The account of Darius’ search for the records of the reign of Cyrus is a fascinating one.  Remember, this is at a time when the people of Britain did not even have a written language by which subsequent generations could record their activities.  The Persians must have had a very good ‘civil service’ to have kept such records.

When the Temple was finally rebuilt, the Passover was celebrated, presumably for the first time since the Exile nearly a century earlier.  The Persian king Artaxerxes also gave gold and silver, blessed the rebuilding and even allowed Ezra to appoint local judges (7:25) as well as to organise the Temple worship.  In return the Jews were asked to pray for the king, an arrangement perhaps similar to the medieval chantry chapels where a priest was employed in return for promising to pray for the king while he lived and for his soul after his death.

This idea that the role of religion is to act as a stabilising force in society, connected to the justice system, and that the state should pay for the clergy in return,  is largely absent from our western ‘liberal democracies’ today, except for example in Germany and some other northern European countries where there is a “church tax” on an opt-out rather than opt-in basis, and in England where the national Church is still tied up constitutionally with the state (although church members do now have to pay for their priests, at Diocesan level).

 

 

The Bible in a Year – 6 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

6 June. Ezekiel chapters 21-23

This is where Ezekiel’s prophecies turn really nasty.  In summary, chapter 21 is a pair of prophecies, poetic in form but certainly not pleasant in content, against Judah; 22 a more specific list of the sins of Judah and its leaders; and 23 another allegory (like earlier ones, but even more graphic) of Israel and Judah as prostitutes in their dealings with other nations. In one sense there is nothing new here, it is his consistent message, but now with added sex and violence (in fact if I were to quote some of these verses of the Bible, which probably do not appear in any lectionary for public reading, this blog would be blocked by content filters).

 

Is all this irrelevant to us in 21st century Britain? Unfortunately not.  These words read shockingly just days after a terrorist knife attack in a part of London that I know well: “A sword for great slaughter, it surrounds them; therefore hearts fail and many stumble. … Attack to the right! Engage to the left! – wherever your edge is directed.” (21:14-16)

 

The charge sheet of sins directed against God’s people, which are the cause of the violence of the sword that they are about to experience, includes many failings of our own society. It does not take much paraphrasing of the text of 22:6-12 to read these charges as: dysfunctional families, injustice for immigrants, insufficient support for the poorest in society, sexual violence, a financial system that leads people into debt, and dishonesty in business.  Those charges can certainly be laid against Britain today.

 

But the charges also include a loss of a sense of what is holy (26), a failing that is not mentioned in the secular media and yet is at the root of the problem. There is undoubtedly a connection between the secularisation of society and the breakdown of communities. The word ‘religion’ ultimately means ‘connection’ – connection between people as well as between us and God.

 

Is there any link between these failings in our society and the terrorism that afflicts us?  I would say yes, but not in any simplistic sense.  Our problems, like our sins, are connected increasingly with those of the world as a whole, but that does not mean that the sins of individuals have nothing to do with it. Much of Ezekiel’s prophecies are directed at nations, and the whole sweep of Old Testament history is the story of the rise and fall of kingdoms, yet the previous chapters have made it clear that sin is the fault of individual persons, and God’s judgement is also on them as individuals. This whole question of guilt and punishment is a complex one.

 

What holds it together is a sense that everything that happens, however horrible, is in some way part of God’s plan. But again, this is not to be taken simplistically.  Christianity has no sense of fatalism – “the will of God” does not mean that we have no choice.  On the contrary, none of these prophecies limits the fundamental human freedom to choose good or evil, a choice we see played out in the Bible from beginning to end. There is always a call to repent, always an opportunity to receive God’s forgiveness and love as an individual, always the option of playing a smaller or larger part in the redemption of the world rather than its condemnation.