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Fehlende Folgen?
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14 JULY 26
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Good morning.
Like millions of others, I stayed up late on Saturday, watching the England men’s team play Norway. It’s actually the first live game I’ve watched this World Cup, and not just because time differences make for very late finishes. What attracted me was that I would be watching it in a crowded bar alongside several hundred of the Church of England’s most committed members, bishops, vicars and lay people, gathered in York for the summer meeting of the General Synod. From the moment we roared out “God save the King”, with a raucous enthusiasm sufficient to send any self respecting choir leader running for cover, to the joyful air punching which greeted the final whistle, we were bound together in a common cause.
Watching the match in York with my colleagues brought home to me that neither following Jesus nor following the England team are things I’m satisfied doing on my own. My faith is far more than a combination of private beliefs and personal moral practices. Yesterday morning, along with most of my fellow Synod members, or at least those of us who had recovered from the match, I attended the main Sunday Service in York Minster. The hymns we sang differed somewhat from the chants I hear on a Saturday afternoon, as a season ticket holder at Salford City’s home fixtures, but both are an expression of a shared commitment and belonging. So, whilst there are plenty of churches whose services I could follow on line, some of them with Premier League quality preachers, the moment Covid restrictions were lifted, I was straight back in church. I need to be worshipping God as part of a congregation gathered physically together. That’s where I belong.
But gathering in church is not the end of the matter. The final prayers of the Church of England Holy Communion Service often include the plea, “Send us out in the power of your Spirit, to live and work to your praise and glory”. It’s a powerful commissioning, one that underpins how Christian faith breaks out beyond the church doors, equipping us to serve both our communities and the whole creation. It’s a reminder too that we are not simply sent on private missions, but to work together, tackling the inequalities and injustices so visible in the world around us. That, for me, is a faith worth belonging to. A faith that needs to gather together.
By Wednesday’s semi-final, Synod will be over. I’ll be with another of my tribes, in Parliament. And with all due respect to the other home nations, who are no longer contenders for the cup, I think Britain will be better governed if the palace authorities can match York University and find us a big screen, so we too can watch the game together.
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11 JULY 26
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Good Morning.The Government recently published its draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices that aim to change someone sexual orientation or trans gender identity. Parliament will debate the detail, as it should. Laws matter. They define the standards by which we choose to live together and, at their best, they protect those who have too often been left vulnerable. Just a few days later, I found myself walking through central London at Pride as one of the Co-Leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism. It was the first time our new Movement had marched together, and the first visible Jewish presence in the parade since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. The new law and Pride belong together. One asks what a society will protect, the other asks what kind of society we hope to become.After the parade, someone sent me a message. They wrote that, growing up as a gay Jew, they could never have imagined their rabbis marching at Pride. They said seeing rabbis there would make it easier for people to believe they don’t have to choose between their faith and who they are.I’ve carried those words with me all week.As a student at rabbinic college, I had the privilege of being taught by Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose warm, wise voice became so familiar to generations of Radio 4 listeners through Thought for the Day. He was the first openly gay British rabbi. Long before inclusion became part of our public vocabulary, Lionel simply lived his life with humour, honesty and deep faith. In doing so, he quietly expanded people’s imagination of who could speak with religious authority. Perhaps that is how change really happens.Laws matter because they protect people from harm. They draw a line around what a society will no longer tolerate. But communities have a different responsibility.The law tells us what is unacceptable.Communities show us what is possible.The Torah repeatedly tells us to “walk” in God’s ways. Faith is not simply about believing the right things. It is about choosing where we stand and alongside whom we walk.That may be why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, after marching for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, that he felt as though he was “praying with my feet.”Sometimes our feet say something our words cannot. Perhaps somewhere on the streets of London last Saturday, someone looked up and saw something they had never imagined before: rabbis walking at Pride, openly and joyfully.If so, then perhaps they also caught a glimpse of something else.That while the law can protect us from harm, a community, at its best, can help us imagine a future in which we truly belong.
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09 JULY 26
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08 JULY 26
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07 JULY 26
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06 JULY 26
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04 JULY 26
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Good Morning.Last Wednesday I conducted Annabel’s funeral. Diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Annabel took the attitude: ‘Whatever time I’ve got left, I’m going to use to make the world more beautiful.’I’m taking her resolve with me as we enter a bleak period in the Jewish year, three weeks of mourning, culminating in the Fast of the Ninth of Av. We remember the sacking of the Jerusalem Temple, the destruction of Jewish life across history, and all the destructiveness in our world today. I love people, animals, birds and trees. When I see how we kill each other and treat nature with contempt, how forests burn and waters are poisoned, my heart aches with fear and grief.That’s when I remember Annabel, and the wonderful Matt Biggs of Gardener’s Question Time. Looking out on a piece of wasteland during chemo, he redesigned it into a gorgeous garden so that others would find solace while having their infusions. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ he said in his final broadcast, ‘but if it doesn’t have one, make it!’ He saw nature as God’s home, and understood its healing powers.There’s a rabbinic maxim: When your heart is broken, try to cling to creativity, not destruction.So many people do just that. There’s Gabrielle, who breeds turtle doves, a lovely bird with rust-and-black wing feathers, almost extinct in Britain. She’s inspired twenty-eight local farms to grow hedgerows with the seeds these doves need. Now hundreds are flying and nesting free. Across our faiths, EcoJudaism, Eco Church, Eco Sikh, Eco Mosque and Eco Temple, we’re working together to plant and restore. It’s the opposite of climate crisis denial, and we’re doing it with love. Malini Mehra, of London Climate Action Week, which just ended, writes how ‘in the big story of climate, love is underrated…[T]hat’s a mistake. People protect what they love. It’s the single most powerful driver of action.’ ‘I don’t love only hedgehogs,’ says Hugh Warwick, trustee of the British Hedgehog Society and author of A Prickly Affair. But you start with what you love.The love that drives us is fierce. It’s deep love for people, nature, the whole interdependent community of life and above all for the children, to whom we’re determined to leave a thriving, wonderful world. Destructiveness, taught the rabbis, comes from causeless hatred. It’s causeless because it brings only more hate. Creativity comes from causeless love, love whose only purpose is to make the world more caring, just and beautiful.
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03 JULY 26
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01 JULY 26
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30 JUNE 26
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29 JUNE 26
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27 JUNE 26
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With the re-emergence of Andy Burnham as a Westminster politician, people have become fascinated by his backstory. The most recent episode is his time as Mayor of Manchester – responsible not just for the city of Manchester but also towns like Bolton and Rochdale and Manchester’s immediate neighbour, the City of Salford. One idea Burnham mentions frequently in connection with his time as Mayor is what he calls the politics of place – the idea that politics must concentrate on meeting local needs.
One reason why I find this so fascinating is because of the years I spent studying and working in both Manchester and Salford. For some of the time I lived in Manchester, and the rest in a Salford tower block that used to appear in the opening credits of Coronation Street.
Much of the old Salford I knew has gone. The docks have been turned into Salford Quays with the Lowry Centre there paying homage to the painter who made recording industrial Salford his personal vocation. Row upon row of houses have been lost and old communities with them. Some things stay the same, though. Poverty is still visible but in post-industrial Salford there are different employers.
It’s not only politicians but faith groups too who have to think about meeting local needs in conventional or different ways. Salford Roman Catholic Cathedral, where I used to worship on Sundays and has just reopened after a three year restoration, was built in the 1850s. It served a huge, mostly Irish, migrant community attracted to jobs in the north west. Catholic bishops then were criticised for being triumphalist as they were restored to Britain but Cardinal Wiseman riposted that all he wanted was to serve the poor, living in squalor, wretchedness and disease. Yet for all that the Catholic Church wanted to make buildings beautiful for God. There was a tension there between serving the poor and honouring God.
Nowadays there’s another tension as somewhere like Salford Cathedral seeks to work out its future role. Should it restore past glory or reinvent new ways of doing things? Churches have to do this to survive. There’s a new, vital requirement to focus on safeguarding to protect children. At Salford, the cathedral continues to serve the poor but nowadays that means a foodbank.
Now, as well as the traditional parishioners living alongside the cathedral there are more office workers . The cathedral still has Mass on Sunday but now there are daily lunch time services for the local workforce. It’s a simple way of showing that even when life changes, churches and cathedrals can still find a way to inspire, welcome and console those who pass their doors – a kind of theology of place.
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25 JUNE 26
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Good morning. If you’ve ever seen the musical ‘Godspell’ – and yes, it’s still in the repertoire for colleges and theatre companies round the world – you’ll remember the catchy opening chorus: ‘Pre…ee, pare ye, the way of the Lord…’ – I’m tempted but I’m not going to sing it – the point of the chorus is to accompany the arrival of John the Baptist, the herald, of Jesus.Today, the 24th June, the Church celebrates the birth of this extraordinary figure of Jewish history, who appears not only in the Gospels but in the writings of the first century Jewish historian, Josephus. John’s birth is traditionally the 24th June, 6 months before Christmas, and it also comes just after the Summer Solstice – and that has symbolic meaning too, because John reportedly said of Jesus Christ. ‘He must increase but I must decrease’. However bright the sun is in today’s sky and however long the day, we’re on the way down to long nights and shorter days. John the Baptist is known as the forerunner, the one who, as the chorus insists, prepared the way of the Lord. Yet he did not see his hopes fulfilled, at least not in the way he expected. He was arrested by the local puppet King, Herod Antipas, and beheaded in prison in a macabre episode when Herod’s niece, Salome, danced so fetchingly before Herod that he offered her any reward she would like – and she asked for the prophet’s head on a platter. Yuk. Oscar Wilde wrote a one-act play about it, and I remember playing Salome’s evil mother who had prompted the request. So John the forerunner, the herald, ended up disgraced, confused, betrayed – and was never quite sure whether Jesus was the one whose coming he had prophesied or whether it would turn out to be someone else. John’s story makes me realise how little we understand the significance of our own lives. We’re all part of a stream of history, we come and go, but the stream goes on. There’s so much in society that tells us we can be who we like and achieve what we want, that our sole purpose is to maximise our own significance. The story of John comes as a corrective. We are not Messiahs, World Kings, or even as one world leader puts it, ‘Very Stable Geniuses’. Yet we all have some capacity for discernment. We can practise truthfulness and generosity and be humble before God and one another. What comes after us we cannot know but all of us we can hope and pray the days ahead will bring flourishing and peace to ourselves and our overheating planet.
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