This last week has seen the publication of another video showing a brutal attack by US police officers on a man they had just arrested. The officers apparently did not care that they were being filmed by their own body cameras. We have also had the testimony from a Russian officer of the torture of Ukrainian PoWs, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. It is not hard to see links between these isolated examples of inhumanity and the dreadful mass genocides that characterised the 20^th century and which are also likely to feature in this century. At their root is the failure of the perpetrator to recognise his or her shared humanity with the victim. I would like to believe it is unthinkable that I could ever do this, but I am aware that the US police officers, the Russian soldiers, those who involved in mass genocides, quite possibly also considered themselves as moral and decent individuals; at least, at some stage in their life that is how they would have appeared. I was disturbed some years ago by a documentary about an idealistic Lutheran priest in Germany, who began by opposing the Nazi party but then freely joined the army at the outbreak of the Second World War and ended his life on the Eastern Front. 

One of the more difficult concepts in Christianity is that of “original sin”; that we all have something dark within us.  It has been misused to terrorise people. But at its core there is a warning we would all do to heed; we have the potential to do evil as well as good. I do not believe that I or any rational person I know would commit an atrocity. However, the best guarantee of that is if we constantly examine our own consciences. As a Christian, I must do that against the teachings of my faith, to see how often I fall short. 

There has been considerable discussion in recent weeks in the popular scientific press about the new discoveries coming from the James Webb telescope. This is a space telescope that uses special techniques (infra-red detection) to obtain images from objects that would be invisible from earth. It was launched in December 2021 and despite some problems, pictures are now flooding in; these can be seen by anyone with access to the internet (ESA – Webb). It has the ability to advance our understanding of the origins of the universe and to shed light on many other questions in astronomy. Very recently it has sent back pictures of a planet from another galaxy; this is the same size as our earth, although it is not clear if it has an atmosphere. As more earth-like planets are discovered, it becomes more and more likely that we are not the only life in the universe. 

Some people may feel that their faith is threatened by new discoveries such as those made by the James Webb telescope; personally I am excited by them. There is no point in looking in the Bible for answers about the physical formation of the universe; scientific enquiry was not something that its writers would have known about and even if they had, I doubt it would have been much interest. They were curious about the relationship between God and ourselves, not beings on other planets. But they did grasp that God was, in some sense, creator and Lord of all the universe, even if they did not see any need to speculate how that actually worked out. It is more recent writers who have started to address this question. As we are still technically in the church season of epiphany until this coming Thursday, this gives me an excuse to reproduce the words of the late Sydney Carter’s carol, “Every star shall sing a carol”, which beautifully capture my response to the discoveries coming from James Webb.

Every star shall sing a carol!
Every creature, high or low,
come and praise the King of heaven by whatever name you know.

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

When the King of all creation had a cradle on the earth,
holy was the human body,
holy was the human birth.

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

Who can tell what other cradle,

high above the Milky Way,

still may rock the King of heaven on another Christmas day?

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

Who can count how many crosses,
still to come or long ago, crucify the King of heaven?
Holy is the name I know.

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

Who can tell what other body
he will hallow for his own?
I will praise the Son of Mary, brother of my blood and bone.

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

Every star and every planet,
every creature high and low,
come and praise the King of heaven by whatever name you know.

God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.

As has been made very publicly and painfully obvious by the publication of a certain book, we cannot chose our relatives and there are often tensions within families. Whilst we talk about “brotherly love” and “the sisterhood”, I am sure we are all aware that the reality is sometimes rather different. It does not have to be open hostility; sometimes family members simply do not have much in common and so naturally lead separate lives. I am fortunate in that I had a close relationship with my parents and whilst I have no brothers or sisters, I am supported by cousins, aunts and uncles, but I am aware that this is not the case for everyone. 

The Bible reflects this dilemma. The family, the household, was the building block of society, but the book is full of stories of brothers quarrelling, of mothers and daughters scheming or wronged. Paul talks about how all believers are members of God’s family, but it seems that there were times early in Jesus’s mission that his own family did not understand what he was doing. The Bible is honest about human ideals but also human failings. Perhaps a Christian perspective allows us to be honest about the relationships we have within our families; to accept failure with grace and to seek to love our relations, even if we do not always like them. 

Last Thursday (12^th January), the church remembered Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in the 12^th Century. He does not seem to have always been a terribly easy man to get on with; this is often the case with religious leaders. His writings can be difficult. In particular, he put friendship as a higher virtue than love. However, Christians are called to love everyone, including our enemies. In practice, this can mean that at best we remember those we do not like in our prayers or thoughts, perhaps through gritted teeth. By contrast, our friends are those whose company we seek, they are those for whom we have real love. As someone who lives alone, I am comfortable with my own company, but this is only because I am periodically energised by conversations and meetings with my close friends. 

 In John’s Gospel, the writer explores how Jesus, in the Last Supper, told his disciples that they were his friends, as he was their friend. The friendship that Jesus and Aledred were talking about is the highest form of love; perhaps I know this for only one or two people, but it is something that I cherish. 

Last Thursday was the funeral of Pope Benedict XV. I would not normally find much value in the thoughts of a conservative Pope and indeed, I do disagree with him on quite a few issues. I also suspect even his admirers will admit he was not a great leader. But the tributes that have been paid to him, by people who I do respect, have made me think again about the man. Benedict, first and foremost, was a scholar and a person who taught that Christianity was “reasonable”, in contrast to some beliefs and philosophies. By this, he actually meant that the Christian faith is open to study by human reason; we can and should use our minds as well as our emotions to engage with it and there are no places where we should not venture. From this came an important conclusion; because Christianity can be studied and debated, in turn Christians can apply their reasoning to critique society and politics. Faith is not just a private eccentricity, to be tolerated as long as nobody mentions it in public; it must challenge and engage in public debate. He particularly condemned what he called the “tyranny of relativism”; that there is no such thing as an absolute truth. In an age when some, especially in politics, seem determined to push their own view of what is true and false, in contradiction to reality, it is well to remember that in God we are confronted with absolute truth.  

Fresh from a World Cup, with the Premier League due to start again, my thoughts drift towards the greatest line ever in a film, at least that I can use in public as a vicar. “The disappointment I can take, it is the hope that kills me”; John Cleese, in “Clockwork”. Now if you are an avid listener to “Thought for the Day”, you might know where I’m going with this, as I’m basing this on a broadcast a couple of weeks ago. But even if you did hear it first time round, it is worth repeating. Because behind the words in the film is a truth. Hope can sometimes be an enemy, when it is an unrealistic hope, when it is dodging the truth, an attempt to escape reality. As a vicar, I sometimes worry that when I hear people speak about what they believe, they are actually hiding behind false hope. 

I think the Christian Hope is rather different, because it is grounded in the reality that we remember at Christmas. Our hope is “God with us”; it isn’t that all our problems will magically pass away, it is that whatever happens, nothing can tear us away from the love of God. And the grounds for this hope are because God has entered into our world as one of us, experienced all that the world can throw at us, culminating in death upon a cross and triumphed over that at the end. As the carol puts it, “man shall live for evermore, because of Christmas Day”. That our hope, that is why we celebrate this season. 

So in the week before Christmas, my thoughts turn to football…. But it was Albert Camus, a famous French philosopher who claimed that he learnt about the human condition whilst playing as goal-keeper in his local football team. And so, through the tears, I turn back to the events of last Saturday night, when yet again England fell at the quarter-finals. But it was not the match itself that struck me; I’ve watched enough football to know about the disappointment. It was the films of the England supporters watching on the big screens set up in city centres. How they shared joy; the exuberance when England scored. How they shared disappointment; the huddles at the final whistle as they embraced each other and exchanged words of consolation, trying to make sense of how they felt and how they would go forward. And then I thought about the surveys that, for many decades, have shown how people increasingly have rejected organised religion, especially, in the country, Christianity. That is true, but in the moments of glory and dejection of a big sporting event, people share in a what I can only call a spiritual experience; they share the emotions that I feel in my faith. Of course, you do not need to believe in God to experience these emotions, I doubt many of those jumping and weeping would have given the Divine a second thought. But I think it does show that we are all spiritual people; that is something that contributes to how we respond emotionally and perhaps intellectually. For those of us who have a religious faith, that gives us a way of understanding and responding to the “spiritual” side of our nature. But everyone, whether religious or not, shares in a spirituality. 

A piece of research from Harvard Business School recently caught my eye. It concerns the increasing polarisation in society. This is particularly an issue in the USA, where there seems less and less tolerance in political debate as people take extreme positions. I fear that in this country we are not far behind; we seem to be losing the ability to disagree gracefully with others. The research showed that people seem to follow those with more pronounced views on a subject than themselves; they then move their views to coincide with the views of the person they have just read or heard speak. As a consequence, there is a move to the extreme, be it left or right and a loss of toleration of different opinions. Whilst this is particularly apparent with the availability of the internet and social media, the problem is a very old one; the case for “civility” as it has been called, has been made over the centuries. 

Of course, people of faith are as prone to intolerance as anyone, as can be seen in the some countries, where religious leaders are cheerleaders for extreme views. But I would suggest that this comes from a misguided, or perhaps wilful misreading of religious traditions. With Christianity, we are ultimately called to follow the teachings of Jesus, who advocated extreme love, including to those with whom we disagree. The standard is so high that, if we are honest, we will fall short, which also ought to give us some humility. Perhaps if we followed the Good News of the Kingdom of God rather than trends on social media, we might avoid the drift to intolerance and follow instead the path of civility.