Last time I spoke from this lectern, I started by talking about a bank branch a few metres down High Street. I am going to talk about banks again. A nationalized bank at that. Seventy percent of the Royal Bank of Scotland is owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury … well, the better name is the taxpayers’ Treasury, our Treasury. In turn, RBS owns the NatWest bank in England; we have a branch down the road. Before I get too much into the banks, let me take a detour, and talk about oil. I promise to come back to banks … ’cause that seems to be where the action’s at, these days.

In 2003, I attended the Congress of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. In one of the sessions, I heard for the first time about the idea of extracting petroleum from tar sands. A representative of the oil company Shell Canada explained that, to extract the oil from the tar sands, one burns a quarter of the oil to extract the other three quarters of the oil. This sounded very inefficient to my ears. But as the world is running out of oil, the companies are counting on oil being expensive enough one day soon for this to be worth their while.

One of the places where tar sands are found is the Alberta Province in Canada: there is the Canadian connection. Land inhabited by the indigenous peoples (or First Nations) of Canada such as the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, will become wasteland because of the removal of trees at the open-pit mines, and because of the toxic waste products from the oil extraction process on site. I am now wearing a T-shirt: in front it asks: ‘eat money?’ On the back, it has a saying, a short poem:

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
will we realize we cannot eat money

Guess who said this? The Cree people. The same Cree people said this, decades if not centuries ago. A large area of Alberta, roughly the size of England, will be blighted in this way if it is not stopped.

And the surprise is that we all, all of us, are funding this destruction. Not directly of course, but through our collective ownership of the Royal Bank of Scotland. A recent report Cashing in on Tar Sands (commissioned by campaign groups such as People and Planet, and researched by the thinktank Platform) set out the specifics of the Bank’s investment in tar-sand projects. This was flagged up in the newspaper The Guardian. The corporate responsibility chief of the Royal Bank was allowed the right of response. What did he say? I quote: ‘RBS [...] has not provided any finance directly to tar sands projects in the last three years’: end of quote. Watch out for the weasel words … the adverbs. I repeat, quote: ‘RBS [...] has not provided any finance directly to tar sands projects in the last three years’: end of quote. On Thursday 11th of March this was printed in The Guardian. Unlucky for him, on Wednesday 10th of March, a local paper in Alberta, the Calgary Herald reported that RBS opened an oil-and-gas advisory office there. It quoted RBS Canada executive Larry Maloney’s announcement, quote: ‘we feel there’s a good niche for us to play’: end of quote.

If you are surprised and outraged, well, the Members of Parliament on the parliamentary environmental audit committee were too, Tuesday 9th in the same week last month. The Treasury officials seemed nonchalant, though the MPs turned up the heat on them: the Treasury just wanted RBS to make money – as much money as possible, whatever the cost. So here you have a caricature – a real-life, bleeding-edge caricature – of what the Accra Confession is trying to tell us, to get us to recognize. The big structure – the Empire – rolls on, growing in the wrong places and sucking resources greedily like cancer. This is sold to us as economic growth – as something of value, the only thing of value, against which all else must be measured. But people’s lives – especially those of the poor and the indigenous peoples – see little improvement if at all. The environment is ruined. And the worst: we are inextricably bound up in the whole business. And this goes on, as our planet turns, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, whether we notice it or not.

It would be pretty bad, pretty sad, if that were the end of the story. Thankfully, it is not. Another bank, this time the Co-operative Bank, is funding the Cree people in their court case against the tar-sand developers. If you have not noticed, the Co-operative Bank is also owned by some of us, its customer–members. People and Planet, a campaigning charity, is taking the Treasury to court for a judicial review on this matter. Our sisters and brothers in the Reformed-church family, the United Church of Canada, is working on the ground, trying to reconcile those who are bent … hell-bent … on this kind of development and those who look upon it with horror.

So there is some hope, though the shape of it is not entirely clear yet … this, as we would recognize between Easter and Pentecost. What are we to do? How do we get this power back, that is rightfully ours? As consumers, as investors, and taxpayers, as voters, and as Christians, followers of Jesus Christ … in all, as citizens both of this country and of the other country: there is something for us to do. As our sisters and brothers remind us through the Accra Confession: There is some confessing to do. There is some repenting to do. Some changing of minds. Some naming of idolatry. Some rejection of anathema. Telling apart Mammon from God. Yes, there is some work to do. We can talk about this after the service. Perhaps the discussion, and the action, will take as long as our lives. God help us. Send the workers. Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.

Luke 15:11–32 (Prodigal Son).

May I speak in the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. Amen.

A few years ago, I went to the National Theatre in London, to see Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, in a version by David Hare. With 20th-century hindsight, the German playwright Brecht retold the life-story of the 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei. Today, on this Ash Wednesday, I want to talk about the nature and motivation of scientific pursuit: this play happens to provide some hooks for my thinking. So, at the risk of substituting a theatre review in the place of a sermon, here I go.

If you recall, Galileo championed the theory of Copernicus that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church forced him to recant this view. The famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’ Is this modern science a good thing in the round? Was the Church right to slow Galileo down after all? Galileo’s 17th-century contemporaries did not have the benefit of hindsight and retrospection: They were riding the wave of the Renaissance, pregnant with the prospect of rationalism’s triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But now, a few decades after Brecht, no one in our times can be so sure of the liberating promises of rational progress anymore. It appears we are about to destroy many of the existing species in our biosphere, and make life more difficult for most of our own species, through man-made climate change. We may soon run out of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, leaving a large fraction of us too unskilled to cope with fuel poverty.

The longest-living legacy of the human species is likely to be our radioactive waste. It would be good if a few pieces of paper in the desert and some stone carvings survive this. But that looks unlikely; even if that is the case, those that survive would be the so-called ‘atomic-heritage’ manuals, teaching those to come how to safely manage the radioactivity. (Yes, some scientists are actually planning for this.) This is not the worst case scenario actually. But these manuals are not as interesting as the works of Dante Alighieri, depicted in one of the chapel windows.

There are two survival strategies open to us, the Homo sapiens species. The first is advocated by the so-called transhumanist extropians. These are people trying to live in gated communities, walled countries, with large arsenals of arms to keep everybody else out. These are people trying to preserve their bodily selves – or rather, their (near-)dead bodies – in cryogenic suites. (But who is going to keep them plugged in and frozen when our energy runs out?) These are people planning to colonize the Moon and Mars. This is rationalist thought, carried to its logical conclusion.

The second strategy is that of (what we now call) ‘the poor’ and the ‘hippies’. These are resourceful people who are self-sufficient and resilient, who have not been too-absorbed into the globalized monetary economy. They are of all sorts, and more likely to emerge from (what we now call) the global South. ‘All sorts’ are the keywords here: ‘all sorts’.

Let me return to Brecht’s depiction of the dynamics between Galileo the scientist and the Church of his times. The conventional, rationalist wisdom blames the Church for trying to limit the progress of science, and counts it fortunate (or, inevitable) that reason’s march cannot be halted, if paused by the ‘martyrdom’ of Copernicus and the forced recantation of Galileo. ‘Traitor of science!’ they cry, against Galileo.

Brecht, a socialist, cannot bring himself to totally demolish this rationalistic paradigm upfront, but he still questions it as any thinking person in the 20th century has to. The present production at the National Theatre had images from the Visible Earth project for the backdrop, but equally appropriate, if anachronistic and less subtle, there could have been a mushroom cloud, an utterly disappointing scene for gung-ho believers of absolute rationalism.

Following Brecht, I would also not go so far as to say that the Church had it right all along, but rationalism and blind progress certainly did not have it right all along. No, the Church definitely cannot smugly say ‘I told you so’. Perhaps the Church did not express herself in quite the right way? Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history?

‘What are we for?’, Brecht’s Galileo asks: Are we scientists to be ‘inventive dwarfs for hire’, working for the highest bidder? Or can we have ‘science in the service of humanity’ (as often attributed to Marie Curie)? ‘human-scale science’? Is it possible for the scientist to work, not for fame or profit, not even for the gratification of gratuitous ‘curiosity’, ‘Reason’ with a capital ‘R’, or ‘science for science’s sake’; but as a bird makes a nest, as a tree bears fruit, as a beaver builds a dam, as bees make honey? Or is this one of the human activities where it bound to be more complicated than that? Is it asking too much? or indeed, too little?

What I am trying to ask is: whether the scientific pursuit can be without the alienation of labour, as in the Marxian analysis – after Karl Marx; equally in the Christian sense, can it be a vocation. That is to say, can a scientist say nowadays: I am doing this neither for greed nor for fear? The Prodigal Son, in our reading this evening, was first bound … spellbound by greed for the imminent inheritance; then bound by the threat of poverty; before finally finding his home again, where he started. Can a scientist say: this my scientific pursuit is where my deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need: this is truly my calling?

These questions are even more poignant nowadays. Giles Fraser, a radical Christian cleric from St Paul’s Cathedral in London, wrote in the Church Times last month: ‘As modern science is so extremely expensive to conduct, often even too expensive for governments, it becomes something done by pharmaceutical companies and those manufacturing weapons. These days, it is in places such as these that most scientists work, and not in universities. This means that science is now done mostly by big business and to make money.’ Some present in this chapel know well that even the research and teaching done in universities are now driven by the profit motive, by the drive for commercialization, by the requirements of UK plc, rather than driven by curiosity and education.

[Story about freshers’ first physics tutorial in Oxford – ad lib.]

I ask again: Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history? Almost ten years into the new century, I am still trying to understand the last one. (Can one speak of ‘coming to terms’ with the 20th century?) It is as if humanity, or at least a large part of it, after learning how to read, write, and take the square root, has now graduated from school and reached adolescence. This young man (allow me to be gender specific here, which is not entirely inaccurate) – this young man, he then proceeds to squander the inheritance which his parents and ancestors stored up, all in a very short time, spending it in a self-destructive way, however instantly gratifying.

Does this sound familiar? Perhaps, one day he will find himself down with the pigs and suddenly change his mind (μετάνοια) – change his mind – repent. I just hope it won’t be too late to go back to his dad. What would his brother, living in the South, out in the farm, say? ‘Dad, I have always worked for you, but you never cooked a little young goat for me. This chap, he spent all his money at the brothel, but now you give him all this bling-bling and throw a big party for him!’ Me – after thinking this through, I now know slightly better how the Prodigal Son will feel, upon hearing this.

If you remember the two strategies open to our species I mentioned earlier: which one are we to choose? Bob Marley sings in his song ‘So much trouble in the world’: ♪ ‘You see men sailing on their ego trips | Blast off on their space ship | Million miles from reality | No care for you, no care for me.’ ♫ Prodigal endeavours, such as space exploration, only become a legitimate exercise once we learn how to live sustainably, within the bounds of a planet. Rather than engineering ourselves to get out of this planet post-haste, we should first try to engineer ourselves to be able to stay in comfortably.

Maybe the Prodigal Son will eventually settle down, have a small family, and start thinking for his children. One can only hope. Amen.

Here are some highlights from each the speakers, with links to their texts for the gentle readers’ perusal over Christmastime:

Grand Mufti of Syria:

So, let us build a new generation that believes that the civilisation of mankind is a common work and that the most noble of all is mankind and freedom – after God, of course. If we would like to see peace in the world, let us start from the land of peace: Palestine and Israel. So we can tell people, as the Pope said years ago, rather than building the wall, let us build the bridges of peace, because Palestine is the land of peace. Considering how much it costs to build that wall, we could actually allow Christian, Jewish and Muslim children to attend the same school and to live as brothers and sisters in a school of peace.

Dr Asma Jahangir:

In my opinion it is important to start at an early age with getting acquainted with the approaches of your neighbours or of other religions. This would not necessarily need to involve long-distance travel, but, for example, could be organised by setting foot and meeting people at your local church, mosque, synagogue, temple or other places of worship. The size of the groups – especially for grass-root interfaith meetings – should not be too big, in order to give the interlocutors an opportunity to speak and to get to know each other personally.

The Ecumenical Patriarch:

For Orthodox Christians, the icon, or image, stands not only as an acme of human aesthetic accomplishment, but as a tangible reminder of the perennial truth. As in every painting – religious or not, and notwithstanding the talent of the artist – the object presents as two-dimensional. Yet, for Orthodox Christians, an icon is no mere religious painting – and it is not, by definition, a religious object. Indeed, it is a subject with which the viewer, the worshipper, enters into wordless dialogue through the sense of sight. For an Orthodox Christian, the encounter with the icon is an act of communion with the person represented in the icon. How much more should our encounters with living icons – persons made in the image and likeness of God – be acts of communion!

The Chief Rabbi:

What is a covenant? A covenant is not a contract. A contract is made for a limited period, for a specific purpose, between two or more parties, each seeking their own benefit. A covenant is made open-endedly by two or more parties who come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to achieve together what none can achieve alone. A contract is like a deal; a covenant is like a marriage. Contracts belong to the market and to the state, to economics and politics, both of which are arenas of competition. Covenants belong to families, communities, charities, which are arenas of cooperation. A contract is between me and you – separate selves – but a covenant is about us – collective belonging. A contract is about interests; a covenant is about identity. And hence the vital distinction, not made clearly enough in European politics, between a social contract and a social covenant: a social contract creates a state; a social covenant creates a society.

The Dalai Lama:

As a human being I believe – and for a number of years, many of my friends have agreed with my views and feelings – that in modern times there is too much emphasis on the importance of material values. We have somehow neglected our inner values. That is why, in spite of materially being highly developed, I have noticed there are still a lot of people – even billionaires – who are very rich but are an unhappy on a personal level. So one of the most important factors for happiness or joyfulness is very much to do with peace of mind, a calm mind. Too much stress, too much suspicion, too much ambition and greed I also think are factors which destroy our inner peace. So therefore, if we wish to achieve a happy life, there is no point in neglecting our inner values. These inner values are not necessarily what we bring from religious teaching, but I feel they are a biological factor we are already equipped with: warm-heartedness or a sense of responsibility, a sense of community.

By the way, the latest issue of New Left Review (number 54, November/December 2008) has a symposium on Robert Brenner’s book The Economics of Global Turbulence, also mentioned here earlier.

I walk down High Street and I see a sign: ‘Good news! Your debts paid – free of charge.’ If I see it in a bank window, I might well think of alerting the Financial Services Authority and the Advertising Standards Authority. But if it says ‘Jesus pays for my debt, and yours too! Come in for the Good News!’ in a church window like ours, I might not think twice. Well, maybe it is time to think twice! Maybe such statements need to be considered not just metaphorically, but literally.

What about today’s reading? If I wanted bad news, it is not difficult to find them in the newspapers. When I want good news, I find it from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But where is the good news in today’s parable? The weeping and gnashing of teeth do not sound like it. I struggle to look for the good news, whilst reading the bad news from the newspapers – banks are not lending to each other, and to people who need loans. Then the master’s suggestion to the third slave of investing in – or lending to – the banks almost sound like the macroeconomic prescriptions from the ilk of the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervin King and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling: ‘We gave you all these billions of pounds, now go get it moving out there!’

Maybe the good news lies in this suggestion: Money is not at all useful if buried in the ground, but – in the idea of John Maynard Keynes and many others – the worst thing you can do with money is accumulate it and not spend it, not to give it away or get it moving somehow. Remember that dishonest manager in the other parable? He earned his master’s praise by cancelling debts … and he made lots of friends in the process!

Now back to High Street. This Thursday at Church Meeting, we were asked to consider an interest-free loan of five thousand pounds to the Oxford Credit Union. It was indeed a difficult decision to make, and I am sorry that I was not here with the Church Meeting in your deliberations. Well, since it is interest-free, we might not do as well financially as the first and second slaves in the parable, who got twice the money they started with. But with the support we are already giving to the Oxford Credit Union … plus our future support, in whatever form … we hope the Body of Christ is literally helping some people in Oxford manage their money and their debts in a better way. So maybe the message of the Cross, the message of this bread and this wine, is worth sticking up in a church window after all. Maybe it can withstand the scrutiny of the Advertising Standards Authority after all. ‘Jesus pays for my debt, and yours too! Come in for the Good News!’

It was Mike Benedetti who got me interested in the Apocrypha. I remember that summer nearly ten years ago, sitting in a hotel room in Iqaluit, Nunavut, tired from hiking, but discussing Bel and the Dragon (and, incidentally, also Thomas Aquinas) with some enthusiasm. It is quite a blessing that the early Councils of the Church gave us four Gospels rather than just one ‘consensus version’. I recall that there were a few quarrels about the Letter of James, and (common with Judaism) Song of Songs. John Calvin did not write a commentary for the Revelation of John. And my New Revised Standard Version, in its table of contents for the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books, had entries such as:

(c) in the Slavonic Bible and the Latin Vulgate Appendix
2 Esdras (= 3 Esdras in Slavonic = 4 Esdras in Vulgate Appendix)
(Note: In the Latin Vulgate, Ezra–Nehemiah = 1 and 2 Esdras)

So, unlike people who claim that the Bible is somehow divine data (à la the Book of Mormon) that has to be interpreted literally word-for-word (I overgeneralize), I am glad to have inherited a Bible with fuzzy edges. This does not make me take the fuzzy-edged Bible less seriously – in fact, one has to take the Bible more seriously.

Look at it this way. The Acts of the Apostles (‘Episode 1’) is a sequel to the Gospel according to Luke (‘Episode 0’). And now we are at about Episode 21, in the 21st century. And Paul, when he wrote his letters, probably did not expect all Christians in the last 20 centuries to agree with him on every single point! He probably would be surprised if everything he wrote were to be taken as timeless truths. I now see the Bible as a collection of stories alive and constantly inspired by the Holy Spirit; one that is still being written. Kanye West had it right: If the Bible were written today, he would be in it. We all would be in it.

But with such standard, the arrow of history (of the Christian Church) points straight at my nose – and yours. Do we live our lives worthy of inclusion in the stories of the saints, not just those in the Old and New Testaments, but down the last 20 centuries as well (and those to come)? Do all my text messages and email to sisters and brothers stand up to the calibre of Paul’s? Faced with these questions, I can only work out my salvation with fear and trepidation (and lots of joy!).

So, here is my Bible with fuzzy edges, which comes with a big arrow pointing at my nose and a big cloud of witnesses.

(For a good set of sequels, see Justo L. González (1984) The Story of Christianity, 2 volumes. San Francisco: Harper. ISBN 0-06-063315-8 and 0-06-063316-6. I am also looking forward to my friend Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ambitious project History of All Christianity Everywhere with the British Broadcasting Corporation.)

kua, aimu qa-rimk =ka haw!
sikawma=pa=iku timaimu.
qnaRu zin-na sikawman-ku timaimu: assi =ka trapus haw.
snaquni zin-na 'lak si, mai =ita q<um>nut.
nia-niana zin-na -ta nani na 'lak si, mai =ita paq-sukaw tu anem.
snaquni zin-na =ita na 'lak si, qa-nngi-an -ta anem -ta haw.
m-ati =ita sni-sni, mai =ita s<m>ap-sapang haw.
mangay =imu snaquni haw.
paqa-qa-nngi =ita m-atiw ta 'lak-an haw.

Alright, you do keep quiet, please!
I shall talk to you.
Because I shall talk to you[:] do not forget about the old teachings.
No matter what other people do to us, let’s not get angry.
No matter what other people say to us, do not feel sad.
No matter how other people behave to us, we should be nice to them in our heart.
Wherever we go, we should not be mischievous but behave ourselves.
You should watch out [for] what might happen.
We should be careful when we go to other people’s place.

The Kavalan people were evangelized by Saint George Leslie Mackay.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

What does this mean?

Answer: To be sure, God provides daily bread, even to the wicked, without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that God may make us aware of his gifts and enable us to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.

What is meant by daily bread?

Answer: Everything required to satisfy our bodily needs, such as food and clothing, house and home, fields and flocks, money and property; a pious spouse and good children, trustworthy servants, godly and faithful rulers, good government; seasonable weather, peace and health, order and honor; true friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.

Slavoj Žižek (2000) The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For? ISBN 978-1-85984-770-1.

Terry Eagleton (2007) Jesus Christ: The Gospels. ISBN 978-1-84467-176-2. This is the New Revised Standard Version of the Gospels introduced by Eagleton and edited by radical cleric Giles Fraser. It is pretty cool that Verso is following the Gideons. On this note, I might mention that recently, I bought the Revised English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. My copies of both of these are with the Apocrypha (though the collection there is different), and the NRSV is the ‘Anglicized’ text; both are published by the Oxford University Press. I thought each of these represented very wide (as wide as allowed in the current climate) ecumenical English-language translation work in either side of the Atlantic.

If you are planning a Jagerstatter event or teaching about him, here are some useful resources.

Holy cards: These can be ordered from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. They’re asking a 25-cent donation per card. There’s a funkier card available from Pax Christi for $1.25.

I’m distributing the CPF version of the holy card around Worcester.

DVD: You can order a DVD of the Jägerstätter documentary “The Refusal” from the Center for Christian Nonviolence for $5. I haven’t seen it yet.

Handouts: The Catholic Peace Fellowship has two handouts, in PDF format. In Sign of Peace vol 2.3 (pdf) is the article “In Light of Eternity: Franz Jägerstätter, Martyr.” They also have a lesson plan: Following Christ in a Radical Way: Conscientious Objection and the Story of Franz Jägerstätter (pdf).

Articles: The Wikipedia page on FJ could be much better. I believe that the standard book on FJ is Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness.

I took many of these links from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. I hope the other Pie and Coffee editors will revise this article as they see fit.