Complexity

Last weekend we were walking through the Great Court of the British Museum when I heard someone near me say: 'The thing is I don't actually like old things'.  Now that struck me, due to our present circumstances (i.e.in a museum) as a bit odd!

I have to say I'm rather taken with 'old things' and history has always been one of my favourite subjects. Because of that, and also its excellent acting, I really enjoyed re-watching Alan Bennett's play/film 'The History Boys' earlier in the week.  It charts the progress of some lads from a Sheffield Grammar School as they prepare for the Oxbridge entrance exam. The school, conscious that this was their brightest group of a generation, brings in a special tutor to coach them.  These boys knew the facts of history and wrote 'passable' essays.  The trouble was their work was 'dull' - that is instead of developing an interesting or unexpected line they simply churned out the fact as they saw them.  Their new tutor isn't so much interested in truth but interpretation.  He wanted their examiners to be startled by their work rather than become bored by its predictable content.

Well it makes for a good play but it also poses serious questions about what we do with knowledge, facts and the complexity of statistics.

Our guest preacher/lecturer on Sunday evening addressed some of these issues as he spoke to us on 'Ecology Matters'.  Bob, with a lifetime of research behind him, made us aware that no one should take the science of something so complex as climate change as a 'settled' given.  We can all too easily become either an advocate or sceptic based on false and lazy assumptions.

There is, I sense, (and always has been) a brand of Christianity that longs for simple, watertight answers. Yet the more I experience this pilgrimage the less 'obvious' some of those so called answers become.  Week by week I prepare sermons on lectionary passages that seem to me far from straight forward when it comes to interpretation or even application.

Yet none of this need either depress us or cause us to run away from the tough questions of faith.  Struggle seems to be a natural and often worthwhile part of any normal life.  In the struggle - as we pray, study and live this Christianity, I sense we eventually discover that which is of real worth.

Running away and taking refuge in easy, comfortable answers would mean us missing so much.  But we have to be 'up for it' and willing to live with that sense that maybe in the end we are actually searchers for truth rather than its guardians - as Brian McLaren, a modern theologian puts it:

'Does one have to be wrong and the other right?  I mean, it's right there in the Bible - the sons of Rechab in the Old Testament and John the Baptist in the New served God by being total abstainers from alcohol, and Jesus served God by turning water into wine.  Talk about complexity!'

All good wishes,

Ian