Melt Down in the Moot House

And so as the temperature passed 90°F in the Moot House this afternoon, we had to face a terrible fact.

Not that the world is becoming increasingly hot, though that is disturbing.

Not that the most powerful men in the planet are engaged in a ceaseless flurry of activity to stoke up the warming. Through "drill, baby drill," and endless unnecessary data centres, churning out pictures of trolls carrying badly-rendered Union Jacks and American flags in the cause of "patriotism". Because what says "authentically Ingerlish" more than trolls with bizarre fingers and back-to-front Union Jacks in a computer-generated image that costs the earth?

No.

Worse even than that.

The tea lights have all melted.

So we have spent the afternoon combining them into a giant tea light in the shape of Andy Burnham, "King of the North". Whose puzzled looks and puffing cheeks are now topped by a flame rising from the top of his head, as we celebrate the Feast of St Andy. So we will eat us black pudding pies this evening, and prepare for the liberation of England from something undefinable by a bloke we'd half forgotten. Or, at least, its liberation until in 2 years' time the Labour party panics at the state of the polls and installs Angela Rayner, Jess Phillips or Nigel Farage.

Still - I hope all the Beaker Folk enjoy the Northern Pie Experience. We've packed plenty of tripe in with the black pudding. You can't get much more authentically northern than that.

Trinity Sunday Sermon - pre-release

Every year we get the stress from the people preaching on Easter Sunday. The illustrations that are blatantly heretical. The crying because the vicar has gone away and left the curate to preach (mostly the congregation crying rather than the curate).

So I'm saving you the trouble.

Before you even get near Trinity Sunday. 

It's a traditional three-point sermon, based on insights from three theologians:

1. 'Tis mystery all (Charles Wesley)

2. It's a mystery (Toyah Wilcox)

3. A mystery it is (Yoda)

We may have the wrong Yoder.

St Walpurga's Blight

That's the trouble with such a dry spring.

We lit the Walpurgisnacht / Beltane Wicker person. Next thing we knew the Moot House was surrounded by flame. All the dry grass was just asking for it.

Thankfully the Moot House is safe. After its repeated explosions in the Noughties, we built it fire proof. 

But the potatoes we put in for baking at the bottom of the Wicker Person are probably not fit for consumption.

Looks like it's large fries from McDonald's in Kingston again.

Doored Ash

Why do Anglicans talk about "Communion by Extension" and "(Care) Home Communion"? 

When they could just  call it "Delivereucharist"?

The Local Primary Visit to Church

It is a Truth Universally Acknowledged that any Primary School trip to see the local parish church will end up with at least thirty minutes' worth of focusing on death.

You will tell jolly stories about harvest festivals. About marriages. You can let them splash water in the font.

Feel free to point out the stained glass windows, showing happy tales of Noah's Ark (kids aren't the slightest gone-out about the mass drownings). Let them see happy scenes of hills and sheep.

"Please - look at the lovely sheep. Not the inscription."

Explain what a pipe organ is for. Show them a hymn book. If of the right churchpersonship, discuss the electric guitar on its stand, and the drum kit.

It will be of no avail.

Let them have one nanosecond to consider. And you will hear the fateful words.

"My grandad was buried here."

That's all it takes.

You will be asked why it is that all dead people conveniently die in churchyards.

You will be told that "Nanny died." You will sympathise profoundly that they have lost their grandmother. Say a prayer for Nanny. Offer to help them light a tea light for Nanny.

Then find out that "Nanny" was the gerbil. The grandmothers are respectively called "Gaga" and "Granski" or somesuch. But still, maybe the helium balloon you were conned into sending up for Nanny will have helped with the healing.

Likewise with "Poppa". You thought it was a much-loved family dog? It was great-grandad.

You will be asked if the altar is that size because coffins fit on it so well. You will realise that small children think the only reason churches exist is to provide a portal between this world and the underworld. You will be asked how quickly people become skeletons, whether the "memento mori" skulls on the wall are real. Some children will become nervous of walking on the church floor in case they're treading on dead people.

You wanted to share a happy story of living worship, a living God, a living church.

But the six-year-olds will tell you that you walk among the dead. That the shades are around you. That your building exists only to propel souls into the next life. You will reflect that, based on the inscriptions on the wall, they may be right. You will be drawn into the vortex of realising that all life is doomed to end, all efforts consigned to futility.

And then you'll give them each a bookmark.

A tale of four Marys

Four Marys stood at the cross.

Three Marys went to the tomb.

Two Marys held Jesus' feet 

And the other Mary's husband, Cl(e)opas said "we're going home."

And Mary said, "but he's alive."

And Cleopas said, "we're going home."

And Mary said, "But Mary Magdalene said..." 

And Cleopas said, "we're going home."

And Mary said, "but I saw..." 

And Cleopas got his cloak.

So they set out for Emmaus.

But there was a third who walked with them,

And he broke bread.

And disappeared.

And Mary said, "Didn't I tell you?"

And Cleopas said, "Let's go back to Jerusalem. And tell them the wonderful thing I've seen."

When MAGA went too far

And the King said to them, I was a different colour, and you deported me. I was hungry and you cut off my support. I was sick, and you removed Medicaid. I was oppressed, and you said you'd wipe out my civilisation.

And I let all that go 

But then you posted a picture of yourself trying to look like me.

And enough was enough. Nobody's gonna stand for that.

The Goddess Eostre and the Killer Vampire Bunny-Wunny

Back before the First World War broke out, there was an idea that civilisation was moving forwards and the sum of human knowledge increasing.

Now, I don't know if the sum of human knowledge is increasing these days. But I reckon if it is, the distribution of human knowledge is pretty lumpy.

Take the annual claim expressed by Facebookers that "Easter is a pagan festival". Which I may have mentioned once or twice before.

So taking the claims in turn: they claim that Easter stole the Spring Equinox from the festival of Eostre. Who is probably well-enough attested to accept she was regarded as a goddess by the West Germanic tribes. The main source for her is an 8th Century work by Bede, an Anglo-Saxon Christian, who tells us that the month of April in Old English was named after her. And therefore the feast of "Easter" got its name from her.

So the West Germanic races stole a feast, invented the concept of the Christian "Easter" and named it after her. The modern Eostre-supporters claim the Solstice was named "Ostara" after her. There's no actual evidence for this, and of course "Ostara" doesn't fall in "Eostre-monat". It falls in March.

So far so wacky, proof that anyone who claims that Easter (a celebration dating back to 2nd century Turkey) is based on Eostre (probably an Anglo-Saxon goddess, first named in the 8th century) has been enjoying some festive magic mushrooms. Outside the rain-blighted western Germanic coasts, Easter has a name like "Pasch" that derives from the Hebrew/Aramaic word from Passover. Which it would. Because of course Christianity took its origins (and the principles of its dating) from Passover, the Jewish feast. Not a pagan feast at all. No offence to modern Pagans, who are a kindly and gentle nature-loving bunch in my experience.

But hang on a mo.

What sort of goddess was Eostre? Given we know so little about her. 

Well, obviously she was a Germanic goddess. Do we know anything about Germanic deities in general? 

They had equivalents in Norse deities. Where they were frequently pretty bloodthirsty. The way to get into Valhalla was to die in battle.

And the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Were they peace-and-nature-loving hippies, tripping around saying hello to trees and flowers? Did they think the stars were God's daisy-chain?

Or had they just spent a couple of hundred years before Bede's time, driving the Celtic (also pagan) people of the British isles off to the fringes by a combination of invasion, genocide, and inter-breeding? 

Yes, second one.

So she had mates like Woden, and Thunor. The people who worshipped her were warriors and invaders. 

And then Jacob Grimm suggested her animal familiar may have been the hare. No evidence for this, just made it up. 

So let's pretend for a minute that the Eostre the Angles and Saxons may have worshipped had a pet hare or bunny. What sort of lagomorph might it be? One that just leaps around in spring, mating and eating carrots?

Or Monty Python's Rabbit of Caerbannog? The neck-biting monster?

Break out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is all I have to say on the matter. 

Where do you come from?

Pilate's question to Jesus - in his fear as the people outside demand Jesus's blood: “Where do you come from?”

And it's a question with many potential answers.

When people ask me where do I come from I generally say Husborne Crawley. As I think that's generally true. But I could say I come from Luton, where I was born. Or Dunstable, the town next door, where I attended St Mitholmroyd's Academy for the Daughters of Distressed Gentlefolk. Or I could pay homage to my mum's parents and their story and say I'm "London Overspill". These are all in their way true.

Jesus says nothing. But what could he say?

He could say he's from Nazareth. That little place where he grew up, where he learned to saw and build.

He could say he's from Capernaum - that's where his house is. The house in all likelihood where someone cut a hole through his roof to lower a disabled man to him.

He could recite the Haggadah, the passage from Deuteronomy used at the feast of Firstfruits within tehe celebration of Passover, and say "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous."

He could say from Bethlehem, because he's the Son of David that the prophets promised, the Messiah who God has sent to save his people.

That would not increase his chances of leaving Jerusalem alive.

Or he could say - I come, Pilate, from where you can't imagine. I come from beyond the depths of time and space. I have no beginning and no end. Through me everything was created. Through me everything exists. Through me the stars hang in their lonely orbits and the sun generates its heat. Even the molecules of oxygen that you pant into your panicking body right now own their existence to me. If I chose, you would not exist. I come from God the Father and I will come again from God’s right hand to be your judge. You may have the power to release me or crucify me - but I have the power to release you, if you wanted.

And they would all be true - about this son of Abraham, of David, and God.

But he says nothing. And Pilate can do nothing. Except obey the will of some of the people he's supposed to be ruling. And though Jesus goes to die, it’s Pilate who is the broken man.

And so the one who made the earth hangs above it for six hours, as his human life ebbs away. And he fights the devil on the cross, and he will descend to Hell and fight the devil on his own home turf, and he will win both home and away. And we sing his praise because through his death, we have life. And when he comes again, from the place where he is gone – he will make us like him, and we will see him as he is. And know where he is from, because we will belong there too.

If Tottenham Hotspur Managers were Listed like Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible

 And David Pleat succeeded George Graham, who had been at heart a Gooner

And Glenn Hoddle succeeded David Pleat 

And Jacques Santinti succeeded Glenn Hoddle

And Martin Jol succeeded Jacques Santini

And Clive Allen and Alex Inglethorpe succeeded Martin Jol

And Juande Ramos succeeded Clive Allen and Alex Inglethorpe

And Harry Redknapp succeeded Juande Ramos 

And André Villas-Boas succeeded Harry Redknapp

And Tim Sherwood succeeded André Villas-Boas

And Mauricio Pochettino succeeded Tim Sherwood

And José Mourinho succeeded Mauricio Pochettino

And Ryan Mason succeeded José Mourinho

And Nuno Espírito Santo succeeded Ryan Mason

And Antonio Conte succeeded Nuno Espírito Santo

And Christian Stellini succeeded Antonio Conte 

And Ryan Mason succeeded Christian Stellini

And Ange Postecoglou replaced Ryan Mason

And Thomas Frank replaced Ange Postecoglou

And Igor Tudor replaced  Thomas Frank

And they wondered who should replace Igor Tudor

And everyone wondered if maybe the manager wasn't the problem.

The Noisy Non-Revival

 A few months ago, when great fuss was being made about a YouGov survey for the Bible Society that showed that there was a revival - especially among young people - in churches, the Church Mouse said that it didn't seem to correlate with experience.

When other criticism of the methodology also came in,  and people pointed out that the survey didn't agree with the Good Old C of E's Statistics for Mission, defences such as that of Dr Rob Edward-Symmons on the Premier website came out.

A bit of an industry appeared, celebrating the new rush of converts into the churches. There were conferences. Some people said how much it matched with their experience. 

The Bible Society has just pulled the survey, and removed its FAQs from its website. YouGov has admitted that the methodology wasn't sound.

Which is a great shame. It would have been lovely to see all these people who were allegedly newly arrived in church.

But there's two lessons. One is that some people suffered from confirmation bias. Any church leader experiencing growth would have been shouting out "WE ARE PART OF THE QUIET REVIVAL". Any church leader experiencing decline would have kept quiet and wondered why God was punishing them or what was wrong with them. So the noise makes it sound like there's a quiet revival.

And the other is - you're only as good as the data you use. Many years ago now, a major retailer was having problems with planning for their "returns" - Internet sales that were then sent back. Every week, tens or over hundreds of thousands of items were reported to be in the supply chain from the stores back to the distribution centre. And yet every week only a few thousand actually turned up. They kept planning for and fearing the avalanche, which would overwhelm the available labour and space for processing returns. It never happened. Eventually, someone wondered where the discrepancy came from. And found there was a system issue - stores could report they were a returning an item, but then discover they could sell it instead. The avalanche of returned items - which would have filled up every store warehouse and every lorry in the supply chain -  simply didn't exist. The items weren't in the supply chain, often they weren't even in the stores. Sometimes they were walking down the street on their new owners.

The moral is - if your data is surprising, there's a good chance it's wrong. If your data is good news you weren't expecting, definitely go and check it again. If there's other data showing completely different evidence - compare the two and find out why.

It's the same reason in a way that one injury or death due to a vaccination makes so much more impact than millions of people being better protected. People shout about the dramatic, not about the undramatic.

Data is good. It can help you make good decisions. Just make sure it's right.

Now get out and worship God like you're supposed to. That, at least, hasn't been withdrawn.