One group used photography, and here is one of their photos:

Seeing the cross represented by living bodies lying on the ground gives me a fresh understanding of the cross.  Here I see that it is for real people, people I know, people of flesh and blood like me.   I see that they, and I, will one day lie down in death.  Here, human thought always stops for a moment in dread and hope.  Is there more?  Then we hear the angel’s invitation in Matthew 28, “He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.  Come see the place where he lay.  Then go quickly and tell his disciples …”

Not many years later, one of those disciples wrote, that it is impossible to see, hear or imagine what God has prepared for those who wait lovingly for him (1 Cor 2.9).  We can’t ever do this fully, but we can make a start.  Living theology invites us to use our creative imagination to the full.  At full stretch we ask God in prayer, ‘Dare we hope that it will be like this?’  To which the Spirit replies, ‘Yes, but much better!’

God is able to do more than we can ask or imagine:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2TCeSP4RQQ

When was it that we fell out of love with Sunday in this country? There’s a famous 1958 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour that epitomises the boredom associated here with Sunday. By contrast, other parts of Europe have a real love for Sunday, as a distinctive, more relaxing day. In France there’s even a love song that translates as ‘It’s Sunday when you smile’ (Henri Salvador). However, I’m not certain that would work in English!   

I can understand the desire to accommodate the needs of visitors to London during the Olympics and the importance of boosting the economy. However, I think there would be a number of downsides.

Visitors to London from overseas might actually be offended by unrestricted Sunday Trading, given that numbers of them will be coming from countries with more restrictive Sunday Trading laws and, potentially, a deeper cultural respect for Sunday as a day of rest. Even in the United States many areas restrict Sunday Trading.

But the greatest impact of unregulated Sunday Trading could be on small shopkeepers, who may lose significant amounts of trade, and marginal workers, who may find themselves forced into working on Sundays, with knock on effects on their families. Unregulated Sunday Trading would also be likely to have a wider impact by extending 24/7 society. Would that really add to people’s sense of happiness and wellbeing?

Wilderness as detachment
Lent has been identified with Jesus forty days in the wilderness (Mk 1:12-13, cf. Mt 4, Lk 4), a recapitulating of the Exodus pilgrims’ forty years. For the Ancient Israelites this was a liberation from former slavery by way of preparation for a land of promise. For later Christians, the desert fathers in particular, the desert was a time of detachment from worldly concerns and social pressures, a way of liberation for God. In all of these, detachment proved to be a time of testing and trial, involving self-examination and self-awareness. Lent then is a time to detach ourselves in this season from busyness and everyday concerns, and from the accommodation of social values into which we’ve become accustomed. How will you withdraw, and from what?

Preparation for discipleship
Once a time of preparation for adult baptism candidates, and for reconciliation of those who had placed themselves outside of the church, Lent has become for us a time of preparation and reconciliation, before the renewal of our baptismal commitments at the font on Easter day (and for priests, our vows together with the bishop at the Chrism mass on Maundy Thursday). At the heart of this preparation is a realization that God first loved us, which is showed this love in Jesus living and dying. Preparation involves looking at the loving example of Jesus, and responding by discipleship. Lent might therefore involve us reading about Jesus, or about other men and women who followed Jesus, and preparing to do likewise, following him. What will you read to inspire you to understand Jesus better and to follow as his disciple.

Identification with others
As Lent takes us through Passiontide and into Easter, we follow Christ’s identification with those who suffer, and the witness of the resurrection by those who recognised the risen Christ’s wounds. The purpose of self-reflection and self-evaluation is to better enable us to identify with this Christ, whose spirit came upon the church at Pentecost and at our baptism, that we might live in Christ and share God’s love. How will you look beyond yourself, or the story of Jesus’ suffering, to identify compassionately with others in need.

To detach ourselves from worldly attachments and to engage again in our Christian discipleship, through attention to the love shown us in Christ, we find ourselves again in the Lenten way of prayer, reading, reflection and self-examination. May such devotions lead us to better engage with Jesus story, his identification with the needs, and to as part of his body, the Church, witness to God’s love, as we see this in Jesus.

John Wesley’s Journal, like everyone’s, has no entries for that period, and resumes on Thursday 14 with the comment: ‘So we must call it now, seeing the New Style now takes place’.  Can we detect some disapproval on Wesley’s part at having lost time? He was, after all, a believer in redeeming every fragment of time and not wasting time. Some modern spiritual guides give the impression that it’s a sin to daydream and that all time must be purposively filled. This can appeal to driven psyches. But it can also prevent people from being fully present (to each other and God) in the here and now. Using time wisely in 2012 could mean spending every leisure moment checking your work emails; it could mean continually looking over your shoulder at your achievements or ahead to your life-goals. Or, alternatively, might the best use of time in 2012 be to live fully in the God-given present?

The classical liberalism of 17th and 18th century was driven by vision of the dignity of the rational person and a desire for human freedom, unrestrained by church or state. But with the 19th century economic liberalism of Adam Smith such unrestrained liberalism handed social vision to the markets. Religion was relegated to personal or ecclesial concerns, far removed from political and economic vision.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Roosevelt judged that, ’Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. … The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.’ (Inaugural address, March 4, 1933) Modern social[ist] liberalism was born of a Keynesian critique of laissez faire economics (1938): rather than let the markets govern society, the state took control, with such interventionist policies as Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ (1930s) and British welfare reforms, as imagined by The Beveridge Report (of 1942). Beveridge’s moral ideals led him to address the five ‘Giant Evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’. Yet the 1980s saw a neoliberal return to laissez faire economics, not only limited to Regan and Thatcher. Unrestrained liberalism handed social vision to the emerging global markets, while retaining western protectionist trade barriers. 

As UK politics became less ordered by ideological or theological vision, and more by the political pragmatics of personality and opinion polls, the British electorate became disengaged from politics. The churches were too concerned with internal issues and human sexuality to motivate greater political involvement, except for the successful Jubilee Campaign. But another banking crisis and stagnant economy has given rise to another voice of protest, like Roosevelt’s, which calls for the casting of the money changers from their thrones.

At Christmas we read in Luke’s nativity a voice of protest against the imperial political theology and economics of his day. He presents Jesus as the divine emperor of God’s reign in a socially liberating vision, which we might miss in our sweet but saccharine carols. There is a yet greater vision in eco-theology, which views economics within God’s new creation, if only we could raise our eyes from our anthropocentric perspective, even beyond the temple of our civilization. The churches need to engage such theology and political vision again, for ‘without a vision the people perish.’ (Proverbs 29:18)

For more on the politics of Christmas, see http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/ThePoliticsOfChristmas.pdf

What would Jesus do – it is both a vital question and, potentially, a dangerous one. When the church loses sight of the question it is liable to lose sight of its very purpose. It is not difficult to point to times in the history of the church when this has happened. Erasmus of Rotterdam (a Humanist scholar who lived through the early days of the Reformations) once commented on some of the monks of this day, whose orders competed with each other, that they were more interested in being unlike each other than they were in being like Christ. On the other hand, neither has it been good for the church to be too sure of the answer; the basic flaw in the question is that I can never fully know because I am not Christ. He left us an example of outraged anger in the clearing of the Temple, but no easy rules to identify absolutely where the Temples that need clearing are today.

What would Jesus do? He would undoubtedly protest injustice and stand up against the Pharisees. He would care for the weak and the oppressed and, yes, I think he would be with the protesters. Undoubtedly also, Christians need to ask ourselves if we are doing enough to follow this example.  But I also need to seek the wisdom to be as faithful as possible to Christ’s example without ever believing that I have fully understood him or his calling on my life.