The Kingdom of Heaven

Sorting through old family photographs, I came across a picture of my grandfather.  He was the son of a Victorian evangelical preacher.  The Bible was big in their house, with a quotation for everything.  Perhaps because he was also a founder member of the Labour Party, one of my grandfather’s favourites was, “The labourer is worthy of his hire.” (Luke 10:7)

And I thought of the dockers.  The men who unloaded cargo before the days of containers.  Dockers were hired by the day to unload the ships.  No work, no pay.  The younger, fitter looking men would be chosen first.  As they got older some dockers would dip their combs into a pot of black tea to darken their hair.

Two Sundays ago the Gospel reading was the parable of the Labourers in the vineyard.   It begins, “For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.”   He agrees a price for the day’s work.  The householder goes back four times and each time hires more workers.  Men who have no work and are standing idle. 

The shock comes when they come to be paid at the end of the day.  The householder pays them all the same.  The amount agreed for a day’s pay goes to all of them, even if they only worked an hour.  In the “kingdom of heaven” the labourer is of intrinsic worth and not just “worthy of his – or her – hire”.

Chris Dawson

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Open to Possibilities

Terry (not his real name) was wheeling me along the broad smooth corridors at pace.  We were heading for a CT scan and an X ray.  “Have you been doing this long?” I asked.  “About six months.  I love it.  I used to be in demolition.  Straight from school till the 2008 crash and things changed.”

“What happened then?”  “With a friend we started a cleaning company..  It grew and we had big contracts.  Ended up doing work for McCarthy and Stone.  Then Covid came along and another change.  My wife suggested I took life a bit easier. She works in the NHS.

“Unbeknownst to me, she’d filled in an application for this job.  I only knew two days before the interview – the first I ever had.  In the building trade it’s all word of mouth.  So there I am in a white shirt and smart trousers on my way to the interview.  A button comes off my shirt and I’m running and sweating a bit, because I’m late.

“I have the interview on Wednesday and they say they will ring me in the next two days.  I don’t hear anything.  Then at Friday teatime the phone rings.  I’ve got the job.  I love it.  Wish I’d done it years ago!”

St. Paul was pulled kicking and screaming in another direction.  For most of us it’s not so dramatic.  Winston Churchill’s observation that we stumble over opportunities and simply get up and carry on, is probably more accurate.

Chris Dawson

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It’s a Parable!

Some tour guides on the bus between Jerusalem and Jericho point to a roadside building and say, “That’s the inn the Good Samaritan took the wounded man to be cared for.”  We all smiled when Canon Nigel Ashworth told us this during our recent choir weekend at Manchester Cathedral. 

I’m not often on my own in Manchester at 7.30pm on a Sunday evening, striding towards Piccadilly Gardens. Tired after an uplifting but busy weekend.  Relieved too, that when I get to the stop, a 192 bus is about to leave.  I sit in one of the few seats left, one at the front facing the aisle.

I look to my left.  A young man is resting against the single seat next to me.  He is wrestling with a sack barrow loaded with a plastic box full of very large, empty cordial bottles.  We exchange a smile.  I look at the people around me and realise that I am the only white person on the lower deck.  A minority of one. 

We journey on.  Ardwick, Longsight, Levenshulme.  Men at tables talking in lit cafe windows.  Persian, Turkish, Indian, Middle Eastern.  Huge displays of fruit and vegetables.  Money transfer, immigration lawyers, sari shops and Halal.  A few people get on the bus, but mostly they leave.  And just at the Stockport boundary, by McVitie’s biscuit factory, I realise that I am the only person left on the bus.

Every journey a parable?

Chris Dawson

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Perhaps

Autumn is in the air.  It’s that little bit cooler.  Flowers are fading and a few leaves are turning and dropping.  Days are shorter.  Holidays are coming to an end.   It can feel a bit melancholy. 

For many young people it’s a time of change. Particularly for those who received their GCSE and A level results.  For some it will be a time of disappointment.  They didn’t get the grades they hoped for.  It may also be a time of regret, wishing they had worked harder. 

Each week, on Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili interviews a leading scientist about his or her life and work.  Last week he interviewed Chris Barratt.  Professor Barratt, as he now is, did not do very well in his A levels.  His favourite subject was history and that’s what he wanted to study at university…but his grade was not good enough. 

Instead he studied Zoology and found he enjoyed it.  He qualified as a teacher and, after spending time teaching in a school, studied for a PhD.  He became fascinated and went on to further research, which led him to look closely at male fertility.  He is now Head of Postgraduate Medicine and Head of the Reproductive Medicine Group  at Dundee University. 

Sometimes things don’t go where we think they should.  They don’t work out as we hope or expect.  I wonder what Jesus’ disciples thought when he called them from the jobs they were doing and said, “Follow me.”

Chris Dawson

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Time Present and Time Past

I remember hearing about a church clock that, at midday, struck thirteen.  Workers in the fields did not possess timepieces, but they could hear the church clock.  The first strike was to get their attention.  Most of the time the movement of the sun gave them their daily rhythm.

When a worker retired from years of working in the mill or the  factory, as a reward for loyal service the owners often presented them with a watch.  They were given back their time. 

Young people don’t bother with watches.   In fact I have a nephew who has a first class degree in computing, but he can’t “tell the time” from a clock face.  Like everything else, time is on their phone and it’s a series of passing numbers.

As we hurry through our lives, we talk of “spending time”, of “running out of time” and “getting behind”.   Later in life we might reflect on how, if we “had our time again”, we might do things differently.   But “time passes” and that is not possible.   We only have the present and the challenge of being with “what is” now.

Jesus asks us to “Consider the lilies of the field…” and Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests something similar in his poem Perfect:

These roses under my window

make no reference to former roses or to better ones,

they are for what they are; they exist today.

There is no time to them.

There is simply the rose; it is perfect

in every moment of its existence.

Chris Dawson

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Holy, Holy, Holy

The little girl standing outside Cale Green Park stamped her foot and said loudly, “I want to go!”  Beside her, her mother and a friend were struggling with two buggies and two toddlers.  Clearly the allure of the children’s playground was very strong.

We often talk of children going through the “terrible two’s”, or the “terrible threes”, a time when they are beginning to assert their individuality.  Up to that stage life has been about safety, connection and dependence.  Now the part of us often referred to as the ego, is telling them that they can be separate and individual.

In August, when there is no choir, I enjoy joining the congregation.  A change of place suggests a change of perspective.  But where shall I sit?  Where do I feel comfortable?   On the left, two thirds of the way towards the back, as usual?  That’s the ego doing another of its jobs – keeping me feeling safe.

In the service, saying the Sanctus, rather than singing it, prompted a sudden thought, “Words wander from their original meanings”.   Holy, Holy, Holy.  That’s about “wholeness and completeness.”  A God who is whole and complete.  Who has no ego.  One in three and three in one.

The road to wholeness may begin with separation and stamping our feet.  But that is not the end.  The ego only gets us so far.  And we can get stuck.  The challenge is, as Jesus told his disciples, to “deny ourselves“ – to leave our ego behind.

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Letting Things Go

“Do you think you will want your Great Grandmother’s grandfather clock?  And what about the roll top desk?  Your Grandad wanted you to have that.” 

“ Yes, I like the idea.  Not sure of the cost of transporting them to Australia.  And they would have to stay in storage, because the house we live in is single storey, open plan and really quite small.  So they might be in storage for quite a long while.”

I’m in the mood to sort things out and pass things on.

The van from Renewal has just left.  It’s a Christian charity based just round the corner from us in Shaw Heath.  They take donations of furniture and sell it on to fund their work supporting people who have been long term unemployed.  They help people to get their lives back.

Renewal have taken half a dozen items, but some they can’t take.  They can’t pass them on.  Fashions change.  A friend of mine who deals in antiques, says no-one wants brown furniture.  You know, the sort your Grandma had – wardrobes, chests of drawers, dressing tables – all beautifully made and polished.  But out of date.

I suppose that “letting go” is “letting go”.  I may be in the mood to sort things out, but I can’t insist on what goes where and who gets what.  That would be “hanging on”.  St. Paul urges us to run the race with patience – and he doesn’t say it’s a relay race!

Chris Dawson

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Going Towards

The Desert Mothers and Fathers, as they became known, were trying to “get away”.   Between the third and the sixth century CE, men and women were living out in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Arabia.  They went because they wanted to get away from a society whose values were contrary to theirs. 

“Getting away” can also mean “going towards”. Those who went into the desert were spiritual seekers who wanted to become closer to God.  Not just to get away from a society with its emphasis on material possessions and one in which relationships and power were abused.

The Mothers and Fathers committed themselves to a life of simple living.  Such a basic, and uncomfortable life, may not be for us.  Yet, what they were trying to achieve might appeal to us. Realising that worldly pleasures bring little long-term satisfaction, they looked to experience God in each moment and in each activity they undertook. 

They committed themselves to a spiritual life of prayer and self-enquiry.  A path that may seem a hard one to follow.  Yet, one that we may have started to walk without quite realising it.  Because any time that we are mindful of God’s presence, mindful of our actions and mindful of our relationships, we are on the way.  On the way to what T.S. Eliot called, “A condition of complete simplicity.”

Chris Dawson

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Getting Away

It was all so much simpler in Jesus’ time.  When he needed to get away, to take a break from the crowds, he took to a boat on the lake or walked into the desert.  He looked for some quiet time.  Something anyone could do.  Now it’s a much bigger deal.

A friend of mine has just got back from taking his family to Barbados.  Two former teacher colleagues are keen on cruises.  I have just read about a new cruise ship, due to launch in 2024, which is five times the size of the Titanic.  The planes in and out of Manchester Airport seem to be as busy as they ever were.

Livelihoods worldwide depend on our urge to take a holiday.  Barbados relies heavily on tourism.  The CEO of Heathrow Airport said this week that to run the airport, a total of 25,000 people had been employed since the Covid epidemic.  The Greek islands  still want tourists to visit in spite of the heat and the wildfires.  Tourism and the effects of global warming side by side.

Even with hard economic times, such is the desire to “get away”, that, according to a report in the i newspaper last weekend,  “Tens of thousands more children have been missing lessons because parents are opting for cheaper term-time holidays as the cost of living crisis bites.”  It’s cheaper to pay the fines!  

That’s a step up from those one in 20 adults – reported in the same paper – who, over the past fortnight had to take a different kind of break, because they ran out of food and were unable to to pay for more.

Chris Dawson

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Let’s Assume – or Not

Making assumptions is a very human activity.

A friend of mine was a good tennis player.  He accepted an invitation to a social occasion where he met an attractive young woman who also enjoyed playing tennis.  She agreed to his suggestion that they play a game. Once the game started, he realised that he was not going to be, as he thought, the one to impress. Afterwards she told him she had been playing at Wimbledon the week before.

Mike was head of our Art Department.  Carol, a member of his department, brought her husband Paul to a staff do.  Mike got talking to him and found that he liked cricket.  “Bring a team from your place and play our staff.  We’ll see if you’re any good.”  The next day Mike remarked to Carol that Paul seemed keen on cricket.  “Yes”, said Carol, “He played for Pakistan!”

Mildly embarrassing for those involved. 

This week sees the start of the latest Homeless Football World Cup.  Interviewed in the Big Issue, Co-founder Mel Young describes how, back in 2003 when he was waiting for the first Homeless World Cup to begin, he heard a noise and realised it was applause for a Dutch team of footballers making their way down to the pitch from their accommodation.

“Something very profound had happened because the day before these people are being spat on in the street.  Or the media is talking about them as if they’re the reason for the collapse of the country’s GDP or whatever.  As if they’re all evil.  All that’s happened is we’ve created a football pitch, put soccer tops on them and the whole place is applauding them.  It’s the same person, we just changed the backdrop.” 

And it’s the backdrop that creates our assumptions.

Chris Dawson

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