Month: June 2021

Ezekiel 2.1-5, Mark 6.1-13

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 4 July 2021, Eldroth, Clapham

I’m too young to remember what I was doing when the news came through of John F. Kennedy’s assassination – maybe getting my evening bath in the tub by the living room fire. I think the first major world event which impacted me deeply was on the morning of 9th  December 1980, when, leaving for work, I was stopped in my tracks by the radio announcing the murder of John Lennon. My head spun with this news as I walked to the corner to be collected by my work colleague Eric, an old and somewhat glass-half-empty sort of guy who nevertheless was generous enough to give this 18-year-old apprentice a lift each day. I’d grown up in Beatle City, I couldn’t help but have been shaped and formed through the melodies of Paul McCartney and by John Lennon’s sass and quirk and delphic pronouncements; these musicians were a part of who I was; so this was a big shock to my young heart. Imagine the impact on me in the moment when after stepping into Eric’s car, he pointed to the car radio, and gave me his chilling judgement on this event: “He’s never done anything for this city,” he said. “Left us for London as soon as he could.” And that was it. Eric had no compassion for a home-town hero: instead he’d taken offence.

Many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ [1]

Six months after Lennon’s assassination I was at Earl’s Court, London to see another musical legend perform: Bob Dylan was no stranger to controversy, having once provoked his traditional folk audience to uproar by bringing out an electric guitar onstage at Manchester Free Trade Hall, reinventing his songs in a rock and roll idiom accompanied by a verbal onslaught from the stalls  which famously included one heckler loudly calling him ‘Judas’. [2] The 1981 tour was similarly controversial as Dylan had then embraced evangelical Christianity, and his songs had taken a particularly bible-thumping turn. When Bob followed a traditional gospel group onstage he opened with one of his new songs. ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, it was called: “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody” – he sang, setting the tone for the evening. ‘When you gonna wake up?’ was his gospel refrain, and none of the Dylan fans on the midnight train back north could sleep, for we were buzzing about his performance, some reviling the proselytizing language, others thrilled that musically Dylan and his band were on their best form for many years, seemingly reinvigorated by this revivalist turn in his career. [3]

Anthropologists talk about the complex relationship which we groups of people, whether villages or families, crowds or churches, have with those people we uphold as our ‘models’ – how at one and the same time we attack and cherish them, hate and love them, diminish and exalt them. 

“This is scandal,” says the writer Robert Hamerton-Kelly, “and it is the essence of anxiety (and addiction) because it is the love of what one hates and the hatred of what one loves. Mark tells us it is the state of the hometown crowd in Nazareth with respect to Jesus. The proverb that a prophet is honoured everywhere except in his own home sums up the scandal. Envious of this person, we are at the same time attracted and repulsed by them. The crowd wants to be like the ‘other’ and to destroy him, because he is so pleasing.’ [4]

Can we see this in our nation’s complex relationship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales? How we feel love for this fairytale princess, and at the same time revulsion for her moving beyond the expectations of Royal protocol to live on her own terms? Do we not see this time and again in politics where the ones we admire we empower and then wilfully desire their demise? Do we see this happen on a local level with those we choose to lead us and then – when they try to make their mark – we reject or oppose? Have we seen it happen in families where the one who breaks out to do something different with their lives is both admired and criticised for their unconventional behaviour?

They took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’

The effect of this is to cause people who might make a difference in the world, to toe the line and pull back from the brink of realising their potential, to become part of the crowd again.

The writer and broadcaster Pat Nevin records a recent encounter at his publishers with a young marketing man who tried to persuade Nevin to stop expressing his own interests and opinions and instead to write about the ‘trending’ topics on social media in a way which would reinforce their readers’ views and prejudices. This sort of pressure is felt by all within the media these days. Nevin, however, resists it; he has always been on the one hand a great crowd-pleaser – previously one of the most attractively gifted footballers of his generation, and on the other hand never swayed by the crowd, both admired and criticised for sitting very lightly to his sport – ‘The Accidental Footballer’ who really wanted to be a teacher, expressly as interested in music, arts and culture as in sport. [5]

This sort of resistance to the pull of our home crowd can leave a person isolated. The entertainer and practicing Roman Catholic Frank Skinner has just published A Comedian’s Prayer Book, of which he writes, ‘At least no one can accuse me of being too commercial.’ [6]

It is not a comedy book that merely uses prayer as a vehicle for its gags, he says, for ‘The writer of such a book runs the risk of finding himself exiled to that most desolate of all places: the Humour Section.’ Is it, then, a prayerbook specifically for comedians? ‘No,’ he writes, for in thirty years in comedy, ‘the religious believers I’ve met among my fellow japesters would, if assembled, just about fill a Vauxhall Corsa.’ Skinner portrays himself as a man on a pilgrimage – in serious pursuit of a God who he speaks with often – but dressed in a jester’s outfit, for comedy is his calling in life. For taking faith seriously, whilst keeping people smiling, he risks being simultaneously loved and derided, admired and misunderstood. He’s at ease with it. 

What you take from this talk may depend on whether you place yourself amongst those prophets dishonoured in their home town, among their own kin, in their own house, struggling with following what you might describe as a ‘higher calling’ against the flow of your folks. What is this wisdom that has been given to us? 

It may depend on whether you’re more at ease in the crowd with its instinct to reign in the mavericks among us. Is he amazed at our unbelief? 

Or finally, it may depend on whether, though you see what crowds can do to people who are open about their faith, you nevertheless determine to respond to Jesus’ calling – to go out, to proclaim, to cast out, to cure and heal. He calls us, sends us out, and gives us authority over the unclean spirits. [7]

 

 

Notes

[1] Mark 6.1-13.

[2] Chris Long, Bob Dylan and the Manchester Free Trade Hall ‘Judas’ show. BBC News, May 2016.

[3] Bob Dylan Setlist, Earls Court, London, 27 June 1981. See Clinton Heylin, Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years: What Really Happened for a forensic account of this period of Dylan’s career.

[4] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred. Poetics of Violence in Mark, pp. 95-97. Quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary. Resources, Proper 9B.

[5] Pat Nevin, The Accidental Footballer: a memoir. Prologue, p.1-4.

[6] Frank Skinner, A Comedian’s Prayer Book. Introduction, p.1-2.

[7] The talk concludes with a recording of Bob Dylan, I Believe In You, performed by Alison Krauss on BBC Four Transatlantic Sessions, 24 March 2012. Sourced from YouTube: https://youtu.be/b5dpkBV2ifs.

Lamentations 3.22-33, Mark 5.21-43

The Fourth Sunday after Trinity 27 June 2021, Austwick

Jairus was a man unaccustomed to being interrupted. A man of some position, a leader of the synagogue, his days were set out in order – prayers, meetings, meals, more meetings, more prayers – and this was to be expected, this was to be respected, this routine which gave this man his power and position in a world of powerful men.

But when his daughter became critically ill, when her near-death condition touched him, he felt his power drain from him. For this interruption to Jairus’ life revealed his powerlessness in the face of his beloved child’s suffering, his inability to help or save her. 

So here in Mark’s gospel passage we see this esteemed elder of the community throw himself at the feet of an imposter, a freewheeling guru peripheral to Jairus’s institution, Jesus, with his reputation for healing: Jairus, desperate for any help he could find to restore his beloved child’s health. We might imagine Jairus weeks beforehand, taking the first call from his wife, asking him to come home quickly to help attend to his suddenly-ill daughter. We can imagine his irritation at this message interrupting, let’s say, an important finance meeting, his head starting to spin between the things he had planned for work that day and this unforeseen domestic difficulty. We might map out Jairus’s alteration over the coming weeks from being a man in complete control of his circumstances to one brought literally to his knees by a problem he could not solve. Touched by this ailing daughter whom he loved so much, all his worldly power drained away.

Today’s gospel passage describes two men, interrupted in the course of their lives. Interrupted by two women, in a world where that should not happen.

Let us turn to look at Jesus in this scene, a man at the height of his powers as a teacher and healer, driven by a sense of his own destiny, empowered by the crowds who pursued him everywhere. In this moment Jesus was a man on a mission, handed to him by Jairus at his wit’s end – imagine the transfer of power between these two men when Jairus fell at Jesus’ feet. Jesus, full of his own importance as a healer, unstoppable on the route which led to Jairus’ house and his daughter’s sickbed. Until that moment when, from nowhere, Jesus felt all this power drain from him, and was stopped in his tracks by a woman who bled.

The active Jesus, the Jesus in motion, the one whose initiative powered all the events described in Mark’s gospel thus far, with a ‘sense of purpose and direction, initiative and drive, is interrupted, disrupted, brought to a (temporary) halt.’

The initiative here belongs entirely to the woman. From first hearing about him from afar, she slowly but surely closes the gap between them and, touching him, triggers a flow of power from Jesus that is beyond Jesus’ control, intention or even awareness. She is healed before Jesus is even conscious of her presence. When, finally, he says, ‘Your faith has made you well’, he is simply naming what has already happened – responding to ‘the whole truth’ that she has told him. [1]

Sometimes it takes an interruption to shake us from ourselves and awaken us to another person’s truth. In those moments when we are stopped in our tracks and we feel our power leave us; this power bound up in our action and our agency – when all this drains away, then, and only then, might we take account of life from a different perspective, and allow this to change or even heal us. 

What was this woman’s ‘whole truth’ which she told Jesus? Doubtless the plain truth of her twelve years of haemorrhaging, the traumas of the treatments she endured under so many physicians, each unsuccessful. Is it likely that her truth would contain the testimonies many women tell to this day – of those times she was unlistened-to by the doctors supposedly diagnosing her, distrusting her judgement, telling her that ‘she was not the most reliable narrator of her pain’? [2] Did her truth involve situations where she had felt exposed to treatment by people not entirely in control? This woman may have been suffering from what today is called endometriosis, a condition which has  hospitalised the novelist Hilary Mantel. She recounts the last thing the surgeon said to her, on the afternoon of her procedure: 

‘For you, this is a big thing, but remember, to us it is routine.’ But when I woke up, [she said] many hours later, he was standing at the end of the trolley in the recovery room, grey and shrunken as if a decade had passed. He had expected to be home for dinner. And now look! [3]

The woman who spoke her truth to Jesus told of her poverty, having spent all that she had on medical treatment, to no avail; perhaps she also spoke of exhausting the goodwill of people around her, who grew tired of her endless tales of menstrual woe, accused her of being a hypochondriac, or of other kinds of madness which conspicuously, mostly only women are ever accused of: neurosis, anxiety, depression, even hysteria: did they repeatedly tell her: ‘it’s all in your mind’, when she knew beyond doubt that it was in truth in her womb, in her ovaries, in her very blood? Had there been a husband whose faithfulness ran out? Did she speak of the sadness and shame she felt in being excluded, not just from the temple with its cleanliness laws but from ordinary friendships, ordinary conversations? By feeling ill-at-ease at always being associated with this disease afflicting her? [4]

Think of the many different ways that this woman’s ‘whole truth’ affected Jesus. Think of how being stopped in his tracks like that, must have challenged his drive and his busyness and his sense of the power and destiny of his purpose. Think of how this One who had become accustomed to being listened-to by rapt audiences everywhere, was challenged to become a listener to this woman’s truth. Challenged to listen well, to listen hard, to things he’d never before been exposed to. Consider what emotions arose in him for this woman as she told him all her truth.

For notice how Jesus responded to this woman’s truth-telling. Moved to not dismiss her as ‘woman’, and send her coldly away; moved instead – maybe by seeing Jairus’s evident deep love for his ailing child – Jesus called this woman ‘Daughter’. He called her ‘daughter’, that most loving and intimate of names; he called her ‘daughter’, embracing her as his own; and he sent her away with something she hadn’t known for twelve years at least. He sent her away in peace.

Another contemporary sufferer of endometriosis, Lauren Gross Blanco, writes of how she has found ‘a true friend in this unnamed biblical character.’ Reflecting on her own condition she writes that, ‘Although, like [the woman Jesus met], I will require a miracle to be cured, I have found deep healing in the hope which comes from a Savior who sees women like me.’ [5]

 

Notes

[1] Al Barrett, Ruth Harley, Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In, p.98.

[2] Arifa Akbar, Pain on the page: is this the end of the hysterical, ill woman of literature? Guardian, 19 June 2021.

[3] Hilary Mantel, Meeting the Devil. London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 21, 4 November 2010.

[4] This paragraph draws examples from Arifa Akbar, Pain on the page: is this the end of the hysterical, ill woman of literature? Guardian, 19 June 2021.

[5] Lauren Gross Blanco, Jesus Sees You: Endometriosis, the Bleeding Woman, and Me. CBE International Blog, March 24, 2020.

Job 38.1-11, Psalm 107.1-3, 23-32, Mark 4.35-41

 The Third Sunday after Trinity, 20 June 2021

Clapham, Eldroth  

‘In 2010, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. They chose Somali piracy.’ Around that time the journalist Rose George discovered that ‘some 544 seafarers were being held hostage in ships often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight’.

‘Would that happen in any other industry?’ she asked. ‘Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their Jumbo Jets on a runway, for months, or a year? Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? It wouldn’t happen.’ [1]

But it was another fact which she discovered at that time which most astonished Rose George – almost for the fact that she hadn’t known it before – that is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping, an industry today ‘far removed from Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows’.

Sometimes it takes an interruption to awaken us to facts like these. For many of us this year such an interruption came in the shape of the stricken mega-ship ‘Ever Given’ which blocked the Suez Canal after it was hit by ‘a sudden strong wind’ on the 23rd March. John Lanchester described how this made ‘many, many people annoyed and upset’: 

The ship’s captain and all-Indian crew, for a start; the Egyptian pilots who were in charge of the ship during its passage through the canal. Everyone stuck on board the several hundred ships waiting to go through. Everyone worried about the stupefyingly diverse cargo on board all these ships: oil, of course, but also many tons of the world’s most mined commodity (can you guess? It’s sand); and, of course, everything else, from widgets to trainers to computers, from coffee to consoles, from plastic crap of all types to medicines to, well, everything. Since 12 per cent of global trade passes through the canal, the economic damage caused by its closure was significant: a boggling $9.6 billion a day. [2]

All of this was something of a revelation to many of us, for as Rose George so powerfully puts it in her book Deep Sea and Foreign Going, shipping is an ‘invisible industry that brings you 90% of everything’. [3] ‘It has quadrupled in size since 1970. We are more dependent on it now than ever’. [4] And yet we suffer from what the chief of the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, calls ‘sea blindness’. We pay little heed to the sea itself and those who traverse it, to the companies who run shipping under their very elusive flags of convenience; [5] we pay scant attention to what goes on behind the high-security fences of the world’s container ports, and least of all to the conditions in which the world’s seafarers live. They will joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary – but those who know both forms of institution agree that sea life is the far harsher form of incarceration. 

Those who go down to the sea in ships 

and ply their trade in great waters, 

These have seen the works of the Lord 

and his wonders in the deep.

Let us try to go some way to overcoming our sea blindness and opening our eyes to these people who have brought us nine out of every ten things we own. 

Who are they? [6] Often people for whom seafaring is a route out of poverty. Happy to take any well paid work that they can get, in less affluent regions such as the Philippines a seafarers wage will invariably support up to 15 family members at home. 

The long term voyages they complete leave them isolated from friends, family and loved ones for up to nine months at a time. Whilst their wages are pitifully low by any measure, and their living conditions sparse, whilst the working hours and contracts are long and they may have to eat unfamiliar food for months on end, nevertheless many seafarers count being able to provide a better life for their families at home as worth the sacrifice of time away from them. 

At his word the stormy wind arose and lifted up the waves of the sea.

They were carried up to the heavens and down again to the deep; 

their soul melted away in their peril.

It’s a dangerous occupation in a tough environment: the perils of life at sea are real. Extreme weather conditions are one thing; but piracy at sea is a real and ever-present threat. Forget Johnny Depp winking at the camera and saying ‘life is good’: real-life piracy is an extreme danger and a frightening experience for seafarers, and the Mission to Seafarers describe how many suffer mental breakdowns as a result of the torture and torment they receive for weeks or months on end.

They reeled and staggered like a drunkard and were at their wits’ end.

Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress.

Could you go nine months without Wi-Fi? You might have to on a cargo ship. Have you found it hard enough only being able to FaceTime your loved ones during the lockdowns of the past year? Imagine not even being able to do that. Many seafarers choose to only sail on those ships which do have Wi-Fi access on board. Imagine the strain that extended periods away from home can put on relationships with loved ones as well as on mental health, particularly so during the pandemic.

They woke him up and said to him, 

‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’

The Mission to Seafarers cite ship abandonment as one of the most important issues afflicting seafarers: a surprisingly common event where unscrupulous vessel owners abandon their ships due to financial problems or on account of legal disputes. The ships are left in port or at anchorage, often because money has dried up for port costs, unloading fees and wages. The only way that seafarers can ensure that they are paid any wages owning to them is to remain on board for a statutory eight weeks and maybe more.

He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea,  ‘Peace! Be still!’ 

Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.

Many will find it entirely plausible that Jesus the Son of God, the co-author of creation, has such an affinity with the wind and the water that he can ask them to be calm, and they will respond. But even if that is a stretch for you, I imagine you may still be open to the metaphor in the miracle – to an appreciation of the One who yearns to calm every storm of life, to heal and make whole. 

“Christ, I dare you hear the prayer I sing!

Lord, who cares if we are perishing?” [7]

As we pay constant heed to the storms in our own lives – the stormy seas we all navigate – let us also keep ourselves minded of those who go down to the sea in ships… praying, hoping, that they may see the works of the Lord.

 

 

Notes

[1] Rose George, TED Talk: Inside the Secret Shipping Industry. TED@BCG Singapore, October 2013.

[2] John Lanchester, Gargantuanisation. London Review of Books Vol. 43 No. 8, 22 April 2021.

[3] Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything.

[4] Rose George, TED Talk: Inside the Secret Shipping Industry. TED@BCG Singapore, October 2013.

[5] Wikipedia: Flag of convenience.

[6] The following descriptive paragraphs are based on extracts from the website of the Mission to Seafarers: What is a Seafarer? and Our Issues, accessed 17 June 2021.

[7] Psalm 107:23, 25-26, 28-31 & Mark 4.35-41 – “Some Went Down to the Sea”. Prayer and song for God, original text adapted from the ELW psalter with original tune and performed by Pastor Joel S Neubauer, St Mark Lutheran Church (ELCA), Yorktown, Virginia. Shared for the season after Pentecost 2021 (Covid-19/coronavirus). Sourced from YouTube: https://youtu.be/VODlmwcL9ug.

Ezekiel 17.22-24, Mark 4.26-34

The Second Sunday after Trinity, 13 June 2021 

Austwick, Keasden

It’s a noxious and invasive weed, say gardeners and agriculturalists. Whilst farmers complain that it upsets their livestock’s stomachs. Herbalists though, speak of its medicinal use for relieving headaches and painful joints, reducing inflammation and clearing sinus congestion. And what kitchen would be without it as a spicy relish in so many meals? The jury is out on wild mustard. Which Jesus compared to the kingdom of God.

Pliny the Elder in around AD 78, saw it both ways. “Mustard,” he wrote, “is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

Not good news, then, for those who like to keep their gardens well-ordered or their fields under control. Wild mustard. I’ve heard it recently described as “the single most pestilential invasive plant in the entire country.” 

So why would anyone dream of sowing it? When they tell this story, Matthew and Luke write of ‘a grain of mustard which someone took and sowed’. But Mark’s version doesn’t suggest any human involvement: the mustard seed here may well be simply sowing itself, falling to the ground, scattered on the wind or even helped along by a friendly bird. And if that’s the case, then this parable points beyond the human activities of ploughing and sowing, planting and tending – human efforts to make the ecosystem work for us. This parable takes us into the heart of the wild workings of the more-than-human ecosystem itself. [2]

Now that’s a fascinating point to take. For whenever we hear Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is like ‘something or other’ we automatically assume he’s using that ‘something or other’ as a metaphor for us – in our arrogance and self-absorption we assume that his parables of the kingdom must always be about the human world, that they are lessons about the way we interact with each other or with God. We assume that, because we think the world revolves around us; to use a fancy phrase, it’s an anthropocentric point of view.

So… what if this passage about the mustard seed is not a parable about human behaviour at all – but instead is a pretty straight telling of how God works in nature? If it is then it should humble us.

For, as permaculturalist Toby Hemenway explains, human agency plays its part in wild mustard’s story. He says that ‘opportunistic’ plants like mustard ‘crave disturbance, love sunlit edges, churned-up ground, and often, poor soil’. The likes of mustard thrive best in ‘disrupted ecosystems, fragmented and degraded by grazing, logging, dams, road building, pollution, and other human activity. When humans make a clearing, nature leaps in, working furiously to rebuild an intact humus and fungal layer, harvest energy, and reconstruct all the cycles and connections that have been severed. A thicket of fast-growing pioneer plants, packing a lot of biomass into a small space, is a very effective way to do this.’ [3]

Mustard might be an ‘invader’, if we have to call it that, but this ‘invasion’ is one way in which other-than-human creatures bring healing and stability to habitats that humans have disturbed, renewing the fertility of soils that humans have farmed-out and overgrazed. Mustard and its kindred seeds are driving green life back into the open through the cracks in the concrete. [4]

Is Jesus really saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a pioneering plant which starts the process by which nature recreates itself after humans have disturbed it? When Jesus suggests that the mustard seed grows into ‘the greatest of all shrubs’ with ‘large branches’ it sounds like hyperbole, until we learn how this ecology works: how an ‘invaded’ ecosystem eventually finds a new equilibrium, and invaders like mustard are then kept in check, as the relatively stable, diverse, habitat that they have helped form, in time matures. [5]

Might this cause us to pause before we next condemn wild mustard as a noxious and invasive weed? 

Might this make us stop to reflect on the effects of our obsession with controlling nature, forcing our own agendas onto it, whether they be clearing greenbelt land for industrial development or hacking back a corner of our garden to give it a tidier look?

Might the parable of the mustard seed suggest that the kingdom of heaven is intimately involved in what contemporary scientists call the Wood Wide Web, the deeply interconnected web of organisms through which trees share nutrients, heal their sick, and communicate warnings to each other? Can we allow the parable of the mustard seed to interrupt our idea that the world and everything in it is all for us, that the teachings of Jesus and the way of God are all about us? 

Can we pause on the suggestion that rather than our seeking the kingdom of God, we might adjust to the idea that we are part of the kin-dom of God? For kingdoms are human-focussed institutions, brutal in their interaction with a world they perceive as being outside themselves, whilst the kin-dom of God – the kin-dom, that’s ‘kingdom’ without the ‘g’ – opens up the suggestion that being ‘in God’ puts us humans in a deeper-than-ever-imagined relationship with the more-than-human ecosystem which makes up life on earth in all its fullness. It’s the ‘expansive idea of how we – human and other-than-human creatures – might discover transformed ways of relating to each other as ‘kin’. [6]

What are the ‘opportunistic’ mustard-like ‘weeds’ in our part of the world? What kind of healing and renewal might they be bringing with them? Is there a way we can serve them in their task? [7]

Let’s contemplate these things next time we’re tempted to curse and pull a so-called ‘weed’ from a crack in our concrete.

 

 

Notes

[1] The substance of this sermon is based on Chapter 11, ‘Interrupting’ in Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In, p.121-122. 

[2] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted (p.121) quoting Jim Perkinson, Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-Apocalypsc: Communication and Struggle Across Species, Cultures, and Religions. 

[3] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted (p.121) quoting Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd edition.

[4] A reference to the Michael Leunig cartoon, The crack in the concrete.

[5] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.122.

[6] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.5.

[7] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.122.