It’s all about the context
by David Primrose - December 2020
In this article, David Primrose reflects on how a proper appreciation of our context helps us to understand life, truth, the gospel and ourselves
As a beekeeper, I want to know what the buzz is all about. Where is the noise coming from, and what can I learn from the way the bees are behaving? After my ten years as Social Responsibility Officer in the Diocese of Lichfield, and six years setting up and running our Joint Venture, Transforming Communities Together, I am still looking for those hubs of activity where differing perspectives collide. As I rush towards retirement at the end of this month, I keep searching for fragile shards of new life in the unresolved confluence of conflicting pressures. How are eternal truths made manifest in that tiny space which I occupy? In the weariness of post-modern neo-liberalism, will my perpetual craving for cosmic intimacy continue to shape my quest for meaning. The judge asked the prisoner, what is truth? What’s the connection between how I behave and what matters? Visible discipleship – let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
I do know that Jesus is the answer, but keep asking myself, what was the question? It’s in attentive listening to the issues of contemporary life that we find clues as to what people will find to be good news for today. I accept that for those who don’t believe in hell, salvation from ultimate damnation isn’t a big deal. For those who don’t feel especially guilty about their behaviour, escaping judgement is not much of a motivator. For those who aren’t bothered whether there is life after death, the promise of eternal life may be of little interest.
Likewise if a particular worldview is all pervasive, then appeal to divine endorsement has little to add. In a culture which values babies of nine days ahead of seniors of nine decades, Jesus’ embrace of children can lose its subversive edge. In a world where few leaders expect to be worshipped as gods, St Paul’s exhortation to pray to God for, rather than pray directly to, the authorities lacks its revolutionary threat. So I need to ask myself, from where are those deeply disturbing questions emerging to which the Christ-event offers hope?
It’s all about the context, my colleague said. It is in the midst of turmoil that we look for signs. Scan the horizon; look down at your feet; feel the cracks in your soul. Where everything is seemingly up for grabs, what are the reference points which can help us locate ourselves. What we notice is not points of stability, but patterns emerging within the turbulence of change, themes which keep repeating themselves in seemingly different situations. However much we protest that there are red lines, non-negotiable truths, fundamental principles, core values, these are all but ways to draw lines in the sand which the incoming waves wash away. The context tells us where in the sand we leave our footprints, getting our feet wet in futile attempts to turn back the tide before being forced to retreat inland. Yet it’s there, in that liminal fluid space between high and low water mark, that starfish gasp for life, waiting to be tossed back into salty chaos of salvation. This space, contested by land and sea, subject to the extremities of spring and neap tides, is where we encounter Jesus, the carpenter-come-builder who told fishermen how to fish.
It’s all about the context, especially those places where life is in perpetual flux. Is it these 24 hours, the penultimate day of the UK’s second lockdown? Or is the context the Anthropocene, that era in which the impact of human behaviour is so significant as to define a new geological epoch? Is the context my own, in the closing days of my current vocation? Or is the context that of the diocese in which I serve, where, as an exercise of subsidiarity, the hyperlocal energy of the parish is being corralled into deaneries shaped for mission? Is the context that of the good news of radical inclusivity which last year I preached to over 60 different congregations, many of whose members now sense the privilege of having had a ‘good Covid’? Or is the context that of Reset the Debt and other campaigns challenging the emphasis of economic support for hundreds of big businesses rather than millions of small people?
What is static becomes invisible. What is fixed is taken for granted. When we are surrounded by those like ourselves, we hear our own voice within a self-created echo chamber; we are affirmed in who we already are. Hubris is so invidious that we may invite those near to us to be critical friends, whilst waiting patiently till they come round to endorsing our opinion. Not only do we define our own normal, we have already begun to define our own new normal, presenting our own selection of past and future as if it were the only viable morally-acceptable option.
So when it feels that all around us is in flux, where do we seek our certainties? In the midst of change, what gives us security? As we wade into this ever-deepening river, at what point do we take our feet of the bottom and risk entrusting ourselves to the water’s buoyancy and the current’s lift? Is this the Red Sea, or the Jordan, which we seek to cross on dry land, or is it the river of life, flowing from the temple deeper and deeper, with trees along its banks whose leaves are for the healing of the nations?
So my context is that of questions. I am confronted again by uncomfortable facts that challenge my complacency. An inconvenient truth demands a personal response to the universal threat of climate change – with grandchildren love-miles away on the other side of the world, how do I act local, think global? Whilst we’ve been able to bring my 96-yr old mother to live with us, the obscenely high mortality of those with dementia during this pandemic is an indictment of a hypercognitive society which has now become a matter of social justice alongside the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on our black and minority ethnic communities. Knowing the devastating impact of the way we have responded to the pandemic upon those already financially precarious, I work hard to promote the Covid Cash Recovery course whilst meeting my financial advisor to discuss retirement plans. I discuss how our joint venture might become part of Positive Pathways providing wrap-around support for those coming out of homelessness, and invest some of our savings in a property with three tenants for whom that has been their experience. I’ve been stood down as a blood donor, but am enquiring if they’ll accept a kidney. Our next initiative is to equip churches to support those caring for some-one during an episode of acute mental illness, whilst colleagues help each other cope with the pandemic’s impact on their mental wellbeing.
Whether it’s about money, the environment, or relationships, the struggle seems to be around finding an integrity between the personal and the global, the individual and the social. The Jesus I encounter in the pages of scripture epitomises the life-giving sacrifice to which the big book of creation testifies. So I’m back with the humble honey-bee, the ultimate social animal, who die when they sting, forfeiting their life to defend their colony, and our saviour whose singular death brings global salvation. If you have three minutes – watch this - The Bee-keeping Vicar
David Primrose is retiring as CEO of Transforming Communities Together, having served as Social Responsibility Officer in the Diocese of Lichfield for the last ten years. Previously he’d been a parish priest in the Gloucester Diocese. He was ordained deacon in the Church of Pakistan whilst working as a CMS mission partner with heroin addicts in Karachi, prior to which he was a probation officer. His recent doctorate explores how respectable people cope with their memories of bad behaviour. He has just become a prebendary. He and Alison have two children, both with families abroad, two puppies and a garden with well over a hundred thousand bees.