Jeremy Myers is offering to burn a Bible. Read his post to find out why. I would do so too, if it would help. After all, as Christians we don’t, or shouldn’t, worship the Bible.
I don’t think this is an April Fool. The topic is far too serious for that.
I met John and Ruth Hamilton at a campsite in the south of France in 1987. I also met, among others, a quiet Scottish woman called Mary Gardner. At the time we were all considering joining Wycliffe Bible Translators. Mary, John and Ruth, and I became members within the next few years, and we all spent several years overseas involved with Bible translation work. We would meet one another every now and then as our paths crossed at the UK Wycliffe Centre. I left Wycliffe in 2002. but continued to work on Bible translation until 2008. John and Ruth are still members, now based in Northern Ireland. And Mary Gardner went to be with the Lord just over a week ago, the sole victim of a bomb blast in Jerusalem.
John Hamilton has now posted his memories of Mary, including some pictures from that camp in the south of France. As he also names me, that has prompted me to recognise publicly that I knew Mary. In John’s photo which I have reproduced here, I think the top of my head is visible at the back right. And there, on the left with long red hair, is Mary as I first knew her.
I don’t have anything else to add to what John, Eddie Arthur and several others have written about Mary. I just want to honour the memory of this dedicated woman who tragically lost her life while serving the Lord, but is now in a better place.
I was surprised to receive a letter from the University of Cambridge telling me that they are awarding me a Master of Mathematics degree. Or it might be a Master of Advanced Study – the distinction they make is ambiguous. One way or the other, I qualify for the Retrospective Award of Masters Degrees for Part III Mathematics.
To be honest, this feels like a bit of a joke. The studies I did were indeed at a master’s degree level, including a dissertation, but there was no formal award at the end. The applied mathematics I studied was really more theoretical physics, following on from my undergraduate studies in physics. But all this was over 30 years ago. The last time I looked at the dissertation I could hardly understand a word in it, let alone an equation. Even its title means little to me now – something about particles that could in theory exist in imaginary time.
However, this is a reminder to me that it was on this course that, as I wrote here several years ago, I studied under Prof John Polkinghorne. That was just before Polkinghorne left the academic world to train as an Anglican priest – and before he returned to that world as an expert on the relationship of science and faith. Polkinghorne’s example partly inspired me also to leave the academic world and follow God’s calling, which was at first into a job in industry.
I don’t think I will be returning to Cambridge to pick up my new master’s degree in person. I already have an MA in Theology, from London Bible College (now London School of Theology).
The BBC reports that Lotto winner Michael Carroll wants dustbin job back. In 2002, when he was 19 and already a convicted criminal, he won £9.7 million on the lottery. After his win he continued a life of petty crime. Now he has spent it all, including (he admits) £1.2m on drugs. So he is looking to return to his old job as a dustman.
Sadly the local bin service operators are not taking the same attitude as the Prodigal Son’s father, and have said they “are not recruiting for operatives in the area”.
What does this say about lotteries? I will give the last word to Carroll himself:
Asked if he regretted what he had done since winning the jackpot, Mr Carroll said: “When you give nine million pounds to a 19-year-old what do you think is going to happen?”
I thank Donald Haynes and John Meunier for this wonderful little story which tells us so much about church life today. Apparently (although I can’t find a reliable source to confirm this) it originally comes from a sermon by the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:
Once upon a time there was a village called Ducktown. The entire population was made up of barnyard ducks. They built little duck houses and slept in feather beds of duck down, and gobbled up duck food and quacked in duck talk. On Sundays the females put on little hats and sashes, the males put on little neckties and the duck families waddled down to Duck Church, quacking all the way.
One week they called a new duck preacher, and were very excited to hear his first sermon. He told them that God had endowed all ducks with three great gifts—webbed feet for swimming, beaks for gobbling food and wings for flying.
However, they had lost the talent to use their wings. If they looked into the sky, the preacher said, they could see flocks of wild ducks flying in perfect “V” formations. But they were content to eat, quack and waddle around Ducktown, and couldn’t even swim much.
“I am here to tell you that you can fly,” he said. “Your wings can still lift your bodies into the air and you can soar like the wild ducks. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to leave the church this morning and take a short flight over the village?”
He was so persuasive that suddenly there was a loud “Quaaack” from the back of the church, and one of the young adult ducks was in the air, circling over the congregation. Some of the other ducks were so excited that they joined in the fun, and soon you could hardly see for all the flying feathers. Their lives would be changed forever. They would no longer be confined to the ground; now they could claim their God-given endowment as masters of the skies.
Then it happened. One loud duck waddled down to the front and quacked out a protest: “Stop this nonsense! We are domesticated, not wild. We are civilized ducks. We have houses with beds, yards with gates, a village with streets and a church with walls. Flying is what our ancestors did, but we don’t fly.”
One by one the ducks flew back down to their perches, feeling a bit foolish for what they had done and holding up their heads with quiet dignity. The chastised new preacher pronounced the benediction and they all waddled home, never to fly again.
Are we just waddling like “civilized” ducks, or are we flying like free as God made us?
My local newspaper reports that three real life princesses have gone undercover in my home town of Chelmsford. They have become temporary “Essex girls” for a BBC reality TV series starting tonight (which may be available on iPlayer, probably UK only).
I couldn’t help wondering if my beautiful wife was one of the princesses. Not for this year’s series, but perhaps for last year’s? If so, she hasn’t admitted it to her chosen man, as the princesses are supposed at the end of the series. But she certainly looks the part – and all the more so on our wedding day last October. She is surely in real life the Principessa Lorenza de’ Medici, granddaughter of the last king of Italy.
The BBC reports an interesting row in India, in fact in the 70% Christian state of Meghalaya, about school textbooks
showing pictures of Jesus Christ holding a cigarette and a can of beer.
The state government has seized the textbooks, which were found being used in a private school, and
legal action against the publishers was being contemplated.
The row is likely to spread beyond this one remote state, as the book was published in Delhi, and
The Catholic Church in India has banned all textbooks by [publishers of the book] Skyline Publications from all its schools.
One wonders what motivated the publishers to include in the book such a silly and gratuitously offensive picture (you can see it on the BBC site). It would hardly be the act of any genuinely religious Hindus or Muslims. It sounds more like the kind of stunt that would be pulled by militant secularist atheists.
But to me the most objectionable part of the picture is not the beer can or the cigarette but the way that an image of Jesus as a blond European (which of course he was not) is being used even in India.
Were those wise men on to something when they gave frankincense to the baby Jesus? Could it cure cancer? According to a BBC report, some doctors think so, and are carrying out research to prove it.
I just found an astonishing report at the BBC website. For over a century the Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon have been making their Buckfast tonic wine. One might expect this “Tonic with a smooth, rounded taste” to be a favoured tipple of retired clerics. 
But, according to the BBC, this drink has been linked to no fewer than 5,638 reported crimes, over a four year period, in the Strathclyde region of Scotland.
One in 10 of those offences were violent and the bottle was used as a weapon 114 times in that period.
This drink “made up just 0.5% of Scotland’s alcohol market”, but of one group of young offenders who had been drinking before they offended, as many as 40% reported that they had been drinking Buckfast.
Why should this be? Buckfast does contain high levels of caffeine as well as alcohol, but then so does rum and Coca-Cola, or fine wine followed by coffee. So it doesn’t make sense to claim that this mixture is causing crime. More likely it has simply become the fashionable drink among the particular section of Scottish society which are anyway most likely to offend while under the influence of alcohol.
So the monks can hardly be blamed for the problem. Banning the drink would hardly help as young offenders, who are under 18, are already not allowed to purchase any alcohol. But perhaps greater efforts should be made to keep this concoction, and any other alcoholic drinks, out of the hands of people too young and irresponsible to handle them.
I was struck by this story on the BBC website, about a famous Australian judge who told a small white lie to get out of a speeding fine, and ended up spinning a web of deceit which has not only ruined his international reputation but also landed him in jail. How easy it is for little white lies to grow! How important it is that we tell the truth, in small things as well as big ones.