Default

Throughout August 2012, at our informal 4pm congregation at Malmesbury Abbey, instead of one 20-25 minute sermon we will be having a TAKE 3 series– where three speakers have 5 minutes each on the same predetermined text. No collaborating, no secretly preparing a carefully balanced 15 minutes together so that one speaker magically speaks on the Father, the second on the Son and the third on…we would be throwing food and jeering at the last speaker for such blatant contrivance. Potentially we get three people saying exactly the same thing three times, potentially we get three insights that intersect and illumine, and then the congregation get to vote. Actually there is no (formal) voting at all, but the congregation do get five minutes to discuss in groups what the text and the three talks have stirred up in them. This has been fun and interesting and pretty fruitful when we’ve done this in the past and breaks the mind-numbing monotony of my preaching.

So in July I will give two pieces of advice to our mini-preachers. Firstly, five minutes is not nine minutes. Do the maths, 2000 words do not fit into 300 seconds without some sort of illegal stimulant. And secondly, be aware of your default setting – the thing that we always get up and say, the point we always make in spiritual conversations. You know the sort of thing - the church needs to re-engage with the poor; we need to pray more so that things will change; people are living less holy lives; the UK is about 3mm from spiritual catastrophe; we need to go deeper in worship. Sometimes we present our default as ‘the gospel’ so that we can say the same thing every time and our brothers and sisters can hardly argue against ‘the gospel’. Sometimes we feel the Lord has ‘laid on our heart’ precisely what our default setting is, a remarkable coincidence. (The only thing laid on my heart is cholesterol.) We all do it – let’s come clean.

I know a preacher whose default will often lead him (helpfully) to the perspectives of the Church Fathers on our journey together; another for whom we really should wake up and follow the radical Jesus in an transformative missional community (he’s absolutely right); and another for whom St Paul’s writing is a regular clarification and a stirring challenge (it is) - even if he’s been speaking on Old Testament cookery. I love these preachers and their teaching and I hope they will show me similar mercy when I rather predictably encourage the church, yet again, to get out there, to see God at work in the world and join in, and to live lives which commend the gospel to those for whom it is an irrelevance (we should.)

But I think, if we're honest with ourselves and can push past the awkwardness, we can dig deeper. Jung writes about our shadow side, or dark side, but I have a feeling that the lives we live are formed by something far less sinister but ultimately far more compromising; a subconscious laziness that allows us to drift back again and again to our habitual spiritual default. And we flip back to it when we leave the building or shut the Bible or say Amen (if it has been our default to go to church, read the Bible or pray in the first place.) The Lord is doing a new thing. Go, install, reconfigure, reboot.