In Stephen Fry’s recent documentary on the making of the Gutenberg Bible, what came home to me with a jolt is that the Bible - at least the sheaf of bound and printed paper we hold in our hands and call the Bible - is first and foremost a piece of technology.

Only in the last 500 years or so have we had widespread access to this particular gadget. For the first three half-millennia of the Christian era, the word for most Christians was wholly oral, as it was read out to them from valuable, handwritten texts.

We Protestants can’t quite handle this fact: that for most of Christian history the Bible has been unavailable to Christians. In the New Testament period, there was no New Testament available. And prior to the Reformation, there were no pocket Bibles, virtually no lectern Bibles, no Bible study groups, no Bible notes, few available commentaries, and not a huge amount of preaching either.

Some would say: precisely - no wonder the Church needed a Reformation! And there is some truth in that. But let’s linger with the thought that the Bible as we know it - printed and bound - is a 15th century gadget, the beginning of mass production, a first seed sown in what is now the jungle of consumer culture. A product.

Eugene Peterson (Eat This Book) draws attention most forcefully to the idea that in the shift from an oral to a written (printed) faith, our relationship to the Word has changed dramatically. No longer do we encounter it as a personal word addressed to our hearing ear in a real-time event: instead we encounter it through the seeing eye in a moment that we control. We treat the Book as object. Instead of encountering the Word as a word spoken to us, and which demands a response, we treat it as just one text among many, useful for information, gossip, entertainment, scorn - whatever we happen to think. The last thing we do is hear in its pages a personal address from God.

Peterson’s remedy for this distancing of the Word - turning it into a handbag accessory, or a baptismal talisman - is to recover the art of lectio divina. This involves a prayerful reading of Scripture, in which the emphasis is not so much on study and rational understanding, as on an encounter with God.

So while we rejoice in this newfangled gadget - the printed Bible - that only modern Christians have known, let us also remember that our reliance on personal and group Bible study in Protestant circles is a consquence not of some timeless pattern handed down from a holy mountain, but merely a quirk of modern technology.

Who knows, in a hundred years time there could be a new Reformation built around the microchip. And then the badge of keen Christian commitment will no longer be the large slab of black calf-skin tucked under the arm, but perhaps a small chip implanted in our brain giving us instant recall of every Bible version ever printed.

Have you ever been asked this question? I was once asked by a careers advisor to name my ‘worth’ - of course, I replied, “I’m priceless.” She didn’t look impressed.

But then nor am I. When I hear that Bill Gates is ‘worth’ several hundred billion dollars, I think, “Poor guy, is that all?”

I came across a business website recently that offers to calculate the ‘worth’ of your blog. I took the test, and apparently, my blog is worth the tidy sum of $0.00. I like that. Accuracy to two decimal places.

I think what it means is that I have no advertising on my site - and it’s going to stay that way. But worth nothing?

How is it that we have become so caught up with the idea that the worth - the value - of people and things can be described within the tiny confines of a price tag? And surely this carries with it the dangerous assumption that anything that has no price tag is therefore without value. Children. The elderly. The unemployed.

The contemporary attitude that tries to turn everything into a commodity creates a view of the world in which everything has an imaginary price tag. But it overlooks the fact that most of what we value in everyday life cannot be tagged so easily - fresh air, natural beauty, human kindness, health, children, good neighbours, springtime, a moment’s peace, the scent of heaven.

I would go further. This life is one enormous gift, evidenced in its very givenness, its details, even in its limitations. Price is nothing more than a mechanism for regulating scarcity. It has nothing to do with intrinsic value.

So I will go on saying I am priceless: because I am; and so are you. And this blog? Well, I hope there’s some value in here somewhere.

Today I preached on Mark 8:31-38.

Listen again here.

Jesus said that if anyone is to follow him, that person must ‘deny self’, and take up the cross. But what does this mean in practice?

There is a confusion here: in English, to ‘deny’ can mean either to refuse, or to contradict.

So ‘deny self’ sounds like it could mean either to refuse myself something that I want, or to contradict or negate some aspect of myself.

Often we read it as the latter; so we conclude that it is not OK to want or need things; not OK to be assertive or have much of a personality. Denying self becomes about making ourselves invisible.

In complete contrast to this emotional anorexia, Jesus seems to want us to have a buoyant, confident self. He wants to give us life in abundance. He showed himself as the life and soul of the party; as the one who hung out with colourful characters; who told the religious elite where to get off. And it is out of this confident self that he was able to deny himself, to take up his cross.

Following Jesus is not about the bland leading the bland. It is about confident, healthy people, choosing to forgo some pleasures or privileges for the sake of others. It is about looking beyond the tiny circle of self-concern to embrace the world.

I like this. A masterpiece of emotional intelligence.
Sometimes pictures say it better than words.

By the way, I find myself on spiraluniverse this April. It looks like fun.

Let me get this straight. If the shrill crescendo of media voices in recent months is anywhere near correct, this century is going to be the century of apocalypse.

The threats crowd in like bullies. First, if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions virtually to zero in the next four decades, we will be committed to a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees. At this point, ‘feedback’ mechanisms kick in which accelerate global warming. The difference between now and the last ice age, when Scotland was beneath 2 miles of ice, is just five degrees. We’re on course for that in the possible lifetime of my children. The last 12,000 years have been an unprecedented period of climactic stability - the ‘holocene’ - and it is now ending. This period of stability enabled civilization to flourish. In just the last 200 years, we have extracted enough fossil fuels, and destroyed enough rainforest, to bring about the end of an age. Humanity can be likened to a healthy 28-year-old who, in just one hour, lives so unwisely he becomes critically ill. There have been five periods of mass extinction in the history of the earth. The last was 65 million years ago. We have just initiated the sixth. Some predict the loss of 95% of species. In James Lovelock’s mind, we are looking at a scenario where less than 10% of the population are likely to survive, huddled together at the two poles.

Two. By the end of the century, global population will reach around 9 billion. (When David Attenborough was born, there were just 2bn people on earth). Human beings have existed for around 50 million years: the majority of these are alive today. Three factors make this terrifying: the amount of habitable space through desertification and coastal flooding will reduce at the same time as population rises; the number of people consuming multiple times the amount the earth can sustain (like westerners currently do) will also increase rapidly; and the oil on which our current way of life depends will virtually run out. We are facing accelerated global warming, pollution, the loss of major cities through flooding (25m rises as the ice caps melt) and starvation and conflict on a global scale.

Three. How long will it be before terroist groups, or unstable nations, acquire nuclear and biological weapons? What will the world look like when 9/11 goes nuclear? Or a fresh pandemic is unleashed on the world?

No doubt in the hours before the Titanic sank people were rearranging the deck-chairs; just as Europe in the 1930s thought that Hitler could be appeased, and few could foresee what would happen.

Simon Barnes, writing recently in the RSPB magazine Birds wrote that in the face of these kinds of catastrophe we need to move beyond both naive optimism, and paralysing pessimism. We need, instead, simply to act. It may be that our shouting at the Captain, or paddling furiously with a broken plank, will make no difference as to whether or not the ship strikes the iceberg. But at least we tried.

And there’s something else. There’s Easter. I woke up this morning and thought, well at least there’s hope. There is the Risen One who came to remake the world. He came to show us a new kind of existence - in a body not immediately recognizable; a body that on the one hand could eat fish, but on the other could enter a locked room. A spiritual body. He has something in store for us that we can’t quite understand, but we do know it involves the whole of creation. There is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth; not so we can jump ship on this heaven and this earth, but so that we can work towards its redemption.

The prophets of doom are abroad right now; and they may well be right - let’s not kid ourselves. But there’s also the Resurrection; new life; a reason to go on; springtime hope on the creaking decks.

I hesitate to blog about dog poo. However, I was encouraged to stumble upon this blog post on Greener Leith. (Leith is the historic port-town of Edinburgh).

In the past we used to curse irresponsible dog owners every time we felt that slippery ooze beneath our flip-flops, and smelt the stench of a freshly-smeared turd.

Then came pooper-scoopers, bags, and bins; and for a while it looked like our pavements might be clean again, and pregnant mothers would no longer have to worry about their babies being born blind.

But recently, a new and worrying trend has emerged. Some people are bagging their dog’s poo (a useful hand-warmer I’ve often thought) and then flinging it into the bushes. Only, half the time, the bag gets lodged in a tree. Some trees have been so adorned that they now look ready for Christmas.

So what’s going through people’s minds? At least the old-fashioned poo-in-the-street got washed away with the rain, and returned to the soil from whence it came. But with this new, and seemingly increasing, trend not only are our paths and hedges being littered with plastic bags, but their contents have no chance of escape. And if you have gone to all the trouble of picking up the offending stool in the first place, why dump it down again? We disliked the old poo, but at least it vanished; the new poos will only accumulate, until every branch of every tree and hedge is laden with them. Maybe then, the irresponsible dog owners will think to stop.

OK, so it’s not exactly a crisis of the proportions of climate-change or over-population. But perhaps the same mentality underlies both: that it doesn’t matter what I do, because what difference will my behaviour make? It’s individualism at its worst.

And on this occasion, more than ever, it stinks.

Death. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to avoid it. Yet one of the unmistakable features of the passion story, is that Jesus was not overtaken by death; he walked right into it. He chose to die.

On Sunday I’m preaching on John 18:1-11.

Listen again here.

The chapter begins with Jesus and his disciples taking a serene moonlit stroll down from the old city of Jerusalem, across the Kidron Valley, and up to the Mount of Olives. It ends with Jesus before Pilate, about to be flogged. What goes on in between is clear: Jesus refuses every opportunity to escape from the fate that awaits him. He chooses the path to the cross.

Perhaps we wouldn’t volunteer for pain and suffering. Who would? But surely we have known those times when we must face what’s coming to us, and, despite the unpleasantness of it, our mind is made up and there is no going back. Perhaps it’s something as mundane as the dentist’s chair: there’s no point postponing the inevitable. Or maybe it is conflict that needs addressing: we know we are going to have to bite the bullet sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner. Or possibly it’s an issue of principle: there’s nothing else we can do but make a stand and then await the flak.

In the same way, Jesus’ mind was resolute. All the agonizing over this decision had already taken place, in the garden of Gethsemane (lit. ‘olive-press’), where huge drops of sweat were crushed from him in the God-press of obedience. By the time he faced the arrest-party, Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, the soldiers, and the murderous crowd, he was decided.

Is this what it means to walk the way of the cross? Not to go looking for pain and suffering, but to remain decided on all those issues where we can see right from wrong? It would have been so easy for Jesus to hide in the olive grove; he could so easily have got away. He could have flattered Caiaphas, and answered Pilate. But he chose not to. Instead, he chose the cross.

Where are the darkened groves in our lives - places safe, familiar, out of sight of the demands of truth and love and justice? And dare we walk with Christ this Holy-Week, and beyond, stepping out of the shadows, to choose the path of the cross? On what issues are you decided? And what would it mean to walk that path?

I spent the last three days at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales learning how to make biodiesel from waste cooking oil. It’s quite a thought: for a few hundred pounds you can build a small processing plant that will turn the waste oil from you local chippy into biodiesel you can run your car on.

Admittedly, the process is not exactly simple. There are two particularly horrible chemicals involved (methanol and potassium hydroxide.) Both can seriously burn and poison, and one very easily explodes. And if you are going to do it properly, you need to build your plant to cope with potentially hazardous waste chemicals. But the fun thing about it is it is all so wonderfully possible. It can be done responsibly by any careful, handy person.

We get so used to accepting the market structures of corporate Britain, we easily become pliable consumers who lack creativity or self-sufficiency. One of the tutors on this course has changed his lifestyle so that all his electricity is generated from solar - quite an achievement in the UK. But who says we have to visit the petrol station every other week? Or pay the power companies hundreds of pounds every year? Or shrug our shoulders at climate change?

The last three days have been very refreshing - to be around practical people with a positive can-do approach, and who are willing to think out of the box. I don’t know if I will be turning my garden shed into a multi-million pound reactor quite yet, but I’m seriously tempted to make a start.

Today I am preaching on John 17:1-19

Listen again here (from Monday)

John lets us in on Jesus’ prayer to the Father, now that ‘the hour has come’ for him to be glorified.

He is looking forward to sharing the glory that he had together with the Father before the world began - in short - he’s looking forward to going home.

Whatever went on in the Trinity during Jesus’ life on earth, his returning to the father is restoring a communion and fellowship that existed before all worlds.

Sometimes we behave as if God needs us. As if he would be sad and lonely without us, as if his plans would come to nothing. As if he has a neurotic dependence upon our continual praise.

But the shock of John 17 is that Jesus is looking forward to returning to the Father, to a situation he enjoyed before the world had even begun. That’s about 4 billion years, if we want to be literal about it.

I find that just a little bit humbling. God doesn’t need me. He loves me, of course. He would do anything for me (and it seems that he did.) But he doesn’t need me.

So next time I try and persuade God to get on board with one of my grandiose schemes - dressed up as something that is really for God’s benefit - maybe I should remember this. The community of the Trinity is open, yes (see icon); but it is also entirely self-sufficient. Or should I say, three-self sufficient?

Today the Anglican church worldwide commemorates the life of George Herbert. (1593-1633)

Herbert’s poetry has deservedly entered the canon of English Literature; but while we might admire his metre, or feel awed astonishment at his use of imagery, it is surely the spiritual momentum to his poems that make him great. They have the power to carry us to gates of heaven, if we’ll allow.

Herbert’s life was a lesson in downsizing. He started life at the top of the tree, born into a rich, cultured, and well-connected family. He used his education, and became a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, a notable scholar who attracted the attention of James VI, and in his early thirties even served in Parliament.

From these giddy heights, however, in his late thirties he returned to a childhood dream - to enter the priesthood, and serve the ordinary people of his parish at Bemerton in Wiltshire. This he did for just three years, before dying from tuberculosis one month short of his fortieth birthday.

In his poem, Redemption, Herbert speaks of going in search of his feudal Lord in order to ‘downsize’ from a larger house in which he did not thrive, to “a new small-rented lease”. This Lord he does not find among the great and the good, “in cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts”, but rather in the company of thieves and murderers - Christ on the cross.

The poem, reflecting his life, reminds us that the way up is down; that to enter the Kingdom we must become as children; that to gain Christ we need to downsize our worldly ambitions, our status, our self-serving ego. The invitation is to downsize and thrive.

Redemption
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old.

In heaven at his manour I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.