Riot response

    I was quite surprised that the most effective words that came out of the riots were spoken by Tariq Jahan, a grieving father, and a muslim. Christians need to be more open-minded. It is all too easy to get the wrong end of the stick and to take offence, just like the Pharisees who were always taking offence at Jesus, in fact. Jesus wanted his disciples to be more open minded and thoughtful than the Pharisees, and found himself saying to them (i.e. the leaders - not the rank-and-file!): “Are you still so dull?”

    Often, when we are trying to say the right thing, we say the wrong thing: in 1948 the US ambassador to the United Nations urged the warring Arabs and Jews to end their hostilities 'like good Christians'. Some time later President Regan gave a speech trying to appeal to the third world. He told them: 'The United States has much to offer the third world war' - and he repeated this 9 times in his speech. It's not just making a slip of the tongue: all too often we make entirely wrong judgements. In my time as a teacher it became quite clear to me that most of the time I picked on the wrong pupil who I thought was being naughty. It always turned out it was the pupil sitting next to him who was the real culprit!

This very human capacity for blunder has been well illustrated by the recent riots, and by reactions to the riots. On Newsnight last week the historian David Starkey, who has acquired something of a reputation for wisdom - quite wrongly in my opinion - gestured towards one of the other Newsnight guests, Owen Jones, who wrote a book about chavs, and said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black." It was a galactically stupid thing to say.

    The same principle of misunderstanding applies to religion. In Jesus' time the key text was the 10 commandments, which Jesus himself pointed out boiled down to one clear moral agenda of loving God and loving one's neighbour. But the Pharisees insisted on the observance of an extensive collection of instructions, which they themselves had cobbled together, which set out precise rules of behaviour, sometimes overiding the God-given moral code. So Jesus challenged them: 'Why do you break the commands of God with your tradition?' The Pharisees had just not thought it through, and had become inconsistent in how they applied their faith. Jesus even had to point out to his own disciples that they were missing the point that Isaiah had made:

"These people honour me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain;

their teachings are merely human rules."

    But I believe that the same charge could be laid against us. A great 20th Century Christian writer wrote: ‘To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.' These were fine and thought-provoking words. The problem was that they didn't and don't just apply to worship but to the whole of the Christian life. The reverence expressed here retreated to one day in the week, and was regarded, even by Christians, as irrelevant to the other six.

    So then, at the risk of enormous blunder, I would like to suggest that one of the causes not just of the riots but of the general malaise in society that preceded it is our wrong-thinking about money, as individuals, as a society, but also as Christians. The principle of what has been described as 'Possessive individualism' - i.e. earning money whatever it takes - is so deeply embedded in our culture that we take it for granted. Yet putting the acquisition of money or things before community, country or even family began a couple of hundred years ago, after a deliberate rejection of Christian values, and also, I might add, of specific biblical teaching. When we read our bibles, we need to be prepared to take in what the Word of God says, and not just what suits us.