I took this picture in September 2015.

 I was walking through Museum Square when I saw this rainbow. I changed my position to centre the rainbow over the church and took a quick photo on my phone. At the time it reminded me of the verse in Genesis 9 verse 13 “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.”

The rainbow has been a symbol of many things in the past and has taken on a new role during our present crisis. We can only wonder how it must have appeared to early humans when, for no apparent reason, a beautiful band of colour appeared in the sky and then just as quickly vanished. The idea that it conveyed some sort of message would have been strong and for the early Israelites its connection with the story of the Flood made it a symbol of God’s continuing care for his people which was expressed in the Covenant.

Whilst some gaze in wonder, others seek to analyse. Isaac Newton, in lockdown at Woolsthorpe Manor whilst Cambridge University was closed because of the Plague, converted a room to study light. In his 1666 experiment he showed that white light could be split into rainbow colours by a prism. From this the  suggestion that raindrops acting as prisms split sunlight into the colours of the Rainbow rapidly gained acceptance in the West, an idea that had been suggested 200 years earlier by Islamic scientists.

Four hundred years later the controversy surrounding the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial brought the writing of D.H. Lawrence to prominence and I along with many other students at the time read Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbow’ and saw in it an escape from what we saw as the constraints and constrictions of Victorian morality. Interestingly a similar level of controversy was caused within the Church by the publication of ‘Honest to God’ by John Robinson Bishop of Woolwich which challenged Christians to re-examine traditional concepts and beliefs.

In 1995 South Africa won the Rugby World Cup just a couple of years after the end of Apartheid. Nelson Mandela, the County’s first black President, in his speech to the victorious team, spoke of his country as a “Rainbow Nation”, a term first coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the post- apartheid elections in 1995. The idea that a wide range of races, tribes and clans could be united in the same way that the different colours unite to make up the Rainbow made this an appealing metaphor. The new Republic’s flag used colour to represent this diversity.

The idea that the Rainbow could represent diversity in areas other than race and ethnicity has since been adopted in other areas, particularly in the realm of gender and sexuality. This use is well illustrated by this image which accompanied an online article entitled ‘The sexuality rainbow: a colourful and educational glossary. 

In reality however, the flag is incorrect both as a representation of a rainbow and also as a visual metaphor in that the bands of colour have hard edges, whereas in a true Rainbow the colours vary continuously and one cannot tell where one ends and another begins.

In the last few weeks images of the Rainbow has taken on a new meaning as way of showing support for our NHS and other Care Workers as they battle with the Corona Virus. We are now very familiar with brightly coloured children’s drawings and paintings in windows and on notice boards created to show how much we appreciate those in the front line of the battle against the pandemic. I have no idea how this image came to be chosen for his purpose but I wonder if some kind of folk memory connects it with the sense of God’s over-arching protection from Genesis.

In the last three weeks I have been part of a small online group working to devise a new formula to calculate the Parish Share, which distributes the cost of the Clergy between the Churches of our Deanery. People tell me this is one of the best ways to lose friends but fools rush in …

 In this exercise we have amassed a great deal of data about approaches to this, both within the Diocese and in other Dioceses. This has shown a variety of approaches and has also brought home to me the tremendous variation in size, churchmanship and history of our Churches even within our one Deanery. Finding a solution which recognises these differences and yet is accepted by all as reasonable will be a challenge but I think the image of us as a Rainbow Deanery varied, but part of a single whole, might help us particularly if we imagine the Rainbow over St. Peter’s stretching to arch over the Churches and people of our Deanery.  A similar concept could help us as we try to understand and value the wide range of structures and patterns of worship within the Church of England.

Keith W Aplin LLM.  St Peter and Paul Wisbech, 28^th of April 2020, Day 39 of the Lockdown 

We’re busy doing nothing
Working the whole day through
Trying to find lots of things not to do.

We’re busy going nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime?

We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time?

These words (and I apologise if this song now becomes an ear worm for you) were sung by Bing Crosby, William Bendix & Cedric Hardwicke and featured in the film A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur’s Court. (1948)Somehow, the words seem appropriate and inappropriate at the same time for our current circumstances. For those who are working from home, there is the daily juggle between the demands of work together with other domestic responsibilities. Those that are in lockdown, are probably getting close to suffering from a form of cabin fever and for others their days have become busier as they try to get through that endless list of jobs that they have been promising themselves that they will get around to ‘one day’.The lockdown has highlighted how we need to re-set our expectations of ‘normal life’ and what is achievable at the moment. As with anything to do with major changes in our lives, especially those over which we have little or no control, it requires both a mental and an emotional adjustment. If you are a natural ‘doer’ then life will be very frustrating at the moment, but we can learn a lot from those who work quietly in the background, supporting and nurturing other people. It is so easy to criticise others for not doing what you think they should be doing, and imposing ourexpectations on other people, but as I have said before, we all have different skills, gifts and personalities, and we should be using all of those in the best way we can.There are rarely any times in life when we are truly doing nothing. Even when we are sleeping, the brain is still working and our vital organs are still doing their job. When we collapse on the sofaat the end of the day, the mind is still ticking over (sometimes a bit too much). In the same way, God never ceases to be at work in our lives. He isn’t only available when we have the time to remember this. There is never a time when He is busy doing nothing!And when we think we are doing nothing, there is much that we are doing. If we are truly able to turn our whole beings to God, and we are bringing ourselves, our tasks and our concerns, into his ways, then our life becomes a continual prayer of offering. We are called to BE Christians and followers of Christ – the doing will follow!

A prayer before going to sleep
God our Father, by whose mercy the world turns safely into darkness and returns again to light:we place in your hands our unfinished tasks,our unsolved problems, and our unfulfilled hopes,knowing that only what you bless will prosper.To your love and protectionwe commit each other and all those we love,knowing that you alone are our sure defender,through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen Church of South Ind

What world shall emerge at the end of all this pain, worry and the upturning of our present world? We should not be deluded, there are strong forces that want to resume business as usual. But of course for a time they will have no choice, for there will just be chaos and consternation. There will be vast problems with unemployment, businesses that simply did not make it through and people who are milling around terrified at how they will pay the bills and so on. The most typical reactions of governments are likely to be pouring vast amounts of money into welfare and unemployment benefit. 

All the old tabloid staple about undeserving wretches taking free money to sit around and play computer games may or may or not be present but if there ever was such vast numbers of wasters who deserved to be left in penury until such times as they were willing to accept a paltry wage for some spiritually evacuated, repetitious dead end for forty hours a week, now there will be many more of us until things can be brought back to some level of equilibrium . That was those papers function of course. They were there to help ensure that the large number of nothing jobs, vital to the economy were not left unfilled. They were there to bully those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder into taking them. It would be nice to think that as obnoxious as, say, Daily Mail reporters could be in their nasty reductionistic portraits of the more wretched end of our society, that at least they had some kind of moral purpose in calling out socially irresponsible leeching off the state, Sadly that was never really their main function.The state was never going to run into the ground because of any minority of people whose upbringing or mental instability left them without the moral resources to find work like most others. But it might have serious problems if the population didn’t have a regular supply of scapegoats or pour their secrete self hatred and guilt upon, and perhaps finally to fill up the jobs that no one who didn’t have to would touch with a long pole.

Business as usual was exploitative, grossly unequal and profoundly unjust. In some ways it was better than many of the ways in which as a society we made a living before. But don’t relax into some morally complacent bubble and think that just because you weren’t doing back to back shifts in some dog meat factory then everything was as good as it was going to be. This wasn’t just how the world is, it was how we, as a society, chose to make our world. There were many who had the power to change things that certainly would not because while present circumstances enriched them, a serious upturning of those circumstances in favour of something more just, in which the social product was used to benefit people more widely, might not enrich them quite so much.

The people who were the victims of what I was talking about above were possibly some of the worst treated and purposely left as the least understood people in the system, but there were many, many others who didn’t suffer quite so much but who the system still regularly belittled, defeated and just left plain badly off. Sometimes it might have been you. Those who just about never suffered the ‘fag end’ of its treatments were the very rich whose interests therefore always lay in the preservation of things just as they are. And this was a particular problem since these were some of the few people who were capable of changing things.

All societies are, to put it in religious terms, riddled with sin. This is the sort of sin that cannot be so easily focused in individual human beings. It lives in the structure of things, the very language we speak, the signs and symbols through which we see reality. There are notions of what is the right and proper thing to do, the things that are worthy of wanting, and the things that are worth living for, that because they are in the structure of things that we imbibe with our mothers milk, seem so obviously true and right that it is common sense. We would rarely think to challenge these, at least as long as we are not seriously mistreated and left bruised and in pain by them, and then their provisional, not so obvious status might be drawn a little more to our attention. But these structures are nearly always partly grounded in truth, partly in the propaganda of self justification of that group of people who are chiefly responsible for shaping all our cultural world views, ie, those with the time and money to release themselves or their children to be the artists, the poets, the philosophers and academics and, yes, the priests. It’s not an accident that a hugely disproportionate number of priests in the Church of England, particularly the senior clergy, the Cathedral clergy and the chaplains of the great universities, are overwhelmingly middle class. 

No society avoids the self delusions that allow these fault lines in human culture to thrive, but there are societies who are more or less self critical and self reflective. The people in a society who do the reflecting are never more important than in a  crisis, and perhaps especially when they work to envisage what may lie on the other side of a crisis. The things that business as usual before crisis broke out, always insisted were impossible, and the stuff of idealist daydreams, suddenly become possible because the old ways of doing things have been turned upside down anyway. It was said only a little while back that it was easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism and certainly it seemed like Hollywood had an easier time culturally preparing us for armageddon when it came, than with the upturning of the capitalism that the industry so benefited from. It has produced little of imaginative insight lately to give us a picture of what might follow in the aftermath. Well, now it is indeed possible to envisage very different and better ways of live. It will be a sin against God if we do not learn from what has happened and do not try to picture a better, more just and kind way of living together. It is the responsibility of every generation of Christians to do what they can to make their society a thing as close to the kingdom of God as it is possible to be. Well, here is our opportunity to reproduce our little world accordingly. It will be a missed opportunity of the most staggeringly immoral kind to return to business as usual.

                         John 10 vs 3 ‘He calls his own sheep by name.’

Can you imagine being a sheep?This is, perhaps,more difficult for men because not only is it an interspecies imagining, it is an intergender one as well. Rams are notoriously anti social so, for our purposes, you are a ewe.

And you are out on a fell, or in a nicely hedged meadow, or, God forbid, being asked to browse on stinky brussel sprout stalks. And, here we draw obvious parallels with Spring 2020, you are prone to a multitude of nasty diseases. You’re not too fond of ravens either or dog walkers’ dogs.

Yet you have a guardian who calls you by your name. And loves you. At lambing time your guardian and protector will stay up all night, every night, to ensure the safety of everyone in your flock. And will tend your children as of they were their own.

When you eat sweet grass no wolf will harm you; when you are becalmed in the snow, hungry and weighed down, you will be fed and sheltered. Annoying flies will be kept at bay and, most of all, you will know who you belong to. You are marked with their sign.

We humans see ourselves as shepherds, and sometimes we are. And sometimes we are more of a liability to a world in our care than a defence.

Yet in God’s eyes we are sheep. It is the most extraordinary thing that Jesus calls you, me, and the couple next door by name. In God’s eyes you are an individual, but an individual in a flock. You do not need to earn God’s attention, you cannot, by purity of breeding, command more, and you cannot be so riddled with disease that you are written off.

What value, though, is there in being called if you don’t hear. Jesus, in our Gospel, talks about sheep ignoring the voice of strangers. If only human beings had the sense of a sheep. If only we could understand the mortal danger of not being able to distinguish the voice of the shepherd from the voices of those who would take us down paths of their own devising.

In our life of the spirit there are many thieves and bandits but only one shepherd. In these times we have plenty of reasons to be fearful yet we are handed one gift-that of quietness as the normal world is cancelled. In the quiet, perhaps, we can grasp an opportunity. We can hear a gentle shepherd’s voice calling us by our name.

Then, surely, God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life.

Amen