My Saturday morning routine breakfast treat is usually homemade bread rolls with bacon and blueberries baked into the top. Not for the last few weeks though! I’ve run out of yeast and the shops are empty of it.
I suppose I should be
delighted that more people have discovered how nice it is to bake your own
bread. I mostly just miss my Saturday rolls.
Recently though, I
found out it’s virtually impossible to run out of yeast?! Have a look at this
advice on twitter from a yeast geneticist - you most likely have what’s
required to provide yourself with an abundance of the stuff. No artificial
shortages! Go forth and multiply.
There’s probably a
sermon in there somewhere.
The Kingdom of God is
like yeast that works its way all through the dough (Luke 13:21).
The Kingdom of God is
like a weed with tiny seeds that seems insignificant in the palm of your hand,
and yet takes over the whole garden, bringing the wild fowl to flock and
congregate in its branches to caw and croak and generally make a nuisance of
themselves (Luke 13:19).
The Kingdom of God is
insidious. It attracts entirely the wrong sort and is out of our control.
The Kingdom of God is a pain.
If you want God’s
influence to stay where you put it, you’re out of luck because it shan’t. That
yeast will work its way through the dough, and the little seed will flourish
like Japanese Knotweed, and God will be no respecter of persons nor borders
(Acts 10:34-35, Luke 13: 28-30).
My friend Emma and I
have written a book called Ineffable Love that explores the Christian
themes in the TV show Good Omens, which was directed by Douglas
Mackinnon and is based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The TV
mini-series stars Michael Sheen and David Tennant, along with a wealth of
acting talent (Frances McDormand! Josie Lawrence! Miranda Richardson! John
Hamm! Adria Arjona! Jack Whitehall! Anna Maxwell Martin! Derek Jacobi! The list
goes on.)
Like much of Jesus’
teaching, the story of Good Omens is subversive and challenging. It’s
gentle, loving, and concerned with creation and good caretaking. It has much to
say about the nature of power and the corruption of institutions and who is and
isn’t blessed. This is a story in which love with the courage to transgress
traditional social borders leads to life. In the end, it’s about hope,
redemption and renewal.
God knows we need those things.
Good Omens follows an angel, Aziraphale, and a
demon, Crowley, who are under-cover representatives on Earth of Heaven and Hell
respectively. They are disheartened to discover their managerial superiors are
keen to bring about the long-anticipated End of the World. They’re rather fond
of the world. Together, they conspire to prevail over the approaching disaster of
Armageddon: an ego-driven contest of dominance between Heaven and Hell that
will destroy all of humanity.
Shameless Book Plug
Klaxon!
Ineffable Love is published by DLT and
comes out in eBook form on 13th April! Our paper launch was thwarted by the current
Situation. But you will soon be able to get an electronic copy from www.dltebooks.com for half price! Or pre-order the hard copy due in August here: http://dltbooks.com/titles/2274-9780232534542-ineffable-love.
I digress...
Anyway.
The moral heart of
the mini-series is the demon Crowley, an imperfect but sincere prophet who is
unafraid to ask questions. As part of his day-job for Hell, Crowley is on earth
to tempt humanity to evil. Crowley’s approach to his profession is to make a
minor nuisance of himself and let the resulting inconvenience generate
less-than-charitable reactions in the humans it affects. Crowley’s on-screen
efforts to spread frustration usually end up biting Crowley himself on the
bottom.
Curse the M25 during
construction?
Get stuck in traffic in 2018.
Sabotage the mobile
phone networks in Central London in the morning?
By evening, a thwarted demon has to
find the one remaining working telephone box in Britain and hope he has some
loose change.
Crowley’s an agent of
chaos but - unlike his demonic colleagues, who are awful - not an agent of
full-on evil. ‘It wouldn’t be any fun otherwise’ says Crowley, as he turns the
paintball guns at a corporate retreat into real firearms, but ensures everyone
has miraculous escapes and no one is hurt.
To be really really
clear - I’m not comparing the current global pandemic to one of Crowley’s minor
inconveniences. This pandemic is Pestilence, one of “humanities nightmares” as
eleven year old Adam Young puts it in the show.
No, we - if we’re agents of Jesus’
Kingdom - we’re the pains.
I try to lean into
that feeling, unpleasant though it is. From what I can tell, Jesus delighted in
producing it. My standards of right may not be what God intended.
Good Omens is a story
in which the characters with clear us-and-them boundaries learn their desire
for control and insistence on their own purity will kill us all in the end.
They learn it's only by reaching across divides - and by recognising that those
divides only exist at all if we create them - that we live.
There’s no your side
or my side. There’s only our side.
The Kingdom of God is
within you. So, you know. Be the yeast.
A question for
discussion:
I want to recognise
that right now many of us will be afraid and some of us will be grieving - in
which case, I’m so, so sorry and I hope you’re taking whatever time you need
and that you have the support of people around you.
For those of us who
have the capacity: What does Jesus’ Kingdom of God look like in action in your
context right now? Who’ve you reached out to and how? What arbitrary boundaries
of propriety could you trample over in the process?*
(*I don’t mean personal
boundaries. Don’t be creepy.)
Get Creative!
Ineffable Love celebrates the imagination and
creativity in the Good Omens fandom by sharing creative prompts at the
end of each chapter. Our definition of creative isn’t limited to arts and
crafts. Computer programming, joinery, gardening, singing in the shower,
planning an event or a business - it’s all that image of God in us at work.
My suggestion for
today is to create chaos in your creativity by mixing your media!
Write a prayer that’s
also a dance; use a ruler to help you draw freehand (it’s okay, your old art
teacher isn’t watching); tap out the tune from the cricket on the rusty cans in
the shed, shoot a scene from a play using only your smartphone and your pets;
tell a story in smells - I don’t know, use your imagination! I’d love to see
what you make of this. Do something that feels transgressive in the most minor
and low-stakes of ways.
Perhaps blurring some
boundaries in the small things helps us build up to the large things: loving
our enemy, praying for those who persecute us, setting a table where zealots
and tax collectors can gather together and celebrate, facing the reality that
none of us fit the mould we think we ought to, but that none of those moulds
were created by anyone that ultimately matters.
So, go ahead. Spell
out Shakespeare quotes with spaghetti. Make confetti from your old tax
returns*. Make a cake that looks like your tax return. Go wild.
(*only if you’re the
one who is having to vacuum it up)
It could be beautiful,
even if only for a moment.
I think it’s also
important to recognise that if you’ve no energy to be creative, that’s okay.
You are by no means in the minority here. This is a global pandemic. It’s okay.
We do what we can to survive and sometimes that’s just fine.
Stay well, look out
for each other. There’s nothing else you need to be doing right now that you’re
not doing already…
Grace and peace to
you and yours,
xxx Alex
~
Each day, we will post a
short article by one of Darton, Longman and Todd’s amazing authors, offering a
personal reflection on our current situation in life. Sometimes this will be
written with reference to one of their books, and sometimes about how they are
living in response to the coronavirus, COVID-19 and our current world
situation. We hope it will give you a taste of the depth and diversity of DLT’s
list – books for heart, mind and soul that aim to meet the needs and interests of
all.
Today’s post is by Alex
Booer, co-author with Emma Hinds of Ineffable Love: Exploring
God’s purposes in TV’s Good Omens. You can
buy an eBook copy of the book from the DLT eBook site from Monday 13 April.
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