The Neighbour at the End of the List

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 6 September 2026

Exodus 20.12–17; 1 Kings 21.1–15
Romans 13.8–10; 1 Corinthians 11.17–22
 
Back in the spring I looked at a guitar online.
            I didn't buy the guitar.
 
But I clicked on it once,
            the way you might pick something up in a shop,
            turn it over,
            and put it back on the shelf.
 
Except that the guitar came with me.
 
It was there the next morning in Facebook,
            beside an article about the Middle East.
It appeared, with a certain reproachful patience,
            next to a video of somebody restoring an old bicycle.
 
For six weeks it followed me around the internet
            like a dog that has decided you're its owner now,
and every time it said the same thing:
            you love me, you want me, I want to be yours.
 
And it was right.
            I hadn't wanted it before I saw it.
 
But I wanted it now,
            and more each week,
and the wanting had been manufactured,
            and I could see the machinery,
            and it worked anyway.
 
That's the tenth commandment.
            Not the guitar.
            The machinery.
 
On the fifteenth of July this year, seven weeks ago,
            buy now pay later came under the regulation
            of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Until then it wasn't regulated at all.
 
In 2017 that market was worth
            about sixty million pounds a year.
By 2024, more than thirteen billion,
            and around eleven million of us use it.
 
And from July, for the first time,
            lenders have to run affordability checks before they lend –
            including on purchases under fifty pounds.
 
Read that again slowly.
            Until seven weeks ago,
            nobody was legally required to ask whether you could afford it.
 
An entire industry grew up
            in the gap between wanting a thing and being able to have it.
 
That gap is where most of us live,
            and it used to have friction in it –
                        saving, waiting,
            deciding you didn't need it after all.
 
But the genius of the last decade was to sand the friction off.
            Three clicks and the gap is gone,
and the cost arrives later, quietly, in instalments,
            when the wanting has worn off.
 
Now I'm not here today to proclaim that debt is a sin.
 
Some of us here are managing debt we didn't choose and couldn't avoid,
            and I'm not adding a sermon to that load.
 
But I am saying that we've built an economy
            whose central engineering problem is how to make people want things.
 
And the Decalogue, the ten commandments, written three thousand years ago,
            looked at the human heart
            and put its final word exactly there.
 
A fortnight ago we looked at the first part of the list of commandments,
            those that face towards God.
 
Well, today we have the whole of the rest of the list in front of us,
            and I want to take it not as six separate rules,
            but as one thing with a root.
 
The other commandments here are about what you do.
            Honour your father and mother.
            Don't kill.
            Don't commit adultery.
            Don't steal.
            Don't perjure yourself.
 
These are things that can be witnessed.
            They leave marks.
 
And then the last one comes,
            and it goes inside.
You shall not covet.
            Not don't take - don't want.
 
No court in the world can try you for this.
 
You could keep the other five perfectly for eighty years
            and break this one continuously, silently,
            in a pew, in a marriage, at a dinner party,
            and nobody would ever know.
 
Which is why we read this one as the internal commandment,
            the one that catches you out
            just when you were feeling pleased with your record on murder.
 
But I want to suggest that's only half right,
            and the smaller half.
 
Because the Hebrew word here isn't a feeling word.
            Rather, it's desire that reaches.
It's wanting with your hands already moving.
 
When Exodus says you shall not covet your neighbour's house,
            it isn't primarily worrying
            about you feeling wistful outside a nicer property than yours.
 
It's worrying about what happens when wanting gets access to power.
 
Which is why we heard about Naboth this morning.
 
Because that story is the whole second part of the list falling over,
            one commandment at a time,
and it starts with a man at a window.
 
Notice the detail that everybody skips.
            Ahab makes a perfectly reasonable offer.
            A better vineyard in exchange, or the full market price in cash.
 
This is not theft.
            It's a fair commercial transaction,
            of the kind that happens ten thousand times a day in this city.
 
But Naboth says no,
            and his reason isn't that the price is too low.
His reason is theological.
 
It's the inheritance of his ancestors –
            which is the fifth commandment,
            honour your father and mother,
            in its oldest and least sentimental sense.
 
Not be nice to your parents.
 
Under Torah that land isn't Naboth's to sell,
            because it's what his grandchildren will eat from.
 
Honouring the generations means keeping the family's portion intact
            for the ones not yet born.
 
It's not a commodity;
            it's the means of life, held in trust.
 
And Ahab goes home, lies on his bed,
            turns his face to the wall and refuses to eat,
            which is the behaviour of a toddler with an army.
 
And Jezebel says the sentence that gives it away:
            do you now govern Israel?
Meaning – what's the point of being king
            if you can't have the field?
 
Then watch them go down like dominoes.
            Two paid liars, and that's false witness.
            A man stoned outside the walls, and that's murder.
            A king taking possession, and that's theft.
 
Four commandments in a single afternoon,
            and not one was the first thing to break.
 
The first thing to break was a man looking out of a window
            at something that wasn't his.
 
That's why coveting comes last on the list.
            Not because it matters least,
            but because it sits underneath the others.
 
It's where murder comes from,
            and theft, and perjury,
            and the breaking of marriages,
            and the selling-off of what belonged to the grandchildren.
 
It's the root system.
            Cut the tree down and the root will send up another one.
 
Paul saw it too.
 
Listen to how he does the same list, in Romans:
            you shall not commit adultery,
            you shall not murder,
            you shall not steal,
            you shall not covet –
and then he stops listing
            and says that any other commandment is summed up in this word,
            you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
 
Love does no wrong to a neighbour.
 
And notice what he says just before it,
            which lands rather well on a Sunday
            when we've been talking about instalment credit:
owe no one anything, except to love one another.
 
The second part of the list of commandments isn't six rules.
            It's one debt,
            and it's the only debt worth carrying.
 
Now I have to be honest with you about this text,
            because it doesn't deserve to be smoothed over.
 
Look at the inventory in that last verse.
            Your neighbour's house.
            Your neighbour's wife.
            His male and female slave.
            His ox.
            His donkey.
 
The neighbour's wife is in a list with the livestock.
 
And it simply assumes that a household contains enslaved people
            who belong to the man of the house
            in the same sense that his donkey does.
 
We’re too careful here to pretend otherwise.
 
But what interests me is that Scripture is already uncomfortable with itself here –
            by the time the list is given again, in Deuteronomy,
            somebody has quietly moved the wife out of the property column.
 
That's the trajectory.
 
And the gospel's work, still going on here, today,
            is the work of moving people
            off the list of things that can be owned
            and into the position of neighbour.
 
Because here's what I find remarkable.
            In Hebrew, the very last word of the Ten Commandments,
            the final syllable of the whole covenant,
            after all the thou shalt nots,
            is: ‘your neighbour’.
 
‘you shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbour
 
The Decalogue ends on the neighbour.
 
And something strange happens
            when you follow that final commandment into the New Testament.
 
Because when the early church talks about coveting –
            about the itch for more,
                        more than you have,
                        more than the next person –
            they don't file it under social ethics.
 
Colossians says greed is idolatry.
            Straight out.
 
Which means the last commandment
            has just turned into the first one.
 
The Decalogue isn't a list.
            It's a circle.
 
You come all the way round the outside,
            through God and name and sabbath and parents
                        and murder and adultery and theft and lies,
            and you arrive at wanting your neighbour's things,
            and find you're standing back at the beginning,
                        in front of another god.
 
The love of God and the love of the neighbour are one movement,
            and the thing that breaks both at once
            is the conviction that what I have is not enough.
 
Which brings us, uncomfortably, to this table.
 
Because Paul has just told us
            what happened when a church tried to eat this meal
            while that conviction was still running.
 
When you come together, he says,
            it is not for the better but for the worse.
 
There are divisions among you.
            When you meet, it is not really the Lord's supper that you eat.
 
That is an extraordinary thing to say
            to a church that thought it was having Communion.
 
Whatever it is you're doing,
            it isn't this.
 
And the reason is almost banal.
 
They were eating a real meal,
            and the wealthier members were arriving early, because they could –
            they weren't tied to somebody else's working day –
and by the time the poorer members got there,
            the working members, the enslaved members,
            there was very little left.
 
One goes hungry, Paul says, and another gets drunk.
 
They hadn't stolen anything.
            Everyone brought their own.
 
Nobody in Corinth had broken
            one of the other commandments getting to that table.
 
They had simply brought the world's arithmetic into the room.
 
And I don't think they set out to humiliate anybody.
 
Roman society ran on rank.
            Every dinner party in that city was a machine for displaying it –
                        better food at the top table,
                        cheaper wine further down,
            everyone knowing where they came.
 
The Corinthians didn't invent that;
            they had been formed by it since childhood,
            and it walked through the door with them.
 
That is what the powers of this world do:
            they get into our habits before we have chosen anything,
and then turn up at the Lord's table
            dressed as ordinary good manners.
 
They had made the Lord's Supper into a ranking,
            and a ranking always has someone above you and someone below you,
            and the someone below you goes hungry.
 
If we can turn this table into a ranking,
            we can turn anything into a ranking.
 
And no amount of success would fix it,
            because a list always has someone above you.
 
Paul doesn't leave them there.
 
In a few minutes we'll hear what he said next –
            the words he handed on to them, and they to us,
            and which we say over this table every time we come.
 
We sang earlier about safely gathering the grain in
            before the winter storms begin.
 
Jesus told a story about a man who did exactly that,
            and pulled down his barns to build bigger ones.
 
And God said to him, you fool –
            not because he stored grain,
            but because he'd found a way to stop needing anybody.
 
And then look at what's here.
            A piece of bread.
            A sip from a cup.
            That's it.
 
In a moment you will receive
            precisely the same as the person next to you,
and neither of you will have earned it,
            and there will be enough.
 
That is the answer to Corinth,
            and to the whole second table.
 
You cannot covet here,
            because the portions are identical
            and they are not payment.
 
There is nothing to want
            that you haven't already been given.
 
And at the centre of it is Jesus,
            who Paul says elsewhere did not regard equality with God
                        as something to be grasped –
                        something to be seized, clutched, held onto.
 
The one person in the story with an actual claim to everything
            is the one with no grasping in him at all.
 
He opens his hands and gives himself away,
            and the empire reads that as weakness
            and nails it to a piece of wood.
 
And on the third day God raises him.
 
Which is the verdict.
            Not just on death,
            but on the whole grasping business.
 
God looks at the acquisitive life –
            Ahab at the window,
            the rich man building barns,
            the Corinthians eating early,
and God looks at the open-handed life that got itself killed,
            and raises the open-handed one.
 
The ungrasping life is the one with a future in it.
 
So come to the table.
 
Come with your wanting, all of it:
            the thing you saw last week that you can't stop thinking about,
and the thing about someone else's life
            you'd quietly like instead of your own.
 
Bring it.
            Nobody here is going to check.
 
In a moment we'll sing that the love of God comes close.
            It does.
            It comes as close as a piece of bread in your hand.
 
There's bread.
            There's a cup.
            There's enough.
 
And when we go back out,
            the machinery will start up again
            before we've reached the end of Shaftesbury Avenue.
 
It will tell us what it always tells us –
            that we haven't got enough,
            and that we aren't enough.
 
But we'll have eaten by then.
            And the person who was handed exactly what we were handed
            will be walking out of here beside us.
 
That's what we have against it.
            Not willpower.
            Not a technique for wanting less.
            Just a meal, each other,
            and the one debt we'll never finish paying and never want to.
 
And that is enough.
 

Tuned into God

 A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 23 August 2026

 

Exodus 20.3–11 · Luke 13.10–17

I was playing that guitar a few minutes ago,
            and before I played it,
            I tuned it.

You can tune a guitar entirely from the inside.
Finger on the fifth fret,
            tune the next string to match,
                        then the next,
            until every string is in a proper relationship with every other string
            and the whole thing is beautifully in tune.

And it's fine.
            It's fine right up until the piano joins in.
Because relative tuning tells you how the strings sit against each other;
            it can't tell you where any of them ought to be.

Concert pitch has to come from outside
            – a fork, a pipe, an app –
            a note the guitar could never have made for itself.

For those of you who don’t know this building inside out,
            my office is just up there, in that top corner,
            on the other side of the wall where the organ pipes are.

Usually this is a perk of the job:
            somebody practises
and I get an hour of Bach for nothing
            while I answer emails.

But once a month,
            before the recital,
            the organ is tuned.
Thousands of pipes,
            one at a time.

And it is not beautiful.
It's hours of a single note held and worried at and held again,
            that horrible wavering beat
as two pitches slide towards each other
            and don't quite arrive.

There are mornings when I have to get my coat
            and find somewhere else to be.

Two things I've learned from the wrong side of that wall.
The first is that tuning is not a pleasant experience.
            We talk about being in tune with God as though it described a mood;
            but from where I sit it sounds like an ordeal.

The second is stranger.
            Nobody decides to go out of tune.
The organ doesn't choose it.
            It drifts – temperature, humidity,
            the heating coming on in October.
It goes out of tune
            by standing perfectly still in a room where the weather changes.

Which is exactly how it happens to us.
Nobody here woke up one morning
            and resolved to start worshipping something else.
We just sat still in a warm room
            while the weather changed.

So: the first four commandments.
            Not a moral audit.
A tuning note.

The list you can't get God onto

Last week we spent our time on the fact that nineteen comes before twenty
            – God rescues first and legislates afterwards.
These aren't the terms of entry.
            They're the shape of a life that's already free.

So: "You shall have no other gods before me."

I've heard that preached,
            and preached it myself,
            as a question about priorities.
What's number one in your life?
            Is God top of the list?

But the phrase translated "before me"
            means something closer to in front of my face
            – in my presence, over against me.

It isn't a ranking.
            It's a spatial image.

Which means the first commandment
            isn't asking to be at the top of your list.
            It's declining to be on the list at all.

A tuning note isn't competing with the organ for attention;
            it's a different kind of thing.
And the moment you treat it as one item among others
            – God, family, work, health,
let's see if I can get God up to third this year –
            you've misunderstood what it is.

Luther put it as well as it has ever been put:
            whatever you set your heart upon and put your trust in,
            that is properly your god.
So the question was never whether you worship,
            but what you've tuned to.

And the alternatives aren't private spiritual preferences.
These people have just walked out of Egypt,
            where the god they served
            had a name and a face and a building programme,
            and his name was Pharaoh.

What competes for our undivided attention
            is rarely another religion.
It's a system.
            It's what our diaries have already decided
            before we've prayed about anything.

The image that's already been made

Then: "You shall not make for yourself an idol."
No carved thing,
            of anything in heaven above
            or on the earth beneath.
Which is far more interesting than a suspicion of art.

In the ancient Near East
            a divine image did a particular job.
The statue in the temple was where the god was locatable
            – fed, housed, consulted,
            tied to a place and a throne.

And the living image of the god,
            in Egypt and Assyria and Babylon alike,
            was the king.
The king is where you look
            to see what the god is like.

Now hold that next to Genesis 1.
Let us make humanity in our image,
            according to our likeness.

The whole species,
            not one royal man.

Israel takes the most exclusive claim in the ancient world
            and hands it to everybody.
To the slave.
            To the woman.
To the stranger passing through.

So the second commandment
            isn't God being precious about representation.
It's God refusing to be owned, localised,
            carried at the front of somebody's parade
            – because the image has already been made,
            and it's your neighbour.

Where do you look for the likeness of God?
            Not up there.
But across the aisle.
            Or two doors down.
            Sleeping in a doorway on Shaftesbury Avenue on a Tuesday night.

Every idolatry narrows that.
It says the image is here and not there,
            in us and not them,
            in this nation and not that one.

Idolatry is always a shrinking
            of who counts as the likeness of God.

Which is why what we do in this room
            and what we do outside it
cannot be pulled apart
            – and I'd rather show you that than argue it,
because Luke shows it to us,
            in a synagogue,
            on a sabbath.

The name you carry

But first, the third: "You shall not make wrongful use
            of the name of the Lord your God."

Most of us were taught this was about swearing.
            But it isn't, or not mainly.

The verb underneath it
            means to lift, to carry, to bear
– you shall not carry the name of the Lord your God
            emptily, to no purpose.

So the question isn't whether you say the word.
            It's what you carry it onto.
Whose banner. Whose policy. Whose war.

And I could name the obvious offenders,
            and we could all agree comfortably about people who aren't in the room.
I'd rather not.
            Because we're the ones who carry the name.

That's what the word Christian means
            – a nametag,
his name, borrowed and worn in public.

And no institution is better placed to hollow it out than a church,
            because we say it so often and so fluently
            that it costs us nothing.

To say "Lord, Lord" beautifully at eleven on a Sunday
            and mean nothing by it on Monday
            is precisely what the third commandment is worried about.
Not blasphemy. Fluency.

The commandment with the guest list

And then the sabbath,
            which gets more words than any of the others
– more than murder, more than theft –
            and which we've most thoroughly reduced to personal wellbeing.

Read the guest list.
You shall not do any work
            – you, your son or your daughter,
            your male and female slave, your livestock,
            and the alien resident in your towns:
the migrant,
            the one without papers or protection.

This commandment isn't addressed to the exhausted.
It's addressed to whoever has power to make other people work,
            and it tells them their rest is worthless
            if bought with somebody else's labour.

It's a labour law before it's a spiritual discipline,
            and Deuteronomy says so out loud
– remember you were a slave in Egypt,
            therefore keep this day.

Notice, too, who isn't on the list.
The "you" addressed is a male householder,
            and his wife appears nowhere.
Hold onto that,
            because Luke is about to hand us
            a woman nobody had counted.

Which is live rather than historical,
            because the person with power over somebody else's time,
on any given day,
            is nearly all of us.

It's the email I send at half past ten at night,
            knowing perfectly well what that does to whoever reads it.

It's the thing I ordered on a Sunday
            because I wanted it Monday,
which is somebody's shift in a warehouse
            and somebody's van on my street.

The economy that never stops
            isn't run by a Pharaoh in a palace.

It's run by all of us,
            one entirely reasonable decision at a time.
Egypt, it turns out,
            is a collective effort.

The woman who could not look up

So to Luke 13,
            a synagogue on a sabbath morning,
and a woman bent double for eighteen years
            who cannot stand up straight.

Start with what she is doing there.
Eighteen years bent towards the floor,
            eighteen years of feet and paving
            and the hems of other people's clothes,
and she is in the synagogue,
            on the sabbath,
            keeping the fourth commandment.

Nobody in this story has been more faithful to it.
            Nobody has got less out of it.

And Jesus sees her
            – which is worth pausing on,
because to be seen by someone who cannot lift her head,
            you have to come to her
            and get low enough to be seen.

He calls her over.
            He tells her she is set free.
He puts his hands on her,
            and she straightens up,
and the first thing she does with a body that works
            is praise God.

Which is what worship looks like
            when the tuning has done its work.
Not a mood.
            A posture.

Then the leader of the synagogue objects,
            and on impeccable grounds.

There are six days for work.
            Come on one of those.
He isn't a monster,
            and he isn't a stand-in for somebody else's religion
– he's a religious professional
            protecting good order in a building he's responsible for,
and if you want to know who he most resembles in this room,
            it's the man in front of you.

His mistake isn't that he loves the commandment too much.
It's that he's taken it for a fence
            when it was always a rescue.

And notice he doesn't say it to Jesus.
            He says it to the congregation.
Which is a very churchy sort of cowardice,
            and I've done it myself.

And so Jesus answers with an argument about knots.
            Every one of you unties your ox or your donkey on the sabbath
                        and leads it out to water
            – and in Luke's Greek
                        the word for untying that animal
                        is the same word used for what has just happened to this woman.
Loosed. Untied.

You do it for livestock without thinking twice.
            She has been tied for eighteen years.
Ought she not to be untied,
            on the sabbath day of all days?

And then he calls her a daughter of Abraham.

Nobody else in scripture is called that.
There are sons of Abraham all over the place,
            but she is the only daughter,
and he says it out loud
            in a building where the commandment she has kept so faithfully
            was written in words that didn't quite have room for her.

The image had already been made.
            It just took somebody willing to look down to see it.

So the sabbath is not a fence around God's day.
            It's the day the knots come off.

And that argument in the synagogue
            isn't religion against freedom;
it's an argument inside the tradition
            about what the tradition is for,
which is the only argument worth having,
            and the one we are having here this morning.

Because here is the thing that ought to keep us awake.
It's entirely possible to keep all four of this morning's commandments
            – no other gods, no idols,
            the name honoured, the sabbath guarded –
and still be the man in that story.

Beautiful worship.
            And a woman still bent double.
Piety that leaves the world exactly as it found it.

And it's just as possible the other way round:
            to love your neighbour on willpower alone,
            running on your own supply until there isn't any.
That's tuning the guitar to itself.
            Fine, right up until somebody else joins in.

When you can't hear the note

Let me finish honestly,
            because I don't want to leave you thinking
that being tuned into God is a feeling of being in tune.

Some of you came in this morning
            and could not hear the note.
You've done the tuning
            – the prayer, the turning up, the trying –
            and there's been nothing on the other end for a while.

That isn't failure.
It's most of the Psalms,
            and it's the sentence from the cross.
And it was, for eighteen years,
            the experience of the most faithful person in this morning's Gospel.

So notice what the women do at the end of Luke's story.
            They watch him die.
They see where the body is laid.

They go home and prepare spices and ointments
            – and then, chapter 23, verse 56,
            on the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

On the day when God had,
            as far as they could tell,
            gone silent for good,
they kept the fourth commandment.

Not because they felt anything.
But because it was the day,
            and it was the commandment,
            and it was what you did.

That's Holy Saturday,
            and it may be the most honest thing
            the New Testament says about faith.

Sometimes tuning isn't an experience.
Sometimes it's just turning
            towards where the note is supposed to come from,
and being here again next week
            – bent double, if that's what it takes,
but here.

The practice holds you
            when the feeling doesn't.

And then it's the first day of the week,
            and they go to the tomb,
and everything is different
            – and they only found out
            because they'd kept the sabbath first.

We're about to sing
            "Take my life, and let it be."
Havergal wrote it as a list
            – hands, feet, voice, silver, gold, will, heart –
            and it can sound like an inventory of things surrendered.
I'd rather you sang it as a tuning:
            every part of the instrument, one at a time,
turned towards a note it could never have made for itself.

That note has been sounded.
It was sounded early on a Sunday morning
            at the mouth of a tomb,
it hasn't stopped since,
            and it isn't ours and never was.

All that's asked of us
            is that we turn towards it,
and let it do its slow and unlovely work,
            one pipe at a time,
until we can stand up straight.

Amen.

We are all born in Eden

I have been having an online correspondence with a friend about creation, sin and eternal life. It was not intended to become a theological argument, but, as these things sometimes do, it got me thinking.

One of the things I have realised is that I don't quite think about the Christian story of creation, fall and redemption in the way I once did. Or perhaps I should say that I think about it at two levels at once. It is the story of the world and of humanity, certainly. But I increasingly wonder whether it is also the story of every individual human life.

We are all born into Eden.

I don't mean that babies are morally perfect, or that childhood is some idyllic state from which we are subsequently corrupted. I mean something more fundamental. We begin life as creatures who simply are: dependent, curious, vulnerable, capable of receiving and giving love. We have not yet acquired the developed moral consciousness by which we distinguish good from evil, or understand the consequences of our choices, or recognise ourselves as responsible agents.

Then, at some point, we leave Eden.

Genesis 3 is often read as an account of something that happened once, somewhere in the distant past: the moment when humanity fell from an original state of perfection. There are many reasons why I don't find that reading persuasive. I don't think Genesis needs to be a primitive attempt to describe the physical process by which the universe came into being. Nor do I think we need to imagine that there was once a historically identifiable moment when humanity moved from being sinless to being sinful.

I find the story much more interesting than that.

Read in its ancient context, Genesis offers a profoundly different vision of creation from some of the creation myths of the surrounding world. The world is not born out of violence and therefore destined for violence. Creation is good. The earth is good. Human beings are good. The problem is not that God made a fundamentally defective world or populated it with fundamentally defective creatures.

The problem is what happens to creatures who are capable of knowing good and evil, and therefore capable of choosing between them.

The story of the fall is, in that sense, a story that happens to every one of us.

There comes a point when innocence gives way to moral awareness. We discover that some things are good and some are destructive. We discover that we ourselves are capable of both. We discover desire, shame, responsibility, guilt, love, selfishness, generosity and fear. We discover that our choices have consequences, both for ourselves and for other people.

And once we have left Eden, we cannot go back.

That is one of the details of Genesis that I find particularly powerful. The way back is guarded by a flaming sword. We cannot return to the innocence from which we have emerged. Growing up is irreversible.

Perhaps that is what makes redemption necessary.

Sin and idolatry

This also affects how I think about sin.

I am increasingly persuaded that idolatry is at the root of sin. Sin is not primarily a catalogue of things God has arbitrarily decided that we mustn't do. It is what happens when we give ultimate value to something that is not ultimate. We worship something other than God, and our lives become distorted accordingly.

That is why I don't think worship is about making God feel better about Godself.

God does not need us to sing hymns in order to reassure God of God's greatness.

Worship does something to us. It reorders our loves. It reminds us what is ultimately valuable. It turns us away from the idols that promise to give our lives meaning but ultimately consume us. In that sense, worship is part of reversing the effects of the fall.

The opposite of idolatry is not simply atheism. It is rightly ordered love.

What, then, is eternal life?

This is where I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that eternal life is simply something that happens to us after we die.

Jesus certainly speaks about the life of the age to come. But John's Gospel, in particular, seems to me to speak of eternal life as something that can already be possessed. Eternal life is participation in the life of God. It begins now.

I therefore have what might be called a fairly thoroughly realised eschatology. I don't think the Christian hope is primarily about escaping this life for another one. It is about God redeeming this life.

And that makes me think differently about judgement.

Perhaps judgement is not fundamentally God sorting humanity into two piles labelled "good people" and "bad people".

Perhaps the wheat and the weeds are within each of us.

There is good in every human life, and there is destructive, selfish and sinful stuff in every human life. We are complicated creatures. We are capable of extraordinary goodness and extraordinary cruelty, sometimes within the same person and sometimes within the same day.

What if God's judgement is the process by which what is good is finally distinguished from what is destructive?

What if salvation means that God takes the whole complicated reality of a human life and redeems it?

That doesn't mean pretending the bad things didn't happen. Nor does it mean declaring evil to be insignificant. Quite the opposite. Evil matters precisely because people matter, and because what we do to one another matters.

But perhaps God's judgement is ultimately restorative rather than merely punitive.

The things in us that are capable of love, courage, generosity, truth and compassion belong within God's future. The things that destroy ourselves and others do not.

The wheat is gathered in.

The weeds are burned.

The goodness that remains

This is also why I find myself resisting accounts of humanity that begin with the assumption that we are fundamentally bad.

I don't believe in Augustine's doctrine of original sin, at least not in the sense that human beings are born already carrying the guilt of Adam's sin. I don't think a newborn child is a sinner who needs to be rescued from a condition of inherited culpability.

But I do believe that all have sinned.

There is an important difference.

We are born good, but we do not remain innocent. We grow into moral consciousness, make choices, hurt people, are hurt by people, acquire habits, construct identities, worship things that cannot bear the weight of our worship, and become increasingly complicated creatures.

And yet something good remains.

I sometimes describe that, rather tentatively, as a "spark of God". I don't mean that human beings literally contain a fragment of God's substance. I mean that every human being remains God's creation, bears the image of God, and therefore contains something that is worth redeeming.

Even the person whose life has become horribly distorted by evil is still a creature whom God made and loves.

That seems to me to be one of the extraordinary implications of incarnation.

In Christ, God does not merely send instructions to humanity from a safe distance. God enters human life. God becomes vulnerable alongside us. God commits God's self to human existence.

And so, when God looks at a human life, God does not see merely the catalogue of sins and failures. God sees the creature God made, the person God loves, the life that God is still capable of redeeming.

Redemption rather than return

Perhaps, then, salvation is not a return to Eden.

We cannot go back. The sword is still there.

Perhaps salvation is what happens when God takes the person we have become, with all the damage, wisdom, love, failure, courage, selfishness, generosity, sin and goodness that constitute our lives, and patiently redeems us.

That fits, for me, with a process understanding of God. God is not simply standing outside history waiting to pronounce a final verdict. God is continually at work within creation, drawing it towards greater complexity, relationship, beauty, goodness and love.

And that process does not stop with human failure.

Nor, perhaps, does it stop with death.

Death is a mystery. I am suspicious of the confidence with which Christians sometimes describe heaven, hell, judgement and the mechanics of the afterlife. I don't think we know nearly as much about these things as we sometimes pretend.

But I do trust the character of God.

And if eternal life means anything, I think it means that God's embrace of us is ultimately more enduring than our failure.

The Christian hope is therefore not that God discovers a handful of people who have managed to become sufficiently good and admits them into eternal life.

It is that God does not give up on what God has made.

We are all born in Eden.

We all leave it.

And perhaps the story of redemption is God's patient work of taking the lives we have made and making them, finally, what they were always capable of becoming.