A view from the Vicarage

Sticky thoughts in the October newsletter:

I returned from holiday towards the end of September to find one of those annoying cards from Royal Mail that announce you have missed a delivery and can pick up your parcel at some remote location between certain hours when you are usually unavailable. Normally I join a queue of people searching for lost mail only to be given unsolicited junk at the counter or a big envelope containing business documents for Vicky. This time it was different: I opened one of those clever cardboard envelopes from Amazon to find a paperback book I had forgotten ordering a long time ago.

This book took my fancy when I learned about it from a blog called Presentation Zen. It’s called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. In it the Heath brothers are interested in what makes some ideas effective and memorable and others not so. Some ideas stick and others fade away. The sticky ideas are not necessarily correct but they are memorable. For example, we were taught the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from the Moon. Not true. Or sitting too close to the TV will ruin your eyes. Not true either.

Advertisers and politicians make use of sticky ideas, and it seemed to me that I could too. Sticky ideas are story based; they are simple; they are surprising; and they tug at our emotions. I thought perhaps this little book might make my sticky sermon ideas even more memorable, but reading it I am struck by how much it seems to apply to the teaching methods used by Jesus.

Jesus was a master of the sticky story. I am sure you can repeat many of his parables by heart. There was never any need to write them down in a largely illiterate society because they were memorable. Imagine the disciples’ surprise when told of a servant lent 20 years wages by his master. Or the man who sold everything including the clothes he stood up in to buy the Pearl of Great Price. Or the Labourers in the Vineyard who were paid as much for one hour’s evening work as those who had toiled for 12 hours in the heat of the day. You get the picture.

The point is that people are hooked not by complex arguments but by simple messages. John F Kennedy did not use detailed aspirations in his manifesto, but announced his aim was to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to earth. Bill Clinton was persuaded to drop his thorough analysis in favour of one slogan: It’s the economy – stupid.

The Christian faith is as simple as you want to make it. Jesus summed up the law in only 7 words: love God and your neighbour as yourself. Vast tracts he reduced to one golden rule: do to others as you would have them do to you. He turned everything upside down. The first will be last and the last first. If you want to be great you must become the slave of all.

So as the equinox is past and the days get ever shorter, why not join me this Autumn in thinking more deeply about what we really believe – but instead of widening the trench and taking in more and more ground, just digging straight down to the simple heart of our faith, excavating what is at its core, and that, I suggest, will be simple for us both to understand as well as explain to others from our own experience.