Issue 405
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a bailout? If your company or organisation has ever been in trouble you might be aware of the processes and the accompanying emotions involved. At the time of writing this piece there is much discussion of bailout. Generally it is referring to one country, or central bank, transferring a massive loan to another country or central bank to rescue that country’s economy. It is also used to describe state intervention in private sector structures.
No matter who you are or where you live, this Advent season you will be affected by a bailout. You will be in a place affected by bailing out, or by being bailed out.
I’m going to invite you to ask ‘bailed out of what?’ In order to be bailed out or rescued, you need at least to know from out of what you are being bailed.
The assumption, in global discussions, is that we are living in an economic climate with economic downturns, twists and turns, blips and flips and are in need of economic bailout. To coin a famous phrase ‘It’s the economy – stupid!’
Why don’t we take a few steps back this Christmas and ask why economies are in such need of bailout? What have we done to create such chaos that collapses, implosions, disasters and apocalyptic scenarios dribble out of media channels into every living room in the developed world? What are we in, from which we need to get out?
Suppose it is not the economy – stupid. Suppose it’s just plain stupid? There is an old fashioned, out of fashion, word which could throw some light into our bailout discussions. We will use it in a minute. First, let’s describe it.
‘Listen to me everyone’ said the grown up baby of Bethlehem ‘and understand this. Nothing outside you can make you unclean by going into you. Rather, it is what comes out of you that makes you unclean’.
He later spells it out further by saying ‘from within, out of your heart come…’ then he catalogues thirteen dimensions of this stuff that comes out of us.
It is all to do with thoughts, immorality, stealing, greed, and deceit. It makes unhappy reading for us and it must have made difficult hearing for his team.
Suppose we are sinking, not in economic flood waters, but in this stuff that comes out of our hearts. Suppose we are in this situation because of greed, malice, deceit and arrogance? Could it be we are people with hearts for a penchant for stealing, envy and folly?
If this is the case then we could do with a bailout from that so that we can start to handle our money with cleaner hands.
This old fashioned word is ‘sin’ and I suggest we are drowning in it. It’s pouring out from us all and overflowing into our countries. It is flowing from country to country. It is lapping up on the shores of islands and leaking from one sector to another. It is carrying banks and clients alike along on a tidal wave of terrifying proportions.
Unchecked, this sin just keeps pouring out from our hearts until we are all flailing about in its treacherous waters. Our economic life is drowning in the same sea or being swallowed up in the rising flood waters.
Now bailout would make some sense. ‘His name’ said the messenger to the astonished father-to-be ‘will be called Jesus because he will save his people from their sins’. Now that would be a bailout. Maybe it’s not the economy – stupid – after all.
Next week: Austerity Measures
Mark 7:14-20
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.” [16] 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) 20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them.
Matthew 1:21
21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
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Geoff Shattock
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