Peace, love and understanding - Nick Baines's blog - Musings of a restless bishop

One of the best bits in the film Lost in Translation is when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson end up doing karaoke in a Tokyo bar. Bill Murray belts out Elvis Costello’s What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? I love the film and I love that scene.

But it’s the song that’s running around the inside of my head just now. Driving to Manchester Airport en route to Kazakhstan for the fourth Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, I had Elvis (Costello) on CD and played that song four times so I could belt it out with him.

The Congress is also the fourth I will have attended – the first one being back in 2003 in Astana. We came back from that one with all sorts of questions and misgivings – particularly regarding some socio-political phenomena in Kazakhstan itself. I have continued to press those questions ever since, but on the basis that engagement is better than shouting from the sidelines. So, we have persisted in working with other religious leaders and their representatives from all over the world and been able to discuss all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be discussed through ordinary diplomacy.

This time we (I am leading a delegation of five from the Church of England) will address themes such as multiculturalism, the role of women, sustainable development and young people. In among these themes there will also be space to address other issues of import and concern. The important thing is to articulate such concerns in ways that will enable them to be heard. There is no value – other than the smug feeling it gives you – in saying things that don’t get heard… however ‘prophetic’ or true.

There’s nothing funny about peace, love and understanding; but they’re dead hard to work on unless we are satisfied with platitudes and sentimentalism.

Perhaps it isn’t entirely inappropriate that today is Pentecost in the Christian calendar. Before leaving for Manchester I confirmed some adults in a Keighley parish this morning and addressed a vast collection of Christians, passers-by and curious onlookers at a Pentecost celebration in Lister Park, near where we live in Bradford. It was loud, colourful and celebratory. But, it reminded me that Pentecost is not about creating a uniform church or a monochrome culture; rather, the key point about Pentecost (at least, as it was experienced by the ‘outsiders’) was that people from all over the place where enabled to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in ways they could both hear and understand.

The job of the church is to work hard at speaking different ‘languages’ to different people in order that the good news might be heard and understood by a vast diversity of people who don’t start from the same place. This is what makes communication interesting and challenging. But, if it seems to be God’s priority at Pentecost, maybe it should be ours, too.

It might even help create a little more peace, love and understanding if we start from where people actually are and speak a language they understand.

Which, I realise, is a statement of the bleeding obvious (as someone once said).