Greenbelt 2025: Bible Study on Ezekiel 37

It was fabulous to be at Greenbelt once again this year. I've gone every year since it's been at Boughton House in Kettering - over a decade now - apart from last year, which I missed because of my exciting trip to Australia. (If you'd like to join me next year, you can buy tickets now!)

This year was particularly special because Greenbelt had asked me to give two Bible studies, on this year's festival theme of 'Making Hope'. I was blown away by the response - over 500 people came along! The two studies were on Ezekiel 37 (the Valley of the Dry Bones) and Exodus 5 (Making Bricks without Straw). 

These talks were recorded and can be downloaded for a small charge of £3 per talk, which all goes to Greenbelt to ensure the festival can keep going well into the future. (You can also download all the previous years talks from 2023 and before for free). 

But if you'd prefer to read them, here are my notes for the talk I gave on Ezekiel 37: 

 Context 

Ezekiel is a pretty depressing book overall, and its written in the context of an abject lack of hope.

 Ezekiel seems pretty clearly to have been a real person, who lived through the period of the Babylonian exile start of 6th century BC. That’s when the Babylonian Empire invaded and took over Israel, and forced all the elite and educated members of Israelite society into exile. The book describes a series of visions and oracles which take place over this period, with the news of the destruction of the temple arriving in chapter 33. 

 The dominant emotion is one of trauma and loss. ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’. They’d lost home and country, but even more profoundly, the experience of exile, intensified by hearing of the destruction of the temple, has caused them to question everything they thought they knew about God and about their identity as a people. 

Feminist scholars have suggested that some of the distasteful imagery of sexual violence in earlier chapters is there to represent very viscerally the experience of being emasculated – these were high caste leaders, for the first time experiencing things that they had always associated with feminity – loss of control, being done to rather than having agency, loss of the freedom to make deicisons and affect events, loss of bodily autonomy and agency. 

 In the context of being cut off from home, family, status, all familiar landmarks, and also being cut off from their sense of religious and cultural identity – how, in these circumstances, was it possible for them to regain, remake, their lost hope? The first 35 chapters of Ezekiel don’t offer much help. Through a series of visions, oracles, and symbolic actions – a kind of performance art – the prophet Ezekiel declares God’s judgement on pretty much everyone and everything he can think of. The world is terrible, awful things have happened and continue to happen, and its hard to see how things can be any different, given the way people have behaved, and continue to behave. There is nothing that Ezekiel can see in how people are choosing to live life, that is going to be the change they want to see. It’s a pretty unrelenting series of misery and woe and lamentation. 

 But the tone begins to change in Chapter 36, when Ezekiel is told to prophesy to the mountains of Israel. A new note of hope, of future restoration, enters the narrative here. In language which surely deliberately evokes the stories of creation in Genesis, Ezekiel speaks ‘to the mountains and hills, to the watercourses and valleys’ – 8 ‘you, o mountains of Israel, shall shoot out your branches and yield your fruit to my people 9…you shall be tilled and sown 11…and I shall multiply humans and animals upon you. They shall increase and be fruiful…’ culminating in verse 35 – ‘they shall say, ‘this land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden’. 

That’s the immediate context for this vision that Ezekiel has next, of the valley of dry bones. Restoration, and re-creation, has been prophesied to the land – but is that sort of re-creation possible for a people who have gone through so much trauma and loss, who are saying, not without good reason, ‘our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’. 

  Prophecy 

 The word ‘Prophesy’ is the most prominent word that jumps out through this passage, apart perhaps from the word ‘bones’. So let’s start by thinking a bit about prophecy was and wasn’t in the Old Testament. 

Prophecy wasn’t magic, or fortunetelling, and it wasn’t soothsaying – it wasn’t, as we might use the word now, about simply predicting or foretelling the future. Prophets in the Israelite tradition were something quite distinctive among the seers and oracles and soothsayers of other ancient cultures. There are quite a few examples in the Old Testament of the powerful and wealthy getting extremely frustrated by the refusal of the prophets to play their expected part when they sent to them for an oracle, whether they were asking them to curse their enemies or to give them the answer they were hoping for in predicting the success of their ventures. 

 The word prophecy probably derived from 'to call'- it has a double or triple layer of meanings. The prophet is one who has been called by God, but also one who 'calls out' what is wrong, and one who is a speaker, a spokesperson. 

 Prophecy in the OT isn’t about declaring timeless truths, its something that is always spoken into concrete historical times. So prophecy and history and intimately related. Prophecy as a Biblical genre arose in a period of particular political turbulence, where the Palestinian corridor was changing hands and being violently contested, first dominated by the Philistines, and in the is period by the Babylonian empire. So prophecy is intimately linked with the sort of questions of hope and hopelessness that we find ourselves wrestling with today. 

The prophets very specifically addressed the particular events of the time, but interpreted them in the light of a much wider sense of history, calling people to set the specific political and economic circumstances of their day into a much bigger picture of God’s activity in and through human history; of creation and of the events of the exodus – the exodus itself, and most especially in the light of the establishment of the covenant at Sinai. That’s why I’ll be looking at a detail from the book of Exodus tomorrow. 

 Against the background of a belief that God has entered human history and calls people to follow the path to freedom even though it might lead through the wilderness, the prophets speak of what God has done, is now doing, and will do. So they are not just agents of doom (though large parts of the prophets can read like that to us!) - also heralds of hope +redemption. To prophesy is to call attention to the bigger picture, to hold out a promise of a better future by recalling us to a sense of history as the sphere of Gods redemptive action. 

  The text 

 So lets turn to the text in some more detail. The first thing to notice is how Ezekiel describes this vision. ‘The hand of the Lord came upon me, and brought me out by the Spirit of the lord, and set me down in the middle of a valley’. Let’s be quite clear that this is not describing a real place or an actual historical event. There is no ‘literal’ sense in which the valley of the dry bones actually took place as a real event. Ezekiel is describing a prayer-vision. 

It might sound esoteric, but it reminds me of the sort of very visceral, dream-like prayer experiences that I’ve had when I’ve been practicing Ignatian imaginative prayer. When Ezekiel describes being ‘brought out by the spirit of the Lord’, he’s describing a very real experience that he had in prayer. So often when people argue about whether the bible is literally true or not, this is some of the complexity that we are dealing with. Was the Valley of the Dry Bones real? Well, no, not in the sense that you could go back in a time machine and watch it happen. But absolutely yes, I think, in that it reads to me as Ezekiel describing faithfully an experience that he had in prayer. And what an amazing prayer experience that must have been. 

Then notice that this is a valley. In the previous chapter, chapter 36, Ezekiel has been called to prophesy to the mountains of Israel. Now he is placed in a valley. There’s something here, I think, about the whole of the land being included in God’s vision of a renewed creation – this isn’t just a mountain top experience, it includes the low places too. Perhaps there’s also a deliberate echo of the ‘Valley of the shadow of death’ from Psalm 23. 

 And the most glaring, horrific feature of this valley is that it is full of bones. It is very much a valley of death. Ezekiel isn’t allowed to stay on the sidelines overlooking this valley as a spectator; he is led all around it, among the bones, noticing that there are very many of them – this is a horrific scene of mass slaughter. 

 He also notices the details of their texture – they are very dry. You might imagine picking up a bone, perhaps a bird’s skull, on a walk through a desert or a fellside. Imagine running your fingers over hat slightly porous texture that dry bone has, the warm, bleached ivory colour of it. It’s important that these aren’t fresh bones – they are old, skeletal, residual. 

 There’s also something in the dryness, I think, that is a deliberate contrast with wetness, water, which is such a powerful symbol of life in that desert culture. When the word dry is used in the Bible its almost always used to emphasise death. Roots, shoots, trees, river beds that are dried up, dead. By contrast, water gushing forth – in springs, in rivers, from rocks – is a symbol of life, closely connected with the imagery of waters breaking in the act of giving birth. And its worth noting that at the end of Ezekiel theres a powerful image of a river flowing from the temple, giving new birth to the land, an image that is more famous in the way it is later picked up in the book of Revelation. The dryness of the bones, then, isn’t just emphasising how very dead these bones are – not just dead, but dead- dead! It’s also drawing us into contemplating the stark dualism of life and death, a dualism that is taken for granted, but a dualism that is about to be dramatically challenged. 

 Then Ezekiel is called to prophesy to the bones. We’ve already seen that this isn’t the first time Ezekiel has been called to prophesy to inanimate objects. But clearly there can be no human expectation that these bones can hear – they don’t, in a common Biblical phrase, have ‘ears to hear’. But that phrase is usually addressed to actual human people, who do have literal ears. Surely there is a deliberate dramatic irony here in the dry bones hearing and responding to the words of the prophet, when so much of what they have said so far seems not to have been responded to by those who have literally heard it.

 ‘Hearing’ is not simply about the literal sense of hearing, but about action in response. Notice the final words of this passage – where God says not just ‘I have spoken’ but ‘I have spoken and will act’. This vision is at least partly a very dramatic image of how God’s word, and our hearing of God’s word is not meant simply to be a passive matter of the broadcast and reception of information, but is meant to galvanise the world into action. 

 Its perhaps a bit of an aside, but lets notice too how the coming of life is described in these two paragraphs. It isn’t a once for all thing, but comes in stages – a foundation of bone, the laying of sinews, the growth of flesh, the covering of skin, and finally the taking in of breath. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this passage referred to in the context of debates about when life enters into a foetus. Now clearly this isn’t intended to be a technical medical description, but it does imply an understanding of life which is gradually more and more inhabited and which becomes fully real with the taking of a first breath. Not only the simple image of the bones coming to life again, but even more this staged process of coming to life, challenges the simplistic duality of life and death. At a time when so many of our theological debates still seem to come down to whether we believe in a dualistic, either/or world, of night and day, black and white, pure or evil, these passages which challenge that dualistic way of thinking about the world are doubly important in giving us hope that there is a way through. 

 ‘You shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD’. Note that when the word Lord is captialised in the text as LORD this is a translation convention representing the Hebrew characters YHWH. This refers to the revelation to Moses from the burning bush of God's self, in Exodus 3, as 'I am who I am' or 'I will be what I will be'. This refers, then, to God as being itself, not one object or person among many to be named. It is not a male title. 

That you shall know that I am God’ is a refrain throughout Ezekiel, at the end of each oracle – it occurs 54 times in total in the book of Ezekiel. It’s not as simple as just that the miracle will be intellectual proof that God is real, as we might read it today. These aren’t two separate things – coming to life and then, hopefully, coming to have knowledge. Rather, living and knowing God are intimately connected for the prophets. Real living, being fully alive, for the people of God, is to live in relationship with God, to live out the covenant established at Sinai. 

 And so the bones are reanimated – first as complete bodies, not dead but not yet breathing, and then fully alive. ‘The breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.’ Notice how even at this point, there are still stages of coming to full life being described. Breath, life, standing, being in community. This isn’t about individual salvation or resurrection, but about people in community; being part of a vast multitude is the culmination of the process of bringing the bones to life. The people who are hearing this vision are themselves physically alive already, but they are experiencing the psychological death of collective trauma. This vision, as interpreted in the final section, isn’t ultimately about physical life, but about the metaphorical life and identity of a community.

This is perhaps one of the aspects of ancient sprituality that is most distant from our modern world view. Its almost impossible for us to fully enter into that ancient worldview that sees the basic unit of humanity not as the individual but the collective. Perhaps the closest we can get is through this kind of festival experience? Perhaps that’s why we feel the strange pull to gather together like this, despite the discomforts and disruption of making a temporary life in a field for a few days. 

 Our hope is in God who can make life out of even the deadest of deaths. But making that hope is not simply about having correct intellectual beliefs about God; its about choosing to live in community which is itself trying to work out what it means to live in right relationship with God and with the world. Challenged and inspired by these strange stories that have been handed down to us, and still choosing to believe that hope is something worth making together.

Beyond Patriarchy: Towards a new teaching on sex and marriage

This week sees the publication of a new collection of essays, 

Created for Love: Towards a New Teaching on Sex and Marriage, edited by Theo Hobson and John Inge. 

I'm delighted to have contributed to this: here's the introduction to my essay, 'Beyond Patriarchy'. 

‘If your friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you?’

Most of us can remember being asked this, in exasperated tones, by a parental figure in our lives. It’s a question the Bible asks of us in the dialogue between Jesus and the tempter (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4: 1-13, with a much shorter reference in Mark 1: 12-13). Having been foiled in his first attempts to tempt Jesus by Jesus’s knowledge of and confidence in Scripture, the tempter turns to Scripture itself as a tool of temptation. We’re used to hearing that the devil twists Scripture, so what I find fascinating in this exchange is that the tempter quotes Scripture accurately. In reply, Jesus doesn’t dispute that the quotation is accurate: he simply quotes another verse. In doing so, Jesus - and the compiler of Luke’s gospel – give us a mini masterclass in the use and abuse of Scripture. It is perfectly valid, as Jesus models for us here, to agree that yes, Scripture does say X – but it also says Y, and on balance that seems more helpfully applicable to the particular issue, situation or temptation that we are currently faced with.

I start with this hermeneutical principle because it is a highly important one when it comes to considering how we might look towards a new teaching on sex and marriage. I have no intention, in this brief essay, of rehearsing again the arguments for and against conservative or progressive interpretations of each of the well-known ‘clobber texts’ on sex, sexuality, and gender. Anyone who is interested in this topic will either have already made up their mind on the interpretation of those texts, or can readily find in-depth analyses from a variety of perspectives elsewhere.

Here, I want to suggest much more simply that yes - much of the Bible does indeed assume a hetero-normative, patriarchal world view. It’s a world view in which sex is considered primarily in terms of procreation, women are considered primarily in terms of their relationship to men, and men are valued primarily in terms of how well they measure up to a particular standard of masculinity. However, just because much of the Bible was written within a context where those assumptions went largely unnoticed and unquestioned, does not mean that following the Bible faithfully today means imbibing the socio-cultural norms of the ancient near-East. To paraphrase what Jesus said to the tempter – yes, you’re right, Scripture does indeed say that. But it also says many other things, which are far more healthy and life-giving, and will lead us to sensible, rather than destructive, behaviour.

This is foundational to understanding the way in which our complex historic inheritance of teaching about sex and marriage has developed. One of the criticisms often levied at those of us who dare suggest that a new teaching on sex and marriage might be healthier, is that we are simply ‘succumbing to the spirit of the age’. We all do well to examine closely what is really motivating and inspiring us. But as a ‘gotcha’, where this criticism falls down is it’s denial of the historical reality that our biblical texts themselves are all, inevitably, suffused with the spirit of successive ages. Our faith is incarnational. In being ‘fleshed out’ in dialogue with successive specific contexts and cultures, God’s w/Word has inevitably been shaped in part by each, as well as deeply challenging each.

Women were seen in much of the ancient world, philosophically speaking, as faulty men. They were also seen reproductively, in a context which had only a limited understanding of reproductive science, as not much more than simply receptive ‘land’ into which male seed was planted to grow. Women were, as a result, seen essentially as property. Let’s be honest about the fact that much of what is seen as a ‘traditional sexual ethic’ is in reality about controlling access to women as property; about respecting the property rights of men in respect of ‘their’ women; and about controlling paternity and thus family lines and inheritance patterns. In the 10 commandments, sex is primarily referenced in property terms, rather than as an act in its own right. Coveting your neighbours wife – that is, wishing to take her from him for yourself - is described as sinful in exactly the same terms as coveting his farm animals (ox or ass) or real estate (house).

But women are not property. We are beautifully and wonderfully made, in the image of God. We are not inferior to men, or the possessions of men. So anything biblical which relates to, or derives from an archaic and damaging view that sees us as such, is to be jettisoned. I’d be tempted to say ‘is to be disregarded’ – but we need, in fact, to pay deep regard to such views, given the damage they have caused and continue to cause to so many, and very explicitly and consciously reject them.

Stepping into God’s vision for the world

 Sermon preached on Acts 6:1-7 & Matthew 9: 27-38, 

For the ordination of deacons, Liverpool, 2025

 The twelve apostles called together the whole community, and said: ‘Friends. Select from among yourselves some of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task.’

Friends, we have a job to do. Things are not right in our world.

It’s probably not, in your neighbourhood or mine, precisely that Greek-speaking widows are being neglected in a daily food distribution. But in your neighbourhood and mine, right now, there are people who are hungry, and who need feeding. In your neighbourhood and mine, right now, there are people who are hurting, and who need healing. There are people who can’t see a way forward, who need hope and insight. There are people whose voice is not being heard, who need liberating from all that binds them, who need empowering.

So year by year the church says – friends, please. Choose from among yourselves a handful of people who are of good standing, who seem to you to be motivated by the right spirit, who you trust to make wise decisions – who we may appoint to help tackle these challenges.

And the fact that the Church is still here, two thousand years after those first deacons were nominated and appointed –

the fact that the Church is still here, despite in some places showing her age, a bit battered and bruised by the passage of time, pretty humbled by the knowledge of her own inadequacies and failings –

the fact that the Church is still here, that we have all gathered here today, is testament to the fact that year by year, people like you have looked out at the world around them, seen that things aren’t right, things are just or fair, seen that there is a job to be done, and have chosen from among themselves a handful of trusted people to help lead them in the work.

So thank you, first of all, to those of you who represent the family and friends, the church communities and the work colleagues, of those being ordained today. And I do mean you – even if you’re not someone who identifies as a Christian, even if you’re just here today to support a friend or colleague in this strange thing that they’re doing that seems to make them happy. Every single one of you - family, friends, colleagues - has been in some way part of forming these ordination candidates into the people they are today.

Adam, Anne; David, David, David, David; James, Kate, Kirsty; Martin, Paul, Tom: Every single one of you is part of a community that has collectively considered that you are people of good standing; who have a good, healthy, holy and positive spirit within them; who are to be trusted to act and decide wisely when faced with new situations and dilemmas. So on behalf of the Church, thank you all for your part in selecting and forming these candidates for this life of service, and thank you, each one of you, for being willing to offer yourselves today.

Because, gosh, there really is a job to do, isn’t there? The world right now is really not how we would have it be. The details of the complaints and the injustices might change from year to year, but the difficult realities that they were dealing with in the early church are still all too present. We still struggle with conflicts over the fair allocation of limited resources.  We still struggle with injustices between different groups, groups that we have a horrible tendency to define and set against each other whether that’s by language, culture, religion, or whatever else we will find as humans to hang our tribal identities on. We still struggle within the Church with the fact that we have to change and adapt what ministry looks like and how its most efficiently organised, as the shape and size and the make up of our churches and as the challenges of injustice that trouble our society change over time.

The world that we inhabit falls far short of God’s intention for a place of peace, justice, and joy. And yet we are given a vision to hold onto, of what the world could be like, of a future that God calls us to help shape and grow. This is the big picture that the Christian faith invites us to inhabit. It’s the story that the Bible invites us to step into. It’s the challenge that these candidates are accepting today.

On page 1 of the Bible, we’re given a kind of dream-time vision, of God creating the world. Day by day, more complexity is added – sun, moon, stars; seas and oceans are carved out from land; the earth and the waters and the sky are populated first with vegetation, and then with an incredible variety of life – things that swarm and creep and swim and fly. And through it all, like a heartbeat, runs the refrain – ‘and God saw that it was good.’ Creation, the earth and all that is in it, are repeatedly affirmed as good. Holy. God-given.

Open the Bible at the other end, and on the last pages of the Bible we find another dream-like vision. The author of the book of Revelation, imagines a new creation. In his vision, he sees God wiping away every tear from our eyes. Things have gone wrong – but they have been healed. He sees a river running through the centre of a city, irrigating everywhere equally; he sees the city itself built of jewels; there is no shortage of resources here to cause conflict. He sees a tree whose leaves heals all ills, all pain and hurt and tension in and between nations; he sees a place where people from all corners of the earth have gathered, where instead of being divided by culture and language, all people rejoice together, united in their diversity by their shared joy in the presence of God.

In between, we get 2000 pages or so of people trying to work out, with God, how we get from here to there. There are poetry and hymns to inspire us; there are stories of incredible successes and abject failures for us to learn from; and as the turning point of it all, a pivot point between the long Old and the much shorter New Testament, the birth of Jesus.

Jesus was an enigma in his time. By all accounts, he by turns attracted, puzzled and infuriated the people who met him. So if you find the figure of Jesus an enigma, you’re in good company.

On the one hand, he did the most incredible things. Take any passage from the gospels at random, and the chances are that, like our gospel reading this afternoon, it will contain miraculous encounters, lives transformed, people healed. What’s not to like.

And yet Jesus also infuriated people on a regular basis. I’m not just talking about the fact that he ended up being crucified – even earlier in his ministry, we’re told at one point he wound up a village so much that they tried to chuck him off a nearby cliff.

He held out such a tantalising vision of what the world could be like, what he called the Kingdom of God. It was strangely attractive – but in a deeply unsettling way. It got under the skin of everyone he met, so that whilst a few followed him, many more found themselves needled unbearably by the challenge he put before them, by the gap he exposed between how we live our lives and how we’d have to risk living if we want the world to be different.

This week marks the 1700^th anniversary of the first great ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea. It was called in 325, starting on 19^th June, to think through and make some decisions about what the Church had been arguing about for 300 years – who exactly is this Jesus? And what does that mean for how we are challenged to live our lives?

I find it strangely reassuring to think that the Church spent 300 years arguing about that before they even got to that point. It puts into perspective a lot of the church arguments and debates that can seem so all consuming to us now. The fact is, the church has always been and probably will always be a place where we continue to debate everything from the nature of God to what that means for how we live out our lives. I can’t see how it can be any other, since inevitably the limitations of our languages and our human finitude can never fully grasp or express the infinity that is God. To borrow a phrase from computing – wrestling with these questions is not a bug, it’s a feature, of our faith.

In the same way, stepping into this big story of faith involves getting used to living with the discomfort between, and wrestling with the disconnect between, the vision of a world of peace, justice and joy that the Bible sets before us – and the down to earth reality of concrete examples that we see at every level of society, from our local communities and neighbourhoods to the world stage, of things not being right, fair or just. People of a certain group being discriminated against on a daily basis. People crying out to have their eyes opened. People who don’t even have the ability to be heard, as they cry out for what they need.

One of the most incredible things that the Bible teaches us, is that for some strange reason God chooses to intervene in these situations through us. Again and again, God trusts normal people like you and me, like these ordinands - chosen by the community, called by God, affirmed by the Church – to crack on with the enormous task of working together with all of us in the eternal task of forming the world, one step at a time, into the place of peace, and justice, and joy that God wants it to be.

Suscipe

 

 

I thought giving all I had to God

Meant a pageant of renunciation.

Unbuckling my jewelled sword and scabbard

Casting down my crowns

Stripping all that clothes me.

 

I thought accepting grace as enough

Meant shivering before the altar

Trying to muster up feelings of gratitude

For the shroud I received in return.

 

I wanted to bargain for what I could keep.

I resented feeling guilty

When I couldn’t feel grateful enough for long.

 

I want to always see this from God’s eyes.

Helping me out of sweaty, tear-stained rags

Receiving them gently

Respecting them for what they’ve seen me through.

 

Cloaking me in a wedding-garment

Handing me a priceless chalice

And, in a golden casket, the key to his treasure-store.

 

 *'Suscipe' is Latin for 'receive', and is the title of an Ignatian prayer which retreatants are encouraged to make their own at the end of the Spiritual Exercises.

Out of the Shadows: Women's Voices

 

I've decided that I need to start blogging again - I was really taken aback to discover that my last post on here was over a year old! So to begin with I'm going to post a few pieces I've written over the last year or so that never made it here.

First up, here's a piece that sadly never made it into print at all. I was asked to write the Foreword for this fabulous book, but it somehow ended up being missed out of the print edition. But here it is!

 

 

Women’s voices need and deserve to be heard. The ‘Women’s Voices’ conferences that Liz Shercliff has convened for the past ten years have been a shining example of how this can be done well, and the first ‘Out of the Shadows’ volume bottled some of that hard-earned wisdom. So it’s wonderful to welcome and commend this second volume, which focuses our attention on women in the Biblical narratives who have been hiding – or been hidden - even deeper in the shadows of the text, and of our Christian consciousness.

Many of the women in these pages have names that will be unfamiliar to all but the most avid Bible readers. Many are omitted from the lectionary altogether, or find themselves mentioned only in passing in stories which mainstream Christian preaching traditions have seen as men’s stories in which they are only walk-on characters. Others, though, are women whose stories are given significant air time in the Bible, whose words and actions form a substantial contribution to the overarching narrative and developing history of Israel, and yet who have been relegated to the margins in the choices that have been made over time about who is important, and which stories should be given precedence.

Many of these stories involve women whose moral or ethical status is ambiguous. There’s a theme that emerges throughout this book that these women are hard to categorise – heroine or villain? Victim or perpetrator? The old tropes of women being categorised as either Madonna or whore strongly persist in the discomfort that Shercliff and Bruce diagnose as we confront these ambiguities. One of the many often unnamed and unperceived aspects of male privilege is the much greater degree of freedom that society grants to men to be morally ambiguous. There is, therefore, a sense of daring courage in Bruce and Shercliff’s insistence on allowing these women to reclaim their audacious freedom to remain ambiguous. They don’t need to have their reputations whitewashed to deserve to have their voices heard.

That’s not the only uncomfortable truth that this book confronts. Many of these stories show women being used, abused, objectified, violated, bought and sold. There are stories of rape, of trauma, of women doing what they have to do to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against them. Perhaps part of the reason these stories are less well known is that we shy away from confronting the reality that these experiences all too often remain part of women’s lives today. In the specimen sermons offered here, Shercliff and Bruce model what it can look like to take these stories seriously as holding up a mirror to our own society. These aren’t just experiences that women had long ago ‘in Biblical times’ – here they are brought into stark dialogue with the realities of modern women’s experiences, through UN statistics, international reports, or the #Me Too movement. Whilst the need for careful handling and content warnings in discussing some of these topics is made clear, it is also made clear that to ignore these realities is to implicitly tell our congregations that they don’t matter. This book forces us to confront the realities of what it is to live in a world and a church shaped by generations of patriarchal rule, and offers us hope in the long-term task of resisting and seeking to reshape it.

In addition to all this, Out of the Shadows is also a practical handbook on the art and craft of preaching. Each sample sermon is followed by short, incisive notes on the rhetorical devices and techniques used by the preacher, which combine to give a masterclass in homiletical techniques. Reading this book will challenge and improve the reader’s preaching on any text, not just these women’s stories that this book brings out of the shadows. In these pages Bruce and Shercliff model for us how to interrogate a difficult text, bring it into dialogue with contemporary experience, and take a congregation from ‘you what?’ to ‘oh, wow!’.