Living Wittily

Hippolytus on the Cross... "the binding force of the world..."

The tree is my everlasting salvation.  It is my food, a shared banquet.  Its roots and the spread of its branches are my own roots and extension… Its shade I take for my resting place; in my flight from oppressive heat it is the source of refreshing dew for me… Food for my hunger and wellspring for my thirst, it is also covering for my nakedness, with the spirit of life as its leaves… Fearful of God, I find in it a place of safety; when unsteady a source of stability.  In the face of a struggle, I look to it as a prize; in victory my trophy.

 

It is Jacob’s ladder, the passage of angels, at whose summit the Lord is affixed.  This tree, the plant of immortality, rears from earth to reach as high as heaven, fixing the Lord between heaven and earth.  It is the foundation and stabilizer of the universe, undergirding the world that we inhabit.  It is the binding force of the world… It is riveted into a unity by the invisible bonds of the Spirit, so that its connection with God can never be severed.  Brushing heaven with its uppermost branches, it remains fixed in the earth, and between the two points, its huge hands completely enfold the stirring of the air.  A single whole, it penetrates all things and all places.

The Art of Biblical Commentary - Exegesis by Word and Image

Student supervision, a preaching request, and a long interest in the Epistle to the Hebrews have encouraged me to tackle G L Cockerill's new commentary on Hebrews. Published in the New International Commentary on the NT series, it runs to 760 pages and will take a while to work through. I've done this kind of thing before with Hebrews - 30 years ago with the commentary by F F Bruce in this same series.

I know all kinds of folk come past this blog and not everyone will be interested in everything posted here. Poetry or tapestry, Renaissance Art and Kirekegaard, photos and haiku, books of all kinds on many subjects from spirituality to biography, to systematic theology to novels, and most anything else that seems interesting to share. So every now and then a piece of self-indulgent bibliphilia, often on that expensive genre of the biblical commentary.

F F Bruce mentioned above was a remarkably humble and even more remarkably learned Christian scholar who almost singlehandedly in the 1950's into the 1960's demonstrated that it is possible to be a convictional evangelical and an academic professor of Biblical Studies holding his own in scholarly integrity in a secular institution. His background in the Christian Brethren, his deep and wide knowledge of the New Testament world and the classical languages, his expertise in New Testament Greek and intra-biblical knowledge meant that his commentary on Hebrews was one of the great written gifts to preachers and Bible students keen to do justice to this vibrant and urgent document from the early church.

So I bought it for £3.25 (not cheap in the early 1970's), and I read it, one of the first full length commentaries I read, and realised that such daily increments of conversation with expert exegetes accumulated in the mind, enriching, expanding and transforming my approach to the biblical text. That's why I put in the sidebar the commentary I'm reading - a gentle corrective for those who might wonder at my tedium threshold, and an assurance that such disciplined understudying is no more tedious than a shower after a long day, or before another one starts!

And now Cockerill - who is persuaded, so far as any guess has credibility, that Apollos wrote Hebrews. A long slow summer read, another exercise in incremental gains in 'the grace and knowledge of God'. The painting is Rogier Van Der Weyden's 'Deposition'. This is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance Art, amongst the most remarkable depictions of human sorrow in its diversity and the concentrated anguish of loss which feels utterly, and ultimately, irreversible and irredeemable. Hebrews explores the heights and depths of divine mercy, suffering, judgement and love - Van der Weyden depicts the heights and depths of human suffering, compassion, sorrow and love.

Praying for what I want, or need - then there's what God wants.....

“Prayer is not for getting what we want, but rather for bending our wants toward what God wants.” (Stanley Hauerwas)

Wanting is one of the strongest drives in our nature. The Lord's Prayer recognises this. Our wants can be as daily as bread, as needful as forgiveness, as desperate as a cry for deliverance from whatever might hurt and harm us. We want the material things we need to live; we want to have satisfying relationships with other people; we want to be kept safe and to live as well as we can. And at times we live as if achieving all that was entirely up to us.

But each of these wants is part of basic prayer. We pray to God for what we need to live our lives – bread to nourish our bodies, the security of home, enough money to provide what’s needed, a job to give us a place and a purpose. We pray to God about marriage, friendships, family relationships, people we work with, neighbours. Time and again these relationships need to be salvaged, renewed, cleansed, recycled.

That same prayer deals with needs as well as wants: forgive us when we get it wrong, as we forgive those who get it wrong with us. In life there are alos givens, those circumstances that come to us, or at us. So we pray to God about those experiences that test our integrity and our faith, that face us with hard choices, when it’s easier to do wrong than pay the price for doing right. So we bring our wants to God; often we want, mostly we need, those things we can’t live without, or at least can't live well without - bread, forgiveness, strength to survive the traps and tests and temptations of life that often feels way too complex, demanding and confusing. 

The Lord's Prayer is a remarkably clarifying agenda to start, and end, each day.

The photo looks towards Stirling from Gartmore - the sense of space and distance help put this small person in  perspective!

Another prayer to read patiently, gently and with inward honesty.

Below is Kierkegaard's prayer as he sets out to write The Works of Love. It's a long time since I read Kierkegaard, and I have to confess I've picked up Works of Love more by accident than design, which could mean more by providence than accident! He is never a comfortable read, always subversive of the ego's search for affirmation and critical of its imaginative strategies to secure opportunities for self promotion, self-comfort, and self advancement into the places of human power and praise.

Geroge Pattison in the introduction encorages a reading one by one of these discourses, each to be considered as effectively a series of scripts for self examination, requiring a response of intentional transformation. This takes place under the discipline of a Love that is the sum and substance and source of all other genuine loves, which are made real in acts, works and habits of performance, sustained by the eternal energy core in the life of the Triune God.

How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O God of Love,

source of all love in heaven and on earth,

You who spared nothing but gave all in love,

You who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in You!

How could love properly be discussed if You were forgotten,

You who made manifest what love is,

You, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave Yourself to save all!

How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgoteen, O Spirit of Love,

You who take nothing for Your own but remind us of that sacrifice of love,

remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself!

O Eternal Love, You who are everywhere present

and never without witness wherever You are called upon,

be not without witness in what is said here about love or about the works of love.

There are only a few acts

which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love,

but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an act of love–

sincere in self-renunciation,

impelled by love itself,

and for this very reason claiming no compensation.

 

The Rule of Benedict and Baptist Ecclesiology...you what?!

I am an occasional and aspiring Benedictine. I've wanted for some time to write a paper on Benedictine Spirituality and Baptist Ecclesiology. Not as daft as it sounds. For me it started with Esther De Waal's book Seeking God. That was my first serious look at a monastic rule, and I was captivated by the moderate, common-sense discipline of a Rule that had much to say to those outside as well as inside a monastery. For example the Rule of Benedict has much to say about community; so has Bonhoeffer in a different context at Finkenwalde (a community pejoratively labelled monastic); and so has Jean Vanier in his still finest book, Community and Growth. And for all our claimed Baptist crededntials about rhe gathered community, the fellowship of believers and the Body of Christ locally, we aren't exactly amongst the front runners in articulating, demonstrating, practising and propagating community.

So when I read Benedict, Bonhoeffer, or Vanier, what I encounter is critical honesty about what gets in the way of community, realistic practices which sustain and grow community, indeed a theololgy of community that is rooted in a way of life, and a way of life that is the outcome of community. A dialectic of discipline and grace, of individual and community, of hopefulness and humility, and of love as both ideal to be striven towards, and human beings as limited, fallible yet graced carriers of the image of God.

Joan Chittister is a nun in trouble - actually she's quite often in trouble with the Catholic hierarchy. She is independent in mind, persuasive and eloquent in her writing and speaking, suspicious of oppressive structures demanding unreasonable obedience, - and a sharp and imaginative expositor of the Rule of Benedict. So as just one wee quote from her book on the Rule - and think Baptist church meeting rather than monastic dinner table:

"Humility is a proper sense of self in the universe of wonders. When we make ourselves God, no one in the world is safe in our presence43. Humility, in othewr words, is the basis for right relationships in life."

And here is Benedict himself, giving advice before the Baptist church meeting sets out on its agenda; remember he was writing for monks - he was such a moderate sensible Abbot that today he would think the accusation of political correctness a small price to pay for using discourse that included men and women!:

Accordingly, brothers, if we want to reach the highest summit of humility, if we desire to attain speedily that exaltation in heaven to which we climb by the humility of this present life, ⁶then by our ascending actions we must set up that ladder on which Jacob in a dream saw angels descending and ascending (Gen 28: 12). ⁷Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility. ⁸Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts the Lord will raise it to heaven.

Question for us Baptists: When was there last a seminar on humility? As opposed to conferences, seminars, sermons, books, and T shirts about leadership?How long before we can buy a Leadership app - or have I missed it and it's already here?

I only ask, humbly.

The Psalms of the Shalom Tapestry, a Textile Testimony

The photo is of the completed Shalom Tapestry. Each Panel expresses imagery from one of the Psalms. It is worked freehand, each panel allowed to evolve on the canvas rather than being pre-planned. During the months I was doing it, I began to explore colour, shape and image as complementary ways of responding to texts that were throughout that time very significant sources of sustaining and strengthening. In their own unique way the Panels are textile textual exegesis, stitched spirituality, contemplation on canvas, Panels of prayer. Those Psalms are now woven into my remembered experience of lost equilibrium, costly love, and the ache of longing for recovered shalom. In that sense the tapestry is testimony, an icon painted in the threads of my life. 

S   = Psalm 1

          "like trees planted by streams of water..." 

h   = Psalm 8

       "when I consider the heavens...what are human beings that you

            care for them?"

a l = Psalm 104

        "You stretch out the heavens like a tent...you make springs

             gush forth in the valleys..."

o   = Psalm 23

        "still waters...green pastures...my cup runneth over...

             goodness and mercy shall surely follow me..

m  = Psalm 121

            "I lift my eyes to the hills..where does help come from?"

 

 

Prayer to Say Slowly, Quietly and Grace-fully 1.

O Thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,

the Life of the souls that love thee,

and the strength of the hearts that serve thee:

Help us to know thee that we may truly love thee,

and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

whom to serve is perfect freedom,

Amen (Augustine of Hippo)

The Importance of Not Explaining Away the Hard Texts

All my life I've wrestled with hard texts in the Bible, those texts that upset, that make no sense, that tell me things about God, or me, I'd rather not know. I've tried not to be satisfied by 'solving' them, 'explaining' them, or ever thinking I could give the definitive answer. Nor would I want to. Reading sacred text is not like a literary sodoku, nor an exercise in literary comprehension and criticism, nor a way of practising that intellectual dominance we sometimes call understanding. Hard texts are reminders of our limited horizons, question marks over our concepts and constructs, speed bumps on the road of discipleship to slow down the comfortable cruiser.

In 37 years of ministry I've preached on the 'sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven' several times. No, not the same sermon; and no, not with the same exegetical conclusions or sermon applications. Hard texts refuse to be tamed; they are theologically untidy; they are spiritual speed traps that catch out our complacent even carelessly quick rush to the truth of our own conclusions. And the text in Mark 3.29 lies like a granite boulder in the homiletical fast lane!

So here's yet another attempt at discerning the meaning of a text fraught with danger, and flashing with warning. In 1995, at ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel offered the following prayer: “God of forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place. God of mercy, have no mercy on those who killed here Jewish children.” How can one of the greatest human beings alive, ask God not to forgive? How can an unforgiving man be a great man, a wonderful human being?

One of the speakers at Wiesel’s award ceremony was Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard. Here is what he said: “There are many excellent reasons for recognizing Professor Wiesel. But none is more important than his role in teaching survivors and their children how to respond in constructive peace and justice to a worldwide conspiracy of genocide, the components of which included mass killing, mass silence and mass indifference. Professor Wiesel has devoted his life to teaching the survivors of a conspiracy which excluded so few to re-enter and adjust in peace to an alien world that deserved little forgiveness.”

Weisel has always argued that authentic forgiveness is a two way transaction. It is a gift of grace, to be received with joy; it is a gesture of newness that challenges old hurts; it is a dismantling of defences that risks further offence. Perhaps, in the end the unforgivable sin is the refusal of forgiveness. If I do not forgive my brother and sister as God has forgiven me, how can I claim to know, to understand, to experience, to live – a forgiven life. And if I refuse to accept forgiveness, because I do not think I am wrong, or I don’t care about the hurt I caused, then my heart is closed to the grace which defines true forgiveness. How can an unforgiving heart, a heart closed to others, be open to the God whose heart is open to all?

Jesus said that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. What can that possibly mean? It is to see the good gift of forgiveness, and call it evil, to encounter mercy and resent it, to witness the renewal of human life as destructive power is expelled and the human spirit set free, and to make it a matter of principle to oppose it. It is to call blessing a curse, to fix the mind so firmly against the truth that in the end we are persuaded that wrong is right and evil is good. Such corrupt speaking, such debased thinking and emotional poison, is to speak against the Holy Spirit, and to place the heart beyond the reach of the God who demands obedient love, faithful living and truthful repentance.

The sin against the Holy Spirit is the exact opposite of Elie Wiesel’s life project – his whole life has been a demand that those who killed his people should seek forgiveness, name their evil, confront the truth, and thereby make possible a response from his people. To offer forgiveness when it is not asked, nor wanted, nor felt necessary, would deny the reality of evil and the immensity of the suffering it brings. Forgiveness is a moral disinfectant which can only be effective when it comes into contact with the contaminant. Only when hearts open to each other, only then can the gracious circle of forgiveness be completed, and the vicious circle of hatred be broken. There is a lasting and final reality in closing the heart to grace and mercy, and it is an eternal judgment that gives what we ask – freedom to make our hatreds and exclusions, our blindness and deafness, our chosen future. That is to sin against the Holy Spirit, and make forgiveness impossible – not because God won’t, but because we won’t, and therefore though it breaks God’s heart, God can’t.

If that's anywhere near the meaning of Jesus words it is indeed a hard text.

Saved by Grace - A Lesson in Lifelong Learning

"By grace you are saved, through faith, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God."

Well, that's me put in my place. What's needed is trust, not competence, grace not discipline, gift and definitely not personal achievement. Of course as a long time Christian I know all this; as a veteran disciple I know all about following and the daily obedience of taking up the cross; like a long term prisoner I'm now a trusty, one of the experienced followers, a seen most of it before disciple, a been there done that and learned the lessons kind of person. Saved by grace, yes, absolutely.

But if I'm honest, my recongition of, dependence on, trust in, gratitude for, astonishment and embarrassment at, this scandalously patient, uncompromisingly generous, disturbingly subversive, endlessly mysterious grace which is the gift of God, and the self donation of Eternal Love in Christ, is so far beyond my capacities of thought and emotion, that it's sometimes easier just to get on with life and try to be faithful, and accept my limitations, failures and mistakes as the way it is and has to be.Grace is just too complicated, or maybe too simple.

There is a Pelagian instinct that wants to carry my share of the burdens, and perhaps a residual pride not that far removed from Peter who promised to follow, never to deny or forsake, and whose best intentions tripped him up as he stumbled and fell on the tragic path that led to the High Priest's courtyard. Trust is such a difficult disposition; an expensive risk to take; a reckless commitment with no guarantees; a surrendering of control from hands used to steering ourselves. So that even the act of trust, the emotional and mental readiness to say yes to the call of Jesus, feels like an effort, something we must do, a piece of hard work on which our all depends.

And that's when Paul's words come with their liberating power and we hear the clink and clatter of falling chains. By grace....through faith....not of yourself....the gift of God. I doubt if we ever reach a stage when those words lose their power to contradict our pride, heal our anxious performance oriented devotions, renew with a different energy our frantic, or complacent walking in the footsteps of Jesus. And you know, that's as it should be. For the gift of God is the gift of God himself, promised presence, sufficient grace, love incognito, the goodness and mercy that follows us, with patience and hopefulness, bearing us up when otherwise we would fall.

Denise Levertov, in a short poem, expresses the reality of a life thus borne up, and her words are a call to the risk of trust, and perhaps to the trusting of risk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Avowal, Denise Levertov.

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Seeing, Seeing with the Mind's Eye, and Seeing Through the Camera Lens.

Today I had my eyes tested for new glasses. I only need them for driving, and middle to further distance. My eyes still read very small print unaided, but don't ask me to watch tennis from the far side of the room. The technical and technological know how brought to bear on my eyeballs was impressive and just a bit scary. I hate the puff-ball test, this hand held machine spitting in your eye! The space invader peripheral scope test is either fun or frustration, and now there's a deep 3d scan to see beneath all the layers and to the very core of the eye, though that costs a bit.

Then there's the choice of frames - my Dolce Gabana frames finally broke at the bridge giving me two designer monocles! After trying on this and that, I settled on a pair that I think fits the shape of my face, and doesn't clash with my grey hair and grey green eyes. And a free pair of sunspecs forbye as weel! When I get them I'll post a photo for those who want to comment on the effortless air of intellectual nous :))

Amongst the great gifts of life, our eyes. Much of what we do for work, pleasure, learning and sharing comes from our visual capacity. I'm not surprised that in John's Gospel several words are used to describe different ways of seeing; to glimpse or gaze; to see superficially or to see and understand; to stare with wonder or glance carelessly; to see beneath the surface or beyond the horizon. No wonder when it comes to understanding, or imagining we see with our mind's eye. We get it. Or as John would say we apprehend it, then we comprehend it. 

Amongst the gifts I've enjoyed most in recent years is my wee sony camera, with its digital eye. More and more I now look at what I see, and see what I look at. No surprise that one of my favourite writers, Thomas Merton, as early as the 50's and 60's was seeing more deeply into the world through the lens of a camera. What that Trappist brother would now make of a digital camera that can take 500 photos at the cost a charcging the battery, and the freedom to discard, edit, crop, reproduce, print from  a home computer - I don't know. I guess merton would be suspicious, even antagonistic to such technological ease and the excesses it spawns; and then too, I think he would find ways to discipline and redeem such facility to serve the deeper levels of human responsiveness to the world - wonder, compassion, praise and awareness. The photos above were taken on the way to Montrose last Sunday - colour is one of God's recurring surprises - give us this day our daily dose of colour... The Red Campion is one of my favourite meadow plants - you can see why.

The Psalms of Smudge 12 : Prayer and the Windmills of the Mind

                    "He bringeth the winds out of his treasuries...." Psalm 135.7