Living Wittily

Remaking Our Planned Future - the Road to Emmaus.

The image of this mosaic was sent to me me by a friend as an Easter greeting. It can be found in a small chapel in Ravenna in the North East of Italy. Amongst the post-resurrection stories the road to Emmaus captures our contemporary love affair with the metaphor of the journey.

Not that our fascination with the journey is particularly remarkable. From Abraham's travelling from Ur to the place God would take him, to Moses fleeing from, returning to, and fleeing from Egypt and leading the wandering of the people of Israel in the desert; from Naomi leaving Bethlehem for Moab to her bereavement and return with her daughter in law Ruth; from Elijah's 40 day scarper to mount Horeb, the long trek of the pilgrims in Psalm 121, and Jonah's failed attempt at giving God a body swerve to avoid Nineveh; from Israel's long forced march and exile in Babylon to the triumphant return through deserts that will blossom three generations later; from Joseph and Mary's slow progress to Bethlehem, and nocturnal flight to Egypt, to their son's 40 day walk in the wilderness, and from Jesus long walk to Jerusalem and death, to the disciples long walk to Emmaus and life, the biblical narrative is woven through with the metaphor and the story of people on a journey.

But the story of Emmaus retains its power and persuasion as a story of Christian experience. Confusion and fear, sadness and regret, broken dreams and emotional pain, minds closed to further hopefulness by the trauma of shattered hope. And yet they are travelling, as if movement at least had the impetus to get life going again. And talking as they go, because talking about things somehow eases the pressure of hurt, recognises and gives in to the human need to make sense, to put into words what can't ever be fully described. Communication, knowing another heart feels something similar, that the loss and hurt aren't borne alone, that by talking we try to salvage sense and purpose out of what has wrecked a hoped for future.

So they walk and talk, and are joined by a third. And their confusion and fear and pain blind them to the presence of one who understands more than they have ever known. No wonder they wanted him to stay over, to keep them company. Indeed this story is one of the great moments in the Bible when our need of others, their support and help, their strength and love, is most plainly stated and most fully understood. And then the moment of breaking bread, the lightning flasho insight and recognition, and the vanishing of the one who made it clear he would always be there.

It is a stunning story of those life-transforming moments of encounter, when Jesus is fully present to us, but we can be so inwardly focused we don't notice. And even if we never notice at the time, we look back and wonder how we got here, where the strength came from, how hope began to grow again, and our hearts burn within us, because he was there, and is here.

All of that, and so much more, is in that lovely mosaic, an art form in which thousands of tiny pieces are arranged into a completeness that requires skill, imagination, patience and planned purpose. Not a bad description of how God works on the mosaic of our circumstances and experiences.

Shalom - a Tapestry of Psalms - Psalm 1

Since Christmas I have been working on a large six panel tapestry which brings together the word Shalom, and the Book of Psalms. During Advent I completed a small tapestry featuring the Hebrew word 'shalom ', and it was based around some passages from Isaiah. I wrote about it while it was still in progress, which you can read here and get some idea of what I'm playing at. I don't mind the phrase 'playing at', it combines fun, recreation and experiment.

In due course I will do a second small one with the Hebrew word 'hesed'. I have chosen these two words because they open theological horizons, no one definition or statement of meaning comes close to expressing the 'thick textual textures'  they create. That's why they are fertile theological ground, rich in possibility for exploring through the texture of textile colour and image. I have chosen six psalms which separately and together celebrate the God of shalom and hesed. And the two smaller panels will celebrate the equally rich poetry of Isaiah. When they are finished, the long Shalom column and the two small Hebrew tablets will hang in a cruciform pattern.

The panel above is on Psalm 1. The imagery is mostly self-evident, once you're told what the psalm text is. The stability of the life founded on study of Torah, meditation on the word of God, contemplative attentiveness to the gracious command and commanding grace of God. In the foreground the sylised orderliness of the landscape contrasts with the flowing rapids of life-giving water. The fecund trees with evergreen foliage and sound abundant fruit make blessing both visble and extravagant. Shalom is continual fruitfulness and roots irrigated from constant living water. Shalom is stability and constancy that comes from deep roots, plunged like anchors into the ground, the tree in its ideal environment. Torah is the ideal environment for the human heart, will, conscience and mind - no wonder the wise delight in such reflective obedience and reverent enquiry.

Isaiah 35 - Giving up Complacency for Lent

My Lenten reading is the work of one of the greatest poets in the Hebrew language. Pushed to discuss critical issues I am persuaded that Isaiah in its canonical form comes to us from at least two authors, and that 1-39 are pre-exilic and 40-66 are exilic but anticipating the end of exile and the return home. But the book of Isaiah as we have it is itself a work of great literary and theological power. Chapter 35 is one of those dream chapters in which the prophet talks into being a different kind of world and an alternative future. And some of the images in it and in 40-66 are of the essence of spiritual hopefulness and theological adventure.

I have the privilege (I NEVER use that word lazily as pious cliche - always it is chosen with as much humility as I can humbly claim!) - I have the privilege of leading worship in one of our churches throughout the Lenten season. Lent is the time for spiritual re-orientation, or for an internal audit, or to go through a personal appraisal in our discipleship, a kind of continuing persoanl development review that is honest, thorough and forward looking. I think what we need to give up for Lent is our secular worldview. Now both those words are contested - secular versus sacred is way out of date as a meaningful distinction in a pluralist, multic-cultural, post-Christian society where spirituality is no longer disenfranchised just because it isn't theistic. And as for world-view - that sounds too much like meta-narrative and we all know how suspicious we have all to become of meta-narratives.

Even granted those two strident disclaimers, I want to give up that secular worldview that is itself a form of intellectual, emotional and theological exile. Second Isaiah wrote to people for whom life had become wilderness, hope had dried up into a dessicated vague complaceny, and for whom any thought of finding home again withered under the sheer heat of circumstance and the weight of the status quo. How could it be any different? Where outside of political realities of power and economic pressures of oppression and recession, were there realistic possibilities of change. Politics and economics are human sciences that have no sense whatsoever of the transcendent, of realities more ultimate than them, of visions more permanent, or hopes more human, or dreams more desirable than the ones they peddle.

And Isaiah says, "Thus says the Lord...". And from beneath the desert ,water gurgles up in glad contradiction of all the surrounding aridity and banality; and out of the sand crocuses burst into colours of purple, gold and white and we ask where the heaven did they come from!; and across the trackless waste of a culture which has spent the last century or three removing known roads, familiar paths and moral rights of way a new moroway is under construction. That's Isaiah 35, and that's his alternative worldview, one in which change is possible and promised; one in which the transcendent tears open our sealed this worldly way of looking at things. And yes, for all our cultural analysis and social theorising, Isaiah has little interest in arguing about the sacr4ed and secular, because it all belongs to God beside whom there is no other. Forget intellectual plea bargains; this is a prophet who tells it as it is because he believes that is exactly how it is. God makes deserts blossom; gurgling springs in the wilderness are the least of his miracles; and as for the motorway across the barren trackless terrain, the One who will one day declare in the words of the Word made flesh, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life..."

Lent is about remembering that, living into it, and looking for the God of hope.

(The photo is of the spring in Aberdeen Botanic gardens, a hidden source of irrigation that you only find if you listen and look for where the gurgling is coming from!)

A Theology of Reading and the Stranger Christ Who Comes Alongside.

The recent advert for the MacMillan Daffodil Donate an Hour appeal, computes the amount of time we spend doing things in an average lifetime. It throws up some "makes you think" statistics. 7,000 hours in supermarkets was one that surprised me till I thought about it. 280 days with a basket or a trolley and a wallet. That's more than a year of working days. And what Macmillan's are asking is just one hour; on average collectors bring in over £40 an hour, so the argument is persuasive. That's quite apart from the wonderful work MacMillan nurses do to accompany and support those who are in the later stages of illness from cancer. I don't need any more encouragement to give to this charity whose work I've witnessed first hand in numerous pastoral situations. Those who care for the dying carry out a ministry that has deep roots in the soil of Christian charity and medical comfort

But it set me thinking about the time I spend reading. Not as much as I used to; not as much as I like to; not as much even as I need to. There are many other important and urgent calls on time, energy and attentiveness. This post is not an apologia for reading; I take the value of reading for granted as a formative, humanising, life enriching, socially informing, intellectually nourishing, morally challenging and educationally effective human  activity. What I am now researching is the theological importance of reading for personal formation, and as a pastime which requires an ethic of reading so that its formative power is genuinely free to challenge and subvert, or inform and affirm, what we know, what we ought to know, how we know it and crucially, what we do with what we know. Oh, and incidentally, "pastime" need not mean desultory non productive time, which has its own value - but a valid way for a human person to pass the time in ways that enhance their humanity and person).

In other words, quite self-consciously and specifically as a Christian, I am interested in reading not only as an intellectual discipline, but as discipline which requires an ethic, a theology and an obedience to the word consonant with our obedience to the Word made flesh. Reading is a search for the Truth that in knowing Him sets free. Reading is a regularly recurring Emmaus journey trying to make sense of things and thrilled when the Stranger Christ comes alongside to rebuke, to expound, to accompany, and to

 

break the bread of life once again. So whether theology or biography, poetry or dogmatics, ethics or novels, history or mystery, philosophy or art, what we read, how we read, why we read, and the immediate and durable effects of the acts of reading are highly significant in following faithfully after Jesus. As a Christian I am also and always a seeker, a listener, a student, with a mind that thinks, a heart that feels and a body that is a living sacrifice. Sotrying as hard as I can, and receiving as much grace as my life can hold, I am engaged in the life work of making this self holy and wholly acceptable to God, which is my reasonable service. Yes that's it, reasonable service.

 On the superficial and playful level I am a bibliophile. But in the deep places of the will, the heart and the mind, I am a lover of the One who took the scroll and read, and declared a manifesto for the transformation of the world. So I won't compute the number of hours I may have spent reading since those early days I worked through the bookcase in our farm cottage. A more important computation is what I have done with the reading, and what it has done to me, by the grace of God, and maybe occasionally by my own determined Emmaus walk. And how I have responded to the countless times the Stranger who is Christ has come alongside to teach, to accompany, and to take the bread and break it so that my eyes are opened in glad recognition, and I see differently, more truly and with something of the loving gaze of God on a world shocked back into life by Resurrection. 

Fighting Against and Fighting For.

I do not deny that I love a good fight,

but I also know that it is a mistake,

at least if you are a Christian,

to have your life or theology determined by who you think are your enemies.

Christians know we will have enemies

because we are told we must love our enemies.

That we are commanded to love our enemies

is not a strategy to guarnatee that all enmity can be overcome,

but a reminder that for Christians our lives must be determined

by our loves, not our hates.

That is why Christians cannot afford to let ourselves be defined

by what we are against.

Whatever or whomever we are against,

we are so only because God has given us so much to be for.

(Stanley Hauerwas, A Better Hope (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2000), page 9.

The picture is of Dorthy Day loving her enemies, and showing what she is for, and therefore what she is against. It serves as a monochrome icon.

The Wright Stuff - The Gospel of the Kingdom

I've slowly been reading Tom Wright's How God Became King. One of the strengths of Wright's overall approach to the New Testament is the way he takes hold of us, grabs our shoulders, and turns us round to look at things from a different perspective. In other words he calls in question the received point of view, and by a tour de force compels consideration of an alternative interpretation of the evidence.

This book is a delight to read, and it helps that I happen to agree almost without demur with his overall thesis  - the Gospels are indeed about the Kingdom of God; and Jesus is the one in whom we see the kingship of God in all the mystery and majesty of love incarnate and the embodied holiness of God. It is unhelpful to create a tension far less a contention between Paul and Jesus - but for that precise reason, Wright is correct to insist that much of New Testament theology and historical study has carried a presumption of  priority for Paul as the theologian par excellence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A reading of the Gospel that takes them at their face value as accounts of the life, ministry and meaning of Jesus restores a necessary balance and provides the major canonical corrective, holding the balance between event and interpretation, between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and the lived reflection of the first Christian communities. Gospels and Epistles create an essential conversation between the Gospel of Jesus and hermeneutic reflection emeging from the church's experience in the life of the Spirit. This and much more comes from Wright's characteristic combination of creative scepticism about received assumptions and persuasive argument built on analytic and synthetic control of the full range of material necessary for constructive New Testament theology and history.

I am enjoying this book.

The plaque above is by Ghiberti, from the Florence Baptistry of San Giovanni, and shows the Triumphal Entry - a key event not only for understanding the KIngdom of God, but as an authoritative statement of Christology. I love the work of Ghiberti.

The Greatest Story in the Greatest Story Ever Told......

 

 







 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The irony of a vulnerable woman circled by hostile men with rocks at their feet or in their hands; the contrast of soft flesh and tears of terror, with lumps of hard igneous missiles lying in the dry dusty heat; the tragedy of a woman reduced to a case study of man managed Holy Law (the gender is not generic but specific - men were the interpreters of the Law) while they tried to trap and damage one whose whole life was a fulfilling of that law; and yes, that film director's dream of an image of the self-possessed nonchalance of the lead man, tracing something in the sand without saying a word.

In conversation with a good friend yesterday about that displaced but not misplaced Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. It comes at the start of John chapter 8 and if read there (rather than in the further displaced position of bottom of the page in small type) then it comes immediately before Jesus' outrageous declaration, "I am the Light of the World". Whoever placed it there made one of the great interpretive text critical decisions in the entire formation process of an early church cherishing its foundation documents.

 This is one of the great scandalous stories in a Gospel full of them; this is subversion of power personified in the casual therefore unmistakable authority of one who will look power in the face and die rather than let it win; this is the story of a man and a woman in which neither man nor woman get each other and instead the exposed woman is clothed with dignity, mercy and love, and the departing men are stripped naked of their self righteous postures and sent away judged by their own departure and closed to the realities of the love and mercy that lies at the beating centre of the faith they represent.

It is a story in which the Light of the World blazes with love and the shadow of each person's own sins are seen to fall on the ground behind those who dare stand before the Light and question its truth. As to what Jesus wrote, or doodled, or drew? We'll never know - commentators guess and the possibilities are richly ambiguous. You does your exegesis and you takes your pick - my own modest suggestion, entirely speculative textually, but in the person of Jesus replete with internal probability, is that the phrase 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice' was doodled the first time - and when there was no response and he stood holding the stone and daring them to enact their claimed sinlessness, he knelt and doodled again. And my mind goes to those searing searching words in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery starting in the heart...and he who is without sin becomes a much harder case for men to prove of themselves. Whatever he wrote the second time - they scarpered! 

The painting is by Titian and is in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.

How to Pray the Cursing Psalms during Holy Week

Dame Maria Boulding OSB wrote out of deep scholarship, alert self-awareness, and perceptive compassion about human hopes and failings, and all this informed by a lifetime of obedience within a Benedictine community. I treasure her books. During Lent I've made my way slowly through her last book, written as she endured painful terminal illness, within the loving support of her community.

Gateway to Resurrection is a gentle reaffirmation of fundamental Christian beliefs centred on God's coming in Jesus, and the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a world class scholar and translator of Augustine, and as one who has reflected and practised the Rule of Benedict for a lifetime, she offers us a rich weaving together of her own experience, Benedictine spirituality, the biblical riches of Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms and the psychological narrative of his Confessions. But this is spiritual writing that is humble yet assured, accessible but utterly unpatronising, full of faith without for a moment encouraging uncritical piety or unthinking assertion in the face of disturbing questions - doubt too, has its place in our journey to God.

She is spiritually shrewd on the vexed question of what we do with some of the cursing Psalms - for example, how does a Christian pray, 'O God break the teeth in their mouths'. (Mind you I guess some of us, some of the time, know perfectly well how to pray a line like that!).  But to pray for the extermination of our enemies children, and to wish those we hate dead and their children orphans - hard to reconcile prayers like that with the Sermon on the Mount. Her answer is profoundly theological, based on taking the humanity and divinity of Jesus with equal and utmost seriousness:

When the Word of God, the Son of God, became man, he was not man in some abstract sense, but a man of a particular race, culture and time. What the instinctive Jewish response to injustice, cruelty or hatred were like, we hear in many of the cursing Psalms. Jesus was personally sinless, and his response sprang from love, but because he came in the loikeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin (Rom 8.3), he took up all our passionate responses into the raw material of his prayer, as he also took the flesh of Israel as the raw material of his sacrifice. We may find it possible as we pray these psalms simply to be with Christ in his Passion, as he assumes all these shouts of rage and despair, all these raw demands for vengeance, and transforms them: 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do'.

At least we can be sure of two things about these psalms: first, that the sweet singers of Israel were rithlessly honest before God, and never thought that anything that was important to them was unsuitable to mention in his presence; second, that there are pre-Christian and non-Christian elements in ourselves that may benefot from exposure to God in prayer.

Over the years I've read so many commentaries and theologies that wrestle with the imprecatory psalms. Here at last is a suggestion that is profoundly Christian because deeply rooted in a full and practised Christology. That our worst thoughts can become our most honest prayers, and be redeemed by being caught up into the Passion of God in Christ, and our darkest places flooded with resurrection light, and that these our most destructive responses are drawn into the eternal life-giving love of the Triune God - that's a thought worth pondering, and a way worth trying to walk, starting this Holy Week.

The passion Story and the Complicated Complexities of our Anger

Last night I did a lot of thinking about anger. I'd been asked to lead the Holy Week Service on the emotions of the Passion, and my allocated theme was anger. You'd think that would be quite straightforward, but the more I read the passion story in all four Gospels the harder it was to pin down just exactly where in the passion story we have unadulterated anger.

I came to the conclusion that anger pure and simple isn't there at all. What is there is that complicated cocktail of dark emotions that underlie the intractable mysteries of human sinfulness, that give rise to violence, hate, cruelty and the ultimate denial of our humanity by the inhumane way we treat other human beings.

You can read what I shared in the file below. I'd be grateful if you respected the copyright on this, but am happy that readers of the blog should be able to read it, and comment if you wish. It is thought in progress, and I'm sure some of it needs second thought. But it does try to take seriously a central paradox of the Passion, how human contrivance and co-ordinated self interest result in torture, injustice and execution.

The two pictures referred to are Peter Howson's Last Supper, currently on exhibition here in Aberdeen Art gallery, and Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Mocked.

Download The Emotions of the Passion

Faith as Persuasion Rather than Certainty

When I was a Christian only a few months I picked up an old Bible in the church I had started going to. Out of it fell a bookmark which if I had kept it, would have been placed alongside other important sacramental objects on my desk, or inside books, or in the top drawer of my desk. I have a very select collection of these souvenirs picked up on my own journey. They are triggers of memory, aides memoires for past blessings, small objects of wonder which when handled kindle gratitude and encourage quiet thoughtfulness. About God, love, friendship, the beauty and gift of life.

Of course I didn't keep that bookmark, one of those vulgar gaudy plastic God reminders- I put it back into the Bible, but not before making sure I remembered the Bible verses written on it.

"For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I wrote those from memory - I still have a head full of verses shaped by the rhythms and cadences of that old translation - I know them off by heart, which is not a bad way of knowing them.

This morning I was reading Maya Angelou's delightful collection of essays and vignettes, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, and I came across a paragraph that took me back to that epiphanic moment at the back of the church, holding a bookmark that told me something I too often forget.

"I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority.

That knowledge humbles me, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation."

Sometimes God's Word comes in one word, and for me it was the word "persuaded".

"For I am persuaded...."

Faith is a living persuasion not a dead certainty, and is often more about beingopen to persuasion than already being absolutely sure. And trust presupposes that if I truly believe something I will be prepared to take personal risks on evidence that persuades me. That's what Paul meant, and what Maya Angelou celebrated - they knew what they believed off by heart. It's a good place to stand, that affirmation of faith, For I am persuaded.....