Living Wittily

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.....

Multum in parvo (I) Nicholas Lash on "What Christianity Is"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the first of an occasional series. Sometimes a sentence or two says so much is needs to be taken with attentive slowness, even clause by clause, allowing it to build towards those moments of insight and recognition that open mind and heart to a richer apprehension of God, the world, ourselves and the infinite variations of those relationships that sustain our existence.

 The prose poem is often enhanced by being written as a form of blank or open verse. I did something like that in the previous post with A W Tozer and William Temple. And have done it before with theologians like Eberhard Jungel, Hans Urs Von Balthasar (I'm under a challenge to get that name included in a sermon without spooking a congregation !) and Kathryn Tanner.

The book Believing Three ways in One God by Nicholas Lash is itself an example of multum in parvo. I've read it twice before and am reading it again - and interested in the pencilled margin notes from last time. The following passage on page 54 has Q in the margin - in JMG code that means quotable, quote it, don't forget it, this is good!

What we call Christianity is supposed to be some kind of school

the purpose of whose pedagogy

 is to foster the conditions  

in which dependence might be relearned as friendship;

conditions in which

the comprehensive taming of chaos by loving order;

of conflict by tranquility,

of discord by harmony,

might be instantiated and proclaimed.

To use the Creed,

to make its articles one's own,

is, therefore,

to be pledged in labour towards the 'kind of heaven and earth'

in which our human work,

might be the finite forms of God's.

Oh yes!

 

 

The Beatitudes as a Daily Exposure to the Radical

 The Beatitudes –

these are such potent and condensed logia of Jesus

that there should never be a claim to definitive exegesis –

more a docile yet energetic receptiveness

before a wisdom that subverts the most cherished notions

of a materialist, consumerist and hedonistic mentality

bent on reducing all of life to barcodes, images and strap lines,

in the service of the self-centred project of secular salvation,

and doing so through radical practices and redemptive gestures.

 

No’ a bad wee rant that! Made it up myself!

 

More seriously, I've had reason to revisit the Beatitudes for a study project.

I'm currently reading them slowly each day

in a kind of receptive repetition,

wondering if such attentive pondering

will become a slow absorption of truth,

and create a transformative patience

with values and virtues too outrageously odd

to take at anything other than their face value.

The photo is of Dorothy Day, whose outrageous opposition to racism and injustice led to this outrageous redemptive gesture. She is an embodied Beatitude.

Come ye apart, and rest awhile......

 

 He leads me beside the still waters:

He restores my soul.

A Litlle Prayer for Samson and Delilah

Yesterday we were at the Westhill monthly book sale. It is held under the canopy of the shopping centre and there are loadsabooks! The money goes to support a local charity and the variety of books is astonishing, but there are also several genres heavily represented. One of the book sorters, displaying them in supermarket fruit boxes made no concessions to equality and diversity - there were "mens' book" and their were "womens' books". I asked him what defines a man's book - seems that's violence, thriller, military, and other accounts of mayhem. A woman's book is romance, nice story, life story of celebrities and other soft options.

I asked him then why the majority of readers of crime fiction are women, and some of the best crime authors likewise, women - including some of the darker forms of the genre. At which point I realised I was pushing too hard at his useful rule of thumb cataloguing technique by stereotype. I moved on.

Anyway, I bought two books having returned five and a CD for resale. (Net loss to our house of three books!) One of them is a book of poetry where I found this poem which is a brilliant example of biblical exposition that is imaginative, michievous, humorous and serious. There are a number of ways you can treat the story of Samson and Delilah. The weak strong man, the naive Judge who couldn't judge character, his own or Delilah's, the arrogance of strength and power. Then there's the Hollywood treatment of Victor Mature and Angela Lansbury as Delilah!

But this poem is quite different and I'm now wondering if the insight given could ever be preachable by a bald man!

 

Little Prayer for Samson and Delilah

When all virtue

like Samson's Rastafarian locks

lie strewn about us,

have mercy Lord,

on those who sleep in weakness,

and those who have shorn us of strength.

 

Like the growing stubble on Samson's head

let us be renewed to undertake

the phenomenal as a matter of course

when we awaken

from the lap of philistine ease.

(Diana Karay Tripp, 20th C, Lione Christian Poetry Collection, Mary Batchelor (ed), p.46.

The painting is by Gerritt Van Honthorst.

When the Good Samaritan is a Parable of judgement and a call to prayer

The parable of the  Good Samaritan figures highly in my personal rule of life. No big deal in that, it's just a way of trying to pay attention to those around me, notice the realities of the world I work and walk in, and try to embody the compassion of Jesus in ways that are neither by-standing nor walking on the other side of the road. Sometimes being intentional in such attentiveness, and with the Good Samaritan as background theme music, that has meant just doing the decent thing when someone is struggling, needs help and may not even ask. Compassion isn't only emotional sympathy - kindness in action, understanding of another human heart, accompaniment on a hard part of the journey, personal expenditure of time, money or energy - it's all of these.

But now and again with the best will in the world none of that seems possible. Driving to work yesterday along a busy street, a young woman in a shell suit was clinging to a telephone junction box on the pavement. She was swaying, trying to hold on and was obviously distressed either because of what she had taken, or because she couldn't get what she needed. I was in a flow of traffic, passing roadworks with a contraflow, and no way to stop the car for several hundred yards. Several people walked past, one or two smiling but no one stopping, or speaking. Not easy to approach someone who is behaving so much in character with the dependency that has brought her to this place - alcohol, drugs, who knows. But at 7.45 am, she was clearly not where she needed to be. I felt guilty of and on for a while, then forgot about it until I remembered this morning. I wonder where she is. If anyone help-ed her. If she lives near where I saw her.

And I wondered too what is the good, or the use, of now praying for her. I don't know her name, her background, and may never see her again. But I have prayed for her.

That she will find somewhere and sometime, a love that will rescue and redeem.

That someone will have stopped and asked her name and maybe seen her safely home.

That we are forgiven for a world where roadworks, house renovation, traffic flow, and impatient commuters on the way to work or the school run, all conspire to make kindness inconvenient, stopping to help socially unacceptable, compassionate action a nuisance.

And that somewhere deep inside her loneliness and hopelessness, she will discover a love that will hold and enfold her towards wholeness, and recovery, and yes human happiness.

To such petitions I say amen, and trust to the Love that moves the sun and other stars, will move in that no less impressive work of healing a broken life, and yes, through the prayers of this mororist who didn't stop.

Ephesians - The Triune God of love eternal and grace immeasurable...

 

From my early years as a Christian I've read and re-read Paul's Prison Epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon). As a pastor I've preached on them often, nearly always with a residual disappointment that mere preaching doesn't begin to convey the 'unsearchable riches of Christ'. If Isaac Newton really did say he felt like a child playing with seashells on the beach when the great ocean of truth lay before him unnoticed, then as a preacher I've felt the same with the unfathomable depths and irresistible currents of a text like Ephesians. That first extravagantly long sentence in Ephesians chapter 1 betrays a mind pushed into theological overdrive, Paul's vision and imagination running out of subordinate clauses as he finds it impossible to end the sentence. Maybe that's what happens when we speak of God - we run out of clauses and the sentence always, but always, finishes with much unsaid and probably unutterable.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached through Ephesians and the published sermons fill 8 thick volumes. By the way the volume on chapter 3, "The Unsearchable Riches of Christ" is a profound account of Christian mysticism illumined by evangelical experience and textual discipline, providing a deeply satisfying exposition of what it means to be in Christ, and for life to be grounded in the eternal love of God made known in Christ.  Here more than anywhere else in his writing. Lloyd-Jones expressed his Welsh fervour, his revival instincts, his theological passion, and through the intensity of his personal experience of Christ, he rhapsodised on the grace unspeakable, the riches inexhaustible, the love unfathomable and the wisdom unsearchable of this God who in Christ reveals His purposes of love and mercy hidden in the ages but revealed in Jesus.

Every now and then I'm drawn back to Ephesians, just as at other times I'm drawn back to other parts of the Bible that to use the old Puritan phrase, 'speak to my condition'. Sometimes Isaiah 40-55;  or the Psalms; the Gospels often, and John most often. But when it comes to Paul the Prison Epistles are where I instinctively go - especially those first chapters in Ephesians and Colossians when Paul sees the universe through the lens of Christ. And my own story is not relativised and reduced by the comparison; it is drawn into it and given a significance that is rooted in precisely that  "grace unspeakable..., those riches inexhaustible, such love unfathomable and the wisdom unsearchable of this God who in Christ reveals His purposes of love and mercy hidden in the ages.

The paradox of revelation and mystery is one we live with as Christians, gladly, gratefully and generously. It's the paradox of the God who comes near in Christ but is beyond our comprehension as the Triune God of love eternal and grace immeasurable. It's the tension of the soul being caught up into the heavenly places while we still deal with the earthly, the everyday, the ordinary, the fragile, the transient, the reality of life as a human being yet as made in the image of God - trying to make sense of this paradox of existence in Christ and living the life that is ours. At those points in our lives when that tension is most acute and that paradox hardest to live with, that's when I read Ephesians 1, and Colossians 1, and Philippians 2. And if I ever need reminding of what it means to deal with the realities of social justice, human values, freedom and community, there's always that short masterpiece of practical theology we call the Letter to Philemon.

All of which arises because I've had on my desk one of the first commentaries I ever bought and which I treasure as a spiritual artefact, a sacred gift to myself, a trusted exegetical companion - Paul's Letters from Prison,G B Caird (Oxford, Clarendon: 1976) Bought in the John Smith Bookshop on the Campus of Stirling University, in March 1976 - cost then - £2.25! I doubt I ever spent money on a book more wisely and for better reward.  Yes there are the big heavies - and I have most of them (Markus Barth, Ernest Best, Andrew Lincoln, P T O'Brien, and just arrived Clinton Arnold and Frank Thielman - no space for Hoehner's encyclopedic doorstopper). But there is an elegance in Caird's 90 pages on Ephesians, and for me an affection for this careful scholar, that makes this small book special. It's one of the very few commentaries I've ever slipped  into a flight bag and read at an airport! I know - sad - better to read Lee Child, or Henning Mankell, Ian McEwan.

Maybe so. But for the umpteenth time I'm keeping company with G B Caird on Ephesians, trying to live with the tensions and paradoxes of grace unspeakable, unsearchable riches, all summed up in Ephesians 2.4-5, "But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved". That's the greatest paradox of them all - our transgressions and God's great love for us. Who would ever have thought they could be reconciled - except God, who is rich in mercy?

When comment is superfluous 1.

Sometimes comment is superfluous. As in the case of the incomparable G Campbell Morgan, who is always good value, often theologically precise, and sometimes profoundly right, and unfailingly accessible. 

"Said Thomas, 'except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails...I will not believe. What Thomas said of Christ, the world is saying about the church. And the wolrd is also saying to every preacher: Unless I see in your hands the print of the nails, I will not believe. It is true. It is the person who has died with Christ...that can preach the cross of Christ."

 

Allow me one unsuperfluous comment. The mission of the church the Body of Christ? It's about nailprints, visible and tangible.