Living Wittily

TFTD April 21-27 - Easter and Beyond...

Monday

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.
Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave-clothes where Thy body lay.

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.

BY Monday morning the Easter eggs are on sale and the boom in chocolate sales is passed. But Easter is forever. Jesus is risen! Death is defeated! The best hymns push us back into Scripture, and this hymn picks up the detail in John’s Gospel of angels left looking after carefully folded grave clothes. In John, Jesus speaks of being glorified in his death, and rising again. Easter glory blazes with life, and grave clothes are now redundant. Christian faith is a resurrection faith in the living Lord!

Tuesday

Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb.
Lovingly He greets us, scatters fear and gloom;
let the church with gladness hymns of triumph sing,
for her Lord now liveth; death hath lost its sting.

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.

I’m not sure any other Easter hymn has a stronger line declaring Christian comfort and hope in the risen Lord. Christian faith is an encounter with the living, risen Lord Jesus in which we are made alive in Him by the power of the Spirit. The hymn imagines that meeting of human hearts with the loving Presence and life-giving power of the resurrected Lord. The risen Christ calls together a church, a fellowship of believers, a company of the committed, an incendiary fellowship, ignited and united in Christ.

Wednesday

No more we doubt Thee, glorious Prince of life!
Life is naught without Thee; aid us in our strife;
make us more than conquerors, through Thy deathless love;
bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.

The One who scatters fear and gloom brings to every Christian heart a deepening assurance that establishes faith and overcomes doubt. The glorious Prince of Life makes each life worthwhile, gives to life purpose and meaning, so that compared to life in and with Christ, living for ourselves becomes mere existence. “Make us more than conquerors, through thy deathless love” is a one line prayer any time we are struggling. Because the resurrection of Jesus is about life, and a love that will never give up on us, that cannot be extinguished, and that will bring us safely home to God.

Thursday

Love’s redeeming work is done. Hallelujah!

Fought the fight, the battle won. Hallelujah!

Vain the stones, the watch, the seal. Hallelujah!

Christ hath burst the gates of hell. Hallelujah! 

The word triumphalist is often used negatively to rebuke those who over-celebrate, or who taunt the losers. Fair enough. But when it is death that is defeated, the grave that is outmanoeuvred, the murderous intent of a world’s sins being borne and overcome, then to quote our earlier hymn, “Let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing, for her Lord now liveth, death has lost its sting!” Love’s redeeming work is fulfilled, completed. The world did its worst, and failed to silence the Word of Life. Even hell has no finality for its gates are burst, its locks broken.

Friday

King of glory! Soul of bliss! Hallelujah!

Everlasting life is this: Hallelujah!

Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Hallelujah

Thus to sing, and thus to love. Hallelujah

Wesley deliberately uses the longest word in the verse to convey its own meaning – everlasting. What is everlasting life now that we stand this side of the resurrection? First, to know Jesus in a personal relationship of trusting love. Second, to experience and rely on the power of the risen Jesus in the living of our own lives. Third, to rejoice and sing and live in the confidence that the world’s worst failed, and Christ has burst the gates of hell. Fourth, to love and serve the risen Lord, in grateful service, in glad obedience, and by loving as we have been loved.

Saturday

This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow.

My Love, the Crucified, has sprung to life this morrow.

Had Christ, who once was slain, not burst his three-day prison,

Our faith would be in vain, but now has Christ arisen!

This hymn deserves to be better known. Once again it pushes us into Scripture, this time Paul’s great argument about the resurrection as the central pillar of Christian hope. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead…” (1 Cor. 15.17, 20) The fatal consequences of sin and sorrow, away with them! Christ has burst his three day prison, and life is set loose to redeem and save and keep those who believe and trust and receive the life of the risen Lord. Because the ground of all hope is established in that last line, “But now has Christ arisen!” The hymn celebrates the love of God in Christ, and the gift of life in Christ. Then there is the answering love of the repentant, grateful heart of each believer, gladly sung and spoken  – “My Love, the Crucified, has sprung to life this morrow.”  

Sunday

One with the Father, Ancient of Days
Through the Spirit who clothes faith with certainty
Honour and blessing, glory and praise
To the King crowned with power and authority.

And we are raised with Him
Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered
And we shall reign with Him
For He lives, Christ is risen from the dead

“See what a morning” has become an Easter anthem for many of our churches. Some of its lines compare with the best hymn writers, making it hard to choose one verse. I chose the final verse because it sums up Easter and what an Easter way of living might look like. One or two spiritual writers make Easter into a verb – Eastering. It’s a way of describing the Christian life as a perpetual Easter journey, walking with Jesus the risen One, being raised with Him to newness of life. “And we are raised with Him, death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.” That too can be a one line prayer in defiance of everything in our world that contradicts life and seeks to frustrate God’s redemptive purpose. A verb is a doing word, and Eastering is what Christians do! We are an Easter people, followers of the crucified and risen Lord.

Easter Wings: A Tapestry Celebrating George Herbert's Pattern Poem

Christ is risen! This piece is based on George Herbert's pattern poem, 'Easter Wings'. This is the fourth tapestry based on one of Herbert's poems. 

 

When the poem was first published the words were printed as shown in the second image. The whole piece is a play on light and Herbert's comparison of resurrection with flight, and so the Christian sharing in the flight with the risen Christ.

 

There's more, but that will do for today. The more easily read text is below:

                      EASTER WINGS

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

       Though foolishly he lost the same,

              Decaying more and more,

                     Till he became

                       Most poore:

                        With thee

                      O let me rise

               As larks, harmoniously,

         And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

 

    My tender age in sorrow did beginne

     And still with sicknesses and shame.

           Thou didst so punish sinne,

                   That I became

                     Most thinne.

                      With thee

                  Let me combine,

              And feel thy victorie:

         For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Reflections on a Day in Iona 1. Here, in This Place, Finally Here.

Iona. I had never been there. It was one of those places I have had to imagine, so that Iona was an idea, not a place; at least not a place I knew by having been there and could revisit in memory. Yet I have read widely and sometimes deeply around the importance of Iona for Scottish history, culture and spirituality. 

George Macleod is one of the Scottish Christians I have admired most ever since I learned of him when I was a teenager still glowing in the aftermath of conversion to Christ. In that quite enclosed early Evangelical context, George Macleod was viewed with deep suspicion as a liberal to be avoided, not least because he was critical of the theology and practice of Billy Graham's form of evangelism.

But George Macleod was outspoken and actively protested against the creation, even the concept of nuclear weapons. He was one of the first notable Christians I had come across who applied his faith to the huge political issues of his time, and mine. I was wholeheartedly, almost instinctively with him in a shared revulsion that the fundaments of matter, the stuff of creation, was being exploited by military co-option towards indiscriminate destruction.

Which brings me back to Iona, and especially George Macleod. I have wanted to visit the abbey that was resurrected by the sheer thrawn persistence of George Macleod. The rebuilding of Iona Abbey was both a monumental achievement of one man's vision, and a process that gave birth to forms of Scottish spirituality that combine contemplative prayer, social activism, political protest, environmental care, and a prophetic and biblical tradition expressed in liturgy, hymn, music and art. Peace and justice lie at the heart of Iona's concern with and for the world. 

So on our recent visit to the West Coast, we spent a day on Iona, and in several occasional posts I will reflect on what I saw and felt, and discovered and rediscovered. The photograph is of the cross that is the theological core, and the theological engine that inspired and energised George Macleod as parish minister, and as founder of the Iona Community. He would have resisted being singled out, or being so dominant in the narrative that he got in the way of the real spiritual vision of Iona. So let me leave Lord Macleod of Fuinary to the side for now.

The forecast was rain with a following wind. The photograph shows why it is that Scottish west coast weather is not to be trusted. On a beautiful breezy and mostly blue sky day we sailed from Mull to Iona. There is no easy, quick, convenient way to reach Iona. That's as it should be for pilgrims. A pilgrimage was never meant to be an indulgent dawdle. We walked slowly, in company with others mostly unknown, up the brae towards the Abbey. I had seen programmes, read books, looked at photographs - the concrete reality was something else, both ordinary and extraordinary.

Ordinary because it is small, sits on a prominent raised setting, and is built in grey stone sympathetic to the surrounding landscape. Extraordinary because built in with those stones are the prayers and dreams, visions and activities, hopes and fears of generations of pilgrims who have come to this place for reasons of their own. And regularly all those inner longings are gathered and spoken in liturgy and song, and in prayer and action.

There's a small rocky hill fifty yards from the front door, from which you can look at the abbey and its entrance. I stood there, thankful and content that I had come. We all have our story, and carry within us memories and imaginings, longings and disappointments, our borne griefs and our heart-held gladness. This place called Iona is now part of that inner life.

As I was standing looking down at the other large stone cross dominating the entrance, I was aware that one of the reasons for my sense of spiritual affinity with George Macleod's political theology is my own experience of the cross as the place where I stand, theologically and existentially, head bowed in wonder. That other irascible Scottish theologian, P. T. Forsyth complained about the toil of mind and heart involved in theological writing about the cross of Christ: “Words are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal things without breaking under us somewhere.”       

So when words live up to their highest capacity to communicate our deepest experiences, they are still inadequate, but perhaps they are all that we have. Perhaps. Because there is always image, and place, and community, and all that can be conveyed by beauty, location, and relatedness to others. Iona facilitates that inner conversation with self and others, with the world around us and the Creator and Redeemer God who surrounds and pervades and besieges our lives. 

I'm writing this on Good Friday. Tonight I will lead the service, based on the the hymn "The Servant King." The key lines, according to Graham Kendrick, and supported by most who sing the hymn: 

Hands that flung stars into space,

to cruel nails surrendered.

This is our God, the servant king! 

Iona was a good place to prepare the heart for such taking, and blessing, and breaking, and sharing of the terrible and good news of Christ crucified. Because there is yet Saturday before Sunday. But Sunday is coming.  

TFTD Apr 14-20 Holy Week: "We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God..."

Monday

Romans 5.1-2a “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.”

At the start of Holy Week, when we remember the surrender and suffering of Jesus, the Son of God, we start with peace, and grace. Christ is our peace, through the cross. We are justified, made right before God, by grace, through faith in Jesus. And through that faithful trust in the faithful Christ, we stand upon, and are surrounded by, and kneel before, the grace, mercy and peace of God. The death of Jesus is what makes that dreadful last week of Jesus’ life a Holy Week; and the resurrection of Jesus is what makes Easter the pivotal event in the history and future of the universe.  

Tuesday

Romans 5.2b-4 “And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

No, Paul is not glorifying suffering, he is showing how out of and beyond the deepest and darkest suffering of Jesus, God has brought hope, life and joy. Christian character grows through resistance, struggle, and our own walk, following faithfully after Jesus, bearing the cross of Christian witness. During Holy Week, in mind and imagination, we each follow in the steps of Jesus, remembering the One through whose death and suffering we have come face to face with the grace of God, “in which we now stand.”

Wednesday

Romans 5.5 “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

“Emptied himself, of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race! Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou my God should’st die for me.” Our hearts are like buckets under Niagara! God’s love is an inexhaustible deluge of grace, experienced and known through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the Christian heart. And all this rooted in eternal love, and revealed in human history at Bethlehem and Calvary, - and in a garden ‘just as the sun was rising’, - hope does not disappoint us!

Thursday

Romans 5.6 “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”

I’ve always paused in puzzlement that Christ accepted and walked the way to the place of powerlessness out of love for the powerless. Like every Christian since, Paul never found words adequate to that occasion. “The Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” “He who knew no sin was made sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” “I am not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”  The power of God is seen in the weakness of Christ; the wisdom of God revealed in the foolishness of the cross.

Friday

Romans 5.7-8 “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

James Denney was one of Scotland’s greatest theologians of the cross. He once spoke of his envy of the Catholic priest with his crucifix. In a sermon he said he wanted to walk up and down the aisle with a crucifix, telling that Free Church congregation, “God loves like that!” Later in another sermon he wrote this: “What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is...you wish to know the final truth about God; here it is, eternal love bearing sin’

Saturday

Romans 5.9-10 “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

Holy Saturday is that liminal in-between time between death and life, darkness and light, Friday and Sunday. Today reflect on those contrasts and that phrase so reminiscent of Jesus in his teaching: “How much more.” Reconciliation is always costly, and the willingness to take the first steps, to persuade and negotiate with goodwill, sincerity and compassion for the one who is alienated – if we would find that hard, “how much more” for God. “He who did not spare his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all, how will he not – along with him – freely give us all things?”

Sunday

Romans 5.11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

Rejoice! Rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Easter Sunday is the day of resurrection joy, and celebration of the reconciling love and power of God in Christ. As promised by the angels, “Peace on earth and good will to all the people.” And that word ‘now’ – reconciliation is in the present tense. Truly, hope does not disappoint us! Christ has died! Christ is risen! Hallelujah – “we have been saved through his life.”