Living Wittily

What does blessing look like?

 

 

 

"...like a tree planted by streams of water,

which yields its fruit in season

and whose leaf does not wither—

whatever they do prospers."

(Psalm 1.3)

 

This verse gently beeps in the background when I turn the corner, across the bridge and on to this path. Psalm 1 is a Beatitude, both a promise of blessing and a description of what blessing looks like. It looks like this!

 

"When through the woods and forest glades I wander..."

Looking down at a chorus of wood anemones, looking forward and seeing the wood and the trees, listening to any amount of small birds warning each other about unwelcome wandering humans.

 

"When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,

and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees..."  

 

I've always thought that word "sweetly" tastes like saccharine! In any case, it shows little understanding of why birds sing, call, chirp, warble, and tweet.

 

Quite often they are signalling our intrusion.

 

But I guess it doesn't work so well if the line is, "And hear the birds complaining in the trees."

 

They're often hard to see, harder to photograph, but yes, their presence is one of life's delights. In this wood we know there are tree creepers, long tailed tits, blue and great tits, gold crests, and the occasional raucous robin. One or two of these we glimpsed while gently trespassing without the residents' permission.

 

Going back to that hymn, "How Great Thou Art", the verse in question plays an important part by including in Christian experience the enjoyment of the creation. At a time when our planet, the natural world around us, is being devastated and ruined by human economic activity, a theological understanding of what is going on is part of the Church's call to be faithful to God in this, our time.

 

Forests with birds, mountains with fauna and flora, seas capable of sustaining life, land and soil being preserved fertile without exhaustion - these too are part of the Christian liturgy, either as cause for thanksgiving, or as cause for repe tance for the waste and destruction of an irreplaceable treasure, our home.

 

The verse about wandering in forest glades and lofty mountain grandeur is natural theology as doxology: 

"Then sings my soul, my Saviour God to Thee,

  How great Thou Art..." 

 

Even more interesting, the hymn has become one of the two or three most popular hymns at Christian funerals. In the face of death, amongst the comforting words that matter, so many of us choose to sing these that celebrate forest birds singing and mountains soaring. Sometimes natural theology, a theology of nature, provides the life-saving sense that life is gift and always precious.    

The Theology of Emil Brunner: "the God of truth, eternally bent on encounter with his creatures..."

Yesterday I enthused about Emil Brunner, a theologian whose work I've read off and on throughout the years of my ministry. It all started with a paper I was asked to do as a young minister, on the theme of human relationships. Amongst the resources I used was Brunner's hefty volume on Christian Ethics, The Divine Imperative. I still remember diving into his discussions of human sexuality, marriage and the irrevocable nature of covenant promises. So much has changed since then, but he modelled theological ethics in the service of the church and the pastoral response to the human experiences of love and commitment. 

I started looking for Brunner's works second-hand. Reason and Revelation was bought in 1978 for 90 pence! Man in Revolt and The Mediator took a bit longer but I was looking for clean copies - and this was before the days of the Internet, Google and the world as bookshop. It was much later before I found a fresh set of his 3 volume Christian Dogmatics, one of the best systematic theologies around, I think.

Other volumes have been added over the years: The Misunderstanding of the Church is a brilliant summons away from church as institution to church as Spirit inspired community; Our Faith started out as one of those slim, eclectic but often fascinating volumes issued by the SCM Book Club, and remains a persuasive apologetic for a faith engaged and engaging; Truth as Encounter is an essential title which characterises and confirms Brunner's theological development towards a relational ontology, the I-Thou theme explored earlier in The Divine-Human Encounter bearing fruit in his later exposition of truth as encountering God in relationship, rather than truth as only statements about God requiring intellectual assent as beliefs. Brunner had no doubt doctrine and the content of belief are essential, but are to be experienced in and by the divine-human encounter with the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ, and those truths appropriated and applied by the regenerating, renewing and reconciling work of the Holy Spirit.

It has always surprised me how little known Brunner is, and I suspect those who read him today will be a small band of those fortunate enough to have discovered him for themselves. I think there are several reasons for the unwarranted neglect of Brunner's theological work.

1. Of course the immediacy and urgency of some of his writing arose out of the theological cultural and historical contexts within which he was doing his theological thinking and writing. Reading it now, I'm aware we are in a different world, and some of his references and assumptions sound dated, because they are. Though that is the case with most classical theological writers being read generations later. His core theology remains vital, engaged and embedded within Scripture interpreted in conversation with and drawing resources from the traditions of the church, and for Brunner, especially the Reformation.

2. During his lifetime, and even after his death, the overcasting shadow of Karl Barth was at times like a large dense tree keeping the sun from the garden. For myself, I read both Barth and Brunner, value both for different reasons, and wish to God (I mean that quite literally) they had been able to understand each other better during their lifetime.

3. By the time the third and final volume of Brunner's Dogmatics was published in 1962, the 1960's were launched with all the radical changes and challenges to cultural assumptions, social conventions, and a new intellectual ferment that would be new wine in old wineskins, with the inevitable result. The 60 years since have changed the planet, human life, and raised questions Brunner (nor Barth for that matter) would not have conceived in their scale of challenge and threat to human existence itself.

At this stage of my own life which is pretty late in the day now (!), I can make a good case for reading the theology I enjoy. I don't mean that in any superficial consumerist pleasure quest. I mean enjoy in the serious sense of a theology that addresses me and points to the God who addresses each human heart and seeks relationship in an encounter that summons us to truth, and to the Truth. The best theologians do this. Brunner is amongst those, and remains, for me and any who happen to come across him, a source of profound insight and passionate apology for the God of truth, eternally bent on encounter with his creatures. 

Here is a brief sample of Brunner at his thoughtful best:

In Christ God Himself lays his hand on me, he opens Himself to me and opens myself to Himself, He breaks through to me through the walls of my I-solation. He establishes fellowship with me and thereby at once becomes my Lord. That Christ is my righteousness is the same as that Christ is my life; the righteousness of God is nothing less than the new obedience. That I turn from self to Christ is already itself the new life; that through faith I participate in the love of God which is in Christ is already the love of God poured into my heart through the Holy Spirit. 

(The Divine Human Encounter, Emil Brunner, (Lutterworth Press, 1943, p.113)

Incidentally the two photos above are a telling contrast of the stern theologian sitting in front of his theological army, and the laughing theologian who finds the joy of God in his calling as witness to the Word of God in Christ.

 

Emil Brunner on Faith and Obedience.

In the 1960's candidates for Baptist ministry in Scotland were quizzed on this book, at the time still deemed one of the seminal books of 20th Century theology. Brunner is a superb writer of theology.

 

The conclusion of this book consists of six statements on Christ the Mediator which distil the long argument and explain the practical difference it makes to live a life of obedient trust in Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

 

It was first published in 1934, in a Europe overshadowed by menacing realignments of power. I've re-read the conclusion and confirmed again why Brunner's is a mind I have kept coming back to ever since I read his The Divine Imperative, oh, a long time ago!

 

Here's the last two sentences of this theologian who wrote out of passion for Christ and his Church:

 

The Christ whom we know and recognize in faith is no other than the Lord who seeks for obedient followers. The Christian Faith is not rightly understood if it is not understood as a summons to the Imitation of Christ. For faith is the entrance into the movement of God in Christ, and it must also prove its reality by making sure that this movement actually takes place." (The Mediator, page 619)

 

Prayer, Patience and That Elusive Moment of Capture.

On holiday last week we walked a lot; sometimes it took a while because I stopped a lot. In his poem happily called "Leisure", the Welsh poet W H Davies  asked the question most of us know by heart, but forget to practice: "What is this life if, full of care / we have no time to stand and stare?"

Now there's walking, and then there is walking. Every day I'm trying to stay active and the nagging little phone app tells me how many steps I've taken - and how many still to do to meet the target daily step count. Really? Well, yes, but not to be taken too seriously. Little point in competing with yourself to prove to yourself that you can beat yourself. It's a guide, a help to self-awareness.

But then there's the walk where "we go for a walk". This isn't about the daily constitutional; this is intentional, planned, something I set out to do in a particular place which can be the beach, a wood or a circular from our door. Back to last week. We were on holiday in Findochty; for those who don't know, a small fishing village on the Moray Coast, which is a great place to walk. Any amount of walking. Also a good place for stopping "to stand and stare."

When I 'go for a walk', I take my camera. I know that as well as walking I'll be looking, and seeing, and stopping. Last week I took a lot of pictures, many and maybe most of them discarded. But several of them record important moments of encounter and of falling in love again with a world far too easily taken for granted. I love the natural world of land and sea, birds and flowers, moss and trees, rocks and lichen, the close-up and the far away, the sunlit and the clouded grey. A camera can be a prayer book with the added feature of a shutter click.

Prayer can be an exercise in patient waiting, and no guarantee that what you wait for will happen; at least, not the way you want or expect it to. Last week I watched rock pipits. They're quite shy, and reluctant to pose conveniently for that guy over there who stops and stares. Those minutes standing still, watching and waiting, hopeful but not certain, alert for the right moment when my intrusion is forgiven and the bird comes into focus - sometimes prayer is just as frustrating, and rewarding. 

When the Psalmist writes "I waited patiently for the Lord, and He inclined unto me" he is saying exactly what I felt at the moment this rock pipit hopped on to this rock and winked at me! I suppose what I'm saying is that prayer isn't always rewarding or satisfying; nor is it meant to be. It is an encounter, a seeking for the other, a longing to see and wonder at the beauty and reality of One who may be elusive, on the move, just beyond the moment of capture, and inviting us to keep looking and hoping and longing. And now and then, we are forgiven the intrusion and we sense "He inclined unto me." (Psalm 40.1)