Living Wittily

TFTD Sep 2-8: The Faith of a Christian and the Face of a Christian

Monday

I Thess. 3.10 “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith.”

Paul understands the importance of face to face meetings. Relationships grow by the way we see and behave towards each other. Phone, text, email, WhatsApp are all fine – just as in Paul’s day papyrus and ink could communicate across distance. But to encourage others, build friendship, and deepen affection and understanding nothing substitutes for being present, being there FOR, and being there WITH, each other, face to face. Christian love is embodied and enacted best in each other’s presence.

Tuesday

Galatians 2.11 “When Peter came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong.”

This is another kind of face to face meeting altogether! Paul is fighting for the freedom of Gentile converts, saved by grace through faith, not through any other means. Peter refused to eat with these Gentile converts to avoid offending those of a different mind. Paul doesn’t simmer with resentment – he faces Peter, speaks truth, and names what is wrong. Sometimes we have to face up to difficult people and situations. Just remember - in this same letter Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, those built in safeguards of Christian behaviour – and he includes love and self-control! 

Wednesday

Matthew 6.16-17 “When you fast, do not look sombre as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face…,”

Jesus is insisting that the face we present to the world is truthful, not pretending to be who we are not. There is an honesty required in the words we speak – but also in what we communicate with our faces. There is a Scottish banter question, “What’s up with your face”? Usually a way of calling out someone in a bad mood, made visible by their whole body language. Jesus is talking about not making a show of our piety and pretending we are super-spiritual. A Christian’s face should avoid being a visible and convincing contradiction of the Good News! 

 

Thursday

Acts 6.15 “All who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”

The first martyr’s face bears witness to his faith as he speaks truth to his accusers. In telling Stephen’s story, Luke describes the face of a man at peace in the midst of a storm that will engulf him. He is a follower of Jesus, and like Jesus, he prays for those who will kill him. The intense and unflinching face of Stephen tells of his faithfulness to Jesus, forgiveness to his executors, and bears witness to the hope of the Gospel – “I see heaven open, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” (7.56) The face of this faithful witness, looks up in faith to Jesus risen and enthroned.

Friday

Matthew 17.2&6 “Jesus was transfigured before them and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light…”

When God said “This is my Beloved Son”, the disciples “fell face down to the ground.” The face of Jesus’ ablaze with glory, and the hidden faces of disciples awed into silence by the voice from heaven, each tell a story. Awe, wonder, the fear of God – I wonder if we are losing that sense of the Holy? Are we less attuned to reverence in the presence of Almighty God? The Transfiguration reminds us that God is not our pal, and we have no right to take liberties in God’s presence. Should we really need to be reminded that Jesus is the Christ, the Beloved Son, and Lord as well as Saviour?

Saturday

1 Corinthians 13.12 “Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face.”

 At the end of the Love chapter, come these words about the vision of God in Christ that awaits all whose faith and love pull the heart towards heaven. The Bible is quite clear that we cannot look on the face of God and live. But if it is the face of God in Christ, the human face of God, the Word made flesh and now glorified, then we will look on Jesus face to face, and we shall know even as we are fully known. Heaven is this personal meeting, face to face, in which our relationship to God in Christ comes to fulfilment. That’s why the greatest of these three, faith, hope and love, is Love.

Sunday

2 Corinthians 4.6 “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

The light that glowed at the Transfiguration on the face of Jesus, now shines in Christian hearts. This light is what we know, in our experience, in the deeper life of our mind, in those hidden places of the heart only God sees and understands. “The light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ” is the light of life, the energy source of all that we are and hope to be in Christ, the presence in all our living of the risen Christ. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.  

Paintings used above:

Icon of The Holy Trinity, Rublev - the interchange of the three faces expressing the life and love of the Triune God. 

Jesus in the Home of Martha and Mary, Vermeer - this painting is in the National Galleries of Scotland, and is the only known biblical subject Vermeer painted.

The Head of the Virgin, Rogier van der Weyden - a rare silverpoint sketch, and for me, the loveliest face of Mary I have seen as artistic representation. 

The Harvest of Doing Good and Making a Difference.

Just over the hill, a granite built cottage with the date above the door, 1958. The tracks through the barley, green against gold, tyre tracks toward home. Distilleries throughout Grampian depend on the hundreds of barley fields ripening now to be harvested soon.

 

What the photograph misses is the visible movement of the breeze across the field, the symphonic dance of millions of seeds sown four months ago, now multiplied ten fold or twenty-fold, even a hundredfold. Harvest thanksgiving will come once the harvest is in, which always seems to suggest a certain lack of faith, a hard-headed wait and see rather than that hopeful risk that trusts the rhythms of nature and the one to whom we pray "Give us this day our daily bread."

 

And then my mind turns to another harvest, the fruitfulness of a life careful of the good, alert to moments when kindness is called for, sensitive to injustice and the wounds of others, so that we will neither be complicit by silence, nor ever think such occasions are 'not our concern.'

 

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6.9. I would like to leave my tyre tracks in the harvest fields of our world.

Ambushed by Bach and Classic FM.

On a recent Sunday journey to Montrose, at the Stonehaven peripheral junction and roundabout, the driver on the outside ignored lane discipline and changed lanes, forcing me off the designated lane for turning right. In a burst of self-righteousness I chose not to be angry, and moved back into position after the offending driver had passed. After all, I was heading to a church to preach about Jesus as the inspiration and model for our lives.

Going through Inverbervie a car was waiting to join the traffic at the junction near the Co-op, and he waited till I was much nearer then slowly pulled out in front of me forcing me to brake. Once again I tried, I really tried, not to be annoyed. At which point Classic FM started playing 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.' Including the following words:

Jesu, joy of man's desiring,
Holy wisdom, love most bright;
Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.

 I defy anyone to sustain annoyance and keep muttering angrily under their breath while listening to that piece of heaven anticipated. Like an all-knowing back seat driver, the Holy Spirit knows just how to tell us to slow down, and grow up! Over the years I've come to recognise that driving is one of those fast track training grounds for the fruit of the Spirit which Paul tells us is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

That morning I was having a road test of at least three areas with room for improvement: patience, goodness and self-control! Learn these and we grow in maturity, and the roads will be safer.

What do we think we are doing when we say 'The Grace' to one another?

Monday

2 Corinthians 13.14: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

These words, often used as a closing blessing at the end of worship, were the last words Paul wrote in the letter that caused him most personal pain. Misunderstood, misrepresented, his heart open and vulnerable to the Corinthians, many of whom had closed their hearts to him. And he writes this! These are not words that say “Everything in this church is fine!” Rather, they are written to remind them, and us, that it is the grace, love and communion of the Triune God that holds us together, nourishes our shared life, and guides and guards our relationships with each other.

Tuesday

2 Cor. 13.11a: “Finally brothers and sisters, rejoice! Aim for perfection, listen to my appeal, be of one mind, live in peace.”

When we say the Grace together, it helps to look at what Paul wrote just before writing this benediction. “Rejoice” is the Christian attitude that contradicts all the other self-indulgent nonsense we get up to! Whatever the problems they (and we) have with each other, God is at work to bring reconciliation. Aim for perfection more literally means, “Mend your ways.” Paul’s prayer and hope for each of the churches shines through these two phrases, “be of one mind, live in peace.” When we close a service with the Grace, that is what we are saying, and praying, and working towards.

Wednesday

2 Cor. 12.11b: “And the God of love and peace will be with you.”

Before we get to the Benediction, which is a wish prayer, we have a promise prayer. It follows from all Paul’s urgings to sort things out that he mentions earlier in this verse. When we work at love as agape, as “indefatigable good-will”, God who is love is with us. Where we seek peace and reconciliation, the God of peace will be with us. To say the Grace to each other, then, is to acknowledge and renew our commitment to all that those words of grace, love and communion bestow on our life together. 

Thursday

2 Cor. 13.12-13: “Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send their greetings.”

What is intended here is the exchange of a visible sign of fellowship, forgiveness, an open recognition that we are all guests in God’s house, entitled to be here, each of us equally honoured by our host, the Triune God of grace, love and communion. The modern practice of ‘exchanging the peace’ is our cultural version of this. It’s worth remembering that the kiss of peace lies at the heart of the parable of the Prodigal Son. The Father’s kiss is the public sign of reconciliation, love and acceptance. “All the saints” send their blessing; not those who felt like it, but all the saints, share in this practice of demonstrating the holy grace and love that infuses Holy Communion.

Friday

2 Cor. 13.14a “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.”

And so, against the background of a troubled church emerging from self-inflicted wounds of hurt and blame, we come to each of the three elements of a Christian Benediction. “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor…” “By grace you are saved, through faith.” “My grace is sufficient for you.” At the heart of our own heart’s experience is the grace that loves us, found us, saved us, and keeps us. To say the Grace as we look around at each other is an act of wondering praise for the amazing grace of God in Christ. Inexhaustible grace pushes us towards greater maturity as Christ’s Body.

Saturday

2 Cor. 13.14b “May the love of God be with you all.”

God’s love for each of us doesn’t depend on us just wishing it were so for each of us. God’s love is already “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit”. John the Apostle of love went on and on about the love of God in his letter: “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God.” When we look into the faces of our brothers and sisters at the close of worship, we are wishing them, and ourselves, a deeper sense of ‘the love that drew salvation’s plan’. Together we are making a shared response that we will love God more, and love each other more, because he first loved us.

Sunday

2 Cor. 13.14c “May the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

‘Communion’, or ‘fellowship’, only capture some of Paul’s meaning. Spelled out more carefully; “Your common participation in the life and power of the Holy Spirit.”[1] Fellowship can sound a cosy word. Not in Paul’s dictionary! This is about partnership, sleeves rolled up, the whole self in and shaken all about! In other words to say the Grace to each other is to commit ourselves to working together, supporting each other, being good colleagues and dependable co-workers in the Kingdom of God.

 

[1] Murray Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, page 962. Harris has spent a lifetime in the Greek New Testament, and is a leading scholar on 2 Corinthians. I don’t usually do footnotes in TFTD, but this one is a worthy exception, to pay tribute to a man whose academic work and meticulous scholarship have always been in the service of the church and its ministries. Like many ministers, I thank God for such vocational excellence.

The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society.

A gem discovered in the Voluntary Services Aberdeen Bookshop, for £2! I already knew about the annual Swarthmore Lectures sponsored by The Society of Friends - previous lecturers include Rufus Jones, W C Braithwaite, Elton Trueblood, Henry J Cadbury, John MacMurray, and Gerald Priestland.

I've long been an admirer of the Cambridge scholar Terrot Reaveley Glover, Baptist, classicist, essayist and author of a compact, illuminating and at times amusing small book on Paul, on some pages a preacher's godsend. It was called Paul of Tarsus.

 

T R Glover, a dyed in the wool Baptist, was invited to address the annual gathering of Quakers in the 1912 Swarthmore Lecture. These lectures are intended to expound, disseminate and showcase Quaker Principles. Glover's Preface is an explanation of why he chose to accept the invitation, and set out "The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society."

 

He is not referring to society in general and its Christian cultural expressions. Rather his lecture is about the nature and purpose of each local meeting of Friends, and indeed each gathering of Christian believers for worship.

 

Glover was a lucid, warm and attractive writer when he wrote of Christian experience. I'll do a second post later with a few extracts once I've finished reading it - like Victoria plums on the cusp of ripeness, good writing like this should be taken in slowly enough to savour. Speed reading words written from the heart is spiritual rudeness

Singing hymns, humanness, and our lives played out in the presence of God.

I've lost count of the number of books Walter Brueggemann has written. Most of them are his particular brand of Old Testament theology, a blend of exegetical and social hermeneutics of Old Testament texts, honed in his unique process that cuts through our long established defences against the disruptiveness and subversive energy of these words from God. I have a shelf full of them, read most of them, and I probably only have about half of what he has put out there.

This book is a bit different. On the publication in 2013 of the new Presbyterian Hymnal, Glory to God, Brueggemann was involved in some of the launch events. Writing this book comes out of those experiences and his conviction that "Congregational singing, along with forgiveness and thanks, marks the church as a very different community in the context of a culture that is, for the most part, unforgiving and ungrateful." This is vintage Brueggemann, looking for the countercultural practices that bear witness to an alternative and God-given way of seeing and being in the world. 

The result is a book that takes some of the hymns from Glory to God, and expounds them as precisely the sung texts that practice awe and wonder, that remember the goodness of God, and acknowledge our own waywardness and recalcitrance to follow in the costly ways of Jesus. Such hymn singing, aids our expression of gratitude for grace, strengthens faith in God's faithfulness, and alerts our responsiveness to those occasions and opportunities in the life of discipleship when we are called to bear witness to the transformative energy of the Gospel of newness, life and flourishing.

The first four chapters are on Psalms are 104-107, praises of Israel and the church which are "definingly human when it is remembered that our humanness consists in our lives played out in the presence of God."  Taken together these Psalms evoke "praise, readiness for obedience, readiness for rescue, and thanks." These are the reasons WHY we sing. The rest of the book explores 15 hymns and expounds in considerable pastoral and exegetical detail, WHAT we sing, and what such singing does to the singer, and to the singing community. 

This is vintage Brueggemann, observant of our cultural context as Western consumers trained to see all of life as marketable, and everything of worth as money-indexed commodity. In doing so he is attentive to the text of the hymn and its rootedness both in theological tradition and in the spiritual experience of a pilgrim people who have been travelling together for centuries, from generation to generation. His interpretations, even of a hymn like "Jesus calls us o'er the tumult" is neither mawkish nor sentimental, two bogey-words for Brueggemann. His exposition of each hymn renders the poetry and theology in terms that are astringent, searching, bracing, and always but always, pointing the way to a deeper faithfulness, a truer repentance, and a rebirth of hope and daring in every reminder and rediscovery of the fidelity and steadfast love of God in Christ.

A good example of Brueggemann's hymn exegesis might help you decide if this book is for you, and worth your time. "Love Divine, all loves excelling" is Wesley at his lyrical best, and on the theme that brought him to raptures of praise: the Love of God in Christ. Each verse undergoes literary analysis by a writer who has been immersed in the Psalter all his long life. Some of Brueggemann's finest writing is on Psalms, and who can forget his framing of Psalms as texts of orientation - disorientation - reorientation; once you get it, you can't get away from it!

Take Wesley's line, 'Alpha and Omega be!' After some biblical digging around you get this:

"In Revelation's anticipatory vision God now declares in a loud voice from the throne a new governance that totally redefines the shape of reality. There is nothing before the rule of Christ; there is nothing after the rule of Christ. There is nothing other than the rule of Christ who says, "I am making all things new."

One of the most enriching qualities of Brueggemann's writing is his familiarity and facility across the whole canon of Scripture. This is Scripture interpreting Scripture, and Scriptural allusions in hymns being repristinated for those who might have forgotten how brilliantly such truth shines. His comment on 'Pray and praise Thee without ceasing': "Such prayer, we imagine, is not an endless torrent of words, but rather an unmitigated mindfulness of living always in the presence of God." That should be on a poster above every office desk - as well as every prayer desk!

Here is Brueggemann the scripture jazz pianist, and here is his riff on the word 'finish' in "Finish then Thy new creation." 

" 'Finish' is not unlike the final delicate act of completing a new building - the close finishing work that requires attention to detail and aesthetic beauty...The hymn's verb 'finish' is reminiscent of the report that God finished creation (Gen.2:1), the finish of the tabernacle as God's new dwelling place (Exod. 39:32;40:33), and Jesus' declaration on the cross, "It is finished" (John 19.30). God can and will make the new creation complete."(p.118)

Coming to the end of seven pages of reflection on Wesley's hymn, he ends as he usually does, as a scholar and pastor who cares deeply for the church and for all of us who try to live faithfully within and beyond our Christian communities: 

"The singing assemblage itself can be and sometimes is a transport into another world of 'wonder, love and praise' that invites us and permits us to redefine our lives so that fear, anxiety and responsibility are are made at best penultimate. When we are fully enveloped by "love divine all loves excelling" we may relinquish, for the sake of a different life, the destructiveness of seeking to live beyond the reach of Alpha and Omega." (p.119)

The combination of favourite hymns that could do with some unpacking, and a seasoned exegete of scripture who is also a prophetic critic of culture and our social and contemporary context, makes for a book that is by turns intriguing, inspiring, surprising and an education in what, at its best, the singing congregation can get up to!

The Works of the Lord and the Mercies of God as Hidden Clues.

Chasing something else, I came across this from the 17th Century Puritan Thomas Goodwin on looking for evidence in our lives of the love and friendship of God - he is commenting on Psalm 111.2 "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who have pleasure in them."

 

(This, may partly explain why photography doubles as a form of contemplative and grateful seeing!)

 

"The LORD is gracious and full of compassion. This is the grand discovery of all the searching, and therein lies the glory that is the conclusion of all. As in searching into any experiments in nature, there is an infinite pleasure that accompanies such a study to them that are addicted thereunto; so to [each] that hath pleasure in the works of God, and is addicted to spy out his kindness in them, there is nothing so pleasant as the discovery of new circumstances of mercy that render his work glorious and honourable. Get, therefore, skill in his dealings with thee, and study thy friend's carriage to thee. It is the end why he raised thee up, and admitted thee into friendship with him, to show his art of love and friendship to thee; to show, in a word, how well he could love thee."

 

Thomas Goodwin. Holiness in the Heart and Life. Works Vol. 7. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863) p.213.

 

Photo from the walled Garden at Holthill Gardens near Windermere