Living Wittily

The Devotional Poem / Hymn of a Quiet Philologist

 

Edwin Hatch is one of the lesser known figures In the history of 19th Century biblical criticism. His Hibbert Lectures, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, changed the course of New Testament scholarship for over a century.

 

His research on the Septuagint was focused on compiling a comprehensive concordance on the Greek version of the Old Testament. He died before completing it, and it was completed by a friend, and became known as the Hatch and Redpath Concordance of the Septuagint, still a defining work to this day.

 

All of this by way of saying that the same Edwin Hatch, shy scholar, content to be in the background of academy and church, wrote one of the loveliest hymns about the Holy Spirit. In Victorian England, and most other periods, t's quite rare for reserved academic philologists and historians to state so simply and overtly their own devotional feelings.

 

'Breathe on Me Breath of God", remains a prayer of the heart for those of us who still sing it, and are in churches that might choose it.

 

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Fill me with life anew,

That I may love what Thou dost love,

And do what Thou wouldst do.

 

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Until my heart is pure,

Until with Thee I will one will,

To do and to endure.

 

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Till I am wholly Thine,

Until this earthly part of me

Glows with Thy fire divine.

 

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

So shall I never die,

But live with Thee the perfect life

Of Thine eternity.

The photograph shows a hairstyle I've never been tempted to copy

Walter Brueggemann 1933-2025

 

Like many, many others, I owe so much to the writing and scholarship of Walter Brueggemann.

 

The multiple debts we owe to his faithful provocations, his relentless compassion, his prophetic imagination, his lifelong vision of shalom, his tireless critique of institutional and ideological greed, and above all his deep and trustful hope in God who redeems the lost and broken, who reverses the impossible, and who makes resurrection and new beginnings theologically thinkable.

 

I for one give thanks for his ministry of keeping us awake to the voice of God, and alert to God's call of grace and judgement.

TFTD June 9-15: The Holy Spirit as Transformative Influencer.

Monday

Our blest Redeemer, ere he breathed his tender, last farewell,
a guide, a Comforter, bequeathed with us to dwell.

Behind this verse is the promise of Jesus, “”I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth.” Pentecost is the fulfilling of that promise. The Holy Spirit is the generous bequest of Jesus, the gift that can’t be bought, the risen Christ made present by his Spirit. This whole hymn is a quiet thanksgiving for the One who comes to believing hearts as wisdom, counsel, strength and the deep assurance that we are indeed, children of God  

Tuesday

He came in semblance of a dove, with sheltering wings outspread,

The holy balm of peace and love on earth to shed.

The descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism combines with the image of sheltering wings. Another hymn tells this well: “O spread thy covering wings around, till all our wanderings cease.” Amongst the great blessings of the Holy Spirit’s coming to dwell in the community of Christ, and in each trusting heart, are the peace and the love of God shed abroad in the heart, in the Christian community, and out the doors into the world where Christ died and rose again, a God-loved world.

Wednesday

He came in tongues of living flame, to teach, convince, subdue;

As peaceful as the wind he came, as viewless too. 

Sometimes the poetry isn’t as good as the words! But this verse interprets Pentecost as the gift of the Holy Spirit to all Jesus’ followers, then and now. The flame of God’s love, burning the truth into the heart, convincing of both sin and its remedy in Christ, subduing our pride and bringing us to the place of prayer, gratitude and obedience. The wind at Pentecost wasn’t peaceful, it was disruptive – but perhaps the hymn writer was thinking about Jesus words to Nicodemus, the movement of the Spirit made visible by the effects on the leaves, and that same Spirit’s effects made visible in lives born again into the Kingdom of God.

Thursday

He came sweet influence to impart, a gracious, willing guest,
while he can find one humble heart wherein to rest.

The hymn writer’s devotional instincts are finely tuned. The Holy Spirit does not gate-crash, though there is potency and persistence in the grace of God working away to open doors locked from the inside by guilt, fear, shame, pride and much else that keeps us at a distance from God. The heart that is humbled by the patient love of God revealed in Christ, the heart convicted of sin and turned towards God in repentance and prayer for forgiveness – that heart is exactly the place where the Holy Spirit comes, and dwells, and becomes the primary influencer of the heart, emotions, will, and mind.  

Friday

And his that gentle voice we hear, soft as the breath of even,
that checks each fault, that calms each fear, and speaks of heaven.

The great Reformers often spoke of “the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.” By this they meant when we read our Bibles prayerfully, we are asking the Spirit to “teach, convince, subdue.” The Spirit is continually at work towards our sanctification, in maintaining the sensitivity of the conscience when faced with temptation, by the training of the mind in our thinking with the mind of Christ, in the control of our emotions and affections as we respond to life’s routines and surprises. The work of the Holy Spirit is “God at work in us both to do and to will his good pleasure.”  

Saturday

And every virtue we possess, and every victory won,
and every thought of holiness, are his alone.

This is the most famous and most often quoted verse of this hymn – at least in the circles I moved in for much of my earlier Christian life and ministry. The author, Henriette Auber, was well aware we are saved by grace – it’s never our own doing. Likewise whatever is good in us is good enabled by the inner working of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness with our spirits that we are assuredly children of God. We are what we are, we are who we are, by the grace of God. Far from being a devaluation of our best efforts, our dependence on God’s grace as we are being conformed to the image of Christ, is what enables and empowers us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who is at work in us”!

Sunday

Spirit of purity and grace, our weakness pitying, see:
O make our hearts thy dwelling-place, and worthier thee.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The hymn writer used early Victorian language – the word pity refers to the compassion and affectionate sympathy of God who knows and sees and understands our struggles. The Holy Spirit is the Counsellor and Comforter who indwells the mind and knows our motives and intentions, our mistakes and failures, and whose work is to conform us to the image of Christ – to make us more like Jesus. That’s the prayer of this entire hymn! 

TFTD June 2-8: The Wind of the Spirit

Monday

Acts 2.1-2 “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.”

C. S. Lewis once longed for the gales of God to blow again through the dusty cobwebs of a passive church. He wasn’t wrong in his longing. These two verses are more than a weather report, they are the Church’s first weather forecast about the power of the Holy Spirit to be seen and heard where the followers of Jesus are gathered together. And so we pray, “O Breath of Life, come sweeping through us / revive your church with life and power.”

Tuesday

Acts 2.2 “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.”

Pentecost was a dramatic interruption that woke the disciples from resignation, uncertainty, timidity about the future, and that lethargy we all recognise when something seems too big to tackle. The sudden noise, the forceful energy, the disruptive effect of power pervading ‘the whole house’ – what to do in face of so much evidence of church decline, fading faith, loss of direction and a world less and less hospitable to Christian life and witness? Perhaps pray for a personal Pentecost, and a local community Pentecost, another blessed interruption to routine faith!

Wednesday

Acts 2.3 “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”

Wind and fire are not the elements of tameness or sameness. The wind is a force that overturns, whips up, impels forward if the wind is at our back. Fire consumes, illumines, warms, purifies and extracts pure metal in furnace heat. The separation of the flames into a gift of flame to each one present, is a remarkable picture of the Holy Spirit falling on the community and hovering over each person. The coming of the Holy Spirit is the realisation in our experience of Jesus’ promise of the Spirit as the Father’s gift. “Kindle a flame of sacred love, on the mean altar of my heart.”

Thursday

Acts 2. 4 “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

While the gift of tongues came later in Christian worship, in Acts the Spirit becomes both the speaker and the interpreter. The Jesus’ followers spoke in a language they had not learned, to people able to understand them. The Gospel can’t be constrained by any one language – the good news is to all people. That long list of peoples, tribes and nations in Jerusalem represented many languages – and the Spirit ensured that they heard of “the wonders of God.” (v11) It may be that the Church today is being called to discover and grow new ways of telling, showing and enacting the good news of Jesus crucified and risen. And not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of God.

Friday

O Thou who camest from above, the pure celestial fire to impart,
kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.

Jesus said he would not leave them orphaned, abandoned or left to their own devices. The coming of the Spirit, the gift of the Father, is the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise. Wesley recognised both the glory of the fire and the ordinariness of the altar. Even a love worthy of Jesus would have to come as gift, a flame from heaven sent to ignite everything in us that will burn. And so Wesley’s prayer, becomes our prayer, “Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.”

Saturday

“There let it for Thy glory burn with inextinguishable blaze,
and trembling to its source return, in humble prayer and fervent praise.”

“The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.” (Lev. 6.13) Wesley describes the Christian heart as an ordinary altar, nothing special. But when sacred love is kindled by the inner working of the Spirit, the heart burns with devotion and creates communion between the glory of heaven and the trusting heart. The result is a life of humble prayer and fervent praise, a life ignited and kept  constantly ablaze by the renewing and refuelling power of the Holy Spirit.

Sunday

Jesus, confirm my heart's desire to work and speak and think for Thee,
still let me guard the holy fire, and still stir up Thy gift in me.

Ready for all Thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat,
till death Thy endless mercies seal, and make my sacrifice complete.

On this Pentecost Sunday, let Wesley’s hymn become your prayer. Against the backdrop of the upper room, invaded by the gales of God, sanctified by the flames of divine love, we ask for a fresh kindling in our own hearts and heads, of love for God, love for Christ’s church, and love for this God-loved world. May our whole lives be an incendiary witness to the fierce and holy love of God. By the power of the Spirit, may God’s holy fire burn with inextinguishable blaze, His love audible and visible in us.

Our Reading Group Spent a While Discussing AI in Ways AI Could Not Imagine!

 

Our Eejits book group were discussing this book about AI this afternoon. Lots of wisdom and wit, some searching questions around the nature of humanity, the relation of humans to machines, the moral challenges of creating something that may become sentient and for which we will have moral responsibility. In addition questions of the nature of what is being created, and it being qualitatively different from all previous technological revolutions, the dangers of military and anti-human and anti-creation potential. Then there are the emerging moral dilemmas, not least the dilemma of ensuring that those who design and develop AI are themselves responsible and humane in their values.

 

There are of course theological responses, and out of these grow the moral imperatives and ethical values we would want to have established as safeguards and agreed boundaries. The potential for human benefit is seductive in its promises; the potential for human harm and irreversible damage to the world as we know it. is equally great, and harder to justify - but it's there all the same.

 

This is a great group, courageous in thinking, trustful and respecting of each other's contribution even when disagreeing, capable across the disciplines of theology, philosophy, ethics and social and cultural analysis. We didn't answer some of the harder questions - but neither did we hide from the obligation to ask them, refine them and understand the urgency of continuing to ask them. There is such a thing as fellowship in thinking. I think!