Living Wittily

God who promises the impossible, makes all things new, and new things possible.

Having spent a while last week doing some digging into the Micah 1.1-5 text I finally preached the text yesterday morning. This isn't the text of that sermon. It is a reflection on why Micah speaks with continuing prophetic power into a world so different from eighth century BC Israel. One particular continuity with that world remains unbroken; our human predilection for power, conflict, violence and therefore war. Micah's vision of peace is as outrageous and outlandish today as it was then. Swords into ploughshares? Study war no more? National disputes settled by the principles of Torah? Don't think so. But let's see. What are we actually about in a Remembrance Day service?

Remembrance Sunday is a day of very mixed emotions for many people. Amongst the most powerful are sorrow at the loss and suffering war causes; grief and anger that war is often a failure of political moral imagination; gratitude to those who exemplified sacrifice and risked their everything to make the world better, safer, more free.

And across that wide minefield of memories of long burdened sorrow and regret, anger and grief, the preacher and minister has to make their way, hoping to avoid needless hurt, careful not to increase the weight of burdens by careless words, unthought out sentiments. Or' just as bad, indulge in banal wishful thinking that we are better, wiser, more mature than those earlier generations who, against their best intentions, found themselves caught up in historic events and social forces they couldn't control.

And yet. Such a service isn't a place for playing safe. Not if we are serious about remembering and honouring those who ventured their all; and not if we are serious about letting the weight of incalculable anguish and desolated hopes be truly felt, but not so as to crush. Into such unsafe emotional territory comes and eighth century BC prophet with his impossible promises and unimaginable reforgings of history. Because that's what Micah is about.

In the age of the great Empires he talks of a God who can make peace happen, and who forges peace out of conflict. Swords into ploughs, spears into pruning hooks, each person safe on their own farm, and military training faciilities rendered surplus to requirements in such improbable and politically impossible images,  Micah, like Isaiah, looks at reality and asks "What if..." These prophets know about the darkness, and choose to be adventurers towards the light. They are not stupid, nor are they deluded by tragedy into baking up dreams that deny the in-your-face reality of life gone wrong. Instead, they look at history, their history and the futures that might be, and they refuse to exclude God from the equation.  

What would the world of politics and military force, the same world riven by war and violence between peoples and nations look like, if the God of steadfast love and justice, the God of shalom and mercy, the God of faithfulness and holiness, were factored in as a decisive presence in our history? Amongst those who have tried that imaginative leap from reality with its determinisms and status quo, to an alternative worldview where radical reversals and transformative visions are not only possible but promised, is the apologist for agricultural and agrarian contentment, the prophet Micah.

What would it be like for farmers to keep their ploughs and mattocks and pruning hooks, and if instead of conscription of property and animals and tools, they were allowed to dwell under their own trees, on their own land, living the life of shalom? Micah argued against the elites and the military adventurers, and criticised the risks the powerful took with the lives of towns and villages, when they went to war in pursuit of territory or gains by military force. Supposing those who had power and resources gave up their fixations on political strategies towards power, and revised downwards economic grand plans towards oppression and profits, and closed the facilities where people rehearsed and resourced military tactics? And what if, instead, the politically powerful and economically ambitious and the lovers of military hardware heard and heeded what such a God as Israel's God requires?

He has shown you O Man what is good,

and what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly, and to love mercy,

and to walk humbly with your God.

What Micah said then, and still speaks now into our much changed world, are words forged from the weapons of despair into the tools of hope, the raw materials of violence hammered into the new shapes of peace. "In the lattter days..." No he isn't saying peace will just happen, or that justice has no cost, nor is he able to confirm that the powers that be won't still be harnessed to policies of oppression and fixation on power, safety and a first strike mentality. But this rural prophet has a powerful theological imagination, formed and informed by a faith in which words like covenant, faithfulness, mercy, judgement, holiness and justice are only meaningfully uttered of God, who has made a world where such moral holiness and eternal values have to be forged out of the human experience of those created in the divine image.

That divine image in each human being is the created gift of the God whose holy love will not be finally thwarted by sin. However we define that vast three lettered word 'sin', it includes as its essence the self-destructive drives which are the engines of hatred, fuelled by mistrust, lust for power, violence, greed, and an inherent over-againstness, which all taken together are the toxins of war. Micah's words in 4.1-5 are both vision for the future and antidote to all that threatens that good human future.

On Remembrance Sunday we choose to hope. Facing the calamitous costs of modern technological warfare, we hear the promised impossible. We look to darkening horizons being forced into recession by the presence and purposes of the God of Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

As Christians we are called to bear witness to hope, and to face the worst of the world as those whose faith is deeply rooted in the cross which stood on Mount Zion, and whose hope stands this side of a tomb made redundant by resurrection. We are heralds of hope, practitioners of neighbour love, ministers of reconciliation, a force for forgiveness, makers and builders and pursuers of peace.

Why? Because on Mount Zion God spoke finally, fully and faithfully – God commends his love towards us in that while we were still enemies Christ died for us. We are heralds and harbingers of hope in a fragmented, fractured, frightened and therefore hostile and divided world. Those words of Micah are now to be heard THIS side of Calvary where sin did its worst and failed, and THIS side of the empty tomb where death died and love won. The cross and the resurrection are the guarantee for Christians that God who promises the impossible, makes all things new, and new things possible.

They will beat their swords into ploughshares...and study war no more.

Walter was the last word in courtesy, a distinguished man with silver hair, knowing eyes and a tall erect frame. You wouldn't be surprised to be told he was a distinguished RAF pilot who survived the Battle of Britain and the rest of the war. His Christian faith was rooted in the life of a church community, the Boy Scouts, the church choir and a mind sharply critical and warmly appeciative at the same time when listening to sermons, or talking about practical Christian living. I met him in my thirties, and for some years he and his wife were friends of our family before they moved way down south. The words you would use to describe Walter would include modest, shrewd, disciplined, and of transparent integrity.

John Machalovich came to our house sometime in the winter of 1961. I know because I was 10 years old when we lived in that house in Ayrshire. He had a problem with his new Decca record player, one of the latest models that could play 8 records, but which would become obsolete a few years later when Hi Fi, Stereo and vinyl revolutionised the whole music industry, and with it, ushered in a whole new youth culture. But that night his problem was that his new record player kept blowing the fuses in his house. He came asking my dad for help. He was a Yugoslavian refugee, who had been part of the resistance in his homeland, and was now a tractor driver in a neighbouring farm. He became our friend for a few years before we moved, and he moved, and we lost touch.

Alistair was a small, unassuming man, who was a prisoner of war and shared a hut in a Japanese concentration camp with the great writer Sir Laurens Van der Post. To stay sane and distract him from his fears he learned to write with bamboo in calligraphic script. In later years he was the calligrapher who wrote the scrolls for the Honorary Degree Awards of the University of Aberdeen. He was a man of many interests, including ornithology, though most of his knowledge by his own admission was from his bird books - and he had some of the best and most valuable of these. I have two personally inscribed poems he did for me, and the combination of precise calligraphy and poetic virtuosity make them treasured reminders of a man who had been to dark places and survived, though not without enduring cost, and a self-imposed silence of what he witnessed.

The poppy is the clue to this post. These three men in different ways are precisely the people we refuse to forget when Remembrance Day comes round. These are men who stood against ideologies of hate, violence and oppression of the other and the vulnberable. I've never thought Remembrance Sunday need invitably be a celebration of war, nor a glorifying of the military and of conflict. These are three people who did what they did, endured what they suffered, and came home to build life again. But not without wounds of mind and body.

In the climate of contemporary Europe and North America, there are dark clouds reminiscent of those forces and ideologies that impelled the Western world towards war. Remembering those who died, and those who were wounded and went on suffering after the war, is of crucial importance to the future and the life opportunities of today's generations. The irresponsible rhetoric of division, the use of hate language, the seductive attractions of power for those fomenting nationalism, separatism and an over-against stance to all those deemed to be 'other', has to be challenged on moral grounds. Part of that challenge is to remember, and to act as reminders to others, of the human consequences of political failure, military adventures, and power sought as an end in itself.

And over and against such dangerous reductions of decency, humanity, generosity, hospitality and generous acceptance of diversity, I want to place the achievements and the sufferings of Walter, John, Alistair and countless millions more. These were decent people, men of ethical principle and responsible humanity. They didn't want to go to war. They had no pretensions to power nor were they seduced by ideology and the rhetoric of the politically overambitious. They did what they saw as their duty, and that meant they did things they found it hard to forget and harder still to forgive.

I wear a poppy to remember people like them, but also as a reminder how easy it is to unleash hell. The poppy's blood red colour far from glorifying bloodshed, symbolises the precious life of each human being, and dares us never to forget the cost and consequence of war. When I hear the shallow, strident self promotion of many of today's politicians, I refuse to be brow-beaten into accepting what they say; and I reflect on the sacrifices of so many, many people, who made possible the freedoms to speak such words. Freedom of speech is not an unconditional given, nor is it permanently guaranteed. It is a hard won privilege of free societies. People died to allow freedoms that enable people to live without fear of being silenced, or violated because they are different, or discriminated against by the powerful.

That's why at remembrance I always include the words that give moral impetus to those urgings towards the common good that underlie a society seeking shalom:

"Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream".

"They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks."

"He has shown you O man what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

One of the words made prominent in the last several years is the diametric opposite of those shalomic visions. The word is weaponise. One example. Immigration is weaponised when it is used to foment fear, anger and hate of the other, even when that other is desperate for human help. The weaponising of words has become mainstream in much political discourse. Those three men who fought for freedom of speech and thought, and to uphold human mutual respect, knew the importance of these.

It is the height of hypocrisy to wear a poppy and hate the other, demonise those we fear or dislike, or discriminate against on the basis of race, religion or other prejudices that dehumanise. The poppy is a reminder of precisely what it costs when these freedoms are abused, or co-opted into political goals pursued with damaging rhetoric and narrow self interest. Such behaviours and attitudes are, in fact, the blue touch paper that once lit have a tendency to explode.

Micah and Defence Spending

Hans Walter Wolff on reforging weapons into something else in Micah 4.1-5:
"As a Christian community we ought purposely to construct in our midst a workshop where reforging may take place. The iron rigidity we all have must be melted downand become fluid. \Then we will seek to influence public opinion in the direction of reducing the budget for military expenditures while increasing contributions for peace, health, education and social welfare. Then we will also renovate our personal budgets; we will give small and large contributions for whatever removes discord and discontent."
Preach it Hans, preach it! (Micah the Prophet, page 175)

Role model football fan.

  Walking from where I park my car, I pass the school playing fields down at the University.

Out of shot some football training or PE taking place at the goalmouth.

Those who enjoy people-watching should try going to a football match and ignoring the play on the field. The real entertainment is the emotional outpourings of spectators whose life frustrations are like heat seeking missiles looking for a legitimate, or illegitimate, target.

Indeed the synonym for illegitimate is a popular preferred term used at football matches quite inventively as an adjectival verbal participle, or more commonly a common noun used with uncommon intensity.

The cathartic surge of anger, frustration, unreasonable claims of unfairness, apopleptic name calling at the referee - these are all suggested by the performance of this crow.

Impressive balance as natural as you like on display here, as it cawed out its complaints, derision, technical instructions. Come to think of it, more reminiscent of a manager frustrated by the technical area but inhibited neither in volume nor vocabulary. It was so intent on firing abusive volleys it ignored the wee guy with the camera behind it, and not very far away!

 

Amongst my more likeable idiosyncracies is my belief that birds are funny - whether intentionally or accidentally they are nearly always fun to watch.

It was a dreich day on the shoreline yesterday. Big waves, mild but strong wind, mist and drizzle combining as mizzle.

I took time to enjoy a coffee in the Inversnecky Cafe and came out the door to see this juevnile tweenage herring gull, looking bewildered and a bit miserable.

Used to being fed by its parents it was hungry and seemed a bit put out. My guess is it was being taught lessons on independence.

Past experience has made me wary of juvenile gulls when I'm carrying food. They have laser eyesight, nil conscience and a primordial instinct for fast food for free. I remember being mugged from behind when taking the first, and last, bite of my pie in the University quadrangle.

But he's standing there for a reason, within a few feet of the rubbish bin. And actually these birds do a lot of the cleaning up behind people who throw food away.

I hope he got some supper. And learns how to survive into and to the other side of winter.

A view from the Road: Gourdon by the sea.

Most Sundays of the year I travel to Montrose where I am part time minister in the Baptist Church.

Down the coast road are several towns and villages - Stonehaven, Caterline, Inverbervie, Gourdon, Johnshaven, St Cyrus and then Montrose.

The weather dictates the scenery. From the road above Gourdon one Sunday, the sea loomed large over the houses. The zoom foreshortens the distance, but the sea was big, at times pouring over the harbour wall, and I guess the path between Gourdon and Bervie would have been a spectacular walk at full tide.

For generations people have lived that close to the elemental power and occasional rage of the sea. In years past Gourdon was a flourishing fishing village and still has a robust well maintained harbour, and small lobster boats operate from there every day. And on the harbour one of the best fish restaurants in the country, The Quay. People travel for miles to eat there, keeping fish as a continuing commercial interest in the life of the village. They do the usual, and occasionally the unusual - like a smoked haddock supper!

The Word became flesh, and encountered barbed wire............

It isn't often I quote Breitbart as a source on this blog. But this time I wanted to nail the source. Notice the piercing, violent metaphor of steel hitting steel into wood. I'll come back to that.

So here's the quote, straight from the mouth of the US President, speaking to one of his base rallies in Montana yesterday, reported on the Breitbart website. 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/03/donald-trump-in-montana-barbed-wire-used-properly-can-be-a-beautiful-sight/

"I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today,” Trump said, referring to military soldiers setting up fences on the border. “Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight.”

We have become used to rhetoric aimed at the lowest common denominator of moral discourse. There is nothing new in the President of the United States using grotesque metaphors, inflammatory humour and the recurrent mockery of truth as his speciality party piece. But his words of eulogy on the virtues of barbed wire demonstrate culpable historical ignorance, dangerous cultural illiteracy and ethical irresponsibility, and this in someone obliged by office to embody the moral and political leadership of an entire people. And not just any people. A vast, diverse, powerfully resourced nation now more polarised than any time in living memory.

Let me deconstruct the President's sentimental attachment to barbed wire. I begin with acknowledging the historical significance of this coming week. We will remember the tragedy, indeed the millions of tragedies that took place over the four and a half years of World War I. Amongst the most lethal and terrible inventions deployed in modern warfare is barbed wire. It is, and is meant to be, an instrument that injures, tears and pierces. Beautiful it is not. Unless of course you are behind a machine gun in World War I, and all that beautiful barbed wire holds up other human beings who happen to be the enemy making them easier to kill.

Thirty years later, electrified barbed wire elevated the usefulness of barbed wire, and enhanced  its beauty as a weapon to a quite new level. Auschwitz provided a prototype for concentration camps where death would come to those trying to escape by climbing over or trying to cut through barbed wire. Beautiful it is not. Unless your goal is to herd human beings, do them harm, and make that harm fatal by the imaginative genius of electrified wire twisted to sharpness that pierces, tears and ensnares.

Alexander Solzhenytsin wrote of the hell of the Gulags and, in his exile, educated Western democracies in the realities of political oppression and the brutalising of human beings. The imaginative ideas factory that is the dictator's mindset, aims primarily for power over rather than power in the service of the people. And one of the more effective instruments for power over is to make someone physically captive. For that, barbed wire is good, you might almost say, is beautifully fitted to purpose.

For weeks now the Trump administration has racked up the threat posed by a caravan of refugees travelling from Honduras, through Mexico towards the United States border. Amongst the measures to be taken to prevent a mass rush on the border is the deployment of barbed wire. Desperate people who have nowhere to stay, no means of support, and who by internationally recognised critieria are refugees, will find themselves confronted by a barrier whose primary purpose is to deter by the certainty of injury and torn human flesh.

"Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight." Loud applause and cheering from the crowd at the rally. Why? Because Trump has once again manufactured the spectre of fear, then shown how as a strong man he can keep them safe, though it means using force against others who are precisely the ones being depicted as a threat to be feared. Create a bogeyman, stir the fear and anger, talk big about being the great deliverer, and use that as an excuse to further demonise and brutalise others. It's the classic tactic of the fascist. Madeleine Albright's recent book evidences that time after time.

But here's the thing. Trump's words expose the danger he himself poses to the American people. "Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight". Did an American President actually say that? Words that are the cry of the powerful, bent on the subjugation of the vulnerable through actions that despise their weakness and degrade their humanity; is that what America now is? Really?

Beautiful barbed wire is a moral oxymoron betraying the aesthetic nihilism of the powerful. From the native American peoples whose free ranging way of life was destroyed by guns and, yes, barbed wire; to the soldiers on both sides who were crucified on endless coils of barbed wire during the maelstrom of World War I; to the millions of Jewish people herded and murdered in killing factories within walls made of barbed wire; to the gulags of Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Berlin Wall, the Concentration camps in Bosnia, the one common factor was the deployment of barbed wire as deterrent and instrument of laceration of human flesh.

I said at the start of this post I wanted to nail my source for the quote, and emphasised my deliberate use of that metaphor of violent striking of steel into wood. I am a Christian. At the centre of Christian faith is steel tearing into human flesh, military power using steel as deterrent, weapon and instrument of pain or death. Barbed wire is ugly, never beautiful. In conception and reality it is a weapon. And it has been used repeatedly as a weapon of oppression, a militarised threat of laceration for those who do not comply with the orders of those who own the wire.

Immigration is a global problem. It is also a global reality that will not go away. But behind the labels of immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, there are human beings, people of flesh and blood. The use of barbed wire as metaphor and weapon, to threaten the lives and the flesh of other human beings is not something that a Christian can ever view with moral neutrality. "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." Barbed wire used against flesh is for me a blasphemy, a refusal to see that of God in the other person. I have no difficulty whatsoever answering the question, "What side of the barbed wire would Jesus choose to stand?" Because Jesus is walking with the refugees in that caravan. He knows about barbed wire, steel through flesh, and the long trek from bloody Bethlehem to the safety of Egypt.

"I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it..."

The white stone is not quite egg shaped, nor heart shaped.

Yet similar enough to suggest those familiar images.

The pebbled beach at Stonehaven is a geological kaleidoscope, awash with fluid formations of millions of fragments, coloured and contoured by sea, sand, and sun.

Fleeting fluid images can be captured by the framing of a photograph, an act of deliberate limitation and focus.

That white stone caught my eye, an image startling in its unexpectedness.

Surrounded by colours reminiscent of autumn shadow and sunlight, it seemed to absorb and contain the light.

The mysterious image of the white stone in the Book of Revelation was for me an inevitable connection.

"To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it." (Rev 2.17)

Those are words redolent of promise, embedding assurance in hearts vacillating and anxious about the future.

In John's troubled world, and in our own troubling times, the white stone points to a mystery beyond our controlling confident cognition, and resists our arrogantly assumed omniscience about what matters, and to whom.

That white stone is both promise and judgement. It is not there for the taking, it is a gift that comes from beyond our ken and power.

It is God's yes to those who stay faithful to Christ, it is an identity marker that cannot be faked, and it is the award of God's recognition of those whose lives have been given to the things that truly matter.

The white stone of justice, love of neighbour, mercy, walking humbly, hospitality, forgiveness, peacemaking, reconciliation, hope-building.

The white stone, with the new name written on it, given to those who in doing these things to the least of Jesus brothers and sisters, remained faithful as embodying the Gospel, performing the faith, and bearing witness to the love of God in Christ, by the power of the Spirit.

 

Not Quite Random Reflections on Pebbles on the Beach.

It takes a long time to make a pebble. And a lot of friction. You need water, sand, and renewable, repetitive lapidary motion. It takes megajoules of energy. But gradually the pebbles take on shape, and the colours settle into patterns and tones, enhanced by the wetness. The beach is a place of slowly worked transformation.

These stones weren't just lying around like this, though they were near each other. Two of them were already there, and as the waves washed over them I placed another two from a foot or two away. It doesn't matter which is which.

I had been thinking about community, that mixture of coming together and bringing together that is human friendship, neighbourliness, various people in their diversity mutually complementing each other. So I brought these four together for a group photo.

As a pastor in a church you come to realise there are those who just happen to be there, been there for years. Then there are those who intentionally come, or recently arrived. Others come rolling in with the next wave. They are differently coloured and shaped and they have come from very different places. But by powers beyond their control they find themselves together, and find each other. They are shaped by friction and moved by waves that come from God knows where.

No attempt at symmetry, no tidy presupposed pattern of arrangement, just four very different pebbles brought into proximity. Which one am I? Where and what did I come from? What gives me my shape, and the colour or character that runs right through all that I am? Reflecting on how a Christian community begins, and exists, grows and declines, changes and is transformed, there is a sense of the divine undertow, the providence that works through our freedoms to bring new opportunities, new movements and directions, and yes, new neighbours we are called to be alongside. 

So I chose four stones. But they were already there, they are what they are, not what I want them to be or would like to make them. Not my call. Indeed, not my calling. My call is to respect the uniqueness, but also to enable each to find a position and place of belonging that honours the story of their journey. There is something non-negotiably given in each of these wave-washed and sand-shaped stones, thrown onto the beach from wherever they have come. But there. And so too each person who is part of a Christian community. There is, likewise, something non-negotiably given in this person, who has arrived here at this time in this place. The divine undertow has pulled them, and rolled them, and shaped them to this point. And here they are, as the gift they are.