Living Wittily

Ministry as biography

 Just preached at two services over in the East Neuk 
of Fife. Despite warm comments, and genuine 
appreciation,there is still, and always, the sense 
that words cannot "stretch to the measure of 
eternal things". The last phrase is P T Forsyth's. 
Sometimes I think that other brilliant, infuriating 
genius, the one from Denmark, should be heeded 
more:

"Order the parsons to be silent on Sundays. What is there left? The essential things remain: their lives, the daily life with which the parsons preach. Would you then get the impression by watching them that it was Christianity they were preaching?"
Soren Kierkegaard, Journals, Ed. Alexandre Dru (New YOrk: OUP, 1938), p. 402.

Biography as theology - and as ministry.

Texts Under Negotiation: Brueggemann and Exegetical Confidence

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
     his understanding is unsearchable.
he gives power to the faint,
     and strengthens the powerless. (Isaiah 40 28-29)

I've read various commentaries on this passage, and learned much. Westermann, Childs, Seitz, Goldingay, and Brueggemann's own commentary. But just to prove that the best comment on Scripture text isn't always found in commentaries, here's Brueggemann in his book with the disconcerting title Text under Negotiation. The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) It is replete with theological insight expressed in pastorally alert terms, and earthed in text, church and world. My copy is split, and the loose pages make it more like a loose-leaf folder - but I don't want to buy another because this one is annotated. But it's still in print and it remains a significant and persuasive example of exegetical confidence in the capacities of biblical text to help us reconceive our world in the light of the Gospel. So here's his comment on that famous Isaiah 40 text, found on pages 35-6.

Creation not only works for the powerful, the mighty, and the knowledgeable. It works as well for the faint, the powerless, the hopeless and the worthless. It works by giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. It works so that strength is renewed. It is creation that precludes wearniness and faintness, and invites walking, running and flying.

Evangelical concern may derivatively raise the issue of our terrible disorderedness that issues in unseemly anxiety and in inescapable fatigue. It is a good question to raise in a local parish; Why so driven, so insatiable, so restless? The answer, in this doxological tradition, is that our lives are driven because we are seriously at variance from God's gracious food-giving program.

And where there is a variance and a refusal to trust:
youth are faint and weary,
     the young are exhausted,
     and there is little liberated flying or exhilarated running. (Isaiah 40.30)

Violence against women, and why Christians don't throw stones.....

I've tried to avoid making this blog a place where I just bang on about the things I want to complain about. That way when something does seem important enough to protest, dispute, or confront, it doesn't get lost in the constant drip, drip of low grade disgruntlement.

For the second day in a row, though, I'm both angry and feeling personally implicated by what is happening in our society. Yesterday figures for violence against women in Renfrewshire were released. Nearly 2,000 reports of violence against women were lodged last year. A specialist police task force has been set up to deal with domestic abuse in our surrounding area; you can read more about it here in the local paper. In my summer job as a student a while of years ago, I worked as an assistant social worker in Easterhouse, Glasgow. One of the first families I became involved with lived in fear of a violent partner. The consequences of this sometimes hidden and sometimes not so hidden violence were catastrophic, and the human cost in misery, fear and injury retain a long afterlife.

Then on the news this week,  video evidence of a police officer wearing reinforced gloves and body armour backhanding a woman protester on the face, before drawing a baton and lashing out at her legs. We are told that the context, the duress of the officers, the need for independent investigation mean that such actions if described as violence or assault are to be preceded by the word "alleged". That on our streets there are again images of crowd violence, and bloodied faces, police and public, needs little corroboration - bloodied faces and broken limbs are not alleged, they are real.

But in my mind a link was inevitably made. A specialist task force to tackle violence against women - and a woman protester the subject of violence from a specialist police officer. It's part of the bewildering fragmentation of our world into news clips, broadcast images, compromised  integrity and ethical erosion - but it signals a society where a deep malaise is settling over our capacity to recognise when the essentials of community life and life-enhancing human values are being threatened.

And the church? What does the church, say and do? That story that floated around in the memory of the early church, but which one way or another had to be included in the Gospels, of Jesus standing with a stone in his hand daring the men to throw it. It remains for me a definitive story about where Jesus chose to stand - somewhere between the stone thrower and the victim. Jesus understood violence - its sources in our fears and prejudices, the ways it feeds on our reductionist views of others who are different, the corrosive effects of violence on both perpetrator and victim so that unless someone absorbs its energy the vicious circle becomes cyclic, chronic, and if unchallenged, legitimated.

The church of Jesus, then, is surely the very place where we understand the significance of violence, recoil at the gratuitously slapped face, resist the use of power to abuse the person. And understanding it, we  name it for what it is. To follow Jesus is to stand between violence and the intended victim; it is to call violence to account; it is to remember that Jesus who urged the turning of the other cheek rather than retaliation, was himself slapped about by gauntlet armoured hands. But that stone, hefted in his hand and offered to men bent on violence, is one of the church's key symbols of justice and compassion. Maybe alongside our other sacramental objects, bread, the chalice, the baptistry, the basin and the towel, we also need to find a large, hefty, bone-breaking flesh-bruising stone - and lay it on the table alongside these other objects of service and vulnerable compassion; that stone, itself a sacramental reminder of our call to patient unyielding protest and spiritual resistance of those actions aimed to diminish humanity, wound the body and subdue the conscience and spirit by violence. And beside them the reminder, stones are not for throwing, they are for not throwing

It's what comes out of a man that defiles - emails and politics.

Not what goes into a person that defiles, but what comes out of him. The observation was made by Jesus. And it applies to words as much as actions. Words are the codes we use to communicate thought and feeling, to express our inner world to the outer world that hears, sees and knows. Acts of Parliament and poems, novels and tax legislation, commercial straplines and sermons, UN resolutions and Argos catalogues, road signs and nutirition information on my box of walnut whips bought at M&S as an Easter treat - they all use words and communicate something deemed essential. But however words are used, they are open to moral scrutiny and ethical judgement. That holds whether they are any of the above, or are used in emails or conversations, texts or phone calls. And that holds especially amongst those who presume to exercise power in the name of the people who elect and hold accountable those who govern our country.

That Gordon Brown has not apologised for the now notorious email exchanges amongst his Downing St staff is an interesting example of how seriously politicians take words - when it suits them. A letter expressing 'profound regret' is not an apology. To say 'I am sorry' would be to acknowledge some personal responsibility, and hand significant adavantage to one's political opponents. And the debate about whether such an apology would be justified will go on.

I suppose what I find most depressing / disturbing / infuriating - is that highly paid public officials in Downing Street - in the PM's office - can even conceive of, imagine, give mental energy and intellectual living space, to emails so shocking in their content, so scurrilous in their intent, so obviously fabricated and with malice aforethought, that they haven't even been published.

Which brings me back to words, and those words of Jesus, that what comes out of a man is what defiles - words included, emails included. That a mind capable of such culpable ethical deficit should be a close and long term advisor to the Prime Minister is a national embarrassment. Whether or not Gordon Brown apologises or merely expresses regret, such a toxic inner world as displayed in such email exchanges is, to use the older biblical term, defiling. For all of us. I don't mean to sound self-righteous - I confess I feel self-unrighteous, tainted, compromised, embarrassed. And someone needs to apologise.

Walter Brueggeman: For the Bible tells me,.....not so!

Do we tell the Bible what it is, or does it tell us who we are? 

Do we tell the Bible what it's for, or does it tell us what we are for?

Is the text of Scripture ours to interpret, or is Scripture God's way of enabling us to interpret ourselves, our world and God's ways in the light of Christ?

Here's Brueggemann in full flow:

"My theme is the practice of imagination entrusted to us in the church, a capability of otherwise so deep in our call, so urgent in our context, so dangerous in our practice.

This practice of imagination is textual. It arises from the intense and sustained study of this inexhaustible text that we take to be Holy Scripture. We notice regularly that this text comprises for us and offers to us what is not otherwise known. This text-driven, text-compelled imagination keeps us under the discipline of close study, for it is not free-lance fantasy. The matter of the text is urgent, precisely because a "modernist" church - liberal and conservative - has largely given up on the text as our gospel script of otherwise".
                      Walter Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise. The Witness of Elijah and Elisha (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), page 40.

Forget about Bible reading and "the quiet time"; Bible reading is the disquiet time. And don't read Scripture text to fuel devotional feelings, but to ignite imaginative faith in the God who dares us to think and act otherwise. Scripture text is not intended to confirm for us our spiritual and theological status quo, but to call us and our communities of faith into question, to unsettle our settled convictions because God is always urging us beyond what we already know and have learned to live with.

"In truth, if one examines the great hymns and prayers or the sacramental cadences of the church, it is abundantly clear that the characteristic rhetoric of the church, when it speaks its own 'mother tongue' is in images and metaphors and narratives and songs and oracles that make almost no concession to dominant definitions of the possible". (page 41) 

And in all our talk about vision and strategy, emergent church, transformative practices, alternative community, this text becomes a sifting interrogative voice, that compels our attention, requires our responsive listening and subverts those "dominant definitions of the possible" that limit the range and reach of the Gospel. Amongst the most important contributions Brueggemann has made to the Christian community is this call to so live in the text of Scripture that we bear witness and give testimony to a Gospel that makes the world otherwise. How does the church embody a life that is so "otherwise" it is good news for the world? The question would be an interesting evaluative criterion for church programmes, Christian community lifestyle and individual Christians' daily discipleship.   

"Meanwhile......" Mary Oliver, Wild Geese and regaining perspective

Early yesterday morning, as we went for a walk in the park, we overheard the shouted conversation between several skeins of geese heading north. There's something irresistible about that gaggled running commentary between around a hundred geese as they pass the time of day during a journey of several thousand miles. For me they speak of Spring, of life on the move, of rhythms easily lost in a life too constrained by demands, expectations and stuff that is more urgent than important.

Geese have always given me a sense of perspective - ever since I saw, year on year, hundreds and hundreds of them stopping off on the fields around the farms in Ayrshire where I was brought up. The way they hold their head absolutely steady as their whole body pulsates with energy. The unerring instinct for the right direction. The rota system of leadership at the point of the chevron. And the sound of their honking, the excited noise of those who know they're going home, wherever that is.

Mary Oliver, (the photo must have been taken during the stereoscopic windscreen years for glasses), as so often, pulls threads of meaning from such natural happenstance and weaves them into images of how we'd like our lives to be. She makes you think about it: despite all our self-absorbed preoccupations, the world goes on. Three times in this poem, like a reprimand for our self-centred worldview, the word "meanwhile". The sentiment not unlike Jesus advice to look at the birds of the air - he probably didn't mean geese, but the point is the same. And whatever else geese do - they do make me look up and out, instead of down and in. They remind me that however important my own life seems at any given moment....meanwhile....the world goes on.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Resurrection Fibonacci (I) and "Easter Wings".

Resurrection Fibonacci (I)

Christ?
Yes!
Risen?
Disbelieve!
Disbelieve for joy!
Incredulity learns to laugh,
unembarrassed by the scandal of resurrection.
"And on the third day." His promise no exaggeration. Empty graveclothes, empty tomb.
Galilee. Peter. Upper Room. Thomas. Garden. Magdalene. Emmaus. Cleopas. Places transfigured, people transformed. Risen indeed! 

Luke 24.41 should always be read in the RSV or AV. "The disciples disbelieved for joy". When that which is singular, unprecedented, inconceivable, incredible, unimaginable, occurs, the normal response is disbelief. When that occurence forces the realisation, even the minute possibility, that our worst fears and worst nightmare can no longer happen, then that disbelief is energised by joy. To disbelieve for joy isn't scepticism, it is wonder giving birth to possibility, because the impossible has just been contradicted.

To disbelieve for joy is to struggle with mixed emotions, at one and the same time to dare to hope and hope to God we are not wrong, deluded, mistaken, duped by our own desire that it be so. Joseph Fitzmyer is my first resort on Lukan exegesis; his translation of the key phrase in 24.41 is 'because they were still incredulous, overjoyed yet wondering...". Resurrection does that . It doesn't take much imagination, (though maybe even the little it takes is too much for some of us) to think our way into the minds and hearts of disoriented disciples, traumatised, grieving and scared. Yes incredulous. And yes overjoyed, overcome with that hilarity that is somewhere between joy and hysteria. Later they would begin to understand, incredulity would give way to faith, joy would become something akin to assurance, worship would become urgent in a world now changed forever, and their witness to that world an affirmation of Christ crucified and risen. And the news so good that countless others who encounter Jesus will disbelieve for joy, that God is like this Jesus, reaching out in love and mercy, meeting them where they, and we, are.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

The statue is by Frederick Hart, and is called "Christ Rising". The image expresses the anguish of Christ's sacrifice and the power of resurrection. One of Hart's descriptions of his own art shows why this statue is such a powerful statement: "Art must touch our lives, our fears and cares – evoke our dreams and give hope to the darkness."

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

.....................................

And because I can't print it the way George Herbert intended, here is a scanned image of Easter Wings, a poem I think is hauntingly beautiful - the words and the form. I've included the words below for easier reading - but the typesetting on the scan was Herbert's original intention.

 

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 this day thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Poetry of the Passion 6 : Holy Saturday and the aching hiatus of not knowing.

Holy Saturday is about emptiness. Empty hope and an apparently empty future. An empty cross and that looming emptiness we know as bereavement. Words like disillusion, aftermath, undone, waste, hiatus, paralysis, unreality, each lacks precision for that confusion that faces a future certain only of not knowing, of not knowing how, and not knowing why.

Chris has captured something of the bewildering ambiguity of the great heart cry of Christ, "It is finished", in her Good Friday reflection posted yesterday. Particularly the unreality of that which was finally and irrevocably real in the death of Jesus, and the brute fact not only of crucifixion, but of a cross now empty. Today's passion poetry can be read there, and thanks Chris for a powerful evocation of that liminal time between Good Friday, Holy Saturday and what comes after, and what it might have felt like to not know, and to disbelieve for grief.

Poetry of the Passion 5: "Incarnation's heaviest weight..."

Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seem in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
and wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don't show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,
He went through with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
nor the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not even, in agony's grip)
was Incarnation's heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.
(Denise Levertov, New selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 2002, page 182)

One of the most important contributions to Western theology made by Jurgen Moltmann's seminal The Crucified God, was to recover confidence in the theology of the cross as a way of understanding the inner relations of love in the life of the Triune God, and to explore the nature of divine self-surrender through the experience of Jesus as God revealed in human flesh. The incarnation as an historic event, and as occasion for the outgoing redemptive love of God to a creation fallen, finite yet the object of eternal purpose and infinite love, opened for Moltmann and subsequent theological explorations, a rich seam of reflection on the nature of divine and human suffering. And in various occasions of reflection in his work, Moltmann takes with reverent seriousness and theological courage, the far reaches of meaning in the great cry of dereliction. The God-forsakenness of Jesus has its deepest echo in the heart of the Father, amplified by the Spirit, and borne as unutterable anguish constrained to the human words, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

In his autobiography, A Broad Place, Moltmann tells of his experiences as a young soldier, the God forsakenness of young men cowering under air attack, and witnessing comrades shattered into oblivion before their eyes as bombs rained from the darkness. Such personal anguish can never be irrelevant to the developments of later theological reflection. In a border village in Austria is a beautiful modern church we visited some years ago while on a walking holiday. At the entrance is placed a War Memorial Plaque, in black marble, with a young soldier cradling his dying comrade. And in German the same words that are on countless similar plaques in British churches, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Good Friday is a complex intersection of emotion, memory, past pain, heightened awareness of loss, and for people of faith the puzzle we dare not try to solve, the holy enigma of God's broken heart, the tear of separation that signals ultimate bereavement, the grief of God. What makes it Good Friday is the love that is revealed yet mysterious, infinite yet personal, pushed to the utter limits of endurance, yet not giving in to

this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.

Levertov displays profound theological insight into the psychological anguish created by uncertainty, as inner resolve seems shattered by physical agony, and yet from somewhere deep in the truth of who God is, final purpose perseveres, "enduring the cross, despising the shame". Few poems idenytify with such precision, exactly what John meant when he said, "For God so loved the world....".

 

Poetry of the Passion 4: Saying no, and yes, to peace

Brian Wren is a provocative, imaginative and at times controversial hymn writer. Several of his hymns have a secure place within my personal canon, and one of them (Lord God your love has called us here) is amongst the very best communion hymns extant. His book, What Language Shall I Borrow manages to argue for gender inclusive language, and for non hierarchical images of God, with cogency, passion, informed theological reflection and at times a noticeable impatience, even resentment at resistance to experimentation with metaphor, image and vocabulary. In Wren's hymns God is the Holy Weaver, deftly intertwining; the Dancer, the Sending One, the Wild One, the Storm of Love, the God who changes place.

He is also unafraid of hymns that have political and ethical edge rooted in the Gospel story, and fuelled by the abrasive protests and angry compassion of the prophets. Interestingly Wren's D PHil is on the Hebrew prophets and he has degrees in Modern Language and in Theology - a fair tool kit of disciplines, ideas and sources which he exploits again and again in hymns that enable worshippers to sing about such scandals as child labour, racist violence, economic tyranny, life shattering loss, aching grief and most of the bad stuff in the news. But it is always juxtaposed with Gospel, with what God is about in a creation so in need of redemption that God takes matters into his own hands to heal, to make new, to begin again....and again.

Holy week, and the events that led inexorably but purposefully to the cross, are frequent themes on which he writes with a fresh understanding of our understandable human recoil from such incomprehensible suffering for love's sake. The first two stanzas of his poem 'Hope against hope', is a condensed theology of the cross, replete with pastoral intent. It's a good example of Wren's approach

Here hangs a man discarded,

A scarecrow hoisted high,

A nonsense pointing nowhere

To all who hurry by

 

Can such a clown of sorrows

Still bring a useful word

Where faith and love seem phantoms

And every hope absurd.

The following hymn is more political, contemporary, but no less insistent on radical Christian protest, and the importance of saying "No!".

The hymn is a frank recognition that peace at any price can never be an option for those who understand the meaning of incarnation, atonement and resurrection - for God, and for the world. In other words the Gospel Story is indeed about peace at any price - the cross even redeems our search for peace, saving us from those short cuts that merely prolong injustice by ignoring the actual cost. Holy Week sets out the timetable of Jesus last days, when again and again, he said no to peace, in order to say yes, and so bring peace.

Say No to Peace!

Say "No" to peace
if what they mean by peace
is the quiet misery of hunger,
the frozen stillness of fear,
the silence of broken spirits,
the unborn hopes of the oppressed.

Tell them that peace
is the shouting of children at play,
the babble of tongues set free,
the thunder of dancing feet,
and a father's voice singing.

Say "No" to peace,
if what they mean by peace
is a rampart of gleaming missiles,
the arming of distant wars,
money at ease in its castle,
and grateful poor at the gate.

Tell them that peace
is the hauling down of flags,
the forging of guns into ploughs,
the giving of fields to the landless,
and hunger a fading dream.

Brian Wren.

Easter, then, isn’t about eggs, bunnies, pastel coloured cards and half full churches. It’s about peace rooted in reconciliation, hope that grows out of justice, and faith that radiates new possibility in a world where Jesus is Risen. The resurrection of Jesus wasn’t just God’s last minute equaliser in the ultimate power contest. The resurrection of Jesus is God saying no today to any peace built on injustice and the suffering of others. Easter is God’s promise of life contradicting death, love overcoming hate, and peace won through costly reconciliation. Easter is God's yes to peace.