Living Wittily

New Beginnings in Montrose and the Logistics of Trying to Talk with Your Mouth Full.

Yesterday I was inducted to be minister of Montrose Baptist Church. The formal Induction service was led by my friend and brother in law, Rev Jim Simpson; another near lifelong friend Rev Douglas Hutcheon preached from Ephesians 3.7-16. The Church Secretary, Ken Sinclair, and I, shared the story of how a first invitation to an ecumenical service at Montrose 2 years ago grew into a friendship with the church that now becomes a partnership in living and being the Gospel of Jesus. As always these are days of lasting significance, when words said and promises made, prayers spoken and hymns sung, gather into the one act of worship and commitment that affirms those decisions, taken on trust and offered to each other as a covenant to which we are each called to be faithful before God.

This was followed by a remarkable banquet of coffee and cake - I've never become anything more than a fumbling amateur at holding a plate with a deep slice of Victoria cream sponge, a mug of coffee, and talking. It takes two hands to hold the sponge while you try to get your mouth delicately and discreetly into position - what then about the mug. And as for continuing a conversation in a socially acceptable manner?

So I did what any sensible sponge connoisseur would do - put down the mug, and gave full attention to the cream cake. I know. Any half respectable pastor would forego the cake and listen attentively to the other person; would see that the physical needs of the stomach are no match for the vocational obligations to listen....but it was a magnificent sponge! Someone took the photo of the tables as they were being set, and there at the front is that GBBO quality sponge.

Notice the text on the wall which I feel might be a plausible excuse for eating the sponge despite the conversation - "May the God of hope fill you......" With just a wee bit hermeneutical imagination, that could be interpreted as a prayer of wishful thinking! Or hermeneutics as wishful thinking!!

Ambushed by a CD - and Made to Think About Israel, Gaza and Land Ideology.

I like this CD. No accounting for taste.

It has several songs that sound different in male voice chorus - not always better, but different.

Tonight this CD ambushed me.

I was working away innocently listening to background music as I wrote a prayer of intercession.

Then they sang the theme from the film "Exodus".

Those first words - "This land is mine, God gave this land to me..."

It's a song of passion, religious fervour, political hope and even generosity.

And I couldn't listen to it.

The ideology of land, underpinned by religious claims, against the tragedy that is Israel, Gaza and the West Bank drain this song of the very humanity of which it sings. 

So what do you do with a CD that has a song which celebrates the claim to land, when the way of defending it has become indefensible?

Seems a pitifully small gesture to skip the track - but that's what I did.

Sometimes our inner discomforts, and our outward actions however trivial, are nevertheless the raw material of larger moral choices and more hopeful moral visions.

 

Dreams, books, are each a world.....

Been reading and writing an essay review on the first two volumes of Veli-Matti Karkkainen's Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. This is a major theological project by one of the leading Ecumenical theologians writing in the West today. He trained as an Ecumenical theologian, has taught on three continents and has a passionate interest in bringing the Christian faith into constructive conversation with the other living faiths (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism); but he wants to do so by being critically and appreciatively faithful to the range and depth of the Christian tradition.

Not everyone who reads this blog will want to invest the time and energy reading these volumes as they become available. But you can get a good sense of what he is about, and the kind of thinker he is by watching an interview he gave at the launch of the first volume, Christ and Reconciliation. You can find the interview here.

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Yesterday I spent some time looking through a bookcase of books that used to belong to a friend. I had the pick of them, but the real interest was simply handling books that had been shapers of thought, inspirations for life, companions of comfort. Over 7 or more decades, books that have been bought, ead and reread. Some of them now taped together; others with what the booksellers call foxing, spine split, some highlighting or underlining. The whole lot together wouldn't make much money. But then riches afren;t just about money.

Some of the enduring values and gifts evade the commerical tyrranny of the barcode. I only took four. A lot of them I haven't read and won't. Some of them meant more to my friend than to me - it's like that with books and friendship. I don;t have to like what he liked, nor pretend it does for me what it clearly accomplished in his own inner life. There were two or three though that brought memories of ding dong discussions over a lunch table with a crusty loaf, a pot of soup, and a bowl of fruit. Two of the ones I brought away I'll give to someone else.

The two I'll keep are because they say much for my friend's theology, faith and way of thinking and living. One is a biography of Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, whose theology was generous, passionately questioning of God in the face of suffering, and utterly grounded in Calvary and the Cross as the place where earthly suffering and Divine mercy comingled in the sacrifice of Christ. The other is The Path to Perfection, W E Sangster's volume on John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. I've read it before, it's now a book of past generations, eclipsed by so much high standard contemporary Wesleyan scholarship which shows no signs of abating. But Sangster was a saintly man, a deep lover of Jesus, and so was my friend. "Love is the key to holiness" says Sangster - and my frienc's life underlined that sentence. 

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And then there was this wee red booklet I picked up for £1 at Drum Castle Garden, in the wee shed where used books are there with an honesty box.

I merely mention this. I'll write another post later on the fascinating hopes and optimism of a conference 60 years ago. They say times have changed - but reading this, the aspirations and proposals remain vaslid, and largely unfulfilled. More on this later. 
 

The Best Theology of Prayer in English Poetry

One of the not so subtle temptations of a blog is thinking it always has to be the blogger's voice, saying something new, or interesting, or the blogger opinionating to enlighten the world, or getting whatever happens to be bugging at the time off the chest and into a post. I don't always succeed in resisting these sins.Pity, there are other voices that have more important things to say, and which say them with words that linger in the memory and educate the heart as well as the mind. Like George Herbert, in a sonnet that is in my top ten best poems in the English language - of those I've read that is, which admittedly is a tiny fraction of the whole. But....... Prayer (1)

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
        The land of spices, something understood.

"This love encompasses the whole world of creatures...."

On the whole path from the beginning of creation

by way of reconciliation to the eschatological future of salvation,

the march of the divine economy of salvation

is an expression of the incursion of the eternal future of God

to the salvation of creatures

and thus a manifestation of the divine love.

 

Here is the eternal basis of God's coming forth

from he immanence of the divine life as the economic Trinity

and of the incorporation of creatures, mediated thereby,

into the unity of the trinitarian life.

 

The distinction and unity of the immanent and economic Trinity

constitute the heartbeat of the divine love,

and with a single such heartbeat

this love encompasses the whole world of creatures.

 

Over the years I've come to notice the last few sentences with which an author chooses to end a book. Especially a magnum opus. These are the last sentences of volume 3 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Systematic Theology. They have a liturgical rhythm to them once you allow for the translation from German, and arrrange them for slowed down reading. In which case I read these and can say, Amen. 

The photo was taken in the walled garden at Drumoak Castle, and seems to hint at the love that encompasses the whole world of creatures!

Repentance Is the Only Way Back for Big Malky

The problem with the controversy over Malky Mackay's texts to Iain Moody is that the main protagonists seem to speak a different language from the rest of us.If you haven't read the offending texts, I'm not copying them here - try the BBC website.

I've read the texts carefully, allowing the words used to have their mainstream dictionary meaning, and they are, by any inguistic and reasonable standards,  racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Jewish. Mackay now, on a third attempt at an apology, admits they are "unacceptable and inappropriate" and that there is "no excuse".

He insists he is not a racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Jewish. That leaves me linguistically confused. The texts are unacceptable and inappropriate, why? It isn't the grammar, the poor choice of vocabulary, the timing, the recipient, the fact that he was "under pressure" - it's what they say, and what that tells us about the mind that thinks in these gratuitously abusive terms in the first place, articulates them, and communicates them.

Football managers at the highest level are under pressure all the time - it's the job, and the financial rewards are meant to purchase the experience, character and skills of someone who, under that pressure, behaves in a way that is - well, acceptable, appropriate and respectful. So pressure is no excuse - not even an explanation.

Quoted on the BBC website, Mackay says, "I'm a leader of people and it shouldn't have happened. But I'm a human being and I made a mistake." Quite so.

But the word mistake is a wee bit of an understatement, a piece of spinning rhetoric, an attempt to make serial offences sound like an oversight. Jesus said it's out of the heart the mouth speaks, and Luke 6.45 is a much more honest and realistic assessment of what happens before the thumb presses send.

As a Christian I am appalled at Mackay's language, the mindset that lies behind and chooses the words, and the character of someone who can even think the thoughts requiring such crude, dangerous vocabulary.

So what am I saying? That he should never serve as a manager again? That his claim it was a 'mistake' should be dismissed as self-serving minimising of damage? That his claim to have shown contrition is not enough? I'm frankly gob-smacked that a high profile football manager, who must know that in an age of digital footprints and carnivorous media interest, he is required to act in the character of his role - "a leader of people" - would be arrogant enough to send this stuff and think no more about it.

Perhaps the best question big Malky could ask is "What do I need to do to put this right?" Those who are targeted by, and offended by his language, what would they ask of him, that would enable him again to hold his head up in any company, including theirs?

The word redemption is a rich, old fashioned and essential community restoring word. It enables language to move from conflict to resolution, from prejudice to understanding, from acknowledged guilt to forgiveness, and from a broken past to a recovered future.

If Malky Mackay has any sense, and can think his way forward with or without the aid of publicists and lawyers, he might come to realise what is needed is an intentional and determined decision to face the reality of what he said, and therefore who he is. That will mean repentance, a turnaround, an inner re-orientation, a combination of remorse and commitment to change. Then there would be at least the possibility he can recover a sense of personal integrity as a first step towards restored public credibility.

He needs to hear from those he offended, to listen and understand. He needs equality and diversity training, which he is now quoted as saying he will seek. Good. He needs a refresher course in leadership and self awareness, exposure to the consequences of language and an understanding of the linear moral connection between the words we use and the heart and mind that chooses them to tell the world what we are thinking.

If Mackay insists he is not racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Jewish, then that now needs credible evidence to prove it. He can do that by showing willingness to learn and understand why these texts are morally repugnant, and why they were sent by him. In the fantasy world of football, there are times when what's needed is moral realism. Mackay is not being asked in a post match interview to justify his team's poor performance - he's being asked to do something infinitely more demanding - to identify the weakness of his own performance and train to put it right. I for one hope he will find a way that is redemptive for him, and brings good out of evil, and enables a talented man to work again at the highest level (by which I mean ethics as well as tactics) - but it will require far more than words.

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This post was drafted this morning for publishing later. But then came this. On Football Focus today Garth Crooks a Kick it Out Trustee said, "There has to be room for redemption. This is about education. We are keen for managers, players and coaches who fall from grace in this area to understand what is acceptable in a working environment."

Amen to that, all of it, including his use of that wonderful word - redemption.

How do you know when your conscience is right?

Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill. Read it years ago in Moral Philosophy, and I haven't revisited it since. At least not as a book. But some of the things I learned have stayed in the mind, either as puzzles or insights.

I remember doing an essay on conscience in utilitarian thought, and quoting Mill's definition of what constitutes conscience. I love the way philosophers ask questions some of us would never even formulate, and then answer them with a sublime confidence in the coundness of their own reasoning. Here's Mill on conscience - now stay with me - this gets easier:

The binding force [of conscience] consists in the existence of a mass of feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates our standard of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the form of remorse.  http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill3.htm

So, that's how you get a guilty conscience. That mass of feeling violated and the later remorse. All of this came back to me while reading William Stringfellow's brief essay on conscience. He is not so interested in the general question, what is conscience. He goes for the more personal question, what is a Christian conscience - and then gets interesting. Here's some of the wisdom of Stringfellow:

Conscience, in the gospel, as well as in the actual experiences of the early Christians, refers to the new or restored maturity of human life in Christ.

A person who becomes a Christian... suffers at once a personal and a public transfigurationOne's insight into one's own identity as a person is, at the same time, an acceptance of the rest of humanity... Each time a person is baptized, the common life of all human beings in community is affirmed and notarized.

The baptized, thus, lives in a new primary, and rudimentary relationship with other human beings signifying the reconciliation of the whole of life vouchsafed in Jesus Christ. The discernment - about any matter whatsoever - that is given and exercised in that remarkable relationship, is conscience. In truth the association of baptism with conscience, in this sense, is that conscience is properly deemed a charismatic gift.

The initiative in conscience belongs to God; the authority of conscience is the maturity of the humanity of the Christian; the concern of conscience is always the societal fulfillment of life for all.

What transpires in decisions and actions of conscience, on the part of a Christian or of some community of Christians or of many Christians positioned diversely, is a living encounter between the Holy Spirit and those deciding and acting in relation to human needs in society.

Conscience requires knowing and respecting one's self as no less, but no more, than human. The exercise of conscience represents - as 1 Peter remarks- living as a free human being...Conscience is the access of the Holy Spirit to human beings in their decisions and actions in daily existence.

A Keeper of the Word. Selected Writings of William Stringfellow. ed. B W Kellermann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 299-301.

That's an impressive piece of baptistic pneumatology! The conscience of the baptized is characterised by reconciled humanity and human maturity, actions and decisions for the good of all, freedom and relational renewal, and all within the sphere and orbit of the Holy Spirit's dynamic presence, and in the context of a community of the baptised. In five pages Stringfellow outlines approach to a spirituality of conscience, ethics, justice, compassion, truth-telling and love at the service of the world. Brilliant.

On Not Sticking Theological Labels on Folk

Ever since College days I've been ambivalent about Calvinism - not Calvin so much as the ism. I remember the lilting Hebridean accent of someone I lost touch with after Graduation, as he shook his head sadly, saying, as if he were a doctor giving me a dread diagnosis, "Jim, you're a wee Pelagian Arminian". Now apart from the fact that Pelagius and Arminius are in the unfortunate position of being maligned and [mis]interpreted by those who know them only through the minds of their opponents (Augustine and scholastic Calvinism), and  not from first hand engagement with their writing, it did sound like an ominous theological deficit!

In any case, it was an unfair accusation because it said too little! Yes I am Arminian if by that is meant I believe 'whosoever will' is true at face value as the invitation of Jesus. No I am not Pelagian if by that is meant believing I play the decisive role in the saving work of God, in my life or anyone else's; nor does it mean I have a diluted and perhaps deluded conception of sin. Alongside my Wesleyan commitments to a free Gospel, and faith as a Spirit inspired and graced response to God's call, I hold equally to a strong sense of God's sovereignty and the necessity for a regenerating and sanctifying work of God in the formation of fallen humanity towards Christlikeness. 

I mention all this for two reasons. First, I have learned much from those Christian thinkers down through the centuries who have wrestled and tussled with the Bible and each other, trying to find the words, ideas, and articulations of our deepest Christian experiences. Even those with whom I disagree most, have taught me things I needed to know and forced me to own my own convictions, to question lazily unexamined assumptions which are actually prejudices, and to recognise that though they may get the words and ideas wrong,  with most of them their love for God, faith in Christ and life in the Spirit are no less real than mine. 

I mention it secondly because those old fashioned labels, and their contemporary counterparts (open theist; new perspectivist; emergents; these the least exotic) are mere slogans of convenience, polemical put downs, which say nothing about the relationship to God in Christ of those who allegedly hold such 'unsound' views. Yes I read and admire Moltmann's struggles to speak of God, Jesus, suffering, atonement and hope; he doesn't always get it right but not for want of trying. I also read and admire Calvin who struggles to speak of God, Jesus, suffering, atonement and hope; and Barth, and Forsyth and Fiddes, and Von Balthasar, and Wesley, Julian of Norwich and Jonathan Edwards, not forgetting Athanasius and Torrance, Pinnock and MacCormack, Puritans and Cappadocians, Bonhoeffer and Spurgeon, - all names of people who have thought long and deeply. It's a random list of people in whose company I have learned more about the love of God, and learned to love God more.

I remember being annoyed with Norman - wee pelagian arminian indeed! But I guess he couldn't foresee that I might become a Moltmannian, Balthasarian, Cappadocian, Barthian, full-Wesleyan semi-Calvinist with a Julian-Edwardsian view of creation and a Bonhoefferian take on discipleship - and that's just for starters, and for fun! Theological labels assume consistency, a known content, an ability to reduce the dynamic living relationship of a Christian to God, to the level of their best ideas and words - but words, at best, when speaking of the grandeur and splendour of God, are at best, unprofitable servants.

I wish I had known the words of the Calvinist Puritan Thomas Goodwin (another from whom I've learned loadsa stuff) all those years ago:

"As for my part, this I say, and I say it with much integrity, I never yet took up party religion in the lump. For I have found by a long trial of such matters that there is some truth on all sides. I have found Gospel holiness where you would little think it to be, and so likewise truth. And I have learned this principle, which I hope I shall never lay down till I am swallowed up of immortality, and that is, to acknowledge every truth and every goodness wherever I find it." 

I love that paragraph. 

First photo is Bennachie in winter - bleak, beautiful, a reminder we aren't the biggest deal around.

Second one is King's College open crown - a reminder we've a lot to learn!

 

 

Our hope in God and God;s hope for us.

Hope is lived, and it comes alive, when we go outside of ourselves, and, in joy and pain take part in the lives of others. It becomes concrete in open community with others. (Jurgen Moltmann, The Open Church, 1978, page 35)

I wonder if discipleship today should best be measured by the hopefulness of our living, and thinking, and praying?

The true basis of the soul's hope of God is God's hope of the soul. His confident intention precedes and inspires ours, and gives all its significance to our life. (Evelyn Underhill.)

That old terminology is still important, prevenient grace, the Grace that was there before we ever were, that goes ahead of us, that knows us deeply, truly and unerringly. God has great hopes for each of us - I can live with that thought, and actually without that thought much of what I might call living is deprived of its most sustaining source of energy, hope.

So Paul's prayer speaks directly into the life of those of us, at times overhwelmed by the conveyor belt of evil, suffering and awfulness that is the news just now:

'The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.' I like that word, overflow - it speaks of excess, generosity, extra space, more than enough.

The photo was taken on Sunday, a visitor to our garden, a fragile beauty and harbinger of transformation.

Because I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, I Believe in Forgiveness

There are some writers on Christian life and human existence who are invariably good, and reading them just as invariably does you good. For me Timothy Radcliffe is one such writer, and I came across these words of his, quoted in Stanley Hauerwas' slim volume of sermons, A Cross Shattered Church.

"If forgiveness were forgetting then God would have to suffer the most acute amnesia, but it is God's unimaginable creativity, which takes what we have done and makes it fruitful. The medieval image of God's forgiveness was the flpowering of the cross. The cross is the ugly sign of torture. It is the sign of humanity's ability to refect love and to do what is utterly sterile. But the artists of the middle ages showed this cross flowering on Easter Sunday. The dead wood put out tendrils and flowers. Forgiveness makes the dead live and the ugly beautiful."

Whatever else we can complain about in the news just now, death and ugliness seem to dominate the headlines.

So I want to hear the counter claims of people of faith, that grace is beautiful, that forgiveness beautifies, that mercy makes life possible once again.

I want to hear love defiant enough to claim that compassion is not weakness but strength, that hope is not irresponsible optimism but responsible and determined trust that God's power is redemptive, ultimately and remorselessly redemptive.

I want to hear a faith so confident in the reconciling heart of God that every act of compassion, forgiveness, mercy and self-giving is performed as an intentional and persistent gesture of redemption, an aligning of our hearts with God, in love, purpose and determination that Creation will not die.

Why? Because we believe in resurrection, in life defying death, in love eclipsing hate, in peace persuading violence to desist, in forgiveness denying to enmity its raison d'etre, and in life. Yeds, as resurrection people we believe in life.

This I want to hear - and unless the preaching of the church takes up these vast truths of redemption and reconciliation,we trivialise the Gospel we are called to proclaim, we abandon our privileged role as ambassadors of Christ the Reconciler, and in a world so fragmented and jagged-edged from its own brokenness we will lose the right to be heard as those who bring something entirely different, hope-filled and redolent of new possibility. ASnd what we bring is Good News, crucified love blossming as resurrected hope.