Living Wittily

The Artist, the Poet and the Country Western Singer.

Jean Baptiste Simeone Chardin "A Vase of Flowers"

When Jesus said, and I quote the language of the King James Version, "Consider the lilies how they grow", Matthew uses a word that means to learn thoroughly, observe well, consider carefully. This lovely painting shows the artist has done that.

The peremptory summons of Jesus, to "consider the lilies", is a wake-up call. I know. I also resist the overuse of that cliche. Except this time the metaphor fits the occasion, and sends a text message into our lives. Life today leaves many chasing after their own life just making a living, cramming time with activity, with no time to see, or to be. Our society leaves people with few choices but to get on with it. Still. Jesus words, "Consider the lilies...." are an invitation to be still. Just now and then, stop. Look. Consider, observe well.

Elizabeth Jennings, that so careful observer of things, loved this painting and wrote a brief poem in tribute to the artist:

Chardin

Is it the lack of self that most of all

   Challenges eyes to stay

And linger over the petals that will not fall

   Although they have some way

 

Of suggesting that Chardin, had he wanted to, could

   Have moved the steady light?

Here is still-life that tells us Nature is good,

   Here is a seize of sight.

It takes three quarters of the poem to ask the question about contemplation, and the power of beauty to take us outside our selves. The last line is brilliant. It says exactly what happens when loveliness in all its fragility demands to be attended to, not ignored.

Another artist, Johnny Cash, (yes he was an artist and one of the greatest in his field), was arrested in Starkville Mississippi for picking flowers by the side of the road. Mind you it was 2am. But the satire of Cash's Song, Starkville City Jail, nites deep into a culture where armed police, handcuffs and a jail cell are needed to deal with someone picking flowers. Wonmder what would have happened if he had quoted Jesus and said he was just considering the lilies..........

A World Without Torture and the Genius of the Quakers

The photo in this post was taken with my Iphone at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. The statue and setting are part of a Gold medal winning exhibit at the Royal Horticultural Show 2012. It was called "World Without Torture". It depicts something essential for us all to hear, arising from the Quaker concern for those who are imprisoned, tortured and whose humanity and freedom are taken away.

I have deep and long held respect for the Quaker tradition and that powerful category of thought which they describe as "concern". Not mere unease, anxiety or even compassion; but faithfulness in resistance, imagination and empathy in prayer, and sensitive moral antennae which detect actions and movements and sounds which threaten human flourishing, persistent in finding ways of protest and refusal.

The statue of a woman releasing a dove, and the chain link fence depicting the flight of the dove to freedom, are situated in the corner of the garden at Woodbrooke. Around 7.30am I came across this and was deeply moved. The lovely form of a woman kneeling, eyes fixed on the dove in her hands with the intensity of determined love, contrasts tragically with the brutal functionality of factory made concrete fence posts. Have you ever examined one of those posts? Each one is a work of art, a triumph in design. Made of that so useful mixture of sand, lime and pebbles; shaped to carry razor or barbed wire on the outward facing angled top; drilled at nine inch intervals to thread steel wire, which in turn supports and attaches the chain link fence, a marriage made in Hell for those whom it is fully intended to confine.

And kneeling beside these square, straight-edged concrete prison pillars, a figure shaped in soft curving lines, holding a dove. The silhouette of the dove taking flight, is made visible to the imagination by cutting and re-shaping the chain links, a technique I found to be a startling example of "concern" contradicting, subverting, re-conceiving the worldview implied by concrete and steel fashioned to human misery.

You can read a brief article about this over here

Putting Your Ipad in the Dishwasher

John chapter 13 shows Jesus at his most dangerously embarrasing. There's something scary about someone who picks up the esablished social norms as if they were our Iphones, Ipads and laptops and puts them in the dishwasher for the full cycle, with the stated intention of purifying and re-setting them to a different set of apps and programmes. I know. That sentence is ludicrously overwritten. But ordinary reasoned exposition can't get near the smack in the face reality of what Jesus did that night.

John the Evangelist has argued, hinted, illustrated, spelled out the truth of who Jesus is. The Word made flesh. The Light of the World the darkness cannot extinguish. The Good Shepherd, Heaven's Door, Living Water, the Resurrection and the Life, the Son of God. How many images and concepts does it take? So, by chapter 13, there's no ambiguity, no excuses for even the thickest disciple. Jesus is the great I AM.

Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ² And during supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, ³ Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, ⁴ rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. ⁵ Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. (John 13.1-5

Jesus had just put the IPads in the dishwasher. All the carefully installed apps have just been wiped. New songs have been downloaded from Itunes. New direction finding apps now point in a different direction,  Golgotha, the empty tomb, a world changed forever by the kenosis of God. The basin and the towel, the kneeling Jesus, point upwards, to the downward movements of Love and Light into a world darkened by the sin that refuses to touch the other with service and love and recognition of the human. "He did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself, took on the form of a servant  and humbled himself.....(Phil 2).

Graham Kendrick's greatest hymn has the memorable paradox, "hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered." John's Gospel knows and tells of the nails; but before then he gives us this unsettling and disorienting story. The Son of God washes feet. The great I AM kneels before disciples. The Living Water pours Himself out. Hands that flung stars into space, dry between the toes of his disciples' feet, washing away the sweaty grime of those who follow Him as their Lord and Teacher.

Poetry as a Rescue Remedy: Mary Oliver's Snow Geese

Many of mary Oliver's poems make the connection between the loveliness of the world, the mystery and intrigue of birds, the rhythms of nature and of our lives, and those hard to name longings that murmur just below the surface of the routine and ordinary in our lives. She has the unusual gift of expressing deep contentment, but through the experience of surprise and unlooked for joy which tugs us away from the contented familiar to want newness. The great poets do this - they reassure and disturb, they keep us alert to our mortality and the one off opportunity that is our life; they prevent contentment becoming complacency, and teach us that delight may be the most serious thing we will ever feel. 

Snow Geese by Mary Oliver

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

Remembrance Sunday: Peace and the Grammar of Justice.

                             Poppies and Bennachie, Photo by Ellice Milton

On a day like this I want to hear a poem about peace. Not idealised, romantic utopias, but peace made possible in the midst of conflict, peace imagined into possibility by those whose speech and thought are peace-building, whose dispositions and actions are peaceable, whose motives and emotions are peace-making. This is such a poem:

 

Making Peace

 

Denise Levertov

 

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

Fireworks and the Memory of a Friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the finest people I've ever known loved fireworks. Every year there was a wee party at his house with warm soup, home baked bread, hot chocolate and fireworks. These pictures from the other night are a way of remembering Stewart, who combined great wisdom with a child's heart, and who burned with an inner brightness that illumined life around him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the Preacher Contradicts One Text by Prioritising Another.

Long before the Rev I M Jolly, the lugubrious melancholic cleric, there was Qoheleth, The Preacher, the one who wrote Ecclesiastes. When it comes to incurable negativity, one foot in the grave complaining, and brutal honesty about what life can be like at its worst, Ecclesiastes is up there with the most convincing of pessimists. Here he is at his most unendurably and contagiously miserable:

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:

I saw the tears of the oppressed—
    and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
    and they have no comforter.
² And I declared that the dead,
    who had already died,
are happier than the living,
    who are still alive.
³ But better than both
    is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
    that is done under the sun.

⁴ And I saw that all toil and all achievement

spring from one person’s envy of another.

This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

⁵ Fools fold their hands
    and ruin themselves.
⁶ Better one handful with tranquillity
    than two handfuls with toil
    and chasing after the wind.

⁷ Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:

⁸ There was a man all alone;
    he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
    yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
    “and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
    a miserable business!

This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. This is the text I'm to preach on. It's about the tears of the oppressed, a world stripped of comfort, the flourishing of injustice, and power acting with impunity to take, and hurt and break; it's about competitive markets and endless toil, and the capacity of such misery to drain life of joy, meaning, purpose and hope. It's about human life dragged down into the gnawing teeth of meaninglessness, tragedy and futility.

This is an Old Testament text to argue with, to stand up to, to answer back. Preaching is an act of faith even if it sometimes feels like an act of presumption. I hear what Ecclesiastes is saying; I know what he means and have often enough watched the news and heard me muttering his low toned angry words, "I see the tears of the oppressed and they have no comforter; power is on the side of their oppressors...."

But for all that I don't believe the dead are happier than the living or that it's better for a human being never to have been born. Why? Because I see the world differently, through the lenses of love incarnate, love crucified and love risen.

 

So this Sunday, Remembrance Sunday, I will contradict this text. Not because Ecclesiastes is wrong in what he sees; but because he only has one way of seeing. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about seeing beyond the vision-limited obvious, contradicting the despair of all our evidence based pessimism, and seeking to cure the spiritual colour-blindness that so afflicts us we sometimes miss the visions of hope, mercy, peace. The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells of the love that dies to give life in a divine gesture of redemption born in the heart of Eternal God. The Christian response to Ecclesiastes isn't to prove his perception about the world and human existence is wrong; but to challenge the conclusion that death is better than life. The hopeless resignation of Ecclesiastes should be read alongside the equally realistic world-view of Paul who saw the groaning creation through the eyes of hope; because in the death and resurrection of Jesus this fallen, broken, groaning creation has been visited by God, reconciled, renewed and promised a future and a hope:

May 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. Rom.15.13

Paul arrived at that Benediction only after writing this, which is where Christian faith comes nearest to claiming finality for truth:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8.35-39.

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

By the way, our First Minister, Alex Salmond does a great take off of REv I M Jolly for Children in Need. You can catch it over here.

Arrested for Feeding the Hungry in Public - no, not Jesus, Arnold!

In Fort Lauderdale police have charged a 90 year old man and two pastors for feeding the homeless on the street, in a public place. The Mayor and the other civic authorities defend this action as part of a more comprehensive way of caring for the homeless. You can read about it here. I don't doubt there are other perpectives, circumstances, and different ways of construing this story. But even on a generous reading of what Fort Lauderdale police and civic departments are playing at, I find it astonishing, disturbing, and in a serious way amusing, that a community can score asuch a spectacular own goal in the great game of public relations.

Forget public relations though. Something much more fundamental to human community is going opn here. The issue isn't feeding the hungry, it's doing it in public, on the streets, in communal space that belongs to no individual but to all the citizens, which presumably includes the poor and hungry. The laws and bye laws are to remove the visible presence of the hungry and poor from the street. A law compelling well run and long esatablished charities to feed the hungry indoors, or on private land, smells of something deeply unappetising.

What is it that so embarrasses a Town Hall, Mayor, Civic Development Committee and Police Department that the hungry have to be rendered invisible; that the simple human act of sharing food is criminalised; that compassion and charity have to be regulated to the dictates of the never hungry? Yes the hungry being fed, and the poor being provided for is inconvenient, socially embarrassing, not good for the good name of the town, something that shouldn't happen. And now it has gone viral, which I do hope intensifies the social embarrassment and moral discomfiture of the small minds that thought all this up.

Notice the upper case spelling of the underlined descriptors. To balance that, let's talk about those other upper case important institutions,the Hungry, the Poor, and the Food Charities, especially the one in the firing line here, Love Thy Neighbour. Just as fundamental in this tussle over who can feed whom, and where, is a collision of world views, a conflict of ethical priorities, and a confusion of social responsibilities. No one is saying the civic authorities are inhumane, but they are far from sensible of the place food and the sharing of food has in the human story. No one is saying that thre should be no regulation of issues such as hygiene, public safety, and commonsense consideration for others; but the Poor and the Hungry are just as entitled to these benefits.

I do hope Arnold Abbott has his day in court, and wins. Oh, and by the way, Jesus would have been arrested in Fort Lauderdale for what he did with five loaves and two fishes. Come to think of it,didn't he also say something about "Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry."   

Jonah's Problem: "A God Who Won't Do as he Is Told.

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business.

Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today isn't hard to imagine – where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves. Those of us who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom? V 3 which tells of Jonah running in the opposite direction fro  Nineveh only makes sense when you come to 4.2:

He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much! He knows God too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful. It is an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love. And that isn’t fair.

For Jonah that is theologically inevitable and emotionally unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger, this kind of God isn't what you need when all you want is vengeance. It would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord" means "Don;t be who you are Lord!".

So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God. He will learn that no matter what his theology, God remains sovereign in mercy and steadfast love. He will witness God's involvement in the deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn. This scandalous story touches on some of the most important things those who believe in the God of the Bible will ever need to know about themselves, God, and how God deals with those different "others" who share this planet with us.