Living Wittily

Listening to Your Life Knowing God Listens Too.

These past few days I've been thinking. I do quite a lot of that. Live inside my own head, reflect on this and that, consider, ponder, worry, praise. Rehearse memories, imagine conversations, read, pray, give thanks, complain. Feel guilty or contented, uplifted or sad, impressed by beauty or depressed by brokenness; these and other emotional and intellectual puzzles are the colours and sounds of that world known only to me, and God. And in the most important sense, thankfully, known better to God than to me.

So how much of all of that inner noise and silence, searching and finding, that continuous flowing of thought and feeling that is the life I inhabit, how much of all this muchness of me is prayer. Do I pray or does God pray in me? Is prayer my seeking God or God seeking me? Is prayer indeed "the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed"? As an introvert I hope so, because there is a lot of living goes on inside our own heads, and inside our own hearts, and much of it a shared secret between us and God. Interestingly I find that more reassuring than worrying.

"O Lord, you have searched me and know me....you perceive my thoughts from afar...you are familiar with all my ways...before a word is on my lips you know it completely, O Lord." All this inner noise, like an orchestra tuning up and never quite ready for the concerto at which I am to be the guest soloist, God hears it, knows and understands the pre-performance anxiety. The closed circuit of action and reaction to all that happens in my life, that turns the affective and emotional kaleidoscope of my inner life into ever changing patterns I can't predict, God sees, and knows and understands the passion and the hope, the longing and the shadows, the joy of love found and the fear of love lost. 

All this is a reminder to myself of something too often overlooked and under-appreciated. A human being is a stupendous mystery of unique and eternal worth to God, created and known and enfolded in the creative love that calls us into the freedom and glory that is a human life.

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.

There are of course deep and perplexing questions posed by such theological optimism about my life and metaphysical confidence about the way the universe works. I neither ignore them as irrelevant nor answer them with answers by definition partial, limited and speculative. Like everyone else I have to live with them. As a Christian I have no calling to understate the reality of evil, give intelligible answers to the tragedy of suffering, explain with what could only be uninformed impertinence the mystery of life's injustices cruelties and waste. No, as a Christian, facing the full realities of human existence and being a participant in this essential part of the human story that is my life, I think, pray and act out my life in the long shadow of a cross illumined by the blaze of resurrection.

Donald Mackinnon, was a courageous, intrepid explorer of the metaphysical landscape of 20th Century philosophical theology. He was a giant of a man, with steel wool eyebrows, a a love for his Harris Tweed jacket, and a voice that compelled attention, as with the huge hands and the body language of an Olympic wrestler he grappled and swayed to get a better hold on ideas both massive and elusive, but whose truth if it can be held and stated, are words of life. In one of his last publications he wrote movingly of the witness of the Christian church in a world full of just such tragedies and perplexities as our own.

 “The Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps.”

Out of such ultimate love, we live and move and have our being.

(Both photos were taken early morning - one at the beach in Aberdeen, the other looking across the Mearns from the Bervie Road.) 

The Letter of James 2. Words of Advice for Confused Strugglers

I'm still reading, marking and learning in the Epistle of James, and taking time to inwardly digest a text that is nourishing and therefore not fast food. James is writing "in the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion". So in the very first verse he uses a word that tells us who we are as followers of Jesus, whether we live now or 2000 years ago - we are exiles, dispersed people, a scattered community.

I've long felt that the biblical story of Exile has important parallels for Christians trying to live in our 21st Century culture where faith commitments and religious privilege are no longer the assumed context for our daily living. Christian values, practices and moral patterns are now minority interests, one option in a plethora of other chosen lifestyles, value systems and relational commitments, which have equal validity and powerful promotional claims in a post-Christian, media soaked, inter-connected society.

So when James says his letter is for those who feel displaced, who live away from home, whose identity is constantly under pressure, whose cultural roots are planted in alien soil, then it just may be that his message takes on particular urgency and poignancy. A recent study of Global Diaspora might help us understand why it is that Christians struggle to survive in our society, and are tempted time and again to take the lines of least resistance, and to settle for being non-radical in our discipleship. Here are some of the realities pointed out in that study of what it means being an exile, being dispersed and away from where we are most at home. Each of them is energy sapping, vision reducing, hope impairing, and thus diminishing of life possibilities:

• separation from homeland (alienation from an increasingly anit-Christian culture)
• life on the move (living with rapid paced change)
• erosion of identity as a people (Christian community)
• living on the periphery when power is at the centre (end of Christendom)
• loss of cultural roots ( the things that matter most to Christians matter least now)
• refugee status (citizens of heaven locked into ways of life hostile to Christian values)

Now the New Testament scholar Joel Green then points out that James himself identifies key features of dispersion and exile:

trials of every kind (1.2)

testing of faith (1.3)

humiliation (1.9)

temptation (1.12)

distress (1.27)

conflicts and disputes (4.1)

victims of hostile treatment (5.4,6)

a life of wandering (5.19)

However, James says something early on that is crucial for our survival as Christians amidst all this negative sounding talk - "Count it all joy when you face various tests...". Why? Because suffering trials and tests brings endurance and then maturity. Joy isn't happiness; it's much nearer confidence, a trusting attitude to life that isn't based on only good things happening to good people, and behind all that, James urges a recognition that God is a particular kind of God. James 1.16-18 "Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. Or in an older translation, "in whom there is no shadow of turning."

So exiles in a time and a place, a culture and a society, struggle to exist where following faithfully after Jesus is neither easy nor popular. But, says James, they are those who have a strange, durable joy, because the God who gifts us life and whose gifts sustain our life is faithful, constant, unchanging. No wonder these verses are embedded in hymns of the Church:

"Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

There is no shadow of turning with thee;

Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

As thou hast been thou forever wilt be."

Lenten Thoughts and a Lenten Prayer a Full Fortnight Before Lent.......

Sometimes, following faithfully after Jesus no longer makes sense, our first love has become our last love, focus is blurred, purpose confused, joy is muted.

Sometimes, for all our pragmatism, insistence on faith as "practical" and truth as "applied", Jesus' demands sound like high ideals and begin to sound ludicrously impractical.

Sometimes, we have to admit that our understanding of what it means to be a Christian gravitates downwards towards playing safe, staying predictable, being non-disruptive and we begin to believe following Jesus is easily accomodated within our otherwise busy multi-tasking lives.

Sometimes, reading what Jesus says has the same minimal impact as humming our favourite music, with the lyrics and beat familiarly and smoothly pulsing through headphones into a mind preoccupied by other stuff.

Sometimes, complacency becomes so comfortable, so unnoticeably normal, that we are in danger of losing our edge, closing our eyes, cruising to a fuel efficient slowness, at which point the only thing that might save us is, well, Jesus.

Sometimes, what is needed is a new vision, a recovered love, a re-orientation of the heart.

Sometimes, being a Christian means believing what is wildly implausible but true.

Sometimes, Jesus asks something that is risky and disruptive and demands our whole self all over again.

Sometimes, the soul is healed by unfamiliar music inviting us to move again in God's direction, along unfamiliar roads.

And sometimes, it is the call of Christ coming with resurgent force that electrifies and defibrillates the spirit, and re-establishes the rhythms of our discipleship.

So Lord,

Once you called our name, and we followed; but sometime, somewhere along the way, the sound of your voice diminished beyond our hearing:

Lord forgive our pragmatism and open our minds to the wildly impractical practices of your Kingdom of love and peace-making

Lord replace our complacency with urgency, and replenish our hearts with a holy recklessness turned outwards in compassion and service

Lord save us from the exhaustion of multi-tasking the ordinary, and give us energy for gestures of redemption and enthusiasm for the extraordinary

Lord make us sick and tired of the familiar, the normal, the routine, and call us once again to take up again the cross, the cost, and the consequence of following after you.

May your Kingdom come, here, now, in me, in your world, Amen

 

God only knows the love of God: In Honour of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

Some years ago in a favourite antique shop I found this bust of Spurgeon. It is an original Victorian piece by John Adams Acton, dated 1878, when Spurgeon was at the zenith of his powers as a preacher, Nonconformist leader, and staunch defender of Reformed Calvinistic orthodoxy. I've never doubted either the genius or the incendiary spirituality of the most popular preacher in an age of celebrity preachers. His sermons still read as inspired and inspiring ruminations on the biblival texts. His love of the Bible and his total immersion in the text make him an exemplary Baptist. He spoke of soaking in the text as in the bath, until his body, deep dyed in the words of the Word, became bibline. 

He sits there on my church history bookshelves as a reminder of the importance of preaching, the centrality of the biblical text, and also as a reminder of the Gospel as centred in the person of Jesus. Yes, I know Spurgeon was a thorough-going Calvinist, and that to him Arminian theology was like a high pollen count to hay fever victims. But when he expostulated on Jesus, (no other word really captures the lyrical, emotional, imaginative flights of his  Gospel storytelling), he spoke of One who was quite simply his friend and Saviour, a crucified Lord and risen Companion, One in whom love and sacrifice gladly offered, pulls the rug from every pretention and excuse.

If speculation has any value, I'd speculate about what Spurgeon would now make of the way Jesus is preached today. He might even ask IF Jesus is preached today in any way that would make Jesus accessible, attractive, demanding, unignorable in the magical mystery melee of post-modern, post-Christian, post most things culture. Because Spurgeon knew how to connect with his own culturasl context. The sentiment and emotional appeal, the theatrical performances of extempore preaching, and the reasoned apologetic for a Saviour in an age where private guilt and public shame were powerful undertows, instilled in Spurgeon's preaching a magnetic core, pulling on the cultural longings of Victorian society.

Spurgeon was a man of his age, that's what made him a great preacher and a great man. But by the time he died the world had changed, and the theological climate was altogether more Acrtic for a theology more declarative than interrogative. He had been faithful in his time, as he saw it, and as he understood faithfulness to the Gospel and to Jesus. Even in his own lifetime he was becoming a man rooted in the past, drawing inspiration and strength from his beloved Puritans and Calvin.

His bust sits there, safely placed amongst my books on Puritanism, well away from modern authors and new theological thought forms that would seriously upset him. I think he would deplore hermeneutics; too much like evasion, dissimulation and intellectual mind games with the text! That wouldn't make him right, but it does point to a serious reminder for those of us charged with responsible biblical interpretation for and in our own age. To be faithful to truth doesn't mean a mind made up and closed to all further traffic; it does mean knowing where I stand, and why, and enough humility to confess my knowledge is partial, my judgements provisional, and my task of hearing and obeying the living Word of God a continuing discipline of listening. I treasure the words of another Evangelical statesman, John Stott:

"Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened, and some of our vast ignorance diminished. (Christian Mission and the Modern World, page 10)

Dialogue and humility, intellectual honesty and theological integrity, faithfulness to a tradition and refusal to close the mind to new and better ways of understanding and seeking truth - these are the characteristics of what that other old Victorian evangelical, Alexander Whyte, affirmed as the required stance of the hospitable hearted Evangelical. And it means this. If I live under an imperative to handle the Bible with reverence, respect and humility before God, then before God I am also required to follow where truth leads, to handle holy things with care, and therefore to tell my own presuppositions to quieten down so that the text can be heard above the din of my own opinions, conclusions, or even, God give grace, my certainties. Perhaps the most we can claim with certainty is that over a lifetime, by that same gentle, corrective grace of God, some of our vast ignorance is being diminished!

So Spurgeon looks across at my desk, from behind my shoulder. I honour both his memory and his work. He being dead yet speaketh as one of a great cloud of witnesses who give testimony to the power of the Bible to transform and convert, to sanctify and make new, to lift up heads and give strength to those who struggle and restore hope in those whose lives seem empty of life itself.

"God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of its deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all..God only knows the love of God."

I love someone who can preach like that!