Living Wittily

Why the Phrase "a Kinder Politics" Has the Potential to Generate Change.

Sometimes it's the ordinary words that contain the deepest meanings, and the most far reaching possibilities. We live now in the rhetorically overblown world of politics in which spin is now the least of the dangers to truth. For added devalue of truth, evasiveness is now a required skill, mantra chanting of words like deficit and austerity is a new liturgy of the have plenties, moralised  clauses of exclusion such as 'those who do the right thing', and 'hard working families' are given quasi-moral currency, and promises (such as on child tax credits) are printed and published like promissory banknotes only to find that, once in power, the notes are declared by the issuer as past their use by date. These are rough and hard and harsh times for many people, and they need more than politicians who make a virtue out of being rough, hard and harsh in their policies, even if they do sound like sweet reason in their explanations and claim to represent the nation's interests.

So when Jeremy Corbyn creates what sounds like an unlikely oxymoron it's worth paying attention; he might just be saying something we have waited a long time to hear. He promised a "kinder politics". Who would think that after years of austerity, hard nosed ideology, and conflicted interests as lacerating as any class divisions of the past, that a politician would realistically suggest a kinder politics. The word, and concept and experience of kindness has not been evident on the floor of the House of Commons, or in the development and implementation of economic policies, nor in the crucibles of poverty, disadvantage and vulnerability which have been the three preferred easy target areas for the benefit cuts of recent years - and as for benefit sanctions, these only exist in a society which has grown tolerant, even slowly but surely preferring, unkindness to kindness.

Jeremy Corbyn spoke of kinder politics and a more caring society. It is to his credit as a leader of the Labour Party that Corbyn is unabashed to use such words - kinder politics, more caring society, in other words a commitment to the common good. In one of Walter Brueggemann's recent books, Journey to the Common Good,  a chapter is entitled "Continuing Subversion of Alternative Possibility." What Brueggemann is getting at is that there is a place in Christian witness for calling in question the status quo, a spiritual and ethical necessity to contradict the dominant story of the powerful, a call from God indeed, to subvert, undermine, destabilise the alleged certainties of 'that's the way it is' by persistently and patiently pointing to alternative possibilities. That is what Corbyn was doing today - daring to describe kinder politics, a more caring society, commitment to the common good.

Will he succeed? Will the Party follow, especially the powerful and influential voices which are trained to sniff danger, to act in self-preserving ways and to position themselves to advantage? Such is politics. But if Labour is to win back the hearts of the electrorate, at least enough of them to win an election, then the party faithful and its strongest voices will need to embrace risk; and they will need to put constituents and ordinary folk above personal interests, and open their eyes to a larger vision than the mere calculus of what is safest and least likely to upset the political equilibrium of the status quo.

I am heartened that a politician articulates through such a simple term as kindness, a deeply and disturbingly subversive word of notice to the politics of austerity, with the relentless focus on benefits, welfare and health as key savings sources. This is a call to a more humane politics, a more human face of the body politic, and I for one buy into it 100% as a Christian, as a voter, and yes, as a human being who thinks kindness is a political as well as an ethical value. .  

Why We Like the Music We LIke

In a week or two I'm doing an evening of Desert island Discs with a crowd of folk in our church at Montrose. Eight pieces of music is a strict ration when there are so many kinds of music I like. But choosing them has taken me back to CDs and LP records I'd all but forgotten I had.  Some music I used to like and now have grown beyond. Tastes change and I've often wondered about the various factors and influences that underlie our attraction to certain kinds of music.

At certain times in life we hear a piece of music and it 'fits' or 'takes', in any case it becomes an important vehicle for our joy or sorrow, our questioning or celebrations, our love life or the life we love. Gabriel's Oboe is one such piece. I'll never forget that scene in The Mission where a Jesuit priest calms the fears of the native people by playing the oboe, and that sublime melody Morricone composed replete with a yearning that translated perfectly the human sense of wonder and longed for community with the other.

Other times particular circumstances coincide with music we have known and liked, but for these circumstances becomes a vital language for our faith, or our lack of it, our hopes or their absence, our confidence or our fears. I remember sitting in a friend's living room, a friend who accompanied me through some impossibly difficult days, and who put on Spem in Alium as background music. I had never heard it, and its complex harmonies and calm slowness of movement wrapped me in a sense of new possibility and hopefulness. It didn't solve the problems, answer the questions or take away the challenges of making tough decisions and walking through dark places. But ever since it has been a source of hope, pleasure, spiritual consolation and inner replenishment. Not all music does that.

Then there is the music you heard when you were young and which you'll never let go because it has become part of who you are and who you have been and are becoming. I watched the Johnny Cash concert in San Quentin as an 18 year old. I was hooked on Cash from then on. His anthem Man in Black remains for me an exemplary lyric of social protest, cultural critique and sheer humane defiance of all that dehumanises. Sunday Morning Comin' Down remains for me an authoritative reference point for understanding the pain, cost and loneliness of alcoholism. His later music is deep, dark and amongst the most moving and poignant laments for guilt and regret, and occasionally gives voice, and what a voice, to the trustful openness of redemptive love that enables forgiveness, life and hope in the midst of all that contradicts it.

These three pieces may or may not make it onto a final list which needs some balance, a story to tell, and a point of contact with those who will privilege me with listening to my choices of music. But the choosing has posited some quite intriguing questions about how and why we like the music we do, and what music does in the shaping and enriching of our view of the world.

Often the important gift brought to the table is not the definitive answer but the defining question.

You know you must be getting on a bit when you're prepared to read a 700 page tome replete with dates and names, and theories and movements about how people in the last 80 years have read and interpreted the New Testament. Why would you do that?

It's not as if historical critical study of the New Testament is at the cutting edge of contemporary life, unless it's in the academy, the learned society and those who have nothing better to do with their time.

Now that's an interesting evaulative criterion about a book which spends quite a lot of time examining evaluative criteria for authenticating the words of Jesus! I read this book because I had nothing better to do with my time. What would have been a better use of my time?

Well, read the New Testament itself, not what a lot of dead people wrote and said about it. After all if it really is the historic witness to the greatest story ever told, what it says is more important than the revisions and excisions of  generations of scholars.

Or. Read something that deals with one or other of the huge issues facing our world today, like the mass migration of refugees as people move away from war looking for safety; or the pollution and slow asphyxiation of our planet. Justice and creation care are surely more relevant than whether a demythologiser of ancient texts might have been right or wrong, or whether Matthew or Mark were first to post the patent application for the idea of a written Gospel? 

Or write something yourself that is about your own passion, your own interests, that comes out of your own lived experience rather than merely rehearsing what others have got excited about, or upset about decades ago.

Or bake a cake, cut the grass, go shopping, climb another mountain, read a novel, visit the sick, write and preach a sermon, go a run in the car, do some tapestry, paint the windows, go see a film, walk by the sea, get a haircut, pray for a while, listen to music, read some decent theology, take your camera to the country, support a charity.... actually I do all these things, but I also made time to read this book.

I suppose the point is we will always have something better to do than what we are doing, unless we can give good reasons for what we are doing, and why we are doing it now. So here's a go at three reasons why the time and mental energy reading this book would not have been better spent doing one or some or all of the above.

Intellectual humility. I read the Bible a lot, and anyone who does knows that it bristles with problems, upsets our assumptions, comes from strange places in even stranger times, is embedded in many cultures and that the texts were produced over the centuries of 5 empires. The New Testament is a literary masterpiece made up of documents that were so embedded in their context, so specific to occasion, so soaked in cultural and religious norms, beliefs and values, that the idea I can simply read off what's there as if it were an email from God, is not to reverence Scripture but to trivialise it, not to submit to Scripture but to compel the Bible to be what I think it should be by giving an arrogant primacy to what I think. One way to avoid that is to learn how others have read and tried to understand; the questions, insights and approaches of previous serious readers. Hence names like Dodd and Betz, Conzelmann and Kummel, Barrett and Sanders, Bultmann and Cullmann, Martyn and Wright, are not mere debating ciphers in a tedious display of ongoing literary and theological pedantry. They were and are amongst the Church's most important voices calling the Church to faithful engagement with its own foundation charter.

Balanced Perspective. Bultmann's famous dictum about no exegesis without presuppositions should need no further argument. I read from the standpoint of a western, white, late middle aged male, whose life has been spent in Scotland, a small island nation on the edge of Europe. My education is in philosophy, history and theology, supplemented with 50 years of serious reading around other subjects including natural history, biography, social sciences, poetry and literature. I speak only one language with any fluency; all I know of the southern hemisphere is from TV, online and other distance learning; I am a Scottish Baptist, a small evangelical presence in a country with a powerful Presbyterian and Calvinist history. I read the New Testament through these and other lenses I haven't mentioned, and even some I'm not even aware of. I need other viewpoints and to be shown the landscape of the text from other standpoints. The text requires of me that I listen with care to what others in the community of faith have seen or failed to see; I'm willing to borrow the binoculars of this or that companion on the way in order to see more clearly, and realise that what I took to be a faraway rock is in fact a cleverly built house.

Fruitful Conversation. I don't have to agree with all, or even much, that someone else writes in order to learn from them. Often the important gift brought to the table is not the definitive answer but the defining question. To be made to think, and often enough made to think again, is one of the ways the Spirit of God gets it through our thick skulls that we are not the arbiters of truth, nor the copywright and permissions controllers of the New Testament. To borrow the image from the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses..." why wouldn't we listen to their testimony, the story of their journey, the discoveries they made that I missed when I was last there? That verse goes on "running with perseverance the race set before us.....looking to Jesus, the starter and finisher of our faith."

The mainstream of New Testament Study is overwhelmingly populated by men and women who seek to be faithful within academy and church. Yes many of these scholars dig deep into the foundations of faith and at times rattle us all around with questions and conclusions we don't like. But just one example. Those who dismissed and trashed the work of Rudolph Bultmann overlooked, or worse still deliberately ignored, Bultmann's ministry of preaching sermons deep dyed in Gospel urgency, his faithfulness against Hitler in his witness to the Gospel of Christ, and his own deep piety that was a powerful underwater current in his intellectual and spiritual life. 

 

The Historical Accident That Resulted in a Magnificent Church

I was minister of this church in the early 1980's.

It was completed in 1894, an historical accident in which serious money, skilled craftsmen, highest quality materials, a brilliant architect, and a family dynasty coincided in the building of a memorial church.

Thomas Coats Memorial is the magnum opus of Hippolyte Blanc, an architect who has around 40 church buildings to his credit, most of them in Scotland.

The other day visiting the University of the West of Scotland, I stood in the new student reception hub and took this photo through the window.

Inside there are some of the finest examples of ecclesiastical craftsmanship - alabaster figures adorn the pulpit, three panels of the life of Christ are illuminated in the chancel above the organ, the choir stalls are each decorated with carved oak angels, the walls are decorated with rosetta carving and the lead panelled glass is all hand made and crystal clear.

Above the chancel a vaulted ceiling has painted angels and stencilled work, and the 3 manual Hill organ with over 3,000 pipes is still in regular use. The mosaics in the vestibule were laid by Italian craftsmen, the royal doulton fitted toilets are a sight to behold, and the massive chandeliers which when lit display around 300 bulbs illumine the waem stone pillars. There is no stained glass as Blanc wanted the building to be bathed in natural light.

The open baptistry is made of finest Italian marble and is a major feature dominating the front of the church behind the large intricately carved communion table. Blanc insisted that the overall concept was to be viewed in its completeness; so while any one piece had its own integrity and identity as a work of art, it was its context in the overall building that gave it significance.

The church is a prominent landmark for miles around, and the tower rises as a dominent feature of Paisley High Street. If you haven't seen it, and you like history and architecture the building is really a must see. The congregation is now modest, and the building a massive drain on limited resources, but for 120 years they have sustained this landmark church at the centre of the town. If you are around on an open day, go in and enjoy.  

The New Testament; Deep Waters in Which You Sink and Swim

I owe many debts to R E O White, Principal of the Scottish Baptist College during my training for ministry in the mid 1970's. His insistence, against my lesser judgment, that I should go to Glasgow University and do an Arts degree before coming to College, enabled me to experience the mind broadening and deepening of a degree in several disciplines, majoring in Moral Philosophy. Intellectually, I began growing up at Glasgow University. His lectures were carefully written, delivered with customary restraint, open to questions if you knew enough to ask the right question, and with handouts that were hand typed and duplicated at considerable labour to himself.

But my primary debt has been a lifelong love affair with the New Textament - its text and background, the history of its interpretation, and a humble recognition that in diving into those deep waters you can both sink and swim. His lectures on NT Introduction and Exegesis were eye opening, mind awakening, cold water in the face of sleepy and lazy piety more or less content with uncritical devotion complacently read off the surface of the text. REO in full flow was a wake up call, with his persistent questioning of assumptions, insistence on weighing evidence, teaching us to listen to other voices in the conversation, and his patient valuing of insights and questions from his students. Time and again during or after a discussion, the Parker pen was taken from his top pocket and a note placed in the margin of his lecture notes. He taught by showing and doing. His Greek Testament

That interest in the New Testament has cost me a fortune in books - that isn't a complaint, more a sideways glance of gratitude. Amongst the pleasures of having more time to myself has been a further immersion in the New Testament world, in particular the reception history of the New Testament and the history of interpretation.  So I'm currently working through William Baird's 3 volume History of New Testament Research, having reached volume 3. Many of the names are of scholars I read in College and the years after, some of them I can still hear REO pronouncing - Metzger, Bultmann, Jeremias, Kasemann, Conzelmann, Beasley-Murray, Cullmann, Barrett, Moule, Arndt and Gingrich, Kummel - all of them significant figures in mid 20th Century NT scholarship. Since College days many of those names have faded and their contributions in some cases now either overlooked or even dismissed in the light of new approaches and developments.

Which brings me to the point of this post. These scholars were disciplined and innovative, some of them soaked in learning and expertise across several disciplines, each of them inevitably shaped by their historical and cultural context. Close scrutiny, wide ranging study and creative engagement with the New Testament brought these and countless other scholars to differing conclusions as they argued, contradicted, presented alternative interpretations, called in question the methodology or results of years of research, and produced what can only be described as a heated conversation that is still going on. It is that conversation that is crucial to faith,our own and the faith of the church.

By our own reading and thinking, exegesis and analysis, experience and inner commitments, we each develop our own voice, and begin to take part in that conversation. That process began for me in REO's classes; it has gone on now for 40 years, and I'm still not tired of listening to those voices, old and new. Today names like Sanders, Dunn, Wright, Hays, Schnelle, Luz, Bovon, Martyn, Hengel, are part of that conversation / chorus; they are thankfully joined by the voices of women scholars, Schussler-Fiorenza, Gaventa, O'Day, Thompson, Lieu, and the late Margaret Thrall whom I mention specially because she knew and greatly respected REO - both of them Welsh!

So how do you fill your time in retirement? Apart from a couple of part time ministries that is, and an underlying commitment to read, think and learn. I talk and listen; I read and think; I do what I was taught to do as a biblical scholar, pastor and preacher. I engage with the NT text and dive into the discussions about meaning and message, puzzles and enigmas, histories and stories, people and places, social theories and literary approaches, theological earthquakes and groundbreaking discoveries, the whole blessed thing that is New Testament study.

A Scottish Hill and a Scottish Psalm

This is one of my favourite hills, Clachnaben. It's visible on the skyline from our street, and from the route I take when running / walking. Living where we do I've become more and more attached to Psalm 121 and that first verse, "I lift up my eyes to the hills, where shall I find help?" (REB)

That question goes to the very core of faith when life gets dangerous, scary or in our modern discourse of positivity, 'challenging'. I'm suspicious of that sleight of word habit, by which a problem is redescribed as a challenge, and a setback is always to be thought of as an opportunity. No doubt every problem and setback is also an opportunity, though recognising it, and taking it, might be a bit of a challenge when you're scared, stressed or just not sure how to deal with stuff.

Psalm 121 isn't written for those whose first instinct is to think positive. It's for those whose negativity kicks in when the journey gets hard, strength is depleted and aloneness presses in. "My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth", is the answer to his own question.

In the older Scottish version,

"I to the hills will lift mine eyes;

from whence doth come mine aid?

My safety cometh from the Lord,

who heaven and earth hath made."

One of the greatest achievements of Scottish worship is the Psalms and Paraphrases. The poetics are sometimes forced, but there is no concession to our current love affair with positivity. A problem is a problem, a worry is a worry, fear is real and the valley of deep darkness isn't a crisis to be managed but a real place to travel through.

"Yea though I walk through death's dark vale,

yet will I fear none ill;

for thou art with me, and thy rod,

and staff me comfort still."

See what I mean about the poetic idiosyncracies in what is one of the masterpieces of experiential faith rendered into a nation's language and idiom. So when I'm out running, or walking, I look to the hills. Where I stay there's no option, they are part of the horizon. Psalm 121 is a pilgrim psalm, probably sung responsively on arrival at Jerusalem after the dangerous journey over mountains, through deserts, across ravines and all the time the threat of bandits. This Psalm is sung after safe arrival - I suspect it was sung on the way too. When we pass through ominous terrain, the Lord is endlessly vigilant; when we walk through dark ravines the same Lord is with us as protective shepherd to comfort and strengthen.

Trust is not the same as positivity; trust is dependence on grace beyond our strength. Mere positivity on the other hand is, at worst, a form of denial that trouble is real, and at best, a form of self-reliance that if taken too far becomes practical atheism; which is to live as if God is not our Helper and Companion through the dark places.  Those dark places are still shadowy, menacing and ominous, however much we rephrase those experiences as challenge, opportunity or "it is what it is". The person of faith knows all of that, and has learned to trust the createdness of the world and the goodness and mercy of the Creator, even in the presence of our enemies, and all else that is a harbinger of harm. 

The Doctrine of Creation and the Temptations of the Supermarket Trolley.

Amongst the most familiar wheeled vehicles that clutter up our world is the supermarket trolley. These utilitarian mobile baskets have a massive influence on our lifestyle, health, shopping habits and financial outlays.

Consider. If we shopped with ordinary baskets we couldn't load it with all the processed and tinned food, plastic bulk packed vegetables, cartoned yoghurt, 36 pack crisp bags, frozen foods. 3 for 2 and BOGOF offers. We'd need to go shopping oftener, or go as a team, or pay to have the stuff delivered, or order online. So the trolley colludes with our appetite for quantity, our lust for bargains, our downhill addictions to more than enough.

Trolleys are the workhorses of the postmodern consumer, necessary hardware to enable the big shopping, the habit of impulse buying - do we ever notice that contradiction interms. That we've become habituated to buying what we didn't think we need, because it was there. And they come in various sizes and styles, from the deep loader, to the standard and then there's the quick whizz round version that can still take about four bags of stuff if you pack carefully.

The photo was taken on a walk along the front, the shipwrecked supermarket trolley an eloquent protest at our capacity to grab ands gobble, produce and procure, spend and consume, load up, pay up and use up. When I walk the front most often I'm down on the sand, enjoying the sound of the waves, liking the smooth billiard table feel of sand compacted by tide, feeling body and mind begin to find the rhythm of wave, wind and weather. Next time I'll take a carrier bag and a pair of gardening gloves, and see how far I can walk until the bag is full of the rubbish that washes up, much of it previously transported to the checkout on a four wheeled basket trolley. Much of it around Aberdeen is just as likely to have come from the industrial catering and offshore maintenance of oil rigs and oil fields. 

Of course filling a carrier bag is a futile gesture, not even a drop in the ocean of debris and detritus that washes around our shores. Why bother? Maybe as an act of symbolic repentance for our greed and carelessness; perhaps a prophetic enactment of our inability to look after our planet and yet the defiance that will be required if we are to make a difference; maybe as a prayer for the healing of creation, an embodied act of cleansing of a broken and soiled world; or even a liturgical act of doing for others what they haven't done for themselves, taking away their rubbish.

The Christian doctrine of creation is less about arguments on cosmological origins, and more about stewardship, creation care, environmental ethics rooted in accountability beyond ourselves. Organised clean-ups of beaches and parks, forest walks and mountains are not mere acts of damage limitation; they are statements of value, enacted resistance to the consumer disposable culture, rich in things and poor in soul, satisfied only when consuming, and suffering a hunger which remains an ache no matter how much we stuff ourselves with stuff. Perhaps alongside harvest thanksgiving there should be organised occasions of clean up, cultivation, culture, conservation and celebration of creation, and an asking of forgiveness for our sins against the Creator.

The Importance of Holocaust Studies to Educate and Humanise Conscience.

I have a very good friend who  every now and again passes on his used copies of The Tablet and The Times Literary Supplement. The first is a long established Catholic weekly which is full of news, reflection, critique and comment on all thimgs Catholic and many things not. The TLS is also a weekly, and much of its content can be eclectic, esoteric and at times downright inaccessible - at least to someone whose interests are pretty wide, it often seems so. But every issue of both these weeklies has enough to make it worth trawling through, and here and there reading thoroughly something you would be hard pushed to find elsewhere. Such is the serendipity of browsing within a weekly rather than online. 

That's how I came across a review of the book KL. The book is a history of the Nazi concentration camps, and on this year, the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Nikolas Wachmann has provided a comprehensive, authoritative and humane account of the inhuman concepts and practices that gave birth to horror on an industrial scale.

Over the years I have tried to take seriously as a Christian the theological, cultural and political realities that culminated in genocide as ideology. The novels of Chaim Potok, the writings of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Corrie Ten Boom, and a number of historical studies such as Martin Gilbert's definitive account, have opened up an experience as wide as humanity and deep as any theology can take us. Add to this several of the more significant films including Schindler's List, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, Defiance, The Pianist, and The Reader, and to such fictional and historic written accounts above, is added imagination, image and that visual representation of good and evil that leaves us nowhere to hide from the realities of human life in all its degraded fallenness, and in all its inexplicable goodness. Because if the problem of evil is a challenge to faith in a loving God, the problem of unselfish sacrifice for others is an equal challenge to atheistic nihilism. 

And for me all of these perspectives were distilled into two particular days, each during a holiday. The first was the visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC about 10 years ago. The second was a visit to the House of Anne Frank in Amsterdam 4 years ago. Both are places of pilgrimage, and therefore of education, reflection and prayer - prayers of repentance, for forgiveness, of self-examination, and of commitment to fundamental values of humanity such as justice, mercy, compassion and non-negotiable defensiveness about respect for others, however "other" they are. 

Which brings me back to Wachsmann's book, KL, a title which is merely the abbreviation of Konzentrationslager. Even that acronym, KL, is redolent of administrative efficiency, reducing the reality of the word to an abbreviation in which, pun intended, profound evils are concentrated. And here is what I learned; the concentration camps started in 1933, and eventually there were 1,100 installations. And note this book does not cover purpose built extermination camps where evil well rehearsed in other places, was carried out with an orchestrated brutality that reached across Nazi Europe. These camps were instruments of lawless oppression, set up to demoralise, degrade and exploit human beings with the specific intention of stripping them of humanity and reducing them to disposable and depersonalised commodity.

So having been given a pile of second-hand weeklies, and browsing inncocently and all unaware, I found myself once again being confronted with the murderous work of those who in stripping others of their humanity, lose that essential core which defines the truly human. Whatever else the Holocaust demands of later generations, including me, and us, it requires us to identify what is human and humane, and then to protect, cherish and embody that humanity in a committed humanism. I choose to do so as a Christian, repentant that such horrors happened at the heart of Christian Europe, and alert to all forms of repressive discrimination, and answering back the careless cynicism of rhetoric that demonises and fears and therefores threatens those "others" who share our humanity, and our planet.

The statue is "Tragende", by Will Lammert, Ravensbruck. 

Following Jesus isn't as easy as it sounds.

Following Jesus isn't as easy as it sounds. "Put your feet in my footsteps; obey my teaching; be like me." As if!

Liking and sharing Jesus' message assumes we know what that message is. "If someone slaps you on one side of the fasce, turn the other cheek." "Love your neighbour as yourself" - and your neighbour is whoever crosses your path. "Forgive those who offend you 70 x 7 times", which isn't about doing maths but about forgetting to count. Liking and sharing these messages is a hard call.

If instead we learn from Jesus way with people, how he treated them, spoke of them, thought about them, it doesn't get any easier. In the Gospels Jesus is often and again about relationships, belonging in God's community, breaking down barriers and walls. His parables, those stories about God's love and judgement, and about this God who goes looking for sinners, the marginalised, broken folk, beaten up by life - those stories are about lost sheep found, lost sons struggling their way home, victims of violence tended by the least likely Samaritans, people who work an hour being paid the same as those who worked all day. This is a God of scandlaous grace, who breaks down barriers, whose mercy offends, whose forgiveness is free and costs the very life of God. Liking and sharing Jesus' message is a hard call. Too hard if all we have to do it is our own choices, motives and energy. 

So those people Jesus met, and who were never the same afterwards. Zacchaeus who went looking for Jesus but because he was a small man, had to climb a tree to see over the heads of the crowd. No he wasn't a cheat, more likely on a commission, a cross between a pay day loan agent and a dispenser of benefit sanctions. Understandably he was hated, despised, named and shamed. Maybe the sycamore tree was for camouflage. And what happens. The kingdomn of God happens.

Jesus tells him to come down, quickly; that he must,not might or may, but must have a meal with him. It's the self-invitation and the gift of friendship and acceptance that breaks Zacchaeus wide open and dismantles those inner walls of greed and grievance. Half of my possessions I give away to the poor, and full compensation for all who have been overcharged. To like and share the message of Jesus is to dismantle walls, welcome the stranger, accept and show mercy to those whose lives are lonely, broken, messed up.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;  

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast…..

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.  

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

And as has been said in thousands of so-called childrens' talks, "that’s a bit like Jesus." Something there is that doesn’t love a wall that wants it down. The friendship of Jesus dismantled the walls inside Zacchaeus by accepting him and embodying the love and friendship of God. What.s more the walls between Zacchaeus and everyone else were breached; this man is restored to the community and himself becomes a living parable of God's welcome.

No wonder Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house." Jesus' message to Zacchaeus is quite simply, yes. Each of us like him, scared, camouflaged, looking for meaning and love, a place to belong and a community to belong to, the same word, Yes. We like and share Jesus' message by liking and sharing the love of God with those people blessed enough to have us in their lives – and those people we are blessed enough to have in your lives. Following Jesus is a hard call, made possible by the very grace that calls us to be forgiven forgivers, merciful receivers of mercy, graced givers who embody the love of God in Christ.

Scolty Hill and my Ordination Hymn, Christ of the Upward Way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gates are for opening and closing. As Robert Frost said about walls, gates are for keeping out or keeping in, and it's important to know which is which.

This gate is on Scolty Hill near Banchory. It's a place I've walked often, and remembering my stavaigin' as a boy, now and then I climb the gate rather than opt for the walk through side gate. Because gates are really ladders lying on their sides.

The photo is taken on the way back down.The canopy of trees only shows so much of the road ahead. Paths, gates, hills, trees, all you need really as a metpahor for what the life of faith is mostly about. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly" is the very first verse of the Book of Psalms. Where we walk, and with whom, seems to be important advice if we are serious about God.

So instead of walking with the ungodly and sitting in the seat of scoffers the righteous person, the person who wants to live right and walk the right path delights in the "law of the Lord" and meditates on it day and night. Two choices then scoffing or delight; laughing at what matters, or laughing because we have discovered what matters most. And if we discover what matters most we follow after it; and Jesus said, "Follow me - take up your cross and walk."

Walking up Scolty, and down again, following a chosen path, seeing gates as ladders to be climbed and invitations to walk further, and always only seeing so far; it's an enacting of that daily walk with others, with myself, with God. This time of year some of the paths have ferns and bushes and overhanging trees that restrict vision. That too is part of the joy of it, especially when you near the top and the whole landscape opens up in a 360 degree panorama and you know this is what you climbed for.

Christ of the upaward way my guide divine;

Where thou hast set thy foot may I place mine.

And move and march wherever thou hast trod,

Keeping face forward up the hill of God.