Living Wittily

Beatitudes as Guides for Intercession

Sunday past I was asked to preach on prayer, using a verse from James Montgomery's still remarkable hymn, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire". The verse I was to consider was

Prayer is the simplest form of speech, which infant lips can try; / Prayer the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on High.

As part of the service I wrote a prayer on intercession based on two of the Beatitudes. The reason for this approach was my feeling that prayers of intercession can be dominated by whatever is most urgent in our own lives, or in the headline news of the day as it saturates our awareness with images and sound bytes about the awfulness of the world. By using the words of Jesus there is some attempt at content control that is more than the loudest daily sound byte and less than a comprehensive listing of all that's wrong in the world. In other words if the Beatitudes articulate the values and goals of the Kingdom of God, then they have the capacity to carry the freight of our prayers as children of that Kingdom.

Did it work? Who knows what in our prayers ever "works"? And who knows what "works" would look like in any case as we engage in conversation and heart work with God? But as a way of praying Scripture, of allowing the words of the Bible to inform and direct our praying, it did gather our attentiveness to the experience of people in other parts of this God-loved world. This God of love and reconciliation, of justice and righteousness, revealed in the redeeming vulnerability of Jesus crucified and in the risen life of the crucified, this God whose eternal purpose is the reconciliation and renewal of all things, is the one to whom we pray. What happens to our prayers, and to those for whom we pray, is best left to the loving wisdom of our God.

The two Beatitudes used were about peacemakers and the persecuted. Here is the prayer that was  in two sections, intersected by singing the Taize 'Kyrie Eleison' as the congregational response.

The Beatitudes and Our Prayers of Intercession

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

Peacemaking God, in Christ you were reconciling the world to yourself.
We pray for a world unreconciled in itself, the countries and peoples of

Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Pakistan, Israel and Gaza, Nigeria and Libya:

where for generations fear and anger has blinded and divided communities;
where grievances suffered and suffering inflicted leaves legacies of hate and suspicion;
where history overshadows the present, and violence silences voices for peace.

Help us to trust the subversive wisdom of your Spirit,
teach us to speak the language of hope;
as your Spirit brooded upon the waters of chaos,
enshadow the countries and communities in chronic conflict, with mercy and justice, and peace.
Prince of Peace and Living Lord – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake and the Gospel’s:

O Lord of life and peace, who reconciles through the blood of the cross,
We pray for Christians throughout the world who are persecuted for your sake.
In India and Pakistan, where fundamentalist violence breaks out against small churches;
For Christians in Gaza, in Iraq and in Syria, caught up in the violence and hatred of war,                            persecuted because of their faith in you, targeted by militant and violent groups:
In all their suffering strengthen their faith, and give assurance of your presence, your help and your deliverance.

Keep us faithful in our prayers, grateful for every opportunity to witness as ministers of reconciliation in our place and time – at work, in our neighbourhood, in our families.

Restore our saltness, brighten our light, renew our lives in the love and peace and joy of Christ - Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

"we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing..."

This got me thinking again about austerity. Even if austerity was justified as an economic policy, that still leaves questions about priorities, and the criteria for choosing and implementing these priorities, and the even more contentious issue of who gets a say in the decision making.

What gets me about this image circulating on Facebook is the astounding question behind that word if! As if there could be any doubt - music and art are the grammar of our emotions, the wings of the mind, the nutrients of the imagination, the tutors of the conscience and the proof and celebration of our humanity.

We need music and art education like we need a heart, a brain, emotion and thought; we need music and art education because we are human beings and these are two of the most developed gifts of and to our humanity; we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing, the rhythms and cadences and melodies that make life dance, and weep, and love and leap; we need music and art education because there are pictures we dream and create out of the richly textured kaleidoscope of imagination, vision, longing and desiring that is the human hunger for meaning. 

The removal of music and art education from the classroom is not austerity, it is the removal of opportunity and resources for children and young people to discover the joy and discipline of beauty and harmony. Budget cuts may be necessary to balance the books, but the targeting of music and art education will condemn those same young lives to an austerity of the spirit, an impoverishment of imagination, a limitation of worldview and a constriction of the understanding that through music and art grows into wisdom, wonder, purpose and vocation.

A child learning to play the piano or guitar, a group of young people discovering the disciplined joy of choir and orchestra, guided by the conductor; a teenager with oil paint, brushes and canvas, or with clay and sculpting tool, mentored by a teacher who helps them to see, to really see; these are gifts we can provide for our children which make for a richer, expansive life in which the words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' and 'if only', are freed of their limiting power over the self that is each of these young lives.

Utilitarianism is, paradoxically a useful philosophy, a rule of thumb that fits many if not most substantial decisions we make. The greatest good of the greatest number. But the word also has that undertow of negativity when things are valued for their practical usefulness. Allied to economics it is fatal to those dimensions of human experience which have little market value, which are not crucial to our employability, and which we can live well enough without - until the inner ache of hunger reminds us of their absence. Music and art education are crucial strands of our cultural fabric. To reduce them to market barcodes, budget mathematics, and austerity targets is to apply the utilitarian criterion in its most negative and least valid form. 

If our school budgets cannot support adequate provision in music and art education that is an issue that ought to be placed way beyond the control and competence of budget number crunchers. Decisions made here affect the capacity of our culture to sustain and maintain a supply of creativity, discipline, confidence and ability sufficient to produce, enjoy and celebrate the intellectual, aesthetic, moral and cultural activities that are amongst our most human attributes.

Prayer for those affected by flooding and struggling to recover and rebuilt their lives.

Creator God, whose love and purpose for all your creation is blessing. We thank you for the gift of this wonderful, beautiful, place we call earth.

When we pray give us this day our daily bread, we are confessing our dependence on your mercy and the limits of our own strength and abilities. So our heavenly Father, we give thanks for all that has made our lives good – for food, shelter, home and the people we love and who love us.

Keep us grateful for what we have; generous in what we give; compassionate in our care for others; responsible in how we treat our world; careful not to waste the resources of our planet; and gentle with all those creatures who share our place on this earth.

This past week we have been reminded we can’t always control what happens. We pray especially today for those whose lives are in turmoil after the floods. Those whose homes are ruined; whose businesses are devastated; those now trying to salvage what they can, and find hope for these next weeks and months. In their despair bring hope; in their bewilderment give reassurance; in their fear and anxiety for tomorrow and coming days, comfort and strengthen them.

We thank you that no lives were lost despite the disaster; we thank you for all those who worked night and day to help those overwhelmed and in danger – our emergency services, council workers, volunteers, working together within the community for the sake of each other.

In coming days, when generosity and good planning will be needed, and when the real costs become known, give wisdom and courage to the local council, to our Government, and to those who provide the services to our communities. Help us as churches wherever and however we can, to be engaged in the work of supporting and helping, giving and caring; and if we don’t know how, give us the gumption to find out and to be responsive with whatever we can give and do.

Lord so much rain – yet remind us that you once taught us to notice that the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, and that our Heavenly Father’s love falls upon our world with life giving gifts of refreshing grace, forgiving mercy and righteous peace. Make us then showers of blessing, streams of your mercy, conduits of your grace, and reservoirs of your love in Jesus Christ your son, in whose name we pray, Amen

Believing in Jesus as a Way of Life

As a Christian I believe in Jesus. That obvious and apparently simple and pious confession shouldn't need much theological analysis. There aren't many of our deepest, most significant and defining experiences that can be reduced to concepts, contexts or constructs. They do not need argumentation, they are their own validation. The reality of lifelong love for another person; astonishment at music that causes our inner being to vibrate in sympathy; standing on a mountain top knowing ourselves rooted in landscape, or looking at a clear night sky and feeling small and immense in that one moment of perceived vastness; I believe in love, art, natural beauty. As C S Lewis famously said, whether original to him or borrowed from elsewhere, "I believe in the sun not because I see it but because by its light I see everything else."

So, I believe in Jesus. Is that as self evident as it sounds?

• I believe in Jesus of Nazareth.
• I believe in the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
• I believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
• I believe Jesus is Lord of all.
• I believe in Jesus, the Son of the Father, and who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is One God.

All of these are Christian confessions, from a minimum to a maximum attribution of divinity. So how did Jesus become God? That is one of the pivotal questions in New Testament study today. The big players on the field are Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, N T Wright and my favourite NT scholar, J D G Dunn. I have embarked on a long journey of reading through Dunn's magnum opus, Christianity in the Making, a three volume study that distills a lifetime of scholarship, enquiry and faith seeking understanding. At the heart of Dunn's quest is his own faith as it has grown from that of Scripture Union camps to one lived and studied as one of the pre-eminent New Testament scholars of his generation.

Reading Dunn is like being shown round the National Gallery by someone who knows what they are talking about, who has a passionate interest in and love for the subject, and for each of the exhibits. He is an enthusiast who is self critical, knowledgeable with a disconcerting honesty about what can be known, and what can be shown by the evidence. The range of his mastery of the New Testament social and cultural context, his awareness of the history of the three centuries which straddle what we now call the Common Era, and his patient immersion in the texts of the New Testsament and the extra canonical sources could make him an intimidating and authoritative voice; except he is first and foremost a research led teacher, and one who was doing this long before universities tried to manufacture entire faculties aimed at generating research funding with teaching increasingly ancillary to the real work of the University. Yes that is overstated, only slightly though.

The first 160 pages are important methodological chapters setting his study into the ongoing story of biblical scholarship of early Christianity. Central to that story is what the church and the academy have meant when they have said "I believe in Jesus". And the answers range from Jesus the fictional construct of early sectarian communities to Jesus as understood through the dogmatic and historic traditions of the Church. Of course there is no one understanding of Jesus, how could there be? Dunn's early work was on the unity and diversity of the New Testament, the different styles of Christianity represented in the New Testament documents, and how, despite such diversity there was an underlying unity to be found in the person of Jesus and how he was understood and construed in those writings. 

Those who preach the Christian Gospel have to wrestle all through life with the reality of Jesus, and how that reality impinges on the world of human affairs and the created and cultural circumstances within and around which we all live. But not only preachers; every follower of Jesus is confronted with the challenge of Jesus' own question, "Who do you say that I am?" And to those who follow he says, "What do you want?" Like the disciples at the start of John's Gospel we stumble into we know not what and blurt out the question which represents all our deepest questions, "Lord where do you stay?" And his answer remains sufficient, "Come and see."

I believe in Jesus. And for the best part of 50 years I have followed to see if I could see. And I've seen enough to want to keep following in order to see more. It's well known that John uses several words for sight; from the surface vision that takes in what's around us and processes it as information, to that lingering contemplative gaze that compels attention and urges towards new, deeper, more humble understanding, to that moment of revelation when the window of heaven is opened and we are dazzled by glory - "we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth". 

J D G Dunn is a contributor to a fascinating book, I (still) Believe, in which leading biblical scholars share their stories of faith and scholarship. He titles his chapter In Quest of Truth. The whole book is well worth reading, perhaps especially for those who stand outside academia and wonder what all the fuss is about; even more especially for those suspicious of biblical scholarship and dismissive of scholarly and intellectual engagement with the foundation documents of our faith.  At the end of his magnificent and flawed The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer wrote words that move me every time I read them:

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside,
He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

 

New Year - The Graced Significance of Each Moment.

That moment, when translucent energy tumbles forward

in the joyful rush for the shore;

That moment when the minutes, hours, and days of the past year

bring us to the cusp of something new;

That moment when with valid sadness and grateful gladness for what is behind,

we surrender to the impulse forward and welcome whatever is next;

That moment when an ocean seeks the shore, and a wave the sand,

and when a heart relinquishes what has been in order to embrace what might be;

That moment of silence dissolving into the liquid laughter of arrival

as wave and heart celebrate the turning of the tide.

That moment - yes, that moment.

"For all that has been, thank you; for all that is to be, Yes." (Dag Hammarskjold )