Living Wittily

The More Excellent, but Not Necessarily Least Troublesome Way.

This morning, chasing something else, I came across an essay on 1 Corinthians 13, "The More Excellent Way". It's in one of my older books on Paul, Early Christian Experience by Gunther Bornkamm, which I bought in 1970. Goodness it's good!

 

So, if someone has a go at us, and there's the risk of becoming distant and bitter, here is the more excellent way:

 

"Even if unbelief, lies, evil and scorn could provoke one to anger and provide sufficient reason 'to reckon evil' to the other, the evil is left standing as an unresolved matter, an uncancelled guilt between us. Where one retains evil toward the other person, there one abandons him; but love abandons evil and retains the other person; it is the power of fellowship, because it remits guilt and does not let the brother or sister go." (page 183)

 

The whole essay is a combination of exegetical rigour of an older German school, psychological shrewdness aided by a Lutheran allergy to virtue and any suggestion love is a discipline or law, and a pastoral realism that 1 Corinthians 13 could ever be other than an exposition of the love of God in Christ. And that love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit in the renewing of the moral centre's capacities and motives; it is emphatically not virtue to be cultivated, something we do -but gift to be received and grace bestowed by God who is love, and whose love is precisely that which remits guilt and holds on to the sinner in mercy and forgiveness.

 

Over the years I have wrestled with this brilliant and luminous text, and I come back to something of Bornkamm's take on it. We can read it as love at its most perfect in human relationships, something we aspire to. But if we are honest that's likely to remain aspiration, and those descriptors of love - patient, kind not resentful and all the rest - most likely to be frustrated by the sheer in your face realities of conflict, relationship breakdown, and yes, even intentional hostility from others.

 

That's why Bornkamm insists the more excellent way is only possible by the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, the making of each person in Christ a new creation, in which faith and hope and love become expressions of the Gospel of reconciliation, wrought in Christian experience by the God of all grace. Here's how Bornkamm says it:

 

"In the coordination of faith and hope (not as a 'value' in itself), love also remains. If faith is based on what God has done and hope directs itself to what God will do, then love-- from God, to God and thus simultaneously love toward the brother or sister (cf 1John 4.7ff),-- is the permanent presence of salvation, 'the bond of perfection' (Col 3.14). As such it is the greatest." (page 187)

 

I know. Sometimes you need to read Bornkamm at least twice - but he's worth it. And when all of the above has been said, that such love is made possible only by the renewing and sustaining power of the Holy Spirit in mind, heart and conscience, there is more to be said.

 

"And yet it would be wrong to understand love here only as the distant ideal, derived in contrast -- only as the antithesis to impatience, evil, boasting etc. , an unreachable, radiant idea of enticing and yet deathly brightness in the pure and starry heaven of values.  No -- Paul can speak of love so extollingly, movingly, completely, because it is a reality so living, concrete and variedly effective in detail, as it is described in 4-7, and at the same time it is the all-embracing power of God, put into force in the midst of this world as the love of God in Jesus Christ." (page 188)

 

Goodness I told you he was good. And yes you sometimes have to read him twice. But he's worth the time, and the thought. Now perhaps, we should all go and read 1 Corinthians 13 again. 

 

Welcome is the Default Disposition of Those Whom Christ Has Welcomed

Years ago I had booked to go to a pastor’s conference at the St Ninian’s Conference centre in Crieff.  Sheila and I met there in 1970 so it’s a kind of special place. I led several annual Summer Missions in Crieff in the early 70’s with daily children’s meetings, sports days and open air singing. Crowds of children and parents as helpers spent two weeks of the school holidays doing all this in Macrosty Park.

In 1997 I had booked to spend several days at a conference with one of the finest men I’ve ever met. Not that I had met Eugene Peterson at that point. I had read most of what he had written about the work of being a pastor. His books have been and remain deeply formative of how I think and seek to live, work and preach as a Christian minister.

The week before the Conference Sheila’s mum died, and our family funeral arrangements coincided with the Conference. I couldn’t go, so I cancelled. I was travelling home to Aberdeen the day after the conference finished, so I telephoned St Ninians on the off chance I could speak for a minute or two to Eugene and say thank you for all I had learned from him. He came to the phone and said if I could drop by St Ninians he would be happy to meet, sit on a bench and talk for a while. This man was simply being the kind of person he wrote about; considerate, caring, being gladly inconvenienced, making a gift of time, listening, and happily enjoying the company of those who came his way in the Lord’s good time.

When he met we sat on the bench looking down across the tow towards the hills. He asked me to tell my story, told a little of his own, prayed with me and for our family, took me into the bookstall, bought one of his own books and wrote a lovely greeting inside. That’s the only time I met a man whose love for God and devotion to Jesus were a natural part of who he is and how he relates to people. We emailed a few times after that, and I still have and often use that book, Praying with the Psalms. Eugene died three years ago.

I tell you all this because what happened on that morning diversion to Crieff to meet Eugene Peterson, was nothing all that significant as human affairs and the big moments of history go. But make no mistake. what happened had its own special meaning in the economy of God, showing how God works through the quiet ministry of friendship. I met someone who walked as he talked, and in our sitting and talking together he embodied the welcome he wrote so much about, the welcome of God.

Every time I remember Eugene Peterson taking a phone call from someone he had never met, I remember a particular Bible verse: “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (Rom 15.7) This man had just finished a three day conference with over a hundred pastors, and must have been tired and needing some peace. He could have passed a minute or two being polite on the phone, graciously accepting my words of thanks, and then get on with the day. But welcome was for him, a habit of the heart, his default disposition towards others, part of his calling to treat others as Christ had treated him throughout a long life of faith.

Which finally brings me to the point of this week’s pastoral letter, apart from the telling of a story that still vibrates with good memories of a Godly man who would be surprised, even embarrassed, to have this story told. Welcome of others is the pulse of pastoral ministry, and the heart of an authentic mission in Jesus’ name. Paul’s words at the end of Romans were not to the church leaders, but to the whole church. Us.

We are still some way away from life opening up into the freedoms and opportunities we knew before the pandemic. But as we begin to think about our future as a church community, that word “welcome” is a fundamental and essential descriptor of our Christian presence in our town. The glory of God is made known in the welcome we give; in the friendships we build, the words we share into others’ lives, the prayers we say for the help and health of our town, the ways we use our money, our premises and our gifts and skills in service of others, our willingness to shape our worship to the world we live in as ambassadors of Christ. All of this, and much more, is to welcome others as God in Christ has welcomed us.

As God leads us forward, we know the world has changed, and church cannot stay the same in a changing world. We could do worse than make Paul’s instruction our own habit of the heart towards all who come into our lives and our church: “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

(This week's pastoral letter to our church folk in Montrose.) 

Nahum Unplugged: On Not Toning Down or Explaining Away Words That Upset us.

Reading the text of the prophet Nahum is an exercise in theology in the service of imagination and imagination in the service of theology. Yes it is a text of terror, a tour de force description of the defeat, fall and ultimate humiliation of Nineveh, the greatest imperial power of Nahum's times. Nahum reads like a series of taunt songs, strung together with poetic narrative and sparkling with metaphors and images of military manoeuvres, besieging strategies and punishing campaigns that overthrow and overwhelm the power base of the Assyrian Empire. All that is clear from even a first reading of Nahum.

Re-reading, and lingering over the text, the reader is drawn into the emotional payload delivered by Nahum's words. The dialectic between theology and imagination electrifies the text which at times is shocking in its explicit celebration and gloating at the humiliation and destruction of the rhetorical target - Nineveh. That city was the seat of Assyrian power, and the symbol of a power-base unimaginably strong, durable and indestructible. Except that Nahum imagines the unimaginable, and portrays the supposedly impregnable imperial city being easily invaded, violated, humiliated and utterly dismantled as a political entity.

The devastating truth that shatters the walls and foundations of this Empire and each Empire is stated by God: "I am against you, declares the Lord Almighty." (Nahum 3.5) There follows one of the most controversial and coarse passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. Many commentators feel the need to become apologists for the crudity, misogyny and dangerously abusive imagery of 3.1-7. I have every sympathy with them. Nahum's choice of imagery and words are shocking in the intensity of the mockery, cruelty and humiliation that is heaped on a city that specialised in the mockery, cruelty and humiliation of other peoples they had conquered, plundered and slaughtered. Now the boot is on the other foot, and it is Nineveh's neck it stands on.  

But how else to confront the hopelessness of those whose horizons of hope have long been shut down? How else but by a re-educated imagination can a prophet create a new and vocal defiance of the very hopelessness that would guarantee permanent subjugation? How else conquer the powerlessness of those facing intolerable abuse?

Much of Nahum brings comfort to Judah by portraying a different reality in which Assyria is on the receiving end of what it had handed out to others for centuries - irresistible power, remorseless cruelty, and the destructive energy of an enemy who could punish with impunity. What we have here is a strategy for defiance of that hopelessness that Empires always strive to instil. "Resistance is futile" has been the strap line of the earth's empires long before the Borg cast its shadow across the crew of the USS Enterprise!

The flashing images in chapter 2.1-4, of military power invading the invader, are there to help people witness the devastation of the powers that enslaved them and whom they had thought invincible. As I have read through Nahum, worked through this terrible and terrifying text, playing at the back of my mind has been the theological tension which is first clearly stated, and then woven throughout the entire book. "The Lord is slow to anger but will not leave the guilty unpunished. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God but the Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him, but with an overwhelming flood he will make an end of Nineveh."

Chapter 1.2-7 weaves these statements into the one fabric. This is the God who is against Nineveh, and yet promises to restore the splendour of Jacob. The prophet Nahum would laugh to scorn as sentimental, self-indulgent, anthropocentric and theologically one-sided, an emphasis on God's steadfast love that ignores the realities of human suffering, the evils of the powerful, and the blatant signals of defiance to all that God purposes for created and human life. No. God is not mocked, And yes. The Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished.  

In the end this is a book about divine judgement. The three chapters are almost entirely devoted to an Empire getting its comeuppance. Nothing about repentance, mercy or forgiveness for Nineveh. They have met their nemesis, the mirror image of their own ways of being. Kingdoms may rise and fall but the word of the Lord endures forevermore - and that word to the complacently powerful, and to those who flourish on the suffering they inflict on others, is unequivocal, uncompromising and swiftly approaching judgement.   

Myanmar. Uyghur. Yemen. Name your oppressed people of choice. Human history is replete with atrocity, oppressive policies, military suppression, and violent discrimination. Ask how the text of Nahum would read to such peoples faced with endless trauma, long drained of hope, many never having lived free of fear. Words that imagine the defeat of your worst enemy are hard to find and formulate. But words that take the imagination in hand and compel us to think the unthinkable, conceive inconceivable possibilities, teach us to say again after ages of silence, but what if - such words must have some substance, some hold on reality, but also a capacity to reframe how we think of that reality. 

I think that is one way of taking Nahum seriously as a text for today. For Nahum, God is not mocked - and every time people and peoples made in God's image are brutalised by the powers that happen to be in those moments of history, those powers mock God. And Nahum will have none of it. He brings a theology of God's judgement into the service of imaginations long trained to operate in the interests of the Empire. But the Empire, whatever imperial power it is, Assyrian or Babylonian, Persian or Greek, Roman or British, and whether in our own times the militarised nations inflicting untold suffering on other, such powers that be are not unaccountable.

That is Nahum's message. To those who inflict suffering on the innocent and powerless - "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." To those whose trust is in militarism, materialist consumerism, and / or economic leverage against others, and whose political shenanigans make life Hell for other people - "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." To those who create and sustain institutions of discrimination, who form and inhabit systems of oppression of others, whose ruthless pursuit of profit, gain, power and influence ignore the cost to others who are simply ground under the wheels of the global machine - "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." This is not so much a text of terror, but a text for building resilience in the hopeless, and hope in the despairing.

No, Nahum is not a comfortable guest to have in your head. Reading him is like - well, I remember on an early holiday in Austria, the hotel manageress, a former Olympic downhill skier, took us up the hill for early breakfast. She came round with a glass of Schnapps for everyone, and insisted, (and I guessed it might be futile to resist) she insisted we drink it down in one large gulp. I did - and my head felt as if fireworks had been set off inside, and tears ran down my face. Reading Nahum is like that! 

I'll come back to Nahum one more time when I've thought some more. It still sits uncomfortably alongside what we have come to know of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Which doesn't make Nahum wrong or his message contradicted. But it is a reminder that the Bible is a complex and complicated collection of texts in which diversity and argument are part of the challenge as we try to makes sense of unfamiliar ancient words and how they might apply to the more familiar world in which we try to live wisely and obediently in the light of Christ, the Light of the World.