Living Wittily

TFTD Dec 30-Jan 5: Hope is Believing in Newness.

Monday

Eccl 1.9 “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

There are degrees of negativity, and different ways we express them. Moaning about things not going our way; complaining as a habit of the heart; realism that thinks this is all there is and nothing new can happen; then there’s cynicism, when we question the value of even what’s good and worthwhile. Ecclesiastes is the spiritual equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer! The whole book is a warning against reading God out of the script of our lives. “He has put eternity in our hearts.” That’s the horizon of our hopes. God does newness and transformation. Looking forward in faith to a new year, be prepared to be co-opted into God’s transformative ways.  

Tuesday

Matthew 9.17  ^“Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.”

Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God. God was on the move, and Jesus was the presence of God poured into a life to be given for the life of the world. What Jesus said, and how Jesus behaved, was upsetting for those who wanted things to stay the same. But the good news can’t be contained in the old, tired ideas. The good news is a transformative ferment, a wineskin-bursting energy and fizz that needs flexibility and space to mature. It’s hard for tired minds and complacent hearts to welcome or contain newness. May God renew our minds and hearts and make us fit and fitted to receive the treasure of God’s grace in these earthen vessels.   

Wednesday

Jeremiah 31.31 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel…I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Newness is God’s doing, not ours. Whatever we plan and do it will be by the power of the Spirit, making our shared life in community, and our personal discipleship, a transformative influence around us. It starts with God’s promise and our response – a covenant of love and trust exchanged, and obedience as the practical outworking of belonging to God. A New Year, a fresh start, a new covenant of the heart, by God’s grace starting over in renewed determination to follow Christ.

Thursday

2 Cor 5.17 if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

Christians are born into newness as part of God’s redeeming grace in Jesus Christ. It’s strange that Christians of all people should be tempted to stay with what we know, and at times be resistant to change. At first Nicodemus lacked the imagination to understand the newness of the Kingdom of God. He needed to be born again, to see with new eyes. To come to Christ as the light and life is to open ourselves to the transforming love of God in Christ, to be drawn by grace into a new way of being.

Friday

Psalm 40.3 “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”

Christians should never sound like a stuck record, or a track on endless repeat. Praise arises out of surprise, erupts from gratitude, is kept alive by indebtedness, and grows out of constantly experienced generosity from the hand of God. Since God’s mercies are new every morning, so are the words we say in response. God’s recurring and returning blessings provide the material from which we write a constant flow of new lyrics and create new compositions of praise.

Saturday

John 13.34 “A new commandment I give to you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

The connection between newness and love isn’t hard to make. Forgiveness allows a new beginning in a relationship, and forgiveness presupposes love. To serve, help, support or care for someone allows space for them and us to grow – and growth is one of the processes of being made new, of renewing the core of who we are. That condition, “As I have loved you” means love can never be mere softness, or a matter of our own convenience, or a calculated commitment with limits. Love one another in the same way, to the same extent, at the same cost, as I have loved you. That’s about as absolute as any of Jesus’ demands. It is a call to live in a new way, guided by the new commandment, and enabled by the renewing power of the Spirit who pours God’s love into our hearts. God’s love in us looks for ways to renew the life in others. 

Sunday  

Rev 21.1 “I saw a new heaven and a new earth…Behold I make all things new.”

John is our tutor in seeing new possibilities, and envisioning the future God intends. He reminds us, it’s God who enacts the unexpected, God who brings about the unprecedented, who surprises, shocks and shatters our far too limited expectations of what God prepares, purposes, and performs. At the turning of the year, and as we pivot into a new year, against the apparent tyranny of sameness in our world, and in contradiction to the same old, same old tragedies of human waste, suffering and conflict, hear again God’s words through John – “Behold I make all things new!”

Advent Book Endings 11: The Temple, George Herbert.

I'll get to the book eventually, but first the important context. I've read the poems of George Herbert, the 17th Century Anglican poet, for many, many years. I don't remember exactly when I first read Herbert's 'Love III', which I consider the finest devotional poem in the English language, but it has become for me a description of the love of God that is beyond description.

Apart from the Apostle John, the final poem in George Herbert's book of poems, comes nearest to an accurate description of the nature and meaning of divine love as I have experienced it ever since my conversion in 1967. Herbert's poem, 'Love Bade Me Welcome' is a poem I read and return to so often. I want to try explaining why.  

Let me start with the hinge point of my spiritual life. As far as the externals are concerned, conversion doesn't look that big a deal. Somebody changes their mind about things, makes a decision, and gets on with life. Looking back, I recall a confused and troubled teenager, kneeling in a dull church vestry, at 10 o'clock at night, and finally giving in to what I can only describe as a Love the likes of which I had never known.

It was more than a big deal. It was a surrender of the heart, a re-orientation of the will, a cleansing of the conscience, a renewing of the mind, a re-aligning of those fundamental loyalties that define who we are. It was a relinquishing of all that fankled mess of mistakes made, wrong decisions, stupid behaviour, destructive habits and messed up relationships that was accumulating into a life headed for serious trouble. I heard the gospel preached and don't remember now much of the words used, the arguments put forward or the persuasive rhetoric of a good preacher. But I do remember, vividly and still vivifyingly, a sense that the risen Jesus was saying to me, a 16 year old Lanarkshire lad, expelled from school, in serial trouble with the police, "I have come that you might have life; and have it more abundantly."

Those words of Jesus "life more abundant", I heard as if spoken from heaven to me. That night, at the end of a late after-church service, I had a sense that I had been found by Jesus himself. I heard a call to follow Him into a new and different future, and I said yes. Life was never the same. How could it be? I had been challenged to take a risk, to trust Jesus Christ the one who died for the sin of the world, and for my sin, and to seek the forgiveness of God. I did. I was challenged further to repent of my former life, and I did. Not only remorse and regret, though these were part of it. But repentance as a change of heart, a new direction, indeed a new Director of life, the risen Lord Jesus made real through the Spirit of God the Father. 

In one sense it's no one else's business what my early years were about, or what spiritual experiences I have had, or how I've lived my life since. In another and much more deliberate sense, it is my business to bear witness to the faithful love that welcomed me and renewed me, the goodness and mercy that forgave me, the grace that has guided and sustained me, the God who in Christ gave my life purpose, meaning and motive, such that it has sustained my faith for 58 years.

Over nearly six decades of Christian discipleship, however much I have grown and matured into who and what I am today, it is entirely by God's grace, and only because 'Love bade me welcome.' Through the shaping and nurturing of that Love I am a follower of Jesus, a member of a diverse Christian community, an ordained minister of our Baptist tradition, a theologian, and a lifelong student of the traditions of Christian faith. I have so many debts, intellectual, spiritual and relational. I reflect gratefully on those influences and people who have shaped my thought and practice, those who have guided and encouraged, those whose own struggles and wrestling have helped me to "work out my own salvation with dear and trembling, knowing it is God who is at work within me to bring about his good pleasure."

Though I didn't know it at the time, George Herbert's explanation of his poems exactly describes the ups and downs of Christian life, including my own. He described his collection of poems as “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.” 

I read this poem and inevitably, and wonderingly, it takes me back to that evening in April 16, 1967, and describes exactly my experience of coming to know Jesus, of hear his call, and answering it by trusting the love that bade me welcome, and believing in the One who gently silenced my shame, guilt and sense of unworthiness. I can't be the only one who feels the echoes these sublime words set up in the soul, about the Love that bade, and bids us, welcome.  

 Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
 Guilty of dust and sin.
 But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
 From my first entrance in,
 Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
 If I lack'd anything.

 "A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
 Love said, "You shall be he."
 "I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
 I cannot look on thee."
 Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
 "Who made the eyes but I?"

 "Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
 Go where it doth deserve."
 "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
 "My dear, then I will serve."
 "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
 So I did sit and eat.

TFTD Dec 23-29: Underlining the Vocabulary of the Christmas Story.

Monday

Luke 2.10 “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

We underline words for emphasis. It’s a way of paying attention to what’s really important. The Christmas story has its own vocabulary, words that chime with our own experience, and shape this story of God’s coming amongst us. The shining glory of the Lord is not to terrify but to reassure – don’t be afraid, this is good news and great joy for everyone. What is about to happen is the hinge point of human history, when God pushes open the door and comes amongst us. Whatever else the shepherds witnessed, they saw heaven pouring down, luminous with blessing.

Tuesday

Luke 2.11 “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

It’s not as if there was no warning. For centuries prophets had said God would send the Christ to save his people. Those promises are now happening, here, now. Just as Isaiah said, “Unto us a child is born.” Born as a human baby, the Word became flesh and lived amongst us as one of us. The instincts that draw us to the midnight Christmas Eve service are because we know that the birth of Jesus is of momentous significance – as the angel said – “good news of great joy for all the people”, including us, and our neighbours, and our troubled world. There, 2,000 years ago, in Bethlehem, God kept his promise to his people, and to the nations, and to us.

Wednesday

Luke 2.11b “This will be a sign to you: You will find the child wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

You can’t have Christmas without a manger! Forget the sentimental Christmas card pictures. Jesus was born in the unheated downstairs level where the animals were kept overnight. The shepherds would be perfectly at home amongst the animals, looking in bemused wonder at a young woman nursing her new born child, there of all places. The hard part for them, and for us is making the link between this utterly dependent infant, and the Glastonbury lights and sounds on the hillside. God is here, not in trailing clouds of glory, but nestling in the security of a mother’s arms, amongst the household animals of the kind soul who said, “You’re welcome.”

Thursday

Luke 2.14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all on whom his favour rests.”

Glory to God in the highest. But glory is hidden in a hayrack, wrapped in a blanket, and held in a mother’s arms. This child is the Prince of Peace, God’s gift of shalom. ‘Shalom’ is a welfare word, containing the promise of wellbeing, harmony, human flourishing, a world of recovered fertility, and of human communities where power is used to enable and not disempower others. But not now, and not yet. Still, in Christ incarnate, crucified and risen, God has set in motion his final purposes for creation. Whatever else the Church is, it is the reflected light of the Light of the World, God’s fifth column of reconciled reconcilers, God’s peacemakers and good news agents.

Friday

Luke 2.15 “When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened…”

The ordinary, overlooked, sheep-smelling shepherds, and the resplendent luminous angels, and a small rural town called Bethlehem. Never lose the sense of Christmas as entirely incongruous, the real happening of an impossible story. Those shepherds were nobody’s fools. Like all hard-working folk trying to get by, they had modest expectations of life. Until the angels interrupted their nightshift! We need the shepherds, the angels, the little town, as we need Mary, Joseph and the baby – together they create the time and place when Immanuel happened, God with us.

Saturday

Luke 2.17 “When they had seen him they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child. And all who heard it were amazed…”

There’s quite a lot of amazement goes on in the Christmas story. Mary’s annunciation; Joseph’s dream and the angel; shepherds ambushed by God’s choir; the shepherds’ gawking and gossip. And those who heard them were amazed. Why not? Angels and heavenly choirs, a baby supposed to be the Messiah, a young woman both scared and honoured above all women. The vocabulary of Christmas is full of big words – Jesus, Immanuel, Bethlehem, signs and prophets, child, manger, shepherds, glory, joy, peace, God’s favour, spreading the word. And it’s our story, and these words are our words, the vocabulary of God’s gift beyond all our telling. 

Sunday

Luke 2.19 “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

The modern carol, “Mary did you know?” seems to ignore this verse. Mary knew all right, in those deep places where a mother’s loves and hopes mingle with anxiety and determination to protect. Mary is taking in the significance of all that has happened to her. She holds them close to her heart in the secret intimacy of the risks she has taken. God knows what would happen next. Yes, God knows.

Advent Book Endings 10: Word Biblical Commentary on Romans, J. D. G. Dunn.

"To him who is able to strengthen you, in accordance with my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, in accordance with the revelation of the mystery concealed for long ages, but now made manifest through the prophetic scriptures, in accordance with the command of the eternal God, made known for the obedience of faith for all the nations, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to him be glory for ever. Amen." (Romans 16.25-27)

"All we can say is that [this] doxology has summarized well some of the basic concerns of the letter. All begins and ends with God. His power alone is sufficient to sustain those who rely on him by faith. The gospel which made clear and with which Paul was entrusted, focused on Jesus Christ and contained the revelation of the mystery of the divine purpose for the salvation of humankind. That purpose was in full continuity with God's earlier revelation through the prophet and scripture.

But what had now been made clear, as God had always intended it should, was that God's saving purpose reached out to all the nations and that it was entered into through faith -- a faith which was not different from nor opposed to the obedience God had always looked for in his people, but which in fact came to expression in the dependant submissiveness of the creature to its Creator. It is to this God, the one God, the God who is the source and measure of all real wisdom, now most fully understood and approached through Jesus Christ, that all the glory of the ages belongs. Amen and amen.

              (Word Biblical Commentary. Romans. Vol.2, James D. G. Dunn. (Dallas: Word Books, 1988) page 917.

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

All my vocational life, from being a student in the early 1970s till now, J. D. G. Dunn has been a trusted voice amongst New Testament scholars. His earlier works such as Baptism in the Holy Spirit, Jesus and the Spirit, Christology in the Making and Unity and Diversity in the New Testament were ground-breaking, provocative, and forced those who disagreed to do a lot of homework - myself included. His Romans volumes comprise one of the most valued commentaries on my shelves. 

The final paragraph of Dunn's commentary are quoted above, a few days before Christmas. They are the culminating sentences of a huge effort of scholarship over some of the busiest years of his life - and as I read them they seem to presuppose Advent, and Easter, and beyond. Dunn is carefully summarising what he has argued throughout the commentary, that the central focus on Jesus Christ as the content of God's self-revelation is, in the person of Jesus, the final revelation of a mystery that has eternity in its planning. In Jesus Christ the very truth of God is revealed, seen and active in the salvation of humankind, a revelation that commands the obedience of faith. 

"Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies...Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die." So Charles Wesley, (and later editors).

Or as the Apostle Paul put it to the Christians in Rome, the hub of the Empire and meeting point of the nations: "the revelation of the mystery concealed for long ages, but now made manifest through the prophetic scriptures, in accordance with the command of the eternal God, made known for the obedience of faith for all the nations..."

As Dunn argued consistently throughout his long sojourn with Romans, Paul's vision spanned the long sweep of history, included God's promise to all the nations, the gospel to be received and lived through faith in the incarnate, crucified and risen Jesus, and in the power of the Spirit forming communities of worship and witness to "the God who is the source and measure of all real wisdom, now most fully understood and approached through Jesus Christ, and to whom all the glory of the ages belongs."

More than once in these Advent Book Endings essays there has been a coming together of Advent, mission, and the challenge for us to discover in our own time what "the obedience of faith" requires of us in our own times. That will take some working out, and it will be costly and disruptive for each Christian community that seeks to worship and bear witness to Jesus Christ, embracing and engaging with the mystery of Bethlehem, Calvary, an empty tomb, and the long wait for the final realisation of God's kingdom.

Advent is about that long wait. Faith in Jesus Christ is ultimately faith in the eternal wisdom and final purposes of God for creation, humanity and this God-loved world. And as we wait, we hold closely to the words Paul wrote to those small Christian communities in Rome, struggling to survive the pressures of Empire, not always seeing eye to eye with each other about the meaning of the gospel, needing a focal point for their own worship, witness, and community life in Christ:

"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)    

Advent Book Endings 9; The Christian Doctrine of God, Thomas F. Torrance.

"In the fifth chapter of Revelation the apostle tells us that as he looked through a door in heaven he glimpsed something of the triumphant outcome of God's overruling of the fearful events of world history. Two things riveted his attention: a scroll and a lamb. The scroll was the book of human destiny sealed and firmly held in the hand of God. When no one in heaven or earth was able to open the scroll and look inside, John wept bitterly. Then he was told that the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, had gained the power to break the seals and open the scroll. John turned to see the Lion, the mighty power of God, but what he saw standing in the midst of the throne of God was a Lamb with the marks of sacrifice upon him who took the scroll from the right hand of God, and when he did so a new song was heard to break out in heaven:

You are worthy to receive the scroll and break the seals, for you were slain and by your blood you have redeemed for God a people of every tribe and language a nation and race. You have made them a royal house of priests for our God, and they shall reign on earth. This was echoed by countless angels singing' Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches, wisdom and glory and praise.

This surely means that the atoning passion of Christ must for ever be allowed to govern our understanding of God in all his creative, providential and redemptive relations with us. Is that not why we cannot but think of passion and serenity, passibility and impassibility as interpenetrating one another in the ultimate nature of God? And is that not how we continue to worship him?

Just as the whole undivided Trinity was involved in redemption so the whole undivided Trinity is worshipped in our celebration of the Eucharist. The liturgy of the Church was aboriginally and intrinsically trinitarian, so that it is not surprising that it was out of the sacramental worship of the Church in Baptism and Eucharist shaped by the inspired witness of the apostles handed down to us in the Scriptures of the New Testament, that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, One God Three Persons, came into explicit formulation."

The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons. Thomas F. Torrance. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) pages 255-56.

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

The theology of Thomas F. Torrance is thoroughly trinitarian. This book, along with The Trinitarian Faith (1988) distilled a lifetime of dogmatic reflection into a mature statement of why the doctrine of the Trinity is of defining importance for Christian faith. The Christian Doctrine of God is both dogmatic and doxological theology, carefully argued from primary sources with doctrinal precision and considerable passion, and shaped from within his own experience of God in Christ as believer, minister and scholar. It's not an easy read, not much of Torrance is - nor was it intended to be. This is confessional theology from  within the academy, a summative statement by one of Scotland's greatest theologians whose dogmatic and ecumenical work spanned decades, and reached across the major divisions of Christian tradition.  

As Torrance confessed in the Preface, "the truth of the Holy Trinity is more to be adored than expressed." The last page of this book, quoted above, demonstrates this same fusion of doctrine and doxology was an unbroken thread running through the book; compelled to express what is inexpressible, analysis gives way to adoration, and dogmatic exertion merges with prayer and worship. That's how Torrance 'did' theology; he was a theologian for whom prayer was an essential predisposition to faith seeking understanding. 

Torrance lived through some of the most momentous historical events of his century. The Second World War, the Cold War and nuclear deterrence, a growing ecological crisis, and in the late 20th Century the confrontation of East and West completely realigned with the collapse of communism  in 1989 with all the instability and rebuilding that followed. Against a background of such anxiety and adjustment, late in his own life, Torrance completed the writing of The Christian Doctrine of God. He was providing for the Church a doctrine of God adequate to the multiple contemporary challenges facing an endangered world, and as continuing foundation and guide to the mission and future of the Church.

In 1959 Torrance published a book of sermons, The Apocalypse Today. The book of Revelation was a text that, throughout his vocational life, provided Torrance with a view of human history where God is always on the horizon. His closing words include a text that has Advent woven throughout. The Lion and the Lamb, the Root of David, the mystery of human history and God's ultimate purpose of redemption which would include people from "every tribe and language a nation and race."

The incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and glorification of Jesus is a chain reaction of divine purpose, a defining revelation of how God is to be encountered, thought and worshipped as the Triune God of grace. Torrance is surely right to insist on this story of God's atoning passion, revealed in Jesus Christ, as the governing reality of our deepest Christian reflections about God, leading inevitably to worship, and the singing of the new song.

Or, to put all that in Advent terms:

True God of true God,

Light of light eternal,

Lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb;

Son of the father,

Begotten not created

O Come, let us adore Him...

 

TFTD Dec 16-22 - "The Word Became Flesh - We Beheld His Glory."

Monday

John 1.1-2 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”

“Use your imagination”, says John. Now expand the range of your thought. Sure, Matthew and Luke take us to Bethlehem, a borrowed manger, and a crying infant. But what happened at Bethlehem was no accident. From before the beginning, God has been Creator and Redeemer, and all our scaled down Christmas images of stables, stars and shepherds are against the vast cosmic background of God’s eternal, creative purposes. John is alerting us – this is the most stupendous of circumstances! The One who comes to be with us is the very Word and Wisdom of God. 

Tuesday

John 1.2 “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

Now stretch your imagination even further, well beyond the usual boundaries of what you think you understand. The Creator becomes the creature. The One who made all things becomes in Jesus a “child in the manger, infant of Mary; outcast and stranger, Lord of all.” Nothing exists without the Word which calls everything into existence. As Paul said, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Col. 1.17) And yet, here he is, entering our humanity, “divinity dwindled to infancy”, the sustaining power of the universe made truly human, and entrusted to the care of a young mother. Advent eventually appeared at Bethlehem, but its origins lie deep in the heart of the Eternal, conceived by the faithful purposefulness of God.

Wednesday

John 1.4 “In him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity.”

Remember those grammar lessons when we learned how to write clearly and concisely? John uses the demonstrative pronoun, “that life”; specifically, particularly, uniquely, that life which was in the Word made flesh; that life and no other, is the light of life for all humanity. Indeed that life is the light of the world. Charles Wesley borrowed those metaphors: “Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings”. John’s whole gospel is like a composition through which the themes of light and life are woven into an intricate concerto titled “God so loved the world.”

Thursday

John 1.5. “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

Darkness cannot understand light; cannot take it in; cannot encompass it. Darkness can never put light out. Advent is the season of light…and darkness. The darkness is real enough; we can feel and see its effects when darkness is the descriptor we use for evil, cruelty, oppression, lost-ness, despair, grief, and all the other words we employ to describe the absence of light on the horizons of those who suffer and long for life to be different. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”, says Isaiah, the herald of God’s coming. Advent is an anticipation and celebration of the great reversal, when light shines in defiance of the powers of darkness.

Friday.

John 1.9 “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.”

Truth is another of John’s recurring themes. The true light is the light that cannot be extinguished, and which is neither suppressed by darkness, nor obscured by deceit. Advent is the celebration of the arrival of that true light – truth that exposes lies, and reveals the realities of the human heart. John wrote, “Everyone who does evil hates the light.” Advent is a time for honest review of what matters most to us, where our deepest loves lie, what when push comes to shove, we will give our best energies to. If we live by the truth, there is no fear in being near the light, or of being known for who we are. The closer we are to Jesus the closer we are to the Truth, and the Light.

Saturday

John 1.14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us.”

And there it is. The one liner that has provoked countless books on the incarnation of Jesus; all of them attempts to explain the inexplicable. The Eternal enters time, the Creator takes on creaturely form, Jesus lives and moves in our God-loved but fallen world, fully human and fully Divine. This wasn’t a flying visit, but the living of a human life in flesh and blood. John’s word ‘dwelling’ is about settling down, fully engaging with where a person is. This is God come amongst us in human form, with a name and a family. “Our God, heav’n cannot hold Him.” Advent flows from that!

Sunday

John 1.14b “We have seen his glory, the glory of the Only Begotten, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The glory of God is revealed in the One who is the most generous of gifts and who personifies the steadfast faithfulness of God to all His promises. The Word who became flesh comes as the promised presence of God with His people, and that presence radiates with a strange and beautiful glory. Advent is, for John, the dawn of a new creation, when He through whom all things have their being, becomes the One in whom life and light, and grace and truth, make possible the miracle of being born again by the Spirit. John’s great hymn to the Word, is the testimony of all who wait in faithful trust for the Advent of God’s glory in Christ, in our hearts, and i

Advent Book Endings 8: The God Who Gives. How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story, Kelly Kapic

"Those who belong to God participate in his Kingdom work. Therefore the church embodies and gives away the good news. And just as this good news of Jesus' coming shows us God's concern for is as the weak, the poor and the oppressed, so also the life of God in us will inevitably cause our hearts to burn with compassion for  all vestiges of weakness and poverty around us. God's impartiality makes him partial to the poor. In fairness he favours the fatherless and receives the rejected. They have a special place in his affections because God is not blind to the harsh inequalities of this world. The material world matters to God. When we forget this, we become blind to the fulness of redemption and the joy of our kingdom work."

"The kingdom of God comes to earth not to deny our physicality but to show us how to live by the Spirit in this physical world that God created and is redeeming. Those who belong to Christ thus reflect his heart, his mission and his work. We seek to set the captives free from sin through the finished work of Jesus on the cross; this we proclaim by the spiritual preaching of the Word, through the material administration of the sacraments, and through the physical application of aid to the circumstances of those in need. In this way, those in the kingdom find themselves following the way of the cross by service, sacrifice, and even suffering. Life and proclamation should always be tied together in the generosity of God's people who know that they belong to their Master. He has set us free to live as agents of grace, hope and love. Thus, we enter the story and participate in God's good news. For God so loved, he gave." 

The God Who Gives. How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story, Kelly Kapic (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010) p. 263

So what kind of God do we believe in? This book argues all the way through that God is a generous God. Not a grudging judge; not an indulgent progressive; not a capricious interferer in the life of the world; and not any of the other distorted ideas and conceptions of God that are founded on our own fears, or desires or wishful thinking. The defining words in the Christian understanding of the Triune God of love are grace, gift, and generosity. 

All through this book Kapic argues for a reset in the way Christians think of God. That reset requires a revisiting of the biblical narrative of God's ways with his creation, this world, and our human history. He traces the story of God reclaiming his fallen creation; he reclaims all by giving all. The Son is the Gift of the Father. The Spirit is the gift of the Father and the Son. This circle of generosity and grace, the inner life of Love's exchange in the being of God, encircles God's whole creation in a renewed covenant sealed by God's gift of himself. 

It takes an entire book to argue that, and many of the chapters read as devotional theology at its best. Quoting Michael Gorman, another writer whose work is similarly rich and rewarding, Kapic condenses the burden of his book: "The cross is Christ's loving gift of himself for 'me,' for us, for all. His death for sins was not anything other than an act of love, a voluntary gift of the self."

The Christian life is an invitation to participate in the life of God in Christ, by the power of the Spirit. God's gift is not only generous, it is demanding, it is an invitation to that self-same generosity, self-giving and sacrifice that is summed up in the words of Jesus, to take up the cross and follow him - and to do so in the light of his risen life and by the power of the Spirit.

It isn't much of a leap from the vocabulary of grace, gift and generosity to the theology of Advent, Christmas and Easter. John 3.16 and John 1.14 are as close as John gets to the Christmas story. God so loved the world that he Gave his only Son...the Word became flesh and welt among us." Gift, from start to finish. Generosity that breaks all the limits and calculations of any cost / benefit analysis to the Giver. Grace best understood in language that struggles for articulation - "He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich...thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift." Those are theological distillations of the Christmas story, and the Easter story, and the story of God. 

As Kapic says earlier in the book: "God's grace does not consist in anything we can hold in our hands, but in whose hands we are held." Pure Advent that!

Advent Book Endings 7:| The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin.

The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin still carries a theological punch, and sounds a wake-up call to the Church 46 years after it was published. My copy is one of the relatively few books I own that is heavily annotated and underlined (and would be really annoying if someone else now tried to read it!). I learned so much from this book. Here is the last couple of paragraphs, as he reflects on the parable of the talents, in particular the man who buried his boss's money for safekeeping, and the consequences for the church if it models its mission on similarly risk-averse playing safe with what it was given to invest.

"To invest the money with a view to a high rate of interest is to risk the capital. The church has often been afraid to do this, thinking that the faith once delivered to the saints is to be preserved inviolate and without the change of a comma. Verbal orthodoxy then becomes the supreme virtue and syncretism  becomes the most feared enemy. When this is the mood real dialogue becomes impossible. And so does real mission."

"If such a church is strong there can be a kind of proselytism but there is not that kind of mission which seriously expects the Holy Spirit to take what belongs to Christ and show it to the church thus leading the church to new truth. The mystery of the gospel is not entrusted to the church to be buried in the ground. It is entrusted to the church in order to be risked in the change and interchange of the spiritual commerce of humanity. It belongs not to the church but to the one who is both head of the church and head of the cosmos. It is within his power and grace to bring it to its full completion, that long hidden purpose, the secret of which has been entrusted to the church in order that it may become the open manifestation of the truth to all the nations." 

Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret. (London:SPCK,1978) pp.213-4.

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Isaiah promised that the Servant would become "a light to the nations." John wrote of "the true light that gives light to all, was coming into the world...in his was life and the life was the light of all people." Mission is a direct implicate of Advent, and Advent is the recurring call to mission.

All those years ago Newbigin insisted that God call's the church to take risks, to hazard its life on the gospel, to trust the truth and the resilience of the good news of Christ in the risky business of dialogue, discussion, proclamation and persuasion of human exchange. More than that - his was the call to the late 20th Century church to demonstrate in its life and character, its words and actions, its priorities and strategies, the truth of Christ the Saviour. And to do this by being communities of compassion, gatherings of forgiven and therefore forgiving sinners, incendiary fellowships in which the power of the Holy Spirit in transformed lives was primary evidence of the presence and activity of the living God. 

The gospel is a light that should never be buried in the ground, kept safe as if it could be lost. It sits on the table and gives light to all in the house; it's a well lit city visible from the furthest distance of human longing and need. As Newbigin's title says, the gospel is an "open secret", a mystery to be lived as well as spoken, beyond our best rational explanations which always reduce the wonder of God's love in Christ, but a message so full of meaning that it transforms the lives of those who come to believe, trust and surrender to all the risks of following Jesus. 

Some years after reading The Open Secret, I read the most influential book on mission published during my lifetime, David Bosch Transforming Mission. Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Yes, in the intervening years Bosch's thesis has been critiqued, questioned, refined, and eclipsed by more recent approaches. My point in mentioning it is that I read it during Advent, and ever since then, mission and Advent have a mutual resonance in the way I understand both. The Christmas story is the historical hinge-point when God's redemptive, reconciling and renewing mission entered human history in the person of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us. Advent and mission, is the faith that 'the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." The open secret, is that God is on the move, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.

Here is Newbigin earlier in his book, in provocative mode for emphasis, providing a good summary of the thrust of his argument:

"It is of the essence of the matter that Jesus was not concerned to leave as the fruit of his work a precise verbatim record of everything he said and did, but that he was concerned to create a community which would be bound to him in love and obedience, learn discipleship even in the midst of sin and error, and be his witnesses among all peoples."  (Page 176)  

 

Advent Book Endings 6: Faith, Hope and Love, Emil Brunner.

"But love is the real substance of faith and hope. We cannot say, God is faith; we cannot say, God is hope, but we can say, God is love. That is what God is, and that is what faith and hope are about. But love in itself is not a mere " relation to "; love, agape, is the thing itself. It is his presence, it is himself here and now in us. It is his being as our new being, his presence as our own present. Inasmuch as we have him, we have love, and inasmuch as we have love, agape, we have him and we are " present." This presence manifests itself in our relation to our fellow men, but also in the state of our own mind and heart. It is joy and peace as God's being is joy and peace.

Peace and joy are what everyone craves. That is true of every human being. But it is also true of every human being that his craving is not satisfied. Peace and joy can come into our hearts only by Christ, by God's own presence in them. There is no peace, within ourselves or with our neighbours, apart from reconciliation in Christ, because only if we are at peace with God can we have real peace in ourselves and with our fellow men. And peace with God we can have only through his forgiveness, through his taking away the burden of our past in the cross of Christ. Peace is the realization of his presence as our presence.

And joy! Joy is the feeling we have when we really are ourselves. But we can be ourselves only by being what God has created us to be — truly human. What makes us truly human is not reason, as the Greeks said; nor is it genius, or talent, or power, or intellect. All these can be very inhuman. It is only love in the sense of agape that makes us truly human. It is not cultural creativity but this simplest and deepest thing, agape, which makes us truly human. Giving love, not desiring love — spontaneous, unmotivated, unconditional love. That is what makes man truly human.

That is why only by having this love can we know real joy. The three are so closely connected as to be almost identical; joy, peace, and love — the three go together. They cannot be taken away from us by any circumstance, not even by death. And that is real presence. The one who is in God's love is at peace; he has joy, he has love, and he is truly present.

This is eternal life as experienced already in this temporal life. Its source and reality are in God's love as already given to faith, as expectation to be completed by hope, as a beginning of presence in our own love. God's being with us is shared by our being with our fellow men. This, then, is the unity in diversity of faith, hope, and love."

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Emil Brunner lived too close to the shadow of Karl Barth to be fully appreciated as the brilliant theologian and faithful Christian thinker that he undoubtedly was. Like all major theologians of previous generations, we have to read him to day with critical appreciation and intellectual humility. And with an absence of that 'chronological snobbery' C. S. Lewis identified as the sign of contemporary narrow mindedness - and theological short sightedness.

This is Advent, and there are plenty of possibilities for appropriate readings from Brunner's rich legacy. I've chosen this short, and now hard to find book, which contains three lectures delivered in 1955 in the United States. This is Brunner when most of his constructive theology and dogmatic positions were established and published.

By the way, that first paragraph could be a paraphrase of serial verses from I John: "God is love/ Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him." 

These three brief lectures (in published form under 80 pages) expound the spiritual and ethical fruits to be expected from his theological vision. The revelation of the love of God in Christ, incarnate, crucified, risen, has defining and transforming power that enables Christian life and existence, for each believer and for the community of the Church as the body of Christ.

This wee book is a treasure, containing the wisdom and faith of a theologian who takes time to ask and answer the question, "So what?" Faith, Hope, and Love, are the cardinal virtues. But to Brunner they are much more - they are hallmarks of grace. In digital terminology they are the barcode of discipleship, or QR codes for "Quick Recognition" of what Christian character and existence look like. 

I find it deeply moving that late in his life, and the year he suffered a debilitating stroke, we have these three theological reflections on faith as trustful encounter with the living God, love as the gift of God poured into human hearts, and the hope of the Gospel which is "Christ's ultimate, direct, and manifest victory, the fulfilment of God's world purpose which is announced in the cross of Jesus Christ." (p.48)

For Brunner, the Advent of God in Christ is a historic fact, the pivotal point in the unfolding drama of redemption. In Bethlehem, "the hopes and fears of all the years" are held together by this hinge point in the history of the cosmos. On Calvary "hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered. This is our God!"

Faith, hope and love, when expounded in the light of the Christian Gospel, are a threefold cord that holds together the tragedy of a fallen world and the eternal redemptive purpose revealed in the unique and decisive event, that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."

Brunner's concluding paragraphs, quoted in full above, describe the implications and ultimate fulfilment of that Advent word, Immanuel, God with us. Brunner looks to a transformed future when "the dwelling of God is with humanity." Not yet, but on its way to fulfilment, because God is faithful, sovereign in love, and to be trusted to bring to fruition the loving wisdom of his promises and the true fulfilment of his eternal purpose.

These three lectures contain quite a lot on forgotten questions and discussions. And as in all his books, I frequently have quite large question marks in the margins! But the theological and ethical impetus of Brunner's thought remains urgent, spiritually relevant, and worth the patience it takes to read and learn from this too easily overlooked theologian. Late in life, Brunner is sharing his understanding of what it means to him to live in faith, hope and love. 

NB: Faith, Hope and Love is available online. You can access and download it over here.  

Remembering with Gratitude Thomas Merton on the 56th Anniversary of His Death.

Today is the 56th Anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton. I owe a considerable debt to the writings and the witness of Merton. Of course there would be much on which we differ - but as a young and initially narrow and defensive evangelical, Merton taught me some of the essential inner dispositions of the disciple of Jesus.

 

For example, that to love God is to care about creation, humanity, and the big questions of justice, peace and compassion for the world. That the energising source of such gospel activism is contemplative prayer, and reflective silence before the Word. These, he repeatedly teaches, require costly availability and humble receptivity to the grace that comes from God, and a desire to live in such a way that Christ is visibly evident in who and what we are.

 

Here is Merton the monk, teaching an evangelical activist like me the first and foremost importance of love for God:

"But in all these things, it is the will to pray that is the essence of prayer, and the desire to find God, to see Him and to love Him is the one thing that matters. If you have desired to know Him and love Him, you have already done what is expected of you, and it is much better to desire God without being able to think clearly of Him, than to have marvellous thoughts about Him without desiring to enter into union with His will."

(New Seeds of Contemplation, p.227)