SOUL SURMISE

PAUL BUCHANAN - Mid Air

The Blue Nile were a musical phenomena. Four records in twenty years; thirty seven songs! Everyone haunting, melancholic and utterly majestic. Eight years after their last album, their singer Paul Buchanan releases his first solo project. The surprises on Mid Air are that it contains fourteen tracks; more than Blue Nile’s first seven years! Second that the songs weigh in at just over two and a half minutes; minimal sketches in Blue Nile terms. What is not surprising and still very much the same is the quality and elegiac beauty. With hardly more than a sparse piano tinkle and the odd dash of additional instrumentation Buchanan has hit that early hours of the morning sound; enough to make the whole room resonate with emotion and substance but no way enough noise to wake the neighbours. You do feel that you should be in a high up Glasgow apartment looking over the Mitchell Library like that photograph on the back of Deacon Blue’s Raintown album cover, trailing the lights of taxis and wondering about where they are going, who they are carrying and what goes on in their hearts and souls. Of course we are all much older than we were when we were untangling our worldviews to Walk Across The Rooftops, Raintown, Rattlesnakes and Swimmer and Mid Air is a mature work that deals with loss (I Remember You) domestic realities (Two Children) and the world weariness of 24 hour televised news (Newsroom). This is an album for gentle reflection on the big issues in the most minimalist of ways. As an artist with no Christian Creed to profess Buchanan still stretches life so far that he needs to name check Jesus and linger ever so briefly in spaces of spirit.  That soft sturdy slow burn Buchanan voice gives us aching catharsis and joyous glimpses of grace in the same poignant and gorgeous melodious couplet. Sublime!

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 4... Grace In The Mirror

Grace in the mirror! That is where I am going to concentrate for a moment to show that Grace has been confined to a doctrinal sentence rather than a living reality. When I worked as a Chaplain I became aware of the pressures on how students looked, particularly the girls but not exclusively so. It became very obvious very quickly that girls were taking a lot of time with hair straighteners and doing make up before they left their rooms. I don’t mean leaving the Hall, just their room. To go to the communal areas of the Residence where I lived with them meant as much work on how they looked as going to some formal event. When this effort was the same before we went on to a township building site on cold South African winter mornings while working with Habitat For Humanity. Why? My wife challenged my female students by asking that for the 24 hours before they came to a Girls Group they wouldn’t use straighteners or make up. No one made it! We haven’t even got on to fashion labels which adds more pressure and higher bills!

It is into this kind of world that I believe Grace should ease the pressure, liberate and turn the world upside down. When a young, or middle aged, or old, woman looks in the mirror in the morning does grace come out of its sentence and live in ways that change her life. Loved as you are!? Do we believe it. Magazine editors around the world and fashion houses and the cosmetic industries will bully us into what they want to define as “culturally” beautiful. Can grace interrupt such a pressure? Can we see ourselves as beautiful the way God made us and be content in the unconditional love that he lavishes on us. I know it is a huge ask but Jesus didn’t bring grace as just an idea or just a ticket to heaven. Jesus spoke and acted about this grace in such a way that the world and individual lives in it would be set free from the pressure of a first are first order of things! The psychologists tell us that our basic human needs are love and security. God’s grace brings us a love that is secure. It is not fickle like the world’s love. From its foundation a confidence will grow which will allow people to be part of the world transformation that God ultimately wants.

Grace is a scandal. It is also scandalous that Christians are walking around captive to a first are first world when liberation has been won and is at hand. Let’s set grace free to be part of every aspect of our living.

Lyric For The Day 30.5.12 from Spiritual America by Duke Special

“All the good we could have done

Could have done for everyone

Is this the land of the setting sun

Have we forgotten who we were

And why we came here anyway

So pick up the reins and kick the spur

 

Shackled and shamed and stripped of its voice

Left in a corner to suffer the noise

Made by corporate thugs and their fat City boy

Being sick on their wealth like they hadn’t a choice”

-          From Spiritual America by Duke Special

 

I reckon that this is Duke Special’s most powerful moment, from perhaps his most satisfying work to date Under The Dark Cloth. Writing with one of  England’s finest living songwriters Boo Hewerdine has done his Dukeness no harm and this project of writing to photographs in a gallery with an orchestra as baking brings out the art if Duke perfectly. Spiritual America is a political spiritual piece of beautiful Semtex. The lyrics probe deep into the heart of the American soul and paint an accurate but bleak picture of the state of a nation founded on so much better ideals and dreams that most people’s reality of it today, inside or outside the country. For Duke it is a spiritual issue and he is right. The Pilgrim Fathers came with a spiritual dream and in the drama created by the strings on this recording we might be in the last days of the spiritual nightmare that was gotten to somehow! Greed, bankers, selfishness, gracelessness... Duke squeezes them all in. A sad and powerful piece!

 

SURMISING SCANDALOUS GRACE Pt 3

(this is part 3 of a series called Surmising Scandalous Grace... reading part 1 and 2 might be helpful...) 

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 1

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 2

Last Sunday as I was preaching on this idea of scandalous grace I had two Scripture readings. The first was well known words from Ephesians 2: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. ⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, ⁷ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. ⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.^”  These verses are inspirational words; Paul’s most concise précis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We can be reconnected with God not by our own religiosity, karma balance or good works. It is God’s unmerited favour, grace, that changes who we are.

My other reading was Jesus most imaginative parable that has become known as The Prodigal Son. In this story a son takes his chunk of his father’s inheritance and goes and blows it on “wild living.” Having wasted it all he found himself eating with the pigs he was looking after, the last place a Jewish boy would want to be, and thinks that his dad might give him a job as one of his servants. Heading home he must have wondered how his father would react; he deserved a darn good thrashing. When he saw his father running down the road towards him he must have expected the worst and yet his dad throws his arms around him and gives him a party. This is not as it should be. It is scandalous. That’s what his brother thinks who has been loyal and faithful to his father down the Prodigal’s wasted years.  

Ephesians is a concise theological explanation of grace. Jesus story of the Prodigal Son from Luke chapter 15 is a wonderful story of grace.  The entire Bible is obsessed grace from Genesis through Revelation. What I believe to be a scandal is that we have trapped grace in these readings. We have reduced it to a doctrine; perhaps the most important doctrine in the history of Protestant Christianity but doctrine all the same. We have reduced it to a story, even if the most magnificent story. As I pastor of a Church I am amazed that, although almost the entire congregation could define and even preach on grace, very few see it vibrantly alive in their everyday lives.

Grace is much more than a ticket into a relationship with God, important and all as that is. Grace is the key into the kingdom but also the energy of the Kingdom. It is grace that fires a different way to live; it is not a statement but a force. Grace is also the new life lived. We treat everyone in our lives the way God has treated us by his grace. Grace is not a fictitious story but the story we write in lives lived in this radical way. Every relationship and every decision is under the authority of God’s grace.

(part 4 will look at Grace as a living breathing life force...)

SOUL SURMISING A SCANDALOUS GRACE... Part 2

 

We live in a Graceless world. It is a world where the first are first and the last are last. And so it should be. It seems so sensible and rational and logical. If we score 95 in an examination and are given a fail we will take it to a tribunal and fight for justice. The first should be first! The cool are affirmed and accepted. The beautiful are sought after. The talented go far. If you are none of these things then, what are you expecting? A nerd fronting the world’s best rock band! Two left feet replacing Sergio Aguero in the Manchester City attack! A failure at GCSE getting accepted for a post grad in nuclear physics at Oxford! Come on! No, it is a world where the first are first and the last are last. So it should be. We love our graceless world.

Unfortunately such a world leads to inferiority complexes, insecurities, stress and anorexia, depression, self abuse, addictions and suicide! These mental illnesses are all a result of our failure to win in a world where the world are first. Even when the rare few reach first place many of them end up messed up because of the struggle to remain there. The rest of us, without a hope of first, end up in failed attempts to impress and a fakeness and shallowness that is hoping beyond hope that people never get to know what we are really like. We will struggle in the darkness of a world where everyone lives a constant struggle to be the first and avoid being the last; first are first screws us all up!

What if? What if there was another way; a very different way. What if there was a world where the last were first! What if there was a world where you were loved as you are; completely. What a revolutionary idea. What a radical concept. It is almost scandalous, there very thought of it; the scoundrel would get the prize. This other way is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God loved us as we were and loved us so much that he demonstrated his love for us in this that while we were sinners Christ died for us. It will be very difficult place to get to with the default button that we humans begin with. It doesn’t seem how it should be. Yet, it is our only hope. It is our salvation. It is called Grace, it means unmerited favour and Jesus was born, lived, died and was raised to life in order that such an idea could become a reality. Loved as you are and loved in such a way that you can be made into who you could become. Wow!