SOUL SURMISE

RUSHING OUT OF LOCKDOWN - NOT COOL... NOT BIG... NOT CLEVER!

When my children were small I remember watching a TV documentary. A teacher gave a child five sweets and told them that they were now leaving the room for fifteen minutes. If the sweets were still there when the teacher returned the children were promised more sweets.

Then, most entertainingly, we were treated to watching the decisions and actions of the children when they were alone in the room. Of course most took the sweets in front of them. 

It was a version of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and the research showed that those who waited ended up with better health, higher exam results and more positive in various other outcomes.

I have thought a lot about that wee experiment as the weeks of lockdown have lengthened. 

I have heard so many suggest that they cannot wait any longer to get out from under these draconian laws. It’s a free country and we shouldn’t be asked to live like this. Sadly, some were politicians!

We need shops and we need them now. We need to get to a beach and we need to go now. We need Liverpool to get the trophy and we need them to get it now. They remind me of those who children who were not clever enough to wait.

Now I am not suggesting the stupidity of Liverpool fans even though I support Manchester City and am happy that the Premiership stays where it is! 

No… this is much more serious than sweets. As a society we have gone through the challenge of a generation but can I suggest that the next few months might be an even bigger challenge. If we can hold back our temptation to have a little now, we can have more people alive and a more healthy environment to come back out into later down the line. Eating my sweets NOW would be murderously stupid!

Stay Home might not have been easy for many but at least we knew what was what. The shops were closed. The parks too. The police were stopping you driving too far. 

It was hard but it was easy. It is not going to be so easy when we start opening up. Then we will not be living by law but by mature decision making.

Stay Alert is a trickier deal. It needs the maturity and intelligence of a child who can refrain from a few sweets to get a load more. Staying alert means that even when things open up we need to be about the longer game. What we do in these months coming out of lockdown will effect the results in the future, maybe even if we… or our neighbours… live or die.

Why am I concerned as my life and my loved ones lives might well come down to the intelligence, maturity and selfless discipline of our nation! A shiver runs through me just typing that! Can you see what Stay At Home, plain and simple, still seems a good idea to me!!

The spiritual life is in play here too. The apostle Paul spoke about how the law was a pedagogue (teacher) saving us from our immature selves until Christ came to redeem us and then by the indwelling Holy Spirit brought about our maturity. “Strict laws are for children and freedom is only a good thing in the hands of the mature,” is a very loose paraphrase of Paul in Galatians 3;23-25.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are those who claim to be followers of Jesus and immaturely stlll worship at its altar and try to burden us all with their childishness. There are those with no interest in Jesus who act more maturely. That is how the world is.

However, what I am taking 600 words in this blog to say is that we need a maturity that perhaps we have never been tested for before. We need a social intelligence that is always looking AHEAD rather than at the NOW. We need a discipline that will re-programme every social interaction. We need a Love Your Neighbour that sacrifices every impatience to get what we want in order to stay alive and keep others alive too. 

Rushing out of lock down is not COOL… it’s not BIG… and it’s not CLEVER!

WE LOVE YOU - TRIBUTE TO LUCIA QUINNEY MEE (28.5.1999 - 24.5.2020)

The Stockman hearts are broken today as our dear friend Lucia Quinney Mee passed away. Lucia was like a soul mate to our daughters, an extra daughter to Janice and I.

She lived in the same cul-de-sac where we have a house in Ballycastle. A friend told me we needed to meet the Quinney Mees. They had been missionaries in El Salvador, then worked for a time at Corrymeela. 

It was our daughters, then maybe three to six years old who connected one sunny day and soon were all splashing in our kiddies pool. They were four buddies ever since, walking through childhood and their teens. Lucia would have been 21 on Thursday.

We have so many incredible happy memories. Yet, I guess Lucia’s story stood out in sad and wonderful ways. Around 2007 the girls came up to a Chaplaincy night at Derryvolgie Hall, where I was Chaplain. They did their dance routine, cute kids loved by our students. Lucia’s eyes were a little yellowish… within a week she was in an operating theatre in Birmingham Children’s Hospital receiving her first liver transplant. 

Lucia received her fourth liver in King’s Hospital, London the day before New Year’s Eve 2019. Sadly, she never quite made it through. For five months she has battled with her amazing parents and sister by her side. We hoped. We prayed but as her dad told us “sometimes love is not enough to hold a body together.”

Through twelve years and those first three livers Lucia has lived the most incredible, inspirational life. She became a swimming star at British and World Transplant Games. Gold medals were plentiful. She carried the Olympic torch in 2012.

She set up a charity Live Loudly, Donate Proudly while ill before her third liver transplant that encourages people to donate organs. In 2016 she organised a Gala Dinner for Transplant charities and her speech was so mature and articulate. 

She also spoke at the 4 Corners Festival Banquet in January 2018 when we celebrated families who donated their loved ones organs to others. 

Her Live Loudly Donate Proudly blog showed an exceptional flair for writing for one so young.

In 2017 she was the youngest in the Queens New Year’s Honour’s List, receiving a British Empire Medal. She also got to have lunch with the Queen herself.

In between all of that there were parties and pop concerts and all the stuff a young woman does. In spite of all she had to go through Lucia lived loudly and more than that selflessly. In the pool she swam for her donors whom she never knew but never forgot. She wanted others to have the gift of life she was given for those twelve years. She was a world changer. 

We loved her. We admired her. We will miss her very much but her inspiration will always be with us. Our prayers and love are with her parents David and Rachel and her sister Alice. They are pretty heroic themselves. 

Her dad ended his sad message today by reminded us that Lucia finished all her Live Loudly Donate Proudly blogs “you sign up, Lucia’s signing off.”

 

I remember you, tiny in the corner

Coming over to splash in the water

I had no idea that down the years

You’d become an extra daughter

I remember the Chinese lanterns

Going up in the New Year sky

Writing how you’d change the world

And wondering how they fly

I regret not seeing you in the pool

When, even second, you were a winner

Olympic torch and Empire medal

The Queen inviting you for dinner

I remember your big Gala night

When as well as your beautiful fashion

You spoke courage beyond your years

With articulate flair and passion

Live loudly donate proudly

Is exactly who you are

And in every dark night of my soul

I’ll go searching for your star

 

We loved you and we love you

You will always have our love 

But for holding bodies together

Earthly love is not enough

But we will love you

For love is the best thing

Love is the only thing

Love is the eternal thing

We love you. 

 

THE WOW OF ASCENSION DAY - Belfast Telegraph Column 23.5.2020

(This was my Belfast Telegraph column published on May 23, 2020. It is based on a blog already published. I want to thank Malcolm Guite for the permission to use his poem. This is the poem I was referring to in my Ascension sermon in Fitzroy on May 24, 2020)

 

This past Thursday was Ascension Day. My friend Dani tells me that in Germany they have a school holiday. Growing up Presbyterian I hardly ever heard of it. 

Yet, Jesus’ Ascension is of vital theological importance. For me it sits alongside his birth, his death and his resurrection in its significance. In Luke chapter 9 when Jesus sets his eyes on the culmination of his ministry Luke doesn’t suggest that that is not his cross or resurrection but - “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem”.

When Paul was writing to the Church in Ephesus he explained the implications of the Ascension.  “That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” 

When I preach on the ascension I often use a poem written by Anglican priest, poet and songwriter Malcolm Guite. His Ascension Day Sonnet is stunning in both theological insight and literary flair.

Malcolm begins with the experience of the disciples as Luke records them in Luke 24 and Acts 1:

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place

Malcolm then opens up the eternal meaning of that event:

As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.

Here is the Cosmic zig zag. In the nativity God becomes human. In the ascension, God as a human, flesh on, returns to heaven.

We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,

Jesus spoke to the disciples about the oneness between them as he and his Father were one. Mysteriously he brings us with him and rules over the cosmos for the Church.

I so love the thought that Jesus took us “into the heart of things.” The idea of humans on the pulse of the government of the universe. Wow. What Jesus sings is where we find solace in these challenging days we are living through.  

Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,

This is very good news when you are struggling through a pandemic and find yourself in lock down and isolation. This cosmic rule of Christ is how we find resilience, hope and imagination... the power to live the faith and redeem the world.

The ascension means that Jesus is now ruler of the Cosmos. This a wonderful belief to hold in our current disorientation. In the seeming uncertainty of where the delicate steps out of lock down, we have a God who came to us, redeemed us and now stands strong for us at the very heart of all things. It is worth believing. It is worth celebrating. To finish Malcolm’s Sonnet:

Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.

 

Ascension Day Sonnet is available in Malcolm Guite’s book Sounding the Seasons and is published by Canterbury Press.

 

READINGS:

LUKE 9: 51-56

ACTS 1:3-8

EPHESIANS 1: 18-23

COLOSSIANS 3: 1-4

1 PETER 3: 13-22

JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT - REUNIONS

I don’t believe that the Cornovarius was God given but I do believe that God can use it for the good of earth and we humans upon it. Likewise, I do not believe that Jason Isbell’s alcoholism was God given but my has Isbell’s recovery from it set him above most every other songwriter of his generation.

Oh I would be into that Isbell sound whatever. I love that borderline between rock and country, particularly when it is inhabited by a purist songwriter. That is the homeland of Isbell and his 400 Unit. He stands with the Springsteens, Pettys and Mellencamps as much as he is up to neck in Nashville.

What though raises Isbell above the bar is his introspection. He asks the daily questions that my searching of soul needs. His songs are more consistently a soundtrack to my spiritual journey than most other artists. 

Even U2! Where I would go to U2 for theology, I would go to Isbell for the personal. I’d almost call it discipleship. I believe that the courageous challenge of getting and staying sober are the reason for such a posture and therefore the songs.

Reunions can be described perfectly in so many poetic lines from the record. I’ll begin with a couplet from River: - 

 

“But now I'm tired and a little bit confused

Regarding what I meant to do and what I did”

 

Reunions are songs about what a human being should be doing. It is about how to be a good person, husband, father and in the working out of vocation. Isbell spends a lot of time with the ghosts of his past, in regret, learning and forgiveness.

He then brings that critique to bear on how now to live. The opening lines are telling and a wonderful mantra:

 

What've I done to help?

What've I done to help?

Somebody save me

What've I done to help?

What've I done to help?

And not myself?

 

There it is. A searching of the past. I need to be fixed and an ambition to help others and not just himself. I am with him not only in singing along but in the excavating of soul and determination to contribute.

My current favourite song Be Afraid applies all of this to Isbell’s vocation. He is asking for more from his peers in the music industry suggesting that they are soft and compromising and not using their currency to help others and change the world. 

 

And if your words add up to nothing

Then you're making a choice

To sing a cover when we need a battle cry

 

Isbell believes that there has really been a better time for a battle cry and suggests that we should commit to change no matter the cost. I find that his chorus speaks as much to a Presbyterian minister in Northern Ireland as it does a singer in Nashville:

 

Be afraid, be very afraid

Do it anyway

 

Elsewhere I will turn to Letting You Go when my daughter goes off to University and It Gets Easy (but it never gets easier) will be a helpful companion as life throws losses of any sort my way.

If the content of Reunions resonates in my soul more than most other rock albums have in recent years, so too the sound. Southeastern was my album of the year back in 2013 and though I’ve loved Something More Than Free and The Nashville Sound, Reunions is even more immediate and accessible. 

The opening What Have I Done To Help come across all Michael Kiwanuka with its fluid funky bass line and Mark Knopfler’s guitar sound influences a couple or three others. Everything is ear grabbing. 

Isbell's lyrics are trademark. He's almost better than anyone else mentioned in this review for his vivid images, short stories, wonderful rhymes, fascinating rhythms and memorable lines. 

If we give it time and Reunions will grab our soul too and give them a good spring clean and maybe make us all better human beings. Now that is a record!

TOMORROW ON FITZROY TV - 24.5.2020

Tomorrow on Fitzroy TV our Sunday Service will go live at 11am.

It is Ascension Sunday and we will ask why such a wow event in God’s salvation history should be less considered then Cinderella!

We will be with the disciples as they go into a lockdown in Jerusalem, told by Jesus to wait and see how the promise they hold in their lockdown is only possible because of the Ascension. 

We will also find lessons for our own lock down and indeed comfort for those who find lockdown tragedy within lockdown.

We will also have a video from India, prayers for India and Bangladesh and our legal authorities in Lockdown. 

Worship will be led by Stephanie Hall and we will have special songs from Erin Humphrey and a Fitzroy special as we do our own version of the UK Blessing!

In the evening at 7pm we go live with Gary Burnett’s Paul in Ten, an amazing series of short ten minute teachings on the theology of the apostle Paul. Tomorrow Gary will look at Paul and poverty. Was Paul just a thinker? Had he any interest in the poor and needy? Gary will throw light.

 

see tomorrow's... and past services HERE