SOUL SURMISE

A THIN LINE - PRAYERS OR BLASPHEMY

(in 1998 I had the honour of contributing to Jimmy Abegg's book Ragamuffin Prayers along with others like Brennan Manning, Amy Grant and Mike Yaconelli. I looked at the influence of the Irish language on the use of God and Jesus in Ireland today. I have edited it only slightly.)

It is a thin line between superstition and useful spiritual discipline. Between spontaneous connection with the Divine and using of the name of the Lord our God in vain. Between the prayer of a Ragamuffin and the blasphemy of careless souls. However, something makes me think that the cry of the divine expletive may in some instances, maybe the minority of instances but instances none the less, be the most fragile of Ragamuffin prayers.

I grew up in Ballymena, Co Antrim in the northern part of the island of Ireland. The northern counties are to Ireland what the southern states are to America – Bible belt. There is a puritanical backdrop to life. Regulations once brought in to help towards holiness have drifted recklessly towards a legalism that the Pharisees would have liked Jesus to bring to earth with him. The use of the Lord’s name is very much protected and rightly so, I reckon.. When I hear someone utter “Jesus Christ” or “Oh my God” there is a shudder that races up my evangelical spine. My sin radar sends bright sulphurous flashes across my soul. 

Thirty years into my life and thirteen into my Christian pilgrimage I moved to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. From a predominantly Protestant and saturated evangelical culture I found myself in a country where a merely 4% of the population was Protestant. It was 1991 and Ireland was still very much Roman Catholicism that I was often told was the one great enemy to my Christian faith. It was a massive learning curve and many things were reassessed in the three years I lived there. One of them was this use of Divine expletives. Particularly with older folk I found a different attitude behind the use of “God” and “Jesus” in their daily shouts of wonder and cries of struggle.

So even now over twenty years after my Dublin sojourn I’m wondering could these shouts and cries be Ragamuffin prayers. Genuine calls to God in praise and pleading. Sincere attempts at connecting with the Divine in the every day moments of life. A daily connection which harks back to the Celtic Christianity of Ireland’s past where blessings and prayers were threaded into every chore, every meeting, every part of the daily routine.

So I have been talking to my good friend Timothy Flaherty an Irish speaker (very rare among Protestants) with a degree in the Language (almost unheard of among Protestants) about Gaelic greetings. His feedback has been very interesting. If you meet someone one on the roads of the Gaeltacht instead of saying “hello” you would say “Dia duit” (God save you). The reply would be “Dia is Muire duit” (God and Mary save you) and though it rarely goes there, there would be a listing of saints from Pádraig to Brid to Colmcille and beyond. Blessings are an important part of the everyday greetings and sayings in the old Irish. Entering a house you would say “Dia sa teach” (God in the house) or leaving someone instead of “goodbye” you would say “Beannacht leat” (blessings with you) or possibly “Go dtuga Dia slán abhaile tú” (May God give you a safe homeward journey). 

This is in keeping with all that we know of the Celtic tradition where all of life lies under God’s watchful eye and in every minute of every tiny daily chore God is waiting for communion. There was no setting to the side moments or hours of prayer and worship and reflection and the rest of the time being lived in a different mode than those holy moments. There were prayers and blessings for the lighting of the fire, the milking of the cows and the making of the bed. Every opportunity was taken to use the seemingly mundane to reflect and be reminded of God’s presence. Today as Irish Catholics pass a Chapel they will cross themselves. Perhaps like our helpful evangelical regulations have drifted into reckless legalism, some of their rituals have become empty superstition but for some it is a very real chance to be reminded of God on their journey to work or the shops.

So maybe it is from this heritage that I have heard reverence in the cry for God. Maybe the difference between blasphemy and reverence is whether the searching soul of a Ragamuffin mutters the God word or it is the careless empty heartedness of the cynic or the cold blooded disparager. It is becoming my belief that some expletives are the reaching for the transcendent in the best of the Psalmist tradition. The Psalms are dominated with the awe inspired worship or the confused cry for some sense in the midst of tragedy. And so I remember feeling guilty as a seventeen year old when on my first trip to Canada I was so overwhelmed by downtown skyscrapers that I was speechless, apart from a God word. Today I feel freer to see it as a Ragamuffin in the jaws of wonder. 

When the news came across the radio on Saturday August 15, 1998 that a bomb had exploded in Omagh during the busiest part of the afternoon, much of my island let out that seemingly careless shriek of pain and despair. The “Oh my God no!” as the day and week progressed was the most honest and vulnerable response to a situation where no other words could articulate our loss. We were all Ragamuffins screeching with our minds in tatters. We were left scratching our souls for meaning. In what some might have seen as our blaspheming, and it’s a thin line, we were heard by a God who is “the Comforter” not “the explainer”. I reckon He was angry too. 

My nearly articulate first responses to the tragedy eventually gave way to more carefully considered words. Here is the prayer I prayed on Radio Ulster the following Friday.

IN A WEEK LIKE THIS 

Lord, we come to the end of another week
Except it hasn't been just another week
It has been the worst week of our lives
And even worse for some
Lord help us to be honest, vulnerable and somehow hopeful in the reflection of our feelings

Lord we have been shocked
Shocked by how one tiny second can tear our lives apart
Shocked by how far humanity can fall
Shocked by how callous and painful mankind's actions can stoop

Lord, we are grieving
Grieving for the loss of lives with so much love and energy still to give
Grieving for the man and woman and child who we will never be able to hold again
Grieving for our history that is as sad and twisted as this

Lord we are confused
Confused at why this should happen
Confused about how this should happen to the innocent
Confused about where you and faith enter into these events

Lord we have been angry
Angry at why we allowed our family and friends to go shopping
Angry at how evil people could rip our world asunder
Angry that you allowed it to happen

Lord we are seeking
Seeking some kind of feeble consolation in the midst of our deluge of tears
Seeking some kind of hope that good might come from this evil
Seeking your Spirit whom Jesus called a Comforter to whisper into our maddening silence

Lord we are squinting for faith
Faith that the majority might have some kind of a say in the future
Faith that love will end our hate, good will end our evil and grace will touch our broken hearts
Faith in a God who is as angry as we are and who is reaching out his hand to us. 

Lord we are remembering
Remembering those who today can no longer be shocked, grieve, be angry, be confused, seek or squint for faith
Remembering that you watched as your son covered in blood, died at the futile whim of injustice
Remembering that that very death is the only thing that we can grope in the dark for in a week like this. 

Lord we have planted our loved ones deep in the bloody earth of Ireland this week
We have watered them with our tears
Lord may you allow them to be seeds of a love that will grow into our peace. 

Lord remember us.

MISSION... AND RETREAT... DIFFERENT BUT MINGLED

It has almost become a catch phrase. As I was leaving Belfast, so many people shouted at me to “kiss the African sun.” It is a poem I wrote a couple of summers ago for my friend Alain Emerson. I had just returned from Uganda as he was leaving to go. “I’ll kiss the African sun for you,” he texted.

It made me think of mission and what we do here. It reminded me of the school he founded here, for his late wife, who features in those first lines. 

The key, though, is the last line, “let that African sun kiss you.” Go and give but take in what’s given back to you.

The Sunday before I left Fitzroy I preached from Philippians 4. I find that here is where Paul begins to touch on, what I call, mutual partnership in mission.

As I see it, when our Fitzroy team arrives here on July 3rd, they will be on mission. We will be sharing the good news of Jesus in words and deeds, helping to bring a little more of the kingdom of God to a little community on the edge off Arua, on the edge of north west Uganda. Mission!

But running alongside that will be Retreat. Some go on retreat to a monastery or quiet places set up for contemplation or teaching. Retreats are for finding a different space to be inspired and refilled by the Holy Spirit. For our team Arua will be that kind of space. I always come away refreshed in my soul. Retreat!

So… mission… kissing the African sun.

So … retreat… allowing the African sun to kiss you.

So… mission and retreat on the one trip, different but mingling together. 

 

Her last seed fell so hard

The cruelest smite of all

Then bursting through the pain

A harvest of light for all

Go help make an eternal difference

Turn around every fallen inference

Give the children back their innocence

And kiss the African sun.

 

Throw and scatter and sow

Find more seeds in the cup

Watch harvest yield a harvest

Curse all the weeds ripped up

Love until we all know grace has won

Burn until hopelessness is over and done

Leave nothing out there after the run

And kiss the African sun

Oh kiss that African sun

 

They say that we are rich

But we are only rich in shillings

Oh the wealth of their resilience

Innovation and being willing

They say that they are poor

But they are only poor in shillings.

 

Go and share our mutual poverty

Learn what mutual wealth can do

Bring back home the blessings of God

And let the Africa sun kiss you

Let that African sun kiss you!

GRACE - OXYGEN OF ANOTHER WORLD BUT...

“Grace is the oxygen of another world and we like breathing our own.” I used this phrase as an illustration in a sermon a few years back. I think there is something in it. I thought it it was worth writing down and surmising a little further. 

Jesus truth was grace. God was interrupting the way the world was with the way the world could be, God’s way. It was a scandalous truth that ultimately got Jesus crucified. The world couldn’t handle anything so subversively ridiculous. 

Jesus illustrated it well in his parable of the Prodigal Son. As the religious leaders of his day listened in, Jesus painted a vivid picture of a rascal who took his father’s inheritance and squandered it on sex and drugs and rock n roll, to give it a modern twist. Finding himself destitute he heads for home. As the story moves towards climax you can almost hear the Holywood soundtrack building the tension. 

Jesus says that the father sees the rogue from afar and the religious leaders are getting all excited about what judgement is going to come down... and... the father wraps his arms around him, puts a ring on his finger and throws a party. 

Jesus mentions the loyal, good living, brother as a comparison to the wild hedonist which makes even more acute the sense of the injustice. 

Grace. It seems madness but it is our only hope. It is God’s way of love; loved as we are without merit. Did I say ridiculous?

The follower of Jesus is more than aware of the amazing grace that embraces the wretch and brings the wholeness of salvation. As Paul put it so well in Ephesians, “It is by grace you are saved through faith...” In Philippians he spoke of this in his own life, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.” 

For Paul this was a whole different oxygen. From attempting by his own efforts at holiness to relying on God’s interruption of grace what Jesus achieved for him in his life, death and resurrection.

Down though the history of Christianity it has been a struggle for those who, like Paul, get this theological eureka moment. Falling into the arms of God’s grace like Jacob, Moses, David, Zaccheus and Paul before us we then go back to preferring the oxygen that we grew up on. 

We start to set little legalist systems and then pummel ourselves under the guilt of failing to live up to them. No matter how much we believe in the doctrine of grace we look in the mirror in the morning and would rather be better looking, thinner, more successful and more holy. We never allow ourselves to be loved as we are, as grace informs us we are. Then as we go back to breathing that old oxygen we cut off the supply of the new oxygen that not only loves us as we are but has the transformative power to love us into who God can make us be.

BAD RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BIBLE - YOU CAN'T LEAVE IT ON THE WASHING MACHINE

I have been concerned in recent days about our relationship with the Bible. Three real life scenarios will open up my fears. I was on a social media discussion and someone shared how she was ashamed of herself as she had come in from Church on Sunday, left her Bible on the washing machine in the utility room and had not lifted it for almost a week. My immediate reaction was, “I wish!” 

Wouldn’t it be great if the Bible was the kind of thing that could be set down? It was certainly never God’s intention that it could be left anywhere. It was his idea that it would become apart of us. Paul told the Colossians that they should let the “word of God dwell in you richly”. I find it pouring into my mind and heart and soul in all kinds of daily scenarios while the hard copy is back on my desk! It is not to be contained in lines on pages and bound by leather and gold edge. This is a book that is not so much about you reading it but it reading you. 

The next scenario comes from a sermon that was all about the dangers of the junk that modern culture fills our minds with. I have no argument with that! The preacher, however, suggested that we maybe watch as much as five hours television a night and then only give ten minutes to reading the Bible. Again this is a shocking understanding of the Bible and its relationship to us and our living. It seems that we have compartmentalised the Bible and entertainment. They live in separate rooms and there is no door between. The Bible was never meant to have its own place. It was meant to seep through every pore of our lives. As I am watching the news, film drama, music and even sport that the Bible, even without it open on my lap, is helping me think about all I am watching in a Biblical way. 

The last story is about someone who was worried about their relationship with God. When asked in what ways, it all came down to the amount she was reading the Bible. Though my friend should rightfully have sought some help in re-igniting her Bible reading the fact that she was not reading it has little to do with her relationship with God. Yet she has been taught that it was. Indeed she has been taught that it was the be all and end all of her faith. Of course it is not. For centuries after Christ’s ascension nobody had a Bible to read. Did they have no relationship with God? Of course not! Bible reading notes are a phenomenon of the last fifty years so were the Christians who never heard the words “quiet time” for 1900 years, all living in a dodgy relationship with God. Of course not!

All three of the above stories reveal a fatally faulty mindset when it comes to our relationship with The Bible. And before anybody sees my motives as diminishing the importance of the Bible to our Christian tradition let me state that my concerns are quite the opposite. The above stories are the effects of our containing and confining the Scriptures, of making them too small in their impact. It could well be one of the devil’s crucial distractions that realising we are committed so much to Scripture he abuses that commitment to distort its place. In the end the Bible becomes an end in itself instead of a means to transform our lives and the world!

Bible reading is not so much discipleship as a resource for discipleship. Doing a quiet time is not following Jesus, he never did one! Jesus hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners. That is what we should be doing. The Bible is the wisdom to resource our discernment and give us courage in our decisions as we try to do what Jesus would have done! So on a night where we watch five hours of television and do a ten minute quiet time the entire evening should be a resource for Bible study because as we watch we should be wrestling with its truth and how it applies to every scenario on the screen. And if it comes alive in your dealing with the issues that culture raises then your thinking will be released into every conversation in every area of your life and therefore society and the Bible will suddenly be alive all around us instead of lying like some dead book on the washing machine!

Now something that needs said as we draw this thought to a conclusion. Before it can read you, you have to have read it. So if it is not dwelling in you richly don’t leave it on the washing machine. Get into it. Read it until its coming out of your ears (heart, soul and mind!) but do so not in order to make yourself feel smugly in touch with God today but so that eventually you will not be able to leave it down because it will go absolutely everywhere with you, pages flicking up to teach us, rebuke us, correct us and train us in righteousness so that we are thoroughly equipped for every good work as Paul told Timothy it would do!

So where is your Bible?

ASCENSION - ITS VITAL THEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE

I never remember much fuss about Ascension Day in any Church I have worshipped in. My friend Dani tells me that in Germany they have a school holiday. Here in Northern Ireland, Protestant Churches probably think that celebrating the Church year is a bit Catholic! We need to realise that the wars of Reformation and Counter Reformation are over and we can ringback some babies thrown out with he bath water back then.

Jesus’ Ascension is of vital theological importance. In Luke 9 when Jesus sets his eyes on the culmination of his ministry Luke doesn’t suggest that that is his cross or resurrection but - “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem”.

A look at Paul’s salvation theology from Ephesians 1:19-23 reveals the consequences 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.”

It is time for us in Protestant Northern Ireland to recognise the ascension as a major Jesus moment, alongside the nativity, the cross and the resurrection. This cosmic rule of Christ is how we find resilience, hope and imagination... the power to live the faith and redeem the world.  

My sermon on ascension in Fitzroy was built around a poem by Malcolm Guite. Malcolm is an Anglican priest, poet, songwriter and educator. Check out his website - https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com

Ascension - Malcolm Guite

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
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,
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.

Let us look…

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

Luke records Jesus ascension in both Luke 24 or Acts 1. I wonder what they were feeling…

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,

Before his ascension, indeed before his cross, Jesus spoke to the disciples about the oneness between them as he and his Father were one. He spoke of the vine and the branches. Mysterious he brings us with him and rules over the cosmos for the Church.

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

I love Malcolm’s images here. He is the songwriter and the idea of Jesus singing his intercession for us in heaven and us left to “sing the waning darkness into light.”

The ascension… Jesus now as ruler of the Cosmos… holds the power… for us to be witnesses… The disciples who watched Jesus disappear are those who were called to be witnesses. For us that is to be in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and to the ends of the earth.

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY - THE TUNNEL BETWEEN BROKENNESS AND HEALING

 

Sunday is Remembrance Sunday and I am always a little uneasy as I prepare for it. It is good to remember but remembering is a very sensitive thing. For most of us we are thinking about wars from 70 and 100 years ago. In recent years I have had Italians and Germans in the congregations where we have been remembering. That can be tricky.

 

My favourite song quote on Remembrance weekend is from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It sets the tone for our remembering:

 

 “I see your flags on the marble arch

But love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”  

 

In the Bible we read that the aim of God’s redemption for the world has nothing to do with war. The Bible is about shalom, swords turned into ploughshares, in a day that’s coming when we shall be free from war. 

 

As I prepare for our act of Remembrance in Fitzroy this Sunday I see my job as filling the tunnel between; between the war that we remember and our hoped for God’s Kingdom come when war will be finished with. 

 

Luke 6: 27-36 is a challenging a passage of Scripture for such tunnels, even more for those who dare claim to follow Jesus in Northern Ireland:

 

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.” 

 

Loving enemies – insane. Doing good to those who hate you – come on! This is radical stuff and tough to live out. Yet it is what we are called to do in the tunnel between the brokenness and the healing. It is simply following Jesus who did exactly what he said by seeking out those who were alienated from him and reaching out in grace to them by being incarnated, living, dying and being raised to life for them.

 

A few years ago in the tunnel of a Remembrance service I used an illustration of Jim Wallis from his book On God’s Side. Wallis tells the story of a pastor in Memphis who welcomed the local Muslim community into his area, got the story on CNN and then had phone calls from a group of Muslims in Kashmir, Pakistan saying how they had watched the CNN report and were now going to care for the little Christian community in their community. 

 

Surprising your enemies in the way Jesus taught us to in Luke 6 works! We are called to break the cycle of hatred that causes war. We are called to be the grace interrupters calling on God’s eternal shalom. As I after wrote 9/11:

 

“And in vengeances vicious circle

In the perpetual cycle of hate

Someone has to stop the spinning wheel

Or everything is going to be too late

Jesus said do unto others

As you would have them do to you

That grace can blow holes in our waging of war

So that peace can squeeze through.”

 

 

The call on Remembrance Sunday is to remember and then learn from our remembering to begin to bring that peace to all creation that is the intention of our God.

 

MORE IMPORTANT TO LOVE... THAN ALWAYS BE RIGHT... KISS THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL

Martyn Joseph’s song Kiss The World Beautiful is a beautifully crafted song about loving the world. It is about hope and change and good and right and a shalom-like balance to the way everything that is turns out. 

Though an overall success, some of the lines seem to find Joseph groping for the poetry, the direction to meet the huge ambition of the idea. 

There is for me one couplet that is a dog-at-my-heels line that touches the depths of my psyche and shapes my every day. After he has addressed the world and went for a chat with God, Joseph brings it all back down to loving the one he’s with. As he turns to that loved one and longs to kiss her lips he finds a truth that is explosive particularly in the religious world that Joseph and I have been weaned, damaged and healed in: -

 

“Sometimes it’s just more important to love

Than to always have it right...”

 

This is a line that Jesus might have used against the Pharisees. In the conservative Christian world that Martyn Joseph and I grew up in, there is an over emphasis on being right and an unloving damning dismissal and demonizing of those who don’t think exactly and correctly, as we do; the Pharisees were as much about conformity as legalism! The idea of worshipping at the altar of being right might be an idol of some sections of Christianity in the 21st century.

This can portray an image of God that is far from loving. Indeed I remember at college coming back from hearing one of the popular preachers of the day and someone saying with a condemning sneer, “I suppose it was all about love, love, love?!” I was young and a little naive and thus very confused!Jesus seemed to be all about “love, love, love” from what I read in my Bible. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath they told him it wasn’t right; he thought it was more important to love the man with the withered hand. 

When they wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery and Jesus got them to drop the stones, they had the law on their side; but Jesus thought it more important to reach out in grace and forgive the woman. 

When he touched the leper it was not the right thing to do; but Jesus thought it important to show tangible love to the outcast. 

When asked what the most important commandment was Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40). He even spoke of loving enemies.

This of course should be no surprise to those who have a handle on the entirety of Scriptures. Jesus was reminding us of the Jews daily liturgy of Shema in Deuteronomy 6 and the commands to love neighbour in Leviticus 19.

Paul too knew the centrality of Jesus’ Gospel of love. After an entire poetic chapter on love in his first letter to the Corinthians he concluded, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

Biblically, loving God and your neighbour as yourself, never mind your enemies seemed more crucial to the soul of Christian spirituality than knowing all the theology of legal manoeuvres. 

James K A Smith from Calvin College has spoken about how we are not what we believe, we are what we love. The identity of a Christian is not in being right in every theological doctrine or contemporary issue. Our identity is in how much we kiss the world beautiful. That is how the world will judge us.

As a new week begins let us follow Jesus into the days seeking how we can kiss the world beautiful!

 

Martyn Joseph plays Fitzroy on November 16th… tickets here

 

CROSSroads - BELIEF AND RESPONSE TO THAT BELIEF

The sign of the cross was in use before it became a symbol of redemption and the work of Good Friday. This came up in my research for this Sunday’s sermon. Before it was a sign of salvation, the cross was about finding ourselves at crossroads. It was about decision making. The commentator said that, "It marked a moment when the paths of life were not fixed, when the direction for how to be in the world was less than certain, when God seemed to be rerouting the future." 

I found this fascinating and sought out via Google evidence of such a theory. Without much luck. Then I thought about my visits to New Grange. Anytime I have been to New Grange I am always amazed that when that burial chamber lights up at sunrise on December 21st it is in the shape of a cross… 5000 years BC. When I ask the Tour Guides why it is in the shape of a cross they never have an answer.

Yet, surely death marks a crossroads, “a moment when the paths of life were not fixed, when the direction for how to be in the world was less than certain, when God seemed to be rerouting the future." After the service someone told me that there are similar cross shaped sites in the islands off the north of Scotland.

I love the idea. Not to change the the cross around our neck from a symbol of the Good Friday cross to another but by adding something significant to that. I am all for a cross that symbolises belief and then adds a response to that belief.

I have often preached and written about the caress and collide of Christian belief. The caress is that we are loved, that God throws his arms around us by grace and interrupts history in Jesus birth, life, death and resurrection. The one dimensional meaning of the cross around our necks or on our walls could be static, impotent and very easy; not God’s new life at all.

I was preaching this in the context of Matthew 16 where the disciples themselves are in a moment of crossroads. Jesus is explaining what is going to happen to him. Peter confesses that he believes that Jesus is the Messiah. That belief leads to Jesus telling Peter what come after such acknowledgement. He tells him, “Don’t smoke, Don’t drink, don’t gamble unless you are middle class with stocks and shares, don’t love them until they repent…” 

That would all have been so easy. No, Jesus told Peter, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”   

James warned about faith without works. It was dead, he wrote. At the beginning of Romans 12 Paul tells us that “in view of God’s mercy” we need to act.

Today, in Fitzroy, we prayed for our students going off to University, someone going off to intern with IJM in Washington DC and our new Youth Intern, Ruth, as she starts with us. All of them at a crossroads. For them all, "It marked a moment when the paths of life were not fixed, when the direction for how to be in the world was less than certain, when God seemed to be rerouting the future." 

For all of us, most of the time we are heading towards, in the middle of or heading away from crossroads. If we, like Peter, declare that Jesus is the Christ, then the response is always a decision to follow Jesus. A cross is about belief and response. I like that symbol.

MAY GOD... (SEE YOU THROUGH THE AWKWARD DANCE OF PAIN)

This is the poem of a pastor, watching his congregation going through all kinds of pain.

I am aware every Sunday morning, as I look out on my Fitzroy family, that almost everyone is hurting in some way. Most of us have family members we are walking alongside through very difficult situations. Most of us are struggling ourselves, with many issues of life. 

There can be many unanswered questions in these pastoral scenarios and we live with our faith and the awkward dances of hurt and pain and grief.

The third verse is inspired by Philip Yancey. In a seminar at Greenbelt one year he was speaking about spiritual growth. He took those familiar verses in Isaiah 40: 30-31 -

Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;
³¹ but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint. 

... and gave them another slant. He suggested that when we are young in faith we start out with almost naive enthusiasm. We fly. Everything is possible. We can change the world. We can do it now. Then however we are hit by life's realities - broken hearts, death of loved ones. We land. We are still running. By the time we fully mature in our faith and how it works in a broken world we are down to a walk. In the physical life we walk, then run etc but in the spiritual life it is the other way around. 

So if you are trudging and as a result feel you are showing spiritual immaturity. Maybe not. Perhaps it is a mark of your growing up in faith, learning to somehow trust, through the awkward dance of mystery.

It interested me that when I google imaged "walk and not faint" all I got were pictures of eagles. Maybe we are not up for the maturity that Eugene Peterson called 'a long obedience in the same direction'. 

 

When a loved one’s tossed in turbulence

You watch them smashed whichever way

And God never seems to bring the calm

No matter how hard you pray

May unseen threads of mercy

Weave in, the unravelling doubt

May God grab you by the finger

Before life’s hurting drags you out

 

Knowledge loves the questions

Cos it has a seamless answer

But mystery shimmies all around

She’s an awkward little dancer

And when she dances out of sight

Leaving the soul that lonely ache

May God send a holy comforter

Before you crack up in the heart break

 

Lord, we flew on wings like eagles

Then landed with reality’s thud

We ran but soon were walking

Now crawl through this tear soaked mud

We mature in a world that’s broken

Confessing what our part is

We sing these songs to temper grief

And hope in their catharsis.

FAMOUS LIKE A BUTTONHOLE - THE 10:10 LIFE

The tickets came this week for Fitzroy’s Uganda trip this summer and it immediately caught my eye. The second leg of our flight from Addis Ababa to Entebbe is at 10:10.

For those who know me, that is my number - twice! I am a 10:10 man. It is my birthday. It is John 10 verse 10 when Jesus says, “I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.” It is Fitzroy’s motto. It was this week’s Lectionary reading!

What I did with it this morning was to set it in the Biblical context. John 10 is Jesus discourse after the dialogue and sign of John 9. The fifth of Jesus eight signs of the Kingdom in John’s Gospel is Jesus giving sight to a man born blind. 

The chapter break again hinders us a little but we need to see John 10 as a continuation of that story. So… the question was was what does Jesus 10:10 life look like to the man born blind? It is a bit of a clash with the expectations of life in all its fulness in the 21st century.

You can only imagine todays advertising agencies with the 10:10 concept. Bungee jumps or motorbikes over 35 buses might express the spectacular of what we now see as life in its fulness. When Jesus interrupts the blind man’s life with grace, the shepherd gives him protection, provision and presence. It is not that spectacular. 

As I look out at my community and share these words of 10:10 I wonder if many of them are feeling that they cannot live this spectacular life. Yet, Jesus 10:10 is an ordinary fulness of who we are born and redeemed to be. One of the keys to unlock this whole two chapter filled passage is John 10:11, “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

So, in conclusion I read a poem that I had found this past week in Anne Lamott’s new book Hallelujah Anyway. Here’s the last part: -

…

The boot is famous to the earth,   

more famous than the dress shoe,   

which is famous only to floors.

 

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

 

I want to be famous to shuffling men   

who smile while crossing streets,   

sticky children in grocery lines,   

famous as the one who smiled back.

 

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   

but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

The poem is by Naomi Shihab Nye and those last words are my longing for myself and my community this week. The shepherd laid down his life for a 10:10 life that is not so much spectacular as ordinary yet full! Like buttonholes we must not forget what we can do. 

The fulness of what God created us and Jesus redeemed us to do. Now that is 10:10!