Around the time Moltmann’s The Crucified God was published, a slim book of pastoral and constructive theology was published, with the telling title, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Some of Moltmann’s finest insights into the love of God were anticipated in this slim volume. Canon William Hubert Vanstone (whose contribution to church economic theory was to sell the vicarage furniture to pay for the repair of the church roof!) wrote of his ministry in a commuter estate in the sixties and seventies, and of his search for a theology that would sustain the church in its mission, and himself in his vocation. I’ve read this book several times through, and countless times revisited some of its finest passages. I’ll blog on this book later, but on Good Friday I again turn to Vanstone’s book, and the hymn with which it concludes. He speaks of the precariousness of love, and insists love can have no guaranteed outcome, and that the love of God is expressed precisely in this risk-filled vulnerability of self-giving – the cross is Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense.
“Morning glory, starlit sky”
W H Vanstone (1923-1999)
1. Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth:
.
2. Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavor, love’s expense.
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3. Love that gives, gives ever more,
gives with zeal, with eager hands,
spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
ventures all its all expends.
.
4. Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.
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5. Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.
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6. Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.
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