I I know I'm not very tall, but this photo was taken standing up in high reeds and exuberant gorse.Whenever I'm standing with things growing all around me ( and sometimes above me) I often think of the Sermon on the Mount – about the grass of the field, the flowers, and the pretensions of all those Solomons who think they are eye stoppingly glorious!
More seriously – yesterday I was chasing a number of biblical themes and passages and came across several suggestions that certain biblical texts are particularly fitted to where we are now, in our time, at this place in our history as a world in a mess. Suggestions included Qoheleth (the fatuity and vanity of so much contemporary culture), the Tower of Babel (the power of the Web and Social Network), Amos (inequity and injustice pushed to extremes of social situation). It made me wonder about how we each find a canon within the Canon, selected Scriptures that seem really to 'do it' for us! And one of the ways that might happen is when certain Scriptures seem to have a deep moral and human resonance with our contemporary history – personal social, global. Those Scriptures may bring hope, warn of judgment, describe and analyse our fears and anxieties. Which means that Christians who claim to be biblical in their thinking, ethics, world-view should perhaps stop insisting loudly on their own view of what the Bible says, means. And as an act of obedience to God listen for the still small voice of a text that bears witness to Christ, and like Him will always call in question our assumptions, challenge the closedness of our certainties, undermine and expose the toxic roots of our prejudices, open our eyes to the blind spots we can't see because our cultural lenses have visually impaired our insight.
It will require a deeper more disruptive encounter with Christ the Word for us to hear, and then amplify his voice, which is the voice of self-giving love, reconciling judgment, renewing mercy, the Voice of the Crucified Risen Lord of Life.
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