I spent the morning with the good people of Hillhead Baptist Church. They were exploring options and possibilities for the future ministry of this significant and strategic fellowship, located in Glasgow’s West End. As a friend of the congregation I was offering what wisdom and help I could as they plan for their future. Finished by just after 12.00 noon. I casually mentioned that I was now probably going to sin in the Oxfam Bookshop on Byres Road. Remember I previously bought my Poems for Refugees book there in February and blogged about it several times. Well my sympathetic and pastorally alert friend immediately reassured me:
‘But if you are buying in the Oxfam shop that wouldn’t be sin, that would be a good thing to do.’
And I sinned by the sheer alacrity with which I grabbed hold of this much more positive perspective on my book buying urges and floated in self congratulatory virtue down the street to the Oxfam shop. And yes, I did indeed buy a book – not an expensive one you realise, but enough to consider it a donation rather than a piece of self-indulgence.
More seriously it is a book of sermons – boring huh? By a Victorian Free Church minister who was the leading OT scholar in Scotland for a couple of decades, (1870’s to 1890’s) the venerable A. B. Davidson. Not everyone’s taste – but now and then I dive into the sonorous prose and leisurely syntax of the Victorian age, and find there the extended descriptive responses of another generation to the truth of God – and I find their voices persuasive, their words moving, and the faith that underlies their ruminative theology an antidote to the Devotions for Dummies approach of much contemporary ‘devotional’ writing.
Here is A B Davidson, on the experience of Job and the text ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth…’
The sufferer’s ideas may not be complete, and he may not see the way clearly to that which his faith demands. His expressions are exclamatory and disjointed; but this is his assurance, , that though he die in darkness, as he will, though the riddle of God’s dealing with him remain unsolved here, though God’s face be resolutely hidden from him till, under the ravage of his disease, his flesh be consumed and his bodily frame dissolved, yet that shall not be the end of all. He shall not be dissolved, and God cannot be dissolved; and this darkness is not an eternal darkness. On this night of estrangement and mystery, however long it may be, a morn shall break at last; and through the clouds there will shine out a face, a reconciled face, that I shall see for myself; and mine eyes shall behold and not another’s….
What Job craved, and what his faith enabled him to say he knew, was that the unseen God should become visible; that God whose dwelling is in heaven amid clouds and darkness, should descend and stand upon the earth; that the great problem between God and man, and between men and men, should be unravelled by God in human form, and in human speech; that the riddle of the painful earth, the mystery, misery, the wrong, the bitter wrestlings of mind with mind, should be removed forever and composed and that all those who clung to God amidst the darkness and misconceptions of men, or of their own, should pass out of darkness into an unclouded light, in which their eyes should see God.
No – they don’t write them like that anymore. Taking our human frailty along with God’s redeeming purposeful love, with utter seriousness, and a hopeful trust. These are words that respect life’s tragic turns, puzzling perplexities, and faithful questionings.
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