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Regular readers will have noticed a slowing of posts – this isn't blog fatigue. My laptop has terminal symptoms and I'm in the process of replacing it. So blogging opportunities are a bit limited.

Is there a Laptop Funeral Liturgy out there? All you imaginative, contextual and practical theologians – are there appropriate words and prayers for a dying computer – loss of memory (RAM), terminal slowness (AGE), loss of communication (wi-fi and cable!), the detectable disintegration of the life force (processor / Hard Drive). And words of thanksgiving for a friend who has put up with my thinking and writing, surfing and downloading, key-board hammering and frantic mouse movements for years. It wouldn't be true to say nobody had a bad word to say about my computer – I often did! Nor that it never did anyone any harm – it lost a lot of my stuff!

But it has been a long time companion; there are many things I couldn't have done without it. It has kept me in touch with hundreds of people, dozens of colleagues and many a friend. It shares my enthusiasm for photographs and has happily stored years of digital images which are part of the story of my life. It has travelled 17000 miles a year with me for the past 4 years, and apart fro  cracked casing is still in one piece.

So a prayer of thanksgiving for a Laptop to celebrate how a wee machine can be such an important part of life. OK – that has gone as far as it can go. It's a flipping computer not a person; technology not human; disposable, replaceable and obsolete – unlike human beings.

Next week or so I'll post when I can.

One of my favourite Pentecost poems.The freedom and wildness of the Spirit is divine subversion unimpressed with every attempt to pin down Pentecost to a date in the liturgy, or anything else contrived for our own convenience.

PENTECOST

I share and share and share again

sometimes with a new language

which, if you are so open

will take you behind the sky

and award you cartwheels across the sun

I give and give and give again

not restricted by the church calendar

or concocted ritual

I have no need of anniversaries

for I have always been

I speak and speak and speak again

with the sting of purity

causing joyous earthquakes in the mourning soul of man

I am and am and am again.

Stewart Henderson.

Simone Weil is hard to understand. That’s a reason for reading her. Simone Weil was weird and one of those people who give saints a bad name. But what do we expect of people whose sanctity offends our most cherished presuppositions? Holiness isn't temperamentally tidy or comfortably predictable, and often is not remotely familiar. Her biographer describes Simone Weil as ‘unclassifiable’, someone who believed that ‘to be always relevant you have to say things that are eternal’.

Her lived anguish over the agonies of the world, (she died in 1943) the spiritual importance she placed on uncompromising self-immolation, the coalescence in her of supreme individualism and determined asceticism, made her , well, weird. But such characteristics generated in her laser lights of insight into the meaning of love – the love of God both terrible and tender; the call on human personality to learn to dwell in deepest Hades and highest Heaven and find God in love is indeed there, or not; and love for others, neighbour and enemy, and both with their humanity claiming forgiveness, atonement, compassion and service.

I’ve just been reading Nancey Murphy’s essay again, ‘Agape and Nonviolence’,[i] and she explores some of Weil’s thought on this. Here are a couple of extracts from Weil, via Nancey Murphy:

“To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death…To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance.  We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.”  Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1992) 6.

That isn’t the stuff you come across in any ‘how to’ book I know. It isn’t the stuff that feeds our hunger for ways to increase our self-esteem. The opposite. The aim of nonviolence is to ensure we do not diminish the other person. I guess what she is saying is that a Christian doesn’t try to make someone ‘pay’ for what they have done to us. I told you she was weird, and hard to understand.

But sometimes her uncompromising, unreasonable so called wisdom reminds me of someone who understood the foolishness of the cross.

I've spent a while filleting back issues of The Tablet, passed on to me by my friend Derek. The Tablet is one of the main Journals of contemporary Catholicism in which news, opinion, cultural comment, theological and ethical issues and much more are explored from a faithful but critical Catholic persepctive. One of the regulars is Father Daniel O'Leary whose columns contain some of the best spiritual writing around on the graced gift that is life in a God-loved world. In the 24th August 2013 issue (I told you they were back issues!!!), he wrote about the Eucharist as the feast of the love of God.

Quoting St Symeon the New Theologian he then moved on to celebrate the Eucharist as a deeply transformative re-reception of the embodied grace of God in the sacrament of bread and wine. At the miracle of communion:

…. everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in him transformed

and recognised as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in his light

he awakens as the beloved

in every last part of our body.

O'Leary goes on: "These infinitely intimate experiences of our sacred senses …purify and confirm our graced potential, for recognising God's bread in every bread, God's incarnate body in  every human body, God's own need in every need. And we do not just receive the holy bread….we become it.

In becoming it we are gifted with our true identity. Reputations, titles, possessions, power and prestige do not determine our identity. They die when we die. Who we are before ourselves and our God is who forever we are. And we become the blessed bread and wine not just for ourselves, as Pope Francis preached recently, we become it to light the way for others.

That is one of the most penetrating and generous expositions of the Eucharist I've read in a long while. Leaving aside the theological pragmatism many others indulge in trying to reduce the miracle to the spiritual technology of God's workings, what Daniel O'Leary offers here is a glad receiving, and faithful living into our true identity as the Body of Christ, a regular recovery and rediscovery of our graced potential, a thankful taking of the bread for which we hunger and thirst, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice and and for peace in a reconciled world. 

Father O'Leary goes on:

It is in the ordinariness, accessibility and blessing of bread that this ravishing love incarnate is experienced and celebrated. And it is the sacramentality of the celebration that reveals a most comforting truth; in all our daily efforts to be human and loving, eucharistic grace is always surrounding us, enfolding us, empowering and consecrating us.

Like R S Thomas at the end of his poem, 'The Moor', I read this and then

I walked on

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

I finished the last batch of marking in College yesterday. The process of grading, marking and feeding back on student work is an intriguing mix of discipline, yes at times tedium, enjoyment and reflection on what theological education achieves in the process of forming and transforming people.

Driving home in the car with Emmy Lou Harris singing sadly, then with Dave Crowder blasting out his Happiness Mass in C Major, I had time to think about the formative impact on a teacher of twelve years reading the work of our students.

Theological education is one of the most important foundations for Christian mission today. I am not going to argue that; I take it as self-evident for followers of Jesus who dare to take up the double invitation 'take my yoke upon you and learn of me….take up your cross and follow me.

But one overwhelming argument is the evidence Semester after Semester, of students growing in their faith, beginning to move out of constrained comfort zones into the risky place that is thoughtful discipleship, and engaging with adventurous thinking about a faith that is never safe and sound, but :

celebrates God incarnate in Jesus,

argues, because life depends on it, for the foolishness of the cross,

lives always towards newness and hope, because that's what resurrection people do

comes alive and learns to serve within the orbit of an eternal community of Triune Love

studies and wrestles with Scripture as if their lives depended on it, which it does

learn to love the Church again because it is the Body of Christ and they are part of it

begin to discover, and learn to accept, who they are, God's gift to the church today

and in all of this, to read, pray, think and follow faithfully after Jesus.

So when an essay on Christology and Ecclesiology, or a sermon in Creative Homiletics, or an Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Journal of Theological Reflection on a church placement, or a review of a chapter on the significance of Nicaea for a wee local Scottish Baptist church in the 21st Century – when any of these 'assignments' comes on to the desk for marking and grading, they are sacraments of learning, they are formative spiritual exercises, they are attempts at loving God with mind and heart, they are snapshots of a soul growing and a spirit spreading its wings towards a bigger sky.

So yes. There is the tedium of overload, the deadline for marks to be submitted, the pressure of marking; before that, for the student, the hard graft of reading and researching, of finding the right books and articles, of deadlines looming and 1000 words to go. But theological education is about something much more enduring and transforming than ticking the assignment boxes.

Theological Education is a commitment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength so that, in service to God in Christ, we can learn to love our neighbours as ourselves, live as peacemakers, be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation. And in all that commitment to develop wisdom and discernment, to open ourselves up to God's wide and wonderful world with the confidence of those who know enough to know they'll never know enough; but to live as those who take what they know, what they deeply know, of the grace and truth of Christ, and live it out so that once again in the Christian community, the Body of Christ, the Word becomes flesh and dwells, tabernacles, makes its home in this God-loved world. A world forever changed by Love incarnate, crucified and resurrected in Jesus, the One in whom God was pleased to dwell, and to unite all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross.

All of that underlies an academic assignment in a theological College which is committed, students and staff, to personal formation for the ministry of Christ and His Body the Church. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…take up your cross daily, and follow me…you are the Body of Christ."

Yesterday was an N T Wright day here in Aberdeen. The Launch event for the Aberdeen University Centre for Ministry Studies included an evening lecture by Wright on his recent 2 volume study of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. It was a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose grasp of the height depth, length and breadth of Paul's Gospel was shared, with passion and Christian seriousness in full flow, with a full house of all kinds of people; and it was earthed in the pastoral implications and resources of Paul's theology in the service of Jesus the messiah and the church as the Body of Christ. That by way of acknowledging the contribution of Wright as NT scholar, Bishop, and Christian to the wider church. Post grads, theological educators, ministers and priests, a wide range of church people in none of the aforementioned groups, and an audience whose average age was impresssively low, and whose attention was held for over an hour. 

Is Wright right or wrong is one of those clever bytes that wear thin after the first time! Of course he is right and of course there is room for disagreement, debate, alternative interpretation; and of course he has an agenda, who hasn't. What was obvious was his control of the NT text, his deep reading of Paul and his immersion in the history of the times of Jesus and Paul. Equally evident was his insistence that context and particularity are part of the givenness of revelation in the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, and the rootedness of the narrative of God and the people of God in the election of Abraham and Israel fulfilled in Jesus.

I'm reading Charles Marsh's new biography of Bonhoeffer. One of the real strengths of this book is the clear account of Bonhoeffer and his early collision course with National Socialism over the question of the Jews, and particularly the Aryan paragraph adopted widely in the German Church. So last night Wright's insistence that to decontextualise and de-historicise the New Testament makes the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul dispensable, is in my view a crucial and ethically required element of responsible hermeneutics. In Nazi Germany that historical move of de-historcising and decontextualising opened the door to a distorted Christianity characterised by a legitimated anti-Jewishness; helping lay the ideological rail track that would eventually lead to Auschwitz; and creating an Aryan Jesus abstracted from his own Jewishness and turned into a reason for the lethal hatred of Jews. Evil has its own lethal ironies. 

The evening ended with the ususal reception, book signing and conversation. I took along my early copy of The Climax of the Covenant, in which Wright's essay on Philippians 2 was published (the reason I bought the book in 1991), and now have the imprimatur and greeting of the author.

A good night, one when it was fun to sit at the feet of a Gamaliel and learn how much I don't know, and feel again the importance of attentiveness to the centre of our faith, Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scripture, and living in the new community, the Body of Christ.

Now here's another reason why Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of my most trusted spiritual guides. He preserves and affirms the Godness of God. Long before we fell for what Bill Placher called 'the domestication of transcendence', Heschel was insisting that God is not reducible to human categories of control and usefulness. Those who want a God who is manageable and amenable to our wants, likes, dislikes and life plans had better look elsewhere than the God of the Bible, who refuses to be the default option of the self-interested ego, religious or secular, sincere or selfish, assertive or fearful.

"God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance. It is hard to define religion, it is hard to place its wealth of meaning into the frame of a single sentence. But surely one thing may be said negatively: religion is not expediency.

If all our actions are guided by one consideration, how best to serve our personal interests, it is not God whom we serve, but the self. True, the self has its legitimate claims and interests; the persistent denial of the self, the defiance of one's own desire for happiness is not what God demands.

But to remember that the love of God is for all men [and women], for all creatures; to remember His love and His claim to love in making a decision- this is the way He wants us to live. To worship God is to forget the self. It is in such instants of worship that humanity acts as a symbol of Him."

That single paragraph, broken into three thought sized bytes, contains the substance of Heschel's philosophy of religion, which itself is one of the more demanding intellectual achievements of mid 20th century religious thought. What I get from Heschel is thought distilled to the essence of what we most want to say about the God whose love pervades the universe, carrying with it mercy, purpose and redemptive intent.