Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Wise Stewardship or generosity on behalf of others: which is a Kingdom principle?

    12899a559cb69bc6I've been doing some thinking. About stewardship. Wise stewardship. I dislike the expression "no brainer", but I'm guessing most Christians, Christian organisations and churches would, when push comes to shove, or when vision comes to cash, opt for responsible stewardship as the essential wisdom in dealing with money. Stewardship itself is a word replete with responsible thoughtfulness, careful use of resources for maximum effectiveness, and made more rigorous by qualifiers like "wise" and "responsible" the case seems unanswerable. There are even parables about it with their message of bad things happening to those who don't invest wisely, or spend responsibly.

    But I've been doing some thinking, and that can be a dangerous thing for any of us. Especially if it begins as an annoying niggle, develops into a serious question and compels a complete rethink of a sacred "no brainer" questions and answers like responsible stewardship applied to the use of Christians' money and resources, individually and corporately.

    What was responsible stewardship for the Macedonian Christians who out of their poverty gave to other Christians and their Jewish brothers and sisters in that wonderful piece of irresponsible stewardship called The Collection which dominated the end of Paul's life?

    What was responsible stewardship for the sower who went forth to sow and knew that 75% of the seed would be wasted or worse.

    What was responsible stewardship for the woman who brought an alabaster jar of precious ointment and in an act of outrageous extravagance used it to anoint the feet of the Teacher who had helped her to a place where she could feel loved again? And, said Jesus, with not a hint of concession to responsible stewardship, "She has done a beautiful thing", that would echo round the world and be remembered long after all the budgets and cost cuttings and careful strategies for growth are consigned to that unmemorable place called the balance sheet.

    In a consumer culture where choices of what we do with money are driven by recession, I'm left asking what it is Christians do that is radically different, outrageously generous, counter cultural in the positive sense of offering something that contradicts the worship of the bottom line. Against the current focus on getting and receiving, value for money and the buy one get one free approach to life, what it is that the Christian faith offers is precisely a lifestyle of offering, a way of enacting and embodying a love defined in giving.

    Now I can think of a number of ways the the contemporary church has bought into the whole value for money mentality and I'm aware but not persuaded by the way we re-translate that bottom line spirit by calling it stewardship, wise or otherwise. You see I can't get away from the astonishing puzzle of how it could be that 'he was rich yet for our sakes became poor, so that we through his poverty might become rich'. That is an approach to wealth redistribution that recognises no bottom line, cannot read barcodes, and fails to see the value of always wanting value for money.

    As a Gospel people, Christians are called to that fundamental orientation away from self-interest to self giving, finding value in that which makes for the Kingdom of God which is justice and joy, forgiveness and peace, and a quite reckless generosity that questions careful stewardship as the default position for how we use God given resources. Now and again, and more often than we are prepared to think, we are called to sow seed at a 75% loss, we are moved to take that alabaster jar and waste it in an act of devotion that enriches the world, though some ask the tediously responsible question "why this waste?" We are stewards, not only of money, but of an extravagant Gospel that commits us to a life that is creatively and persistently and inconveniently generous and uncalculating. These are not budget criteria, they are attitudes that require a different calculus.

     

  • Attentive to a different light – Rebecca Elson, Astronomer Poet

    Hs-2005-35-a-webThe slim volume of Rebecca Elson's poetry, Responsibility to Awe, sits on my desk at College. Elson was a gifted astronomer, combining intellectual curiosity with creative cognitive insight and these focused on the vast complex questions of existence. Around the time when Hubble was sending back images of our universe that are at once beautiful and terrifying, expanding beyond previous imagination the exploding, extending immensity of what we call space, the totality of what exists. Her scientific work 'focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death'. She was fascinated by dark matter, "hidden mass which can be inferred only from its influence on observable objects". 

     It's no surprise she is a poet. Precise observation, imaginative reflection, contemplative gaze, the instinct not only for fact, and its significance, but also for its hiddenness, mystery and capacity to provoke questions rather than provide answers. I've often thought the fusion of intellectual penetration and empirical observation, with contemplative wonder and patient humility before what can't be exhaustively explained or dequately described, could produce a rare form of poetry – and for that matter theology! 

    This collection of poems and extracts from her notebooks was written when she knew she was terminally ill, and its contents are by turns poignant and playful, questioning and serene, drawn from recalled memory or pushed towards anticipated realities. The result is a book that invites the reader into an intimate conversation not only about dark matter, but about what matters, and why.

    The title, A Responsibility to Awe, describes the disposition of the true scientist – and though she wouldn't naturally draw the inference, it describes also the proper disposition of the true theologian, and indeed the true worshipper of the Triune God of love made known in Jesus Christ.

    Telescopes

    Those few brave pilgrims

    standing white robed

    At the edge

    of earth and sky

    On their dark mountain

    in the thin dry air,

    for all their altitude

    no nearer, really, to the stars.

     

    But hopeful

    and so patient,

    high above the traffic

    of the lowlands, tracking

    the minutiae of the Universe

    attentive to a different light.

    Now read Psalm 8.

  • Hauerwas and what the church is and is not about

      Hauerwas Stanley Hauerwas, self described as a truculent Texan who swears, is one of the leading exponents of discipleship as theological ethics embodied in virtues and practises that are so reminiscent of Jesus they tell forth the same good news, albeit in fallible humanity trying to be faithful in our following.

    Those who have heard Hauerwas lecture know that he doesn't do scintillating rhetoric, and at times is just plain hard to listen to. But he's always worth the effort and irritation it takes to grasp what he's saying because he seldom misses the hearer and hits the wall. His writing likewise can seem at times obtuse, other times persuasive, and occasionally needing to be read with some patience and that intelligent watchfulness that comes from realising this man is a teacher, and a very, very, good one. And if we come away from an encounter with his voice, mind and keyboard with nothing much new to think about, it may be that our own capacities of thought and capaciousness of heart are the limiting factors.

    Just been reading his essay on 'The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics' in the book Living Out Loud, edited by Luke Bretherton. He's at it again. Telling the church to be the church and stop trying to be what people think the church should be.

    "The church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully. The first question we must ask is not 'What should we do?' but 'What is going on' Our task as church is the demanding one of trying to understand rightly the world as world, to face realistically what the world is with its madness and irrationality."

    I used to have an elderly friend who would emphasise her emphatic tone by mixing up her words, and to borrow one of them in response to Hauerwas, abso-bloomin-lutely!!

    And how does that work out in practice? Here he is again:

    "It is particularly important to remember that the world consists of those, including ourselves, who have chosen not to make the story of God their story. The world in us refuses to affirm that this is God's world and that, as Loving Lord, God's care for creation is greater than our illusion of control. The world is those aspects of our individual and social lives where we live untruthfully by continuing to rely on violence to bring order."

  • The strangeness of a generous world

    DSC00281 Apologies for an absence most of the week. Priorities compel choices. This week I've been a bit like the science teacher in my first year at Secondary School who used to pour some mercury on the work bench and push it around and then try to gather the globules together into one recapturable blob. I seem to have been running after fragments of time and trying to pull together too many different things into a coherent whole!

    But it's national poetry day so here's a poem:

    A Stranger here

    Strange things doth meet, Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair

    World appear;

    Strange all, and New to me.

    But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

    That Strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

    Thomas Traherne

  • The happy scandal of indiscriminate love

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    This was the view from my window last Thursday morning. Whatever else a red sky in the morning foretells, it reminded me of something other than possible rain.

    When morning gilds the skies,

    My heart awaking cries,

    May Jesus Christ be praised.

    Or that glowing promise and affirmation of faith in the book of Lamentations, about the promised steadfast love of God being new every morning.

    This morning in Glasgow it is pouring down in contrast to the south of England which is baking in Mediterranean sunshine. But rain and sun are also sacraments in creation of the love that shines on all, and the rain that falls on all- indiscriminate love is a scandal, as is the Gospel good news of the God revealed in Jesus.

    Thge policy of indiscriminate love is not a postmodern insight after all.

  • The responsibility to take notice, pay attention and applaud creation

     

    We are here to abet creation

    and to witness it,

    to notice each thing

    so each thing gets noticed…

    so that Creation need not play

    to an empty house.

    Annie Dillard, "The Meaning of Life".

    W E Sangster the great Methodist preacher of the mid 20th Century once remarked that to notice a flower is both prayer and one of the sabbath moments of the soul.

    I noticed this flower while meandering in the Botanic Garden in Aberdeen, a kind of botanical snowflake. Annie Dillard is one of the great noticers and her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains one of the best expositions of the field study of natural theology.

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  • Kneeling in the dark, at the place where prayer is valid.

     As the rain hides the stars,

    as the autumn mist hides the hills,

    as the clouds veil the blue of the sky,

    so the dark happenings of my lot

    hide the shining of thy face from me.

    Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,

    it is enough. Since I know that,

    though I may stumble in my going,

    thou dost not fall.

    (Celtic, unknown)

    Night sky The dark night of the soul is an experience of stripping away the assurance of the senses. Disorientation, uncertainty, loss of impetus, mean that absence is more real than presence, and the unfamiliar displaces the familiar. A spirituality fixated on the positive, and in which dogmatic assurances silence those important murmurs of dissent, is for all its triumphalist note, a spirituality of denial. Not self-denial to be sure, but a more toxic form of refusal, a denial of that mysterious withdrawing of God's sensed presence by which we grow beyond adolescent claimfulness.

    The above prayer doesn't express the classic experience of the dark night of the soul. The last line of it is reminiscent of Isaiah at his most pastorally poetic, and as the theologian who best describes the rhythm of feeling forsaken by the one who promises not to forsake.

    This is a prayer that allows us to be both honest and modest about our experience of God. Honest enough to confess that sometimes God's presence is not felt; modest enough not to think our own sense of God or lack of sense of God makes any difference to the reality of things, that God remains actually present even in acutely felt absence.

    "Though I may stumble in my going, thou dost not fall."

    Since I know that, I know the most important thing.

    And even if I am overcome at times

    with doubt,

    uncertainty,

    and the pain of unknowing,

    more important than what I know,

    is that I am known,

    and by whom I am known.

    And one day I will know as I am known,

    and see face to face

    the radiant p[resence

    of that greatest Love.

  • Inconvenient hospitality and the interruptive grace of God

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    Just framed a print of this painting by Chagall and hung it in my study at College. It's a bit loud in its red frame alongside other prints in more sedate burnished bronze, pine and gold.

    Is the mood in this scene anxious, expectant, hilarious, poignant, tense?

    All of these and more – how else draw the artist into the trap of painting the impossible communion of heaven with earth, eternal purpose with quotidian humanity, outrageous promise with long familiar disappointment, God's laughter of future joy and human laughter of disbelief subverted by the glimpsed beginning of risky trustfulness.

    The angels are central to the picture, but Sarah is central to the story – no wonder she laughed. And no wonder we always fail to explain in our superior cleverness what that laugh meant. Chagall depicts hospitality in all its mutuality, ambiguity, inconvenience and possibility.

    …………

    Came away to College without my copy of Buechner – will be a couple of days more waiting before the second part of the quotation from the previous post – hope it feels worth waiting for!

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  • The Importance of Waiting – in a Culture of Impatience.

    DSC00304 Preaching at the on the Anniversary of a congregation, Frederick Buechner decided to preach on the theme of "Waiting".

    Not future mission strategy, not church growth, not a call to more activity, not reflections on the piety or pragmatism of previous generations – but the unfashionable virtue of patience founded on trust.

     

     

    Today and tomorrow, here is Buechner on the priority of waiting over impatience, and the wisdom of waiting over anxious activism.

    "Look at the windows that burn like fire when the sun shines through them, and at the images of Christ and his saints, at the flowers and candles on the altar. Consider the silent space that these walls enclose and also the sounds that break the silence like the choir, the organ, the sounds of our own voices singing or praying, the voices of the men and women who stand up in this pulpit doing their best to proclaim the gospel. What does it all add up to?

    What is it that we are essentially doing here in this building? The immediate answer is that we are worshipping God here. We are trying to speak to God here and to speak about God. We are trying to listen for God. We are searching for something of God's peace, trying somehow to take God into our lives the way we take the bread and wine into our mouths. But deep beneath all of this, in our innermost hearts, I think we are doing something else.

    I think we are waiting. This is what is at the heart of it. Even when we don't know that we are waiting, I think we are waiting. Even when we can't find words for what we are waiting for, I think we are waiting. An ancient Advent prayer supplies us with the words, "Give us grace that we may cast off the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light."

    We who live much of the time in the darkness are waiting not just at Advent, but at all times for the advent of light, of that ultimate light that is redemptive and terrifying at the same time. It is redemptive because it puts an end to the darkness, and that is also why it is terrifying, because for so long, for all our lives, the darkness has been home, and because to leave home is always cause for terror."

    Tomorrow I'll post the next two paragraphs – and maybe there is something to be learned about waiting till tomorrow to learn from Buechner the theological, spiritual importance of waiting as our disposition towrds God.

  • Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

    Theological%20Library%20Strahov%20Monastery Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

    The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life. 

    51C9htgwfjL__SL500_AA300_ And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs. 

    Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

    This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto – there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer – there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!