Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Watch where you put your feet

    Haworth_013 In one of the older Bible translations Paul encourages the Ephesian Christians to ‘walk circumspectly’, which might at a push also mean ‘live wittily’.(Eph 5.16-17) Both renderings are demonstrated in this photo of me on an ancient set of monastery stepping stones, while on holiday down at Haworth (Bronte country). I’ve decided that I look sufficiently careful where I put my feet (well some of the stones were shooglie -Scots word for ‘tottery, insecure’), that I’ll leave the photo on the profile for a while, to illustrate walking circumspectly, living wittily.

    47507392__p5293192_c1_800 Ancient ruined monasteries are significant places for me – the care with which the sites were chosen, the craft and skill and hard labour of building such sacred space, their pivotal place in the local economy of previous centuries, but also the sense that these were places of prayer set to the rhythms of the day, and places of purposeful work and study, of industry and liturgy.

    Abbeysept05d4211sar800 My favourite such place is Rievaulx in Yorkshire. Been there a number of times –

    1. in the aftermath of two days rain when the mist clung to the trees but the rain had stopped, and there was a stillness and a sense of countryside drenched but refreshed by the water that makes life and growth posiible

    2. on a sunny day when the tourist buses were like dodgems in the coach park, noisy children were making the kinds of noise that probably monastery walls were built to keep out, but there was a sense that the place itself was undismayed by the presence of folk, because that’s why it was put there in the first place

    3. and my first visit, when I’d done my homework, knew the plan of the building, and went to do the educational thing, identifying the nave, the transepts, scriptorium, refectory, herb garden, dormitory – and simply admired the sense of permanence that such durable buildings must have given to the community over the generations.

    Where there’s a monastery there is a river, where there are no bridges there are stepping stones – OK to walk across them on a summer day when the river is low, the stones are dry and I’m wearing New Balance trainers. Wouldn’t like to do it in February, across a risen river, stones wet, mossy and slimy, and the water freezing, and wearing leather open sandals or massive working clogs.

    Three thoughts –

    1. The thought that a community builds stepping stones across rivers is an interesting image of how a church serves its local community – the church helping people get from here to there, negotiating the difficulties with them
    2. the thought that whether you’re a monk or not, none of us walk on water, some stones are shooglie and any one of us could slip and fall in, a reminder of our dependence on each other for care and occasional rescue
    3. and the final thought – stepping stones get you there stage by stage -for the monks who put them there, stepping stones were a metaphor for walking towards God, using the means he had given, the stepping stones – scripture, community, prayer, bread and wine, praise, care for the poor and sick.

  • Emerging church and revivalism

    Energetic church – progressive church – emerging church. Whichever qualifying participle we use, we are likely to be theologically redefining the church in response to perceived or desired change. We are also using such words to describe the various ways the church expresses its life and evolves, even metamorphoses, within successive cultures.

    0830825827_01__sclzzzzzzz_aa240_ I’m reading about 19th century revivalism – and am intrigued by the parallels between then and now. Those who generated revivalist practice and theology, and those who criticised and resisted it in the 19th Century begin to sound like Maclaren and Carson arguing about who is being faithful to the Gospel / Scripture.The same polarisations about developments within / out of Evangelicalism that arose over revivalist practices bear some similarity to the current tensions created by ’emerging church’ as it encounters more conservative expressions of Evangelicalism.

    Interestingly Revivalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was seen as doctrinally suspect by many of the most influential Evangelicals, while other Evangelical leaders offered supportive Gamaliel arguments (if it’s of God it will prosper, if not it will not). Revivalists such as Finney and Moody were imaginative, innovative and provocative in their methods and approach to evangelism; and while their preaching aimed at radical and enduring conversion, they were also concerned about the subsequent church experience of converts.

    Moody_sm Their approach was unabashedly pragmatic, often theatrical in expression, the theology focused and clarified in a Gospel presented in ultimatum terms, accompanied in some of its expressions with emotional extremes climaxing in conversion, while others encouraged hearers towards a quieter controlled experience of conversion in which religious affections and elementary theological awareness combined. But I doubt if we have any idea how radical it was in the early 19th century to hold Christian worship services in theatres, to advertise them with flyers as if they were local gigs, with ink-drawings of the main celebrities, and for preachers to perform like religious sales personnel (I avoid the gender restrictive ‘salesmen’, cos some of the finest revival preachers were women! – until revivalist congregations and denominations aspired to social respectability after which women preachers all but disappeared). (See Wolffe, 128).

    Here is one religious journalist’s description, from 1836, of the energetic and progressive piety of American revivalist churches:

    If churches relapse into a low state, they are not satisfied long to continue so; but they begin to enquire into the cause of this declension and the means by which it may be remedied. They entertain confidence in the success of suitable means, and are often at once sagacious in the discovery and prompt in the application of them to the condition of particular congregations. Should plans be suggested which have for their object to waken professors from a state of slumber, and arouse the unconverted from their sleep of death, objections are not urged against them because they are new; they do not restrain zeal, lest it should produce innovation; and are more afraid of incurring the guilt of lukewarmness than of being charged with the extravagance of enthusiasm. (Wolffe, page81)

    Was this the 19th Century church accommodating to cultural change, on pragmatic missional grounds deliberately adjusting Christian experience and church expression to maximise connectedness with the changing life around it? Was revivalism as a movement, a 19th C equivalent to emerging church?

    And before assuming this is oversimplified comparison, and unhelpful anachronism, perhaps we should try to understand, using some historical imagination, just how radical – and transient – such accommodations have tended to be. That might help us see the importance, but only the relative importance, of contemporary accomodations – such as emerging church. And maybe instead of putting participles in front of church (doing words – which do tend to put human activity in the driving seat!) we should put the adjective after – as in church militant – church triumphant – church universal. I have a feeling it’s words that way round that best remind us the church isn’t ours, nor is its future in our hands – and that the church of Christ will always be bigger than our participles!!

  • Jurgen Moltmann meets Jonathan Edwards

    The "Which Theologian are You" quiz can be done here. It sets a lot of theological questions and you show how far you agree/disagree. Then it works out which theologian your theological profile best fits. Seems straightforward enough.

    I came out as 100% Jurgen Moltmann – and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a 100% for anything before! Here’s the result and the summary of who I am theologically and what matters to me theologically, according to this quiz.

    ……………………….

    You are Jurgen Moltmann.

    Speakersmoltmann The problem of evil is central to your thought, and only a crucified God can show that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Christian discipleship means identifying with suffering but also anticipating the new creation of all things that God will bring about.

    Jürgen Moltmann
    		100%

    Martin Luther
    		73%

    Karl Barth
    		60%

    Friedrich Schleiermacher
    		60%

    Anselm
    		60%

    John Calvin
    		53%

    Augustine
    		47%

    Charles Finney
    		47%

    Paul Tillich
    		47%

    Jonathan Edwards
    		27%

    …………………………………………………………….

    OK now for the disclaimers

    • The problem of evil is not central to my thought – Christology is central, and the cross and resurrection are definitive of my Christology because the loving purpose of God is revealed in the crucified and risen Christ. The problem of evil is however deeply implicated in my theology, but also in my worldview.
    • Thus while I think discipleship involves every follower of Jesus in identifying with suffering it involves much more – for me it also involves what John Swinton would call forming strategies and gestures of resistance to the causes of suffering, based on the call of Christ to follow after him, carrying the cross, in the power of the Spirit, witnessing to the Gospel of God’s love through a ifestyle of hopefulness generated by the resurrection.

    Now as for the quiz itself I have a few awkward questions.

    1. How come there are no explicit questions about the Trinitarian nature of God, or about the form of Christology that underlies any Christian theology?
    2. How come there are no women? I know – most of the big noises are men for well rehearsed reasons – but Julian of Norwich bequeathed to the church her Revelations of Divine Love, one of the most profound, perceptive and doxological pieces of theological reflection in the entire tradition. Does every woman who does this quiz have to end up being a man?!?
    3. Where are Aquinas, Wesley, Pannenberg, and for those who know me they’ll expect me to ask also, and where is James Denney, P T Forsyth or Tom Torrance? I know – they aren’t exactly the giants in the field – but who gets to pick the giants anyway, huh? I rate Forsyth well ahead of Tillich – no slight on Tillich, just that Forsyth understood as few before or since, the nature of love as holy, and of God as holy love.
    4. Now as one whose theology is a theology of the cross, understood in Trinitarian terms, Moltmann and Luther are not surprisingly top of the list, and followed by Barth. I’ve spent months of my life, over the years reading them, but how did Schleiermacher get way up there? He is the one I have least first-hand knowledge of.
    5. 26091 And just as intriguing, let me say, if I had to rescue only 10 books from my burning study one of the first would be my (really expensive, but who cares?) Yale Edition of the Ethical Writings, by Jonathan Edwards, containing his sermons on 1 Corinthians 13. This volume contains some of the finest late Puritan moral theology, expressed in language that I still remember on my first reading, bringing a lump to my throat and a never-forgotten heart sense of ‘God’s great ocean of love’. Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith is a Reformed masterpiece in its own right, but in my canon, not before Edwards – so why is Edwards bottom of my list and Schleiermacher is fourth?
    6. I’ve thought a bit about this last question and here’s my attempt at an answer. When a quiz asks propositional questions and asks me to indicate degree of agreement, it assumes I want to be the person who thinks most like me. I’m not at all sure of that! There are aspects of Edwards’ theology which I can’t easily agree with – but there is also much in his theology of God’s grace and glory, and in the homiletical and moral reflections on the Bible that expound these, that have shaped my own spirituality at foundational levels. I have learned more from this towering Christian intellect than most of the other names above him on this list, perhaps with the exception of Barth and Moltmann, and maybe not even them.
    7. So allowing for the glitches in the way the quiz is set out – and the kind of predicable paths it pushes you into, I am not embarrassed by the prominence of Moltmann, NOR by the position of Edwards – where they are on the list is irrelevant. They are long-time and deep conversation partners of mine, lovers of God in Christ through the Spirit, and within the communion of saints, in which they both believe – but expressed it differently.

    I am going to put a few quotations together for a later blog, with Moltmann and Edwards alongside each other – a parallel of opposites who from different perspectives and contexts know a thing or two about theology as doxology, and the theologian’s task of expounding the God of Grace and Glory.

  • Who’s an Evangelical then?

    Several recent outbreaks of Bibliophilia have resulted in additions to the recent acquisitions shelf. I’m already well into the most recent volume of the IVP History of Evangelicalism. One of the taunting howls of Aberdeen football supporters is ‘Who are ye?’. It isn’t a polite enquiry to ascertain the names of newly discovered acquaintances – it’s a demand for self-definition, with the assumption that whoever you are, you are of little consequence anyway.

    The same question is often asked by and about evangelicals – ‘Who are ye?’ This history series is a major contribution to Evangelical definition and description through historical study. Here’s who the people who have used the term ‘evangelical’ are – as they have lived within the cultural and social context of their times from early 18th century to now.

    The value of this series lies in the decision that all five volumes will explore the Evangelical movement internationally, in particular throughout the English speaking world – Britain, America, West Indies, Australia, New zealand and South Africa. The description and analysis of Evangelicalism as a movement reveals vitality and variety, and creates a quite different perspective on who are and who aren’t ‘evnagelical’. And this for me creates a wish that those who use the word ‘evangelical’ would have a greater awareness of a tradition so rich, adaptable and effective in its service to the Kingdom of God, and not hijack it for their own exclusive agendas.

    0830825819_01__sclzzzzzzz_v46523871 The Rise of Evangelicalism, Mark Noll. Noll is the premier church historian in the US, and this book, along with the others in the series, maps the beginnings and progress of the Evangelical movement that emerged on both sides of the Atlantic from the early 18th Century onwards. Key figures are the Wesleys, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards

    0830825827_01__sclzzzzzzz_aa240_ The Expansion of Evangelicalism, John Wolffe. Explores the social and political contexts within which Evangelicalism developed, looking at the consolidations of people like John Newton, Wilberforce, Charles Simeon, the revivalist Charles Finney, and Hannah More. Traces the growing influence of the evangelical voice in the areas of social policy and moral and cultural critique.

    0830825835_01__sclzzzzzzz_aa240_ The Dominance of Evangelicalism, David Bebbington. The nonconformist conscience and the evangelical voice were dominant influences in Victorian society and in the years following the American Civil War. The age of Moody and Spurgeon is presented with verve and ease which don’t disguise the erudition of the acknowledged expert in the field of Evangelical history.

    So, having read Noll and Bebbington earlier, I am now well into Wolffe’s volume and have enjoyed especially the descriptions of the early camp meetings on the American frontiers, and the in your face tactics of the itinerant preachers. And then to read about such exotic groups as the ‘Magic Methodists’ of Cheshire and the ‘Kirkgate Screamers’ of Leeds, is to realise that early charismatic expressions of faith earned such nicknames in a context of ridicule and rejection.

  • Exclusive banks in an allegedly inclusive society

    This from my AOL homescreen

    Logo A bank is to launch a "premier" branch where only the wealthiest customers will be allowed face-to-face services.

    HSBC, which advertises itself as the "world’s local bank", is operating the service at Canford Cliffs in Dorset, where properties sell for up to £8 million.

    From June, to be eligible to use the advisers at the branch, customers must have £50,000 savings, or a £200,000 mortgage, or a £100,000 mortgage and £75,000 salary, or pay a £19.95 a month "premier" account fee.

    So how do we "serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds", and respond to this nonsense. Of the qualifying criteria to be treated as a human being by HSBC, I could, at a push, manage the £19.95 premier account fee. That’s £239.40 per annum in order to qualify for an encounter with a human face, and exchange conversation about ‘filthy lucre’ with a human voice. This is the bank that advertises itself as the ‘world’s local bank’!!

    445886150_7028792d84_b Now supposing I needed a loan, was worried about my overdraft, was on a low income and needed advice on how to make the best use of my local ‘world’s local bank’? Or supposing I was a pensioner on a fixed income – for me, not as daft or far off an idea as it used to be, huh? How did this bank ever dream up such an offensive idea as a ‘premier’ branch that offers only to the wealthy what any bank used to offer as part of the privilege of handling your money?

    As a balancing act of social justice, would HSBC be prepared in underprivileged areas to make available debt and budgetting specialists to help people manage more effectively the little they have? In the spirit of the rules outlined above for the wealthy:

    To be eligible to use the advisers at these branches customers must have less than £1000 savings, be unable to afford the deposit for a mortgage, or require Benefits help with the rent, qualify for tax credits, or be on a fixed or low income.

    Aye right, Jim.

    Dream on, son!

    Not a snowball’s chance!

    Why the scepticism though? After all, as the Wise Sage says, ‘He who gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse…He who closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself cry out and not be heard.’ (Proverbs 28.27; 21.13). Does the Wise Sage mean us to text these texts to HSBC – and appeal to their long term self-interest???

  • Running as an act of faith

    …And if the sleep has left your ears

    You might hear footsteps

    followed close by heavy breathing…

    Bbc007_val_doonican_1_3Reminded of this song (Elusive Butterfly) when I watched the Val Doonican nostalgia hour on telly last week – how sad is that you ask? Not the slightest, I retort – decent, pleasant, unassuming, he was the king of easy listening for a while – and he’s still easy to listen to – talking or singing. No – not sad at all…just a thoroughly likeable human being whose gentleness might not be as marketable as it once was – interesting comment on contemporary TV – why isn’t gentleness marketable? What do we prefer instead? HMMM?

    Anyway, the three liner quoted earlier refers not so much to my murky musical past as my sweaty physical present. Recently I’ve started running longer distances building up to 10k – the heavy breathing, I’ve discovered kicks in seriously around 7-8k, after which – at my present fitness levels – it’s about gritted teeth, aching legs and a glowering or pleading relationship with each passing lamppost, keep going……….. just one more lamppost…………. then another………. come on wimp argue with the pain……  nearly there……   look at the watch.

    Running as personal discipline.

    …

    The Rule of St Benedict starts with the Psalm verse ‘teach me to run in the way of your commandments’. So usually sometime during this self-chosen ordeal I think of the spiritual discipline / gift of perseverance and gulp in and out as a fervent prayer, ‘run with perseverance the race that is set before you…’. Now and again Paul’s words have a more critical note – phrases from my current study of Galatians ‘You were running well, who hindered you….?’ Running as training in perseverance and not giving up.

    …

    As an older man ( well I am, even if I don’t look my age – I’m not as old as Val Doonican and I’m not as old as I look!!!!!) – as an older man, I understand what it meant in Jesus’ unforgettable story that the waiting father risked doing himself serious mischief by running down the road to meet and embrace his son, without doing any warm-up or light pre-training. As the old biblical expositors used to say, stating the obvious because only then do we notice the obvious – ‘note the Son wasn’t at the door….nor was he just at the end of the street – no, my friends, it was "while he was a great way off", his father ran to meet him’. The distance matters, because the father probably ran the length of the village and out towards the edges of his own fields and then his neighbours’ fields – (maybe not 10k but a challenging middle distance jaunt just the same – and done at sprint pace for an ageing parent).

    Running as love impatient for meeting, and running as love’s index of cherished significance.

    …

    Every one of the gospels speaks of disciples and witnesses running  to or from the empty tomb.

    Mark says they ran away afraid, and if we’re honest so would we. Matthew has one lot of bemused ex-followers running to tell the other disciples and then they are all ex-ex-followers – the two negatives of restored faith.

    Luke has Peter running to the Tomb urged on by that potent mixture of disbelief and unprecedented hope.

    John has women witnesses running to tell the self-absorbed mostly male others; and then Peter and the beloved disciple (who weren’t in such good condition as the other disciples it seems) puffing and peching their way towards the miracle that would leave them speechless as well as breathless.

    Running as excitement and urgency on the way to hope.

    …

    So maybe the sounds of my footsteps and my heavy breathing are not only my attempts to stay in some kind of condition, but are evidence that I too am in pursuit of something essential, desirable:

    …across my dreams,

    with nets of wonder

    I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.

    Bells What has always attracted me to this song is that word elusive – and its combination of wistfulness, attraction and hopefulness that seem to me to lie very close to what faith is. And the butterfly, those fragile beautiful creatures emerging from their chrysalis, metamorphosed, transformed, glorified – symbols of the newness and the beauty of the life of Christ – the resurrected Lord, and His life in us, made known in a love that will neither coerce nor ever give up.

    To live my life in pursuit of, and in the strength of that love, is the deepest purpose of my life, and well worth all the puffing and peching it takes ‘to run in the way of His commandments…to press on towards the high calling of God in Christ Jesus’. 

  • Holidays and James Denney

    This coming week is a mixture of visiting friends, walking the east cost beaches and coastlines, having meals with other friends, reading a couple of saved-up books that you want to read with minimum interruptions, cooking and sharing a couple of our favourite meals, and doing a quality check on several of our favourite coffee / home-baking haunts. So no blogging this week till Friday, or even Saturday. Which is just another way of saying we’re having our Easter break.

    But as a thought for the week following Easter, some words from James Denney, from an unpublished paper on The Gospel of Paul. They express Denney’s Colossian view of Christ, an understanding of Christ so radically renovating for the believing mind, that it required an entirely different worldview:

    Eyrwho121_2 [Christ is] the last reality in the universe, the ens realissimum, the ultimate truth through which and by relation to which all things must be defined and understood…

    The presence of God in Christ is the primary certainty; and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement of a specifically Christian view of the universe. Paul would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage to Christianise all his thoughts of God and the world…

    Web He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christianising the universe…he is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast and unwavering light of the divine presence of which he was assured in Christ.

  • John Updike: Poetry of the Passion

    Upd0009a_2 Other than this poem about Easter, I don’t know much else of John Updike’s poetry – and I haven’t read his novels either. This poem came onto my horizon a year or two ago and I was immediately attracted by its robust impatience with any softening of the scandal of the resurrection. The poem proceeds on the assumption that Paul wan’t kidding – if Christ hasn’t been raised the church is wasting its time, and is largely a waste of space in an already crowded world.

    To read this poem, alongside 1 Corinthians 15, and after reading one of the Gospel resurrection narratives, is an exercise in theological clarity and historical particularity. Christ is risen – was dead and is alive – death is defeated – graves are robbed by grace – if Christ be not risen we are of all people the most miserable. But He is risen – risen indeed – so today is a day of rejoicing and feasting, of loving and hoping, of celebrating life and affirming the persistent creativity and plenitude of God’s love – nowhere more evident than in the incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and living eternal reality of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.

    Seven Stanzas at Easter

    John Updike (1932)

    Make no mistake: if He rose at all
    it was as His body;
    if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
    reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
    the Church will fall.

    .

    It was not as the flowers,
    each soft Spring recurrent;
    it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
    eyes of the eleven apostles;
    it was as His flesh: ours.

    .

    The same hinged thumbs and toes,
    the same valved heart
    that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
    regathered out of enduring Might
    new strength to enclose.

    .

    Let us not mock God with metaphor,
    analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
    making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
    faded credulity of earlier ages:
    let us walk through the door.

    .

    The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
    not a stone in a story,
    but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
    grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
    the wide light of day.

    .

    And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
    make it a real angel,
    weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
    opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
    spun on a definite loom.

    .

    Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
    for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
    lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
    embarrassed by the miracle,
    and crushed by remonstrance.

  • Denise Levertov: Poetry of the Passion

    Denise_2 Denise Levertov was one of America’s finest 20th Century poets. A political activist, outspoken and passionately opposed to the Vietnam war, her poems are life affirming and persistent in hopefulness. In 1984 she converted to Christianity – so the poem below is an interesting indicator of her mind and spirit in pilgrimage, travelling hopefully.

    .

    Many of her later poems use explicitly Christian metaphors and images – but this one captures for me the hopefulness of hope, the trustfulness of faith, and the absolute fragility of a human life exposed to all the possibilities of brokenness. On Holy Saturday, that dark mystery when nothing was happening, the time of fearful waiting before that First Resurrection morning, this brief poem celebrates the nature of hope as propagated by telling and sharing – the body of the crucified Jesus, ‘unlikely source, clumsy and earth covered of grace’.

    “For the New Year,1981”

    Denise Levertov (1923-1997).

    I have a small grain of hope

    one small crystal that gleams

    clear colors out of transparency.

    .

    I need more.

    I break off a fragment

    to send you.

    .

    Please take

    this grain of a grain of hope

    so that mine won’t shrink.

    .

    Please share your fragment

    so that yours will grow.

    .

    Only so, by division,

    will hope increase,

    .

    like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower

    unless you distribute

    the clustered roots, unlikely source

    clumsy and earth-covered

    of grace.

  • W H Vanstone: Poetry of the Passion

    0232513805_02__sclzzzzzzz_aa240__2 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.

    .

    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.

    .

    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.

    .

    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.