Author: admin

New Year is a good time to say thank you. And don’t be too hard on the year we’ve just had. It has been difficult, unpredictable, at times infuriating, a bit scary, and a change of calendar to a new year doesn’t really solve anything. Except.

Years ago a lovely older friend remembered the family gatherings at New Year, and it was a big family. Her father used to look round the table and before giving thanks for the food would say. “Aye, isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here?”

So here we are on the first day of 2023, and perhaps for all our complaints during and about the past year, our first words should be a thank you that we are still here, and ready to go again on the next part of our journey. Thankful too for all our friends out there who enrich our lives, touch us with grace, make us laugh, and help us live and love and interpret and understand something of ourselves, our world, and what matters most.

My current screen saver is this photo I took up on Brimmond Hill, with the sun rising over the horizon just ahead of me on the path. In 2023 there will be new paths to climb and follow, which is where hope points us. Every day, we walk towards the future that comes to us from the God who is always ahead of us. And as we walk towards whatever comes next, we’ll do so with our friends around us, and in the good company of God. And maybe find time to say, “Isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here.”

Thought for the Day – Towards a New Year.

Monday

Luke 2.19 “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

The day after Christmas isn’t an anti-climax. Christmas isn’t past and finished. The gift of Christ is God’s self-giving love, coming amongst us, to be with us, always, as Immanuel. Treasure that up in your heart, and ponder, and be glad and grateful. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”

Tuesday

Luke 2.20 “The shepherds returned to their fields, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”

Like the shepherds, back to normal where nothing much has changed. Except we have changed. The world is different because of the coming of Jesus. This is a world where the feet of God walked as human feet. Shepherds who were of no social standing, stood in a floodlit field at an angel rock concert, and then stood first at the manger. Theirs were among the first eyes to see Jesus. No wonder they went away singing.

Wednesday

John 1.14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Maybe we won’t sing Christmas carols again for a while – though I’ve often thought we should sing one occasionally near Easter. “"Hail the Heav'n-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and Life to all he brings, ris'n with Healing in his Wings." See. Christmas and Easter converge. We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth – in the manger, on the cross, and in that early morning sunlit garden.

Thursday

Matthew 1.23 “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Names matter. This child’s name will describe who he is and what his life is about. It was a common and popular boys’ name. The humility of God is shown in his coming as the child of a poor family, born in an obscure village, hunted as a refugee – and yet, he was the eternal Word made flesh, Jesus who saves us from our sins. “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear; it soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds and drives away his fear.” The same writer wrote, “Amazing Grace”!

Friday

Matthew 2.11-12 “Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.”

Like the shepherds, the three travellers go back where they came from, and to the lives they knew. They had worshipped and handed over precious gifts, and deep down they knew the world had pivoted. Our world will always have its Herods, so drunk on power they don’t care about who suffers. But power is not God, and not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Gold speaks of God’s precious gift of Christ; incense is the gift of our worship; myrrh is the sign of sacrifice. Deep down, because of the coming of Jesus, we too know the world has pivoted, Immanuel, God with us.

Saturday

Isaiah 9. “And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

The loving wisdom of God the Counsellor; the redemptive purpose and power of the Mighty God; the patient persistent love of God the Father; the reconciling grace and costly love of the Prince of Peace – these are the promises which all find their YES in Jesus. “No matter how many promises God has made, they are all Yes in Christ.” These four names would be a good way of structuring our prayers – for guidance in decisions, grace and strength, comfort and assurance, and peace for us and others.

Sunday

2 Corinthians 8.9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

This is Paul arguing with the Corinthians to get a move on and give generously to the fund to help those who were starving from famine around Jerusalem. He goes to the very heart of our faith. We have been so enriched and blessed by Jesus’ self-sacrifice; so, in turn we are called to live into and out of that grace, that generous, joyful and life changing Gift of the heart of God. “He who did not spare his own Son, will he not freely, with him, give you everything else you need?” Of course He will!

Smudge says: I have no idea what Karl Barth's Critically realistic dialectical theology is all about. 

The birth of Jesus starts the story of the New Testament. I've always felt that Christmas is a good time to reflect on the way the Old Testament starts the story of all things. Before there was a world to redeem a world was made.

Long before the birth of Jesus, God made flesh, human beings were formed and wrought by the creative impetus of a Love incapable of self-absorption. That seems to be something of what John's Gospel is saying in chapter 1.

And out of that Eternal Love came all that is made, including human beings, with all the risk and cost that would entail. And God still did it.

Whatever else we make of the omniscience of God, that strangely technical word refers to that universe of deep and eternal knowing that we call the Love of God.

Three Fibonacci Poems on Creation and Incarnation.*

Creation

Let
there
be light!
Creation,
from first to last, an
imperative fiat of love,
as Benign Being invites a universe to be.

Rest

God's
peace!
Sabbath
observance.
God's recreation.
Well done good and faithful God.
Now our harder task. Curators of God's masterpiece.

Incarnation

First
word
becomes
final word.
What else could God do,
but wrap words in flesh, be born as
God whose love exhausts whole lexicons of spelled out words?

(c) Jim Gordon

Fibonacci poems follow the mathematical fibonacci sequence, the syllables counted as follows.

• 1 syllable for first line
• 1 syllable for second line
• 2 syllables for third
• 3 syllables for fourth
• 5 syllables for fifth
• 8 syllables for sixth
• 13 syllables for seventh

You can find out more about it all over here – https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/fibonacci-poetry-a-new-poetic-form

I know. It's nearly Christmas and by now we should be immersed in the surround-sound of carols, soaked in images of stars and mangers, keeping company with shepherds and angels, and carried along by the story we know by heart, and most times want to live in, and live into.

The Nativity is the prelude to the Passion. At least the Scottish theologian James Denney thought so: "Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation." To be sure, an over-sentimentalised Christmas story that is uncomfortable with the dark shadows of Herod, Empire, swords and the murder of children is hardly good news for a broken world overshadowed by darkness.

When Mary was told "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins", that was a statement of divine intent, a recognition of darkness and evil, oppression and cruelty, greed and lust, and the whole Gordian knot of the sin that entangles, invades and occupies God's creation like Japanese knotweed in the Garden of Eden, and in our contemporary life in the world. 

Ironically, a Nativity story without sin erases the reason the coming of Jesus is good news in the first place. Matthew tells of the slaughter of the innocents, the refugee status of the holy family, and the weeping and mourning of mothers every bit as loud and penetrating as the earlier songs of the angels. And if we are not careful, we may well be telling a story of sanitised sentiment, in denial of the dreadful consequences of sin for all those caught up in the misery and suffering of human evil, individual and institutional, personal and corporate, past and present. In words first aimed at those flirting with or embracing such a theology, Richard Niebuhr once warned of the dangers of distorted good news:   

'A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.'  

Oh, I know. None of us mean to mess about with the story that defines our identity as Christians. We are those who take with utmost seriousness and ridiculously hopeful joy, that promise than in Jesus God comes amongst us, Emmanuel, God with us, Saviour from sin, Light of Life shining in the darkness. 

So let joy be unconfined. The good news is not that sin doesn't exist, or should be airbrushed out of the realities of our lives. The good news is that sin isn't the final reality. Ultimately, sin can't win. God has seen to that. And what kind of God? That is what takes us from Bethlehem to Calvary, and notwithstanding Denney's words above, the Christian story is of the God revealed at Bethlehem, and on Calvary, and early in the morning in a garden. 

So this Christmas, I for one go back to a favourite hymn, a poem that has shaped my thoughts and prayers and theologising for over 40 years. The Good News is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us", but bearing their full consequence, absorbing their potential for death, and holding within the eternal purposes of Divine Love all that is created and destined for glory when God will be all in all.  

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;

Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;

Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.

Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

For the I don't know how many times, I took this book down this morning. I've had it since it was published in 1981. It's my first port of call when I'm looking for some good warm Arminian correctives to the hard to argue with theology of the Reformed tradition! More seriously, this is a book I've read through more than once and consulted time without number.

It's by no means the most complete Wesley anthology, but it has several outstanding features. The 5 page Preface is written by Albert C Outler, who was an outstanding Wesleyan scholar and one of the driving forces behind the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley. This is a succinct apologia for Wesleyan theology.

The Introduction by Frank Whaling is a sixty page essay covering biography, the rise of Methodism as a movement, the hymns, the sermons, the letters, and some of the theological controversies. It is a succinct summary that does what it says; introduces the reader the the people who wrote the texts contained in the anthology. More than that, it is a superb account of the spirituality and the lived experience of Wesleyan Christianity with its emphases on a free gospel, a universal atonement, the call to Christian perfection, and the experiential chain of conversion, justification, sanctification and assurance as a lived process of salvation enabled by grace and imparted by the Holy Spirit.

The chosen texts are arranged in three sections. Section I includes several extracts from key documents of Methodism, letters of spiritual counsel, John's translations of some German hymns and the Wesleyan Covenant Service. Section II has over 100 pages of representative hymns of Charles Wesley; these are well chosen and touch on the major themes of Charles hymn output. Section III contains the main texts relating to Christian Perfection, the most controversial of John Wesley's doctrines, and along with the brothers' insistence that Christ died for all, the focal points of the fiercest arguments between the Wesleys and Whitefield, Toplady and various other Reformed protagonists.

My copy has three splits on the spine, caused by frequent use. This is a good thing! What's more, there are pencil notes on most of the pages, and some of them enhanced by frequent underlinings, marginal notes, and cross references.

Opening somewhere near the middle I found these verses, their theological optimism one of the reasons my own spirituality has strongly coloured strands of Wesley woven through:

Thou lov'st whate'er thy hands have made;

     Thy goodness we rehearse,

In shining characters displayed

     Throughout our universe.

 

Mercy, with love, and endless grace

     O'er all thy works doth reign;

But mostly thou delight'st to bless

     Thy favourite creature – man. 

I mentioned A C Outler above. Here's a sentence from his Preface:

"Wesleyan spirituality carries within it an implicit theory of social revolution that is non-violent and conservative, a faith in the human future based on an unfaltering optimism of grace."

And I guess when push comes to shove, that's where I hang my theological bunnet too!

Yesterday was a day of several highlights: Nativity play and service at Montrose, the best World Cup final for a long time, an evening Carol Service in our home church in Crown Terrace. In both places good music, traditional and new carols, obvious and careful preparation, candles and atmosphere, Scripture and prayer. All of that, and all good.

But it was one of the readings of scripture at the evening carol service that opened me up to the recurring miracle that we celebrate by doing all that we do on these days leading to Christmas.

I've spent a lifetime fascinated by John's first chapter, especially chapter 1.1-14. I've studied it, exegeted it, read the theologians who went diving into it, learned it by heart (in the RSV version), designed a tapestry around one of its verses, and have come to think of this text as the distilled truth of a mystery beyond all our capacities, except perhaps worship in humility and wonder.

I've found faith and hope and love in phrases like:

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not extinguished it.

"In Him was life and the life was the light of all people."

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth."

The passage is obviously deeply familiar to me. But last night I heard it read by an Iranian friend I've come to know in recent months. He read it in his own language of Farsi, with the English text on the screen for us to follow. The coincidence in my mind of a text I know thoroughly, read in a language entirely foreign to me, but by someone who is my brother and not 'other', in the context of worship and our shared love for Jesus, whose birth we were celebrating – that was a moment of profound realisation of what it is that joins us in our humanity.

"In him was life, and the life was the light of all people." My Iranian friend and our community, we share faith in the same Light, the same love of life, the same faith in the Light of Life. Same words in different languages, same Word that transcends all difference and draws us together in a light that shines in the darkness, and cannot be extinguished – not by hate  and not by complacency, not by difference and not by indifference.

The lead up to Christmas isn't joy for everyone. Not everyone is, or wants to be, included in the often forced jollity. Not everyone is prepared to be implicated in the conspiracy of festive positivity, which easily becomes a denial of the uncomfortable realities of a world in which exclusion, indifference and hostility to 'the other' is an encroaching darkness. But.

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it,

and

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it."

There are two possible translations and I don't doubt John knew what he was doing when he chose his words. An older translation tries hard to reproduce John's deliberate double meaning: "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Darkness can neither understand nor overcome the persistence of light. What God is about in Jesus is beyond human comprehension and defies human conquest. 

Last night, listening to the Prologue to the Gospel of John, originally written in Greek, first translated into English six centuries ago, read in Farsi, by a friend who in his life experience has found the Light of Life who shines in the darkness, and who goes on believing that the darkness shall not overcome – that was a moment when translation moved from semantic equivalence to human embodiment and personal faith experience. 

At that moment, "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….from the fullness of his grace have we all received one blessing after another."

God of Light and Life

In the buzz of this place as we get ready to hear the Christmas story,

And in the quietness of Advent when we are told to wait and see;

Like Mary, help us to hear your voice speaking to us.

Like Joseph open our minds to the incredible and our hearts to your truth.

So that:

Like the Innkeeper we will find room for Jesus in our lives.

Like the shepherds we will come to the manger to see for ourselves.

Like the Wise Kings we will come with our gifts, and kneel in worship.

Like the angels we will sing and tell the good news;

That Jesus is born, that God is with us,

That the light of the world has come,

And that God’s love for the world is to be found

In the gift of the Christ child.

It's been snow and frost for nearly a week up here, and likely to stay that way for a while yet. Braemar was more than -17 degrees last night; we were a mere -11 degrees at 7.00 am this morning.

It stayed below zero all day, and when I came out the door to clear the windscreen and go to the shops, looking down the street there was the most golden sunset. It lasted only a minute or so, but long enough for a photo.

I know ever square foot of this street, having lived here for 12 years. The small pointed tree is in memory of my neighbour. The wheelie bin is left out because the there has been no bin collection. At the bottom of the street a window is lit up by the reflection from the window across the road, of the golden sunset.

Sometimes you have to be prepared to be surprised. I know. That sounds like a doesn't-make-sense sentence. How can you be surprised if you're always prepared for it. A surprise takes you unawares. True enough. But life can become so preoccupied that we are unaware as a chronic way of being in the world. Until something heightens our awareness. 

Advent is a time of heightened awareness for Christians. Oh we know Christ has come. The nativity story stays the same no matter how it's dressed up. Christmas day accelerates towards us and our preparations become the focus, more than the fact, the reality, the truth, that Advent is the time when darkness and light take on deep significance. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

Advent gate-crashes our pre-occupations. Advent prepares us to be surprised, again. I sometimes wonder if that's what wonder is – the readiness to be surprised by something we already know is too good to be true. "Arise! Shine! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord has risen on you."

So I come out the door and turn to lock it, and in the turning I see, I accidentally notice in the turning, a sky ablaze with splendour. It's so cold I'd turned quickly, in a hurry to get on with whatever it was I thought so important. And was ambushed by beauty. Advent does that, surprising us with reminders that God is about, and what God is about.

Something as banal as a wheelie bin, sits there in the afterglow of sunset. A window facing the opposite direction from the light, glows with borrowed radiance from the window across the street. And a wee pointed shrub, looks for all the world like a Christmas tree lacking only lights. All visible from my doorstep – if I have eyes to see and inclination to look, and longing enough to be prepared to be surprised.