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For a few days I have been contemplating some of the verses in the Psalms that use the rock metaphor. What is God like? Ask the Psalmist poet that question and there's a rich cluster of metaphors scattered throughout that remarkable collection of praise and lament, thanksgiving and complaint, exultation and despair, joy and sorrow, trust and fear, peace and terror, prayer and soliloquy, that we call the Book of Psalms.

One of those metaphors "God is my rock" occurs 28 times. Variously translated rock, cliff, crag, it is an image of permanence, of that which has always been present, of solid 'thereness' whatever the weather prevailing in our inner climate. So I preached on that metaphor this morning. And in my reflection and exposition, which was more exploration than explanation, I used one of Denise Levertov's poems, which displays a sure-footedness as impressive as any mountain goat leaping confidently across the rocks, crags and cliff faces. Here's the poem:

"Suspended".
I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted.

For all the confidence inspired by that metaphor, "You are my rock", for many people of faith, life still has periods of vulnerability, times of brokenness, and inner struggle, sometimes prolonged, that comes from not being able to feel, and experience the reality to which the metaphor points. Levertov's own faith journey, and her life experiences of hurt and loss, of illness and anxiety are the human loam out of which poems like this grow. She knows those feelings we often find it hard to acknowledge, and harder still to name.

Just when we need God most it doesn't feel as if God hears the cry of the heart, or comforts our anxiety-driven longings, or changes the circumstances that threaten to overwhelm. The absence, silence and 'not thereness' of God is sometimes a compelling contradiction of our trust and faith and hope. I know of no poem that articulates better this ambiguity touched by trust, or which gives testimony with such honest hopefulness laced with threads of uncertainty. It is a succinct credo of gentle defiance. Those last four words, "I have not plummeted", carry the precious freight of spiritual wisdom borne out of suffering, and survival, and gratitude for both.

And maybe, just maybe, David's use of the image sometimes betrays his own need not only to state his confidence, but to overstate it in cumulative images, as if to persuade his own heart that it is so. Is that what he is doing in Psalm 18.2? "The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold."

There is practical sense and theological wisdom in spitting words of faith and hope into the very wind of adversity. The man who wrote those words, assuming for the moment it was David, had scars of body and psyche, from being hounded and hunted by Saul, and escaping only by accidents of history and coincidences of circumstance; except for the poet psalmist, such accidents and coincidences had their origin not in chance and fortune, but in that mysterious purposefulness that intervenes when we least expect it. And the result is, for all the crisis and threat of life itself, "You are my rock…I have not plummeted." 

While reading the Sermon on the Mount every other day, a kind of C25K for the heart, I'm keeping my eyes open for examples of people doing the Word as well as hearing it.

Jimmy Carter has a long standing and well known Christian commitment that has included teaching Bible Class before and after his Presidency.

More recently he has affirmed his commitment to the ministry and leadership of women in the church, even when that has created tensions between him and the Baptist denomination which has been his spiritual home all his life.

In these late harvest years he is still busy building the Kingdom by getting his hands dirty and living out his commitment to Jesus and to the poor.

It is mere coincidence that his initials are JC. But in another sense those same initials are like a hallmark stamp on much of his life, lifestyle and service to the community. I remember reading one of the early biographies of Jimmy Carter, published by Collins, and before later biographies became partisan and agenda driven, whether villifying him as a failure and much else, or hagiography making him into the saint he denies he could ever be.

He is undoubtedly a man of deep and life-changing Christian conviction. Flawed but faithful, a conviction politician of a past era, highly respected amongst those who care about global issues of ecology, social justice and racial harmony and peace amongst the major faiths, he remains for me, an example of a good man trying to do good in a world of clashing vested interests, global power plays by politicians, states, institutions and corporations. And he builds houses. My guess is, going back to the Sermon on the Mount, he is building the house of his life on the Rock.

This reading of the Sermon on the Mount every other day, it's a time consuming commitment. I mean it takes 4 minutes, that's four minutes, to read Matthew chapter 5, and 3 minutes each for chapters 6 and 7. And that's not reading slowly. So around 10 minutes spent just reading the same thing I read two days ago. Ten minutes is nothing to the time I spend checking out Facebook, or checking and answering email, or listening to the News headlines several times a day.

Interestingly time has that mysterious quality of variable speed depending on whether we are bored or fascinated, depending on whether we think what we are doing is important or optional, productive or a waste of time. Thing is, if I read the Sermon on the Mount for a month, the three chapters every second day so 15 times, I'll spend two and a half hours reading this same text. I already know chunks of it by heart. It might be better to read three chapters of Matthew and get through the whole Gospel in an hour and a half hours

And that is where Jonathan Pennington's approach to the Sermon on the Mount reins in the impatience and obsession with efficiency that thinks of reading broadly and quantitively rather than deeply and qualitiatively. The ancient practice of Lectio Divina was a call to slowed down, repetitive, reflective, contemplative assimilation of a text until the text begins to form and give shape to what and how we think. It is a reading that takes to heart, a rumination both purposeful and nourishing, a repetitive reiteration of that which is significantly formative.

Go back to those early centuries, urges Pennington. The Sermon was not a problematic text too hard to achieve; rather it was a paradigmatic text "foundational to an understanding of Christianity itself." Those words of Jesus deeply sourced in the story of Israel and especially its wisdom tradition, were spoken into a new community that emerged within a Jewish and Greco-Roman matrix. And both cultural traditions posed and sought to answer the deep and enduring question of what makes for human flourishing, and answered in terms of the virtuous life. The Sermon is about the virtuous Christian life, what it looks like when it is embodied in the life of a community and in the heart and practices of the individual. The Sermon is about character formation, growth in the virtues of the Kingdom of God, foundation practices that are rooted and grounded in the person, the ministry and the Lordship of the one who "sat down….and opened his mouth to teach his disciples".

I remember the first time I came across the word "aretegenic", reading a book by Ellen Charry entitled, By the Renewing of Your Mind. Fortunately it was clearly explained in that book, because much of the point and argument depended on knowing what it means. Derived from the Greek word arete, it means "for the purpose of forming character or virtue". This is the word that Pennington wants to use as a description of the nature and purpose of the Sermon on the Mount; the Sermon is aretegenic, formative and transformative of character, by the development of virtuous dispositions and habits. 

"Thus our reading of the Sermon, which is clearly focused on providing a vision for a way of being in the world, should naturally and rightly be focused on reading for the purpose of being trandsformed. All other readings, as beneficial as they can be – historical, literary, dogmatic, political, postcolonial, grammatical, linguistic, text critical – are at best steps toward the highest form of reading, reading for personal transformation." (15-16)

That kind of reading is obviously unconcerned about efficiency as such. The only productivity issue has to do with virtue, character growth, inner transformation towards formative practices of Christian behaviour and ethics. Pennington's focus does the Sermon the unusual courtesy of taking it seriously on its own terms. This is the teaching of Jesus, a person who is simultaneously the fulfillment and incarnation of both virtue leading to human flourishing, and of the Kingdom of God. "He is the complete and virtuous human and the true king." (15)

So a week into this reading discipline, into week 2 of a C25K training regime of reading and praying the Sermon on the Mount, I am being helpfully reminded of what the Sermon is for. Reading for reflection, and such reflection issuing in practice, and practice building towards habits of the heart and virtues of character, and all of this is an intentional commitment to formation of inner life and outward practice, towards the One who first sat down, opened his mouth and uttered these words to disciples. 

That primary point established, there are two crucial words that Pennington takes a chapter each to explore. They are makarios and teleios. The received and common translations are "blessed" and "perfect" respectively – in the next two posts we will consider Pennington's careful reconsideration of both words, which happen to be hinge words in the Gospel of Matthew.

The painting is by David Hockney, The Sermon on the Mount.

Now not everyone knows what C25K stands for. So for the uninitiated, it refers to a training programme to get people from the couch to running 5K in a 9 week, 3 times per week timetable. It starts with a modest alternation between walking and running, so in the first week there's a five minute warm up, then you alternate 60 seconds of running, with 90 seconds of walking, for a total of 20 minutes. Each week the effort increases in small increments until by week 9 a 5 minute warm up is followed by 30 minutes running. I know a number of folk who have done this, and some of them would never have called themselves runners. The secret is in being realistic, determined, disciplined and sticking with it.

The Sermon on the Mount can also seem to be beyond any sense of realistic achievement. It's even harder than changing from Couch to running 5K in 9 weeks! Turning the other cheek, going a second mile, not being dangerously angry, not worrying about food, clothes, money and the other necessities of life. It all seems a bit beyond most of us. In fact it's an interesting question how often any of us have ever taken time to read the Sermon on the Mount all the way through; or to read all or some of it with any regularity, attentiveness, aspiration, or even intention of allowing it to quality check who we are, and what we are about, and what matters most. Even Christians, perhaps especially Christians, tend to look on the Sermon on the Mount as an Everest scale ideal, something to be aimed at but without any real hopes of achievement, an inaccessible mountain, shrouded in mist and mystery, both inviting and forbidding.

I wonder what might happen if the C25K principle was applied to the Sermon on the Mount. Might it feel like a kind of aerobic exercise for the heart, soul, conscience, and mind? Supposing the Sermon was to be read every other day for 9 weeks. The first week read only a few verses, think about them, read a few more, maybe take 5 minutes to write down what's important, and a minute or two to pray. By week 3 we are starting to get the hang of this, and ready to ask what has any of this got to do with us, who we are, how we act, what we think?

Six weeks in and we are reading the whole Sermon on the Mount now, every other day. The words are familiar, the rhythm of the sentences is comfortable, but the content and the meaning is beginning to register. This isn't a game, or a mere exercise in self-development. This is starting to develop intellectual muscle, moral stamina, and our mood is now interrogative as questions clarify, and we are examined. Next our mood becomes indicative as we see exactly what these disruptively creative texts are saying to us, and begin to realise climbing this mountain will change us forever.

But finally as we reach week 9 and beyond, the text takes control and we hear a quite different tone, mood and spirit. It is the imperative. These are the commands of the King for those who seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. These are the promises to those who are Blessed. These are the invitations and the warnings, the prayers and the promises, the desires and the disciplines of those who are called to be disciples and who say they will follow. 

So for the next 9 weeks I'm going to do this. The C25K training programme adapted to learning to walk in the ways of the Sermon on the Mount. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, time set apart to read and pause, read and think, read and pray, read and write, and to allow these texts to take effect on my inner climate. Alongside careful and regular reading of the text, I'll work through Pennington's The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. I'll post here and share whatever comes out of this. Of course it will be very particular to me, specific to my circumstances and inner responses, and in that sense subjective and personal – but why not? Goodness! All over Facebook good folk post their progress in C25K. My own reporting and writing here won't be about progress but insight, not about personal achievement so much as making time and space for transformative texts to do their work, and being available to the grace that comes with the demand.

I have always been impressed, and made to think harder, by Jesus words, "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." The burden of obedience, the discipline of listening, the freedom of being constrained to purpose and guided by the Voice of the one who speaks the wisdom of God. In these words of the Sermon on the Mount, I hear what Joachim Jeremias called the "ipsissima vox" of Jesus, the very voice, the essential tone, the unmistakably particular voice of Jesus.

I remember, in the years before Amazon and one click book-buying, ordering a book on Micah from a theologically conservative bookshop. It was local and I wanted to support it.

There was some breathing in through teeth, and shaking of the head, and I was asked if I really wanted to have a book by that particular publisher, and that even more particular writer.

The inward hissing breath and the melancholic headshake reminded me of the dodgy car mechanic preparing to deliver bad news about the repair estimate for that hard to trace rattle that only happened going round a corner.

"Yes", I said. "Is there a problem?" I asked mildly, despite being mildly irritated.

"Well we don't ususally order from them, but if you're sure,", spoken with the heavy pastoral concern of a parent anxious not to curb the child's development, or expose them to too much risk, and so heavily hinting at what would be the wise choice.

A week or two later I had a phone call that my book had arrived. When I went to collect it my pastorally burdened bookseller, suggested another title I might want to buy to counteract the potential hazards of reading this slippery slope, liberal taking liberty with the text stuff. I declined!

The book I ordered was Micah the Prophet, by Hans Walter Wolff. Yes indeed, a first class critical scholar, whose whole academic life was immersed in the Hebrew Bible, and whose critical commentaries on the prophets are amongst the intellectual high points of historical and form criticism. But the thing about this particular volume was, it is a potent exposition of what it sounds like when the prophet Micah is allowed to speak into the chaos, uncertainties, moral confusions and economic realities of each age and every age, and in particular our own age.

Out of deep scholarly study, and the intellectual wrestling required to listen to a text with the whole self, Wolff wrote a book aimed at addressing what he called the cul-de-sacs of our ailing culture, grasping and unjust, oppressive and extravagant, delusional of its own longevity and careless to the point of dismissive of the fundamentals that are the foundations of healthy human community. The last part of the book is three evenings of Bible Study on Micah, conducted in 1977, the year of Baader-Meinhoff threats, atrocities and on October 18th suicides in Stammheim Prison. This is how to do Bible Study – text in hand, television on, the words of the prophet competing with the news announcer, the first speaking words of life and words of judgement, the second struggling to speak such hard to live by words as mercy, justice and humble compassion.

I have a lot of books. Amongst them, books which have significance and value beyond the price paid for them. Wolff's theological and ethical exposition of Micah has been an important companion on the way when I have needed conversation with someone who loved and soaked in the text of the Hebrew Prophets. Immersion in those great oracles of "Thus saith the Lord…" is one of the required antidotes in our own age when mercy, justice and compassion and walking humbly are absent from the political lexicon, and from many a preacher's thesaurus of frequently used words.

When I left College in 1976 and settled in pastoral ministry, I had to decide what I would do for my probationary studies. Quite rightly, the denominational policy was to encourage lifelong learning, and for the first three years there were set assignments ranging from book reviews to a couple of essays. I've never needed much encouragement to read, study and write. It is one of the perils of being a minister that there are so many words to read, write and speak. I guess the skill is in learning to read in the right places, to write well, and to speak only what's worth other people's trouble to hear.

Early on in my probationary studies, I decided I was going to make my major project a study of the Sermon on the Mount. I still have the typewritten manuscript; a long study of the background and structure, and a verse by verse exegesis using several standard commentaries and monographs. That study, over those years, shaped my approach to the Bible for the rest of my life. I have retained an interest in the Sermon on the Mount, exploring the history of its interpretation, being both inspired and perplexed about how it applies to personal, social and community life. I've tried too, to participate in the ongoing exegetical mining operation that is essential when excavating truth that is so deep, radical and transformative.

Study of the text and its background is one thing; living it as the blueprint of the Kingdom of God is something else again. Knowing the text thoroughly can only ever be the first stage in a transformational encounter with a text that today, as much as ever, cuts across some of the most unquestioned and life-shaping values of our culture. So I was keen to get my hands on the most recent exposition: The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, by Jonathan Pennington.

That a text so old and counter cultural, should have contemporary purchase on how we live; that a vision of life so inimical of late globalised capitalism and consumer driven materialism, might be the salvation of all of us in a world exploited to exhaustion; that words that sound like a manifesto for the Naive and Otherworldly Party, might instead be the words of hard wisdom, and tough talking, and direction-changing discipline we all need to hear, and heed. That this might be so.

That these might each be a possibility; lives of counter cultural persuasiveness lived as intentional critique and compassionate gift; lifestyles that nurture and nourish our world rather than rip up and tear apart the very fabric of our planetary home; that words, ideas and actions might spring from life giving principles and visions of humane community, and begin to heal divisions, cure our propensity to conflict, teach us again the ways of trust, compassion and hope; that all this is possible is part of the burden and the blessing, the risk and the promise, of the Sermon on the Mount.

Make no mistake. These are words of life, and their negation is perilous.

When Jesus says "Blessed" he speaks a word redolent of risk and new possibility.

When Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said…but I say unto you" he is challenging every status quo we've ever stood on.

When Jesus says, "Consider the birds…look at the flowers…do not be anxious" he contradicts the most powerful drives of our money obsessed, image addicted, and deliberately discontented culture.

And when Jesus warns about the intentional foolishness of building our lives on sand, we go ahead anyway, because the waves will crash on someone else's shore.

So I'm back into the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next while I'll post on Pennington's book, and his take on one of the most destabilising texts our complacent culture can encounter. But that encounter will only happen when there are communities for whom those words of Jesus are embraced as the risky possibility and the counter-cultural critique that is the Kingdom of God.  

"But while he is steadily fixed in his religious principles in what he believes to be the truth as it is in Jesus; while he firmly adheres to that worship of God which he judges to be most acceptable in his sight; and while he is united by the tenderest and closest ties to one particular congregation, –his heart is enlarged toward all mankind, those he knows and those he does not; he embraces with strong and cordial affection neighbours and strangers, friends and enemies. This is catholic or universal love. And he that has this is of a catholic spirit. For love alone gives the title to this character: catholic love is a catholic spirit."

That quotation needs a context. It's from a sermon entitled The Catholic Spirit. It was preached by John Wesley probably in 1749, on the text 2 Kings 10.15. That text reads,

"And when he was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him: and he saluted him, and said to him, Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab answered, 'It is.' If it be, give me thine hand. And he gave him his hand; and he took him up to him into the chariot."

John Wesley could be a pain. Dogmatic, opinionated, partisan, stubbornly hard to shift from what he believed was the central ground of Christian faith. But that made him neither an exclusive nor a separatist from other Christians. This sermon is about the spirit of welcome, the formation of a settled and consistent predisposition to love and a commitment divinely maintained to make peace, developing a Spirit inspired instinct for unity of heart and practical goodwill towards others.

When John Wesley talked about the Christian calling to live and think and exhibit a catholic spirit he was unmistakable and explicit in his demand that those who professed faith in the God of universal love are called to mirror that love to other Christians, and even to those who make no such claims to faith. Universal love cannot be selective, a catholic spirit refuses to reject, the "ingrasping love of God" does not exclude or disqualify. The love of God, poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit overflows in goodwill, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, conciliation to those who are friends and those who are opponents, even to enemies, and therefore the love of Christ loves without exception and without excusing.

John Wesley got into trouble for his views on Christian Perfection, and for using phrases like universal love, and yes, for encouraging a catholic spirit in a fractious age. The second half of the 18th Century was a time of denominational jealousies, cultural upheavals, theological realignments, and social unrest. But beneath the surface there were also the subterranean disturbances of established authorities, threatened privileges, competivie religiosity, and these inevitably promoted power games as the Established Church felt the threat and impetus of a rising Dissenting churches, of which the rapidly growing Methodists was one of the more worrying examples.

Wesley's Sermon is a defining document of the classic Methodist commitment to unity and fellowship with other churches. The word ecumenical for Wesley was synonymous with catholic, and both required a disposition of openness and vulnerability to the presence and reality of those with whom he, or his Methodist societies, disagreed. And by the way, this isn't your soft, mushy, marshmallow ecumenism where no matter what somebody believes it's ok. The catholic spirit tries to hold the ground between an exclusive dogmatism and an all inclusive indifferentism, and it is a place where those of different Christian traditions, acknowledging the integrity each of the other, exchange the hand of fellowship and mutual gladness in their shared faith in Christ.

"That we may all love one another as Christ loved us", says Wesley. The past tense is crucial, is a crux point; it points to the supreme evidence of Christ's love on the cross. There, beneath the cross of Jesus, Christians from whatever denomination, tradition, culture or time, stand in the place where all hearts are equal in their need of grace and their sense of gratitude. 

From my earliest days as a Christian I have been passionately ecumenical. From my first serious reading of John Wesley now over 30 years ago I have sensed a kindred spirit. This sermon is one of the core documents of Wesleyan spirituality, and of the Methodist way of being the church. I've gone back to it repeatedly, and I recall it frequently when I encounter those whose primary calling seems to be telling every other Christian tradition how wrong it is, or where its deficits lie, or why they could never be the kind of Christian those other people are pretending to be. And I guess it's kind of quaint to want to answer that spirit of "see me, I'm right" by quoting some words about a guy with the weird name Jehonadad son of Rechab!

But Wesley uses that text to dare his hearers into an act of trust, the shaking of hands between strangers, the measuring of the heart of the other, and therefore the risk of that middle ground where mutual respect and shared grace enable gratitude in duplicate, or in multiples of voices. When this sermon was later published in 1770, appended to it was one of Charles Wesley's hymns, "Catholic Love". Here is one of the verses.

Weary of all this wordy strife,

These notions, forms, and modes, and names,

To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,

Whose love my simple heart inflames,

Divinely taught, at last I fly,

With thee and thine to live and die.

Amongst my many books, and settled on my many shelves, are a number of writers whose work is a balm in Gilead, a tonic for the creeping weariness of spirits jaded by a world too much in our faces.

Isaiah wrote some of his greatest poetry to a people in exile, religiously dislocated, culturally deprived, making the best of alienation and hoping against all odds that one day there might be home for them, or their children, maybe even their grandchildren. So Isaiah the great prophet poet used words like an artist and painted pictures of a desert in blossom, wilderness and parched land ablaze with colour and verdant with foliage, and no mere oasis but springs of living water, streams in the desert, rivers of life flowing freely and irrigating the soul and the spirit and the heart and the mind.

Isaiah is one of those writers who is a balm in Gilead, at least for me. So are several others whose writing and whose thought are like the waters that do not fail the thirsty soul, like the fire that purifies the troubled conscience, the bread that nourishes the stumbling spirit. And amongst those great writers and thinkers whose words and ideas refresh and renew my view of life when I've become jaded by the noise and greed of our culture, or angry at the complacency and selfishness that invade our public and political life, or troubled and unsettled by the divisive rhetoric of power games and image makers and breakers – is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Even the titles of his books help diagnose our condition in our own country, and wider afield in a Western civilisation which is disintegrating and corroding beneath us: The Insecurity of Freedom: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity; Man's Quest for God; God in Search of Man; Man is Not Alone; The Sabbath; Who is Man. One of the ironies of our times is that we are unaware of our own lostness, so certain of our cleverness we are blind to our foolishness, so selfish and greedy to possess and consume that we have learned to ignore the destructive impact on the very planet that sustains the life of ourselves and the creatures who share the earth. 

Earlier today I took refuge once more in that small collection of wisdom and wonder that is Heschel's writing. Our contemporary dilemmas aren't so different from the defining issues of the 30 years from the end of the Second World War till Heschel died in 1972. Dishonesty in public discourse, distrust of politics and politicians, war conducted by proxy overseas, the inordinate power of business conglomerates and concentrated finance over the lives of whole populations, the struggle for freedom, civil and human rights and the need to call out injustice, oppression and to call in question the machinery of capital when it is allowed to crush the poor and the vulnerable. 

In a bold and unflinching article published in Jewish Heritage in 1971, a year before he died, Heschel addressed the immorality of the Vietnam War. It is a searing critique of modern warfare and our ability to wage war on others from a distance, with no real sense of the agony, anguish and brutality inflicted on others in our name. And he has no patience with the religiously distorting question, "Where is God in such suffering?" He turns that particular rhetorical subterfuge inside out and declares like the prophet he absolutely was, "God confronts us with the question, "Where are you? Is there no compassion in the world?" The allusion to Genesis is obvious, and the Fall, the hiding away from God in the Garden, and the Divinely articulated question that finds out the moral peril of every attempt to avoid God, hide from God, break free from God, are distilled into this brief essay.

Near the end Heschel moves from essay writing to prayer, and in doing so provides us with a clue as to how people of faith are to confront, resist and seek to overthrow the powers of injustice and all that they unleash on the world. It is these words of Heschel, two brief paragraphs, that once again helped to re-align my own sense of what is important, what my life is about. Reading them I hear gurgling springs in the desert, sense the stirring of new seeds germinating, believe again in the God of hope who enables us to be defiant of despair.

"O Lord we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Prayer is our greatest privilege. To pray is to stake our very existence, our right to live, on the truth and on the supreme importance of that which we pray for. Prayer, then, is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God. In such awareness we pray."

(A J Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, page 231)

This is a wire sculpture which sits above the harbour at Portsoy. The graceful lines of a dolphin leaping towards the sea is a powerful and poignant symbol of life that is wild, untamed, beautiful and utterly natural.

There are many perspectives on the relationship between humans and the biosphere we call earth. My own preference, intellectual, ethical and spiritual, is the Christian calling to a responsible stewardship of the created order. Yes we can talk of "nature", and even personify it with the pronoun she, and the maternal metaphor of "mother nature". These are at least reminders that we endanger other creatures when we see them as commodities, and the earth's resources are exploited as if they were our sole possession, inexhaustible and all the time forgetting our own dependence on them.

However a theological imperative arises out of the Christian doctrine of creation, and its associated doctrine of humanity. To speak of creation means that the natural world is held within a framework of purpose, value and care. Stewardship as a Christian responsibility is therefore a call to responsible obedience, not to a free for all plundering as if there was no tomorrow. Indeed, the mechanised plundering and unrestrained consumption of the earth's resources may well mean a foreshortening of the number of tomorrows humanity can still count on. The Creator calls the creature to care for creation. A Christian theology of creation is deeply embedded in what we believe about Christ. Here are just two texts which are sufficient in themselves to silence the voices that look on the earth as our property, our unregulated superstore where we can take and do and use to our heart's content:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1.1-2)

So stewardship is an attitude of responsibility, respect, even reverence for that which is the Creator's. Indeed to confess Christ as Lord, is to acknowledge that Lordship over creation. And to believe in the cosmic reach of the cross as renewing, reconciling and redeeming the creation is to hear the deep heart cry of Paul's words as a call to participate in the creative purposes of a God who does not give up on all the He has made. "The whole creation groans in travail, awaiting its redemption…." Romans 8.22

The genesis creation accounts are themselves replete with divine purpose and human blessing. God spoke and it came to be and it was good. God calls all things into being, and gives them to human beings to enjoy, and as the context of their own flourishing. That is why stewardship lies at the centre of the Genesis story, with the good creation entrusted to the care and enjoyment of human beings. Whatever else the story of the Fall brings to our attention, it is clear that the greed for power, the grasp for knowledge of good and evil, the hunger for life and for self-fulfilment was followed by a growing disorder. Toil and struggle, jealousy and violence, theft and murder, guilt and fear, alienation and hate, all took hold in the human heart like the weeds and thorns and thistles that turned fertile ground into wilderness and desert. Cain murders Abel, and the closest human ties are torn. It's no coincidence he wanders in the desert, and suffers the loneliness

We have our own stories today about what the world is, what we each are as human beings, and the relations between ourselves and the earth on which we walk, the environment in which we live and move and have our being. There is the green story, the sustainable development story, the consumerist capital story, the globalisation story, the climate change story and variations and admixtures of these and other ways of looking at the world. It is one of the tasks of Christian theology today to offer for Christians a way of looking at this fragile miracle of a planet that is congruent with our vision of a world that is God created, God loved and into which we are sent as light and salt.

The decision of the United States to renege on the Paris Accord, and that as an act of economic self-interest uninformed by the wider consequences for the rest of the world, is one of the stories that collides with a Christian theology of creation care, stewardship and human behaviour modelled on the image of God. But such reluctance to make any economic sacrifices, and appeals to so-called fairness and national self interest, along with denials of the realities of climate change, are not unique to the current US administration.

My point in this post is ridiculously, and seriously, simple. Christians are not in a position that is neutral when it comes to care for creation. Reckless disregard for the health of this planet is an offence to deep principles of Christian theology. To wreck the work of the Creator, to pollute a creation which is called into being by the Eternal Word, who entered that creation and was crucified and risen as an assertion of life over death, to take whatever we want in a destructive free for all for our own generation – each of these admittedly stark statements offends against the primary doctrines of the Father who is Creator, the Son who is Redeemer, and the Spirit who is Sustainer.

And no, I am not saying this is the only way to view the world; nor the only way that Christian theology brings a different perspective on climate change, resource depletion and planetary pollution. But I am saying that Christians are not in a position to be uninformed, neutral, or hostile to those initiatives and strategies which safeguard, and where possible replenish the health of the environment on which all life depends. At the very least, we are answerable to the Creator, whose greatest command upon us is not to defend our particular exegetical corner on the Creation texts in Genesis. The Creator's imperative, and therefore our obligation, is to care for the creation we believe is created by a God whose purpose is life not death, whose gift is to be enjoyed by generous sharing not by possessive greed, whose will is that humans be blessed and be a blessing to each other.

For reasons I can't clearly remember, I have kept a note of what I read year on year. I can't remember either, why I map my reading from July 1st to June 30th, rather than work with a calendar year. It may go back to University and College days when at the end of one academic year you started planning for the next. In any case my reading over the years has worked within a clear timeframe and framework. I'll write about the specifics of that in a later post.

In 1976 I devised a way of reading across the areas that seemed to me to matter most in what came later to be called lifelong learning, or continuing ministry development. But in reality it was a way of harnessing my own curiosity and diverse interests so that I could read in a number of disciplines and areas of interest. The only time this approach didn't work so well was when I was in an academic context and where reading, study, and research were largely dictated by courses and other programmed work. So by and large since 1976 I have a record of what I read, and it acts as an intellectual diary, a literary biography of books read. Some of the books I read then, are now gone, out of date, no longer relevant, or have been superceded by more recent scholarship and thinking.

But, and here is the point of this post; some books no longer speak to where I am, though once they both reflected and shaped how I thought. Over the years my understanding of life, of society, of myself and of my faith in relation to each of these has changed, and with those changes an inevitable distance between how I now see things and how I saw and thought then. It isn't that fundamental elements of my faith have eroded, or that my early experiences as a Christian are invalidated by later experience. It is more that, as time passes, and knowledge deepens, and intellectual interests change, and the world requires newer considerations of what is important and even defining for Christian mission and ministry, then the engagement of the mind in the service of Christ makes different choices, follows different paths, is required through simple obedience to journey forward to the new things God is doing, and the new horizons which open up in every future.

Here is one example of what I mean. When I was ordained in 1976 there were significant shifts taking place in a society increasingly impatient with the constraints of a culture less and less Christian. The Church, and the churches, were enaged in a reconfiguration of what mission might look like; indeed it was around that time that missiology became a key focus of Christian theology. In the late 1970s I remember reading John Stott's Mission in the Modern World, and then Lesslie Newbigin's early The Open Secret, and Verkuyl's hefty Introduction to Missiology. All three books are now dated, but not out of date; all three were also part of significant shift in evangelical theology towards a much more considered view of the Gospel, culture, the church and the challenges around evangelism and mission to the wider world.

Around this time the Lausanne Congress on Evangelism launched a global exploration of what world mission might loo like on a global scale that was careful of culture, context, communication and the beginnings of reaction against colonial, imperial and Western based, and biased, views of Christianity beyond Europe and North America. So one area in which there has been a pardigm shift in emphasis is in the developing and diversifying theology, practice and contextual emphases of Christian mission in a globalised world.  One of the lasting fruits of such expanded thinking was the classic and enduring magnum opus of David Bosch, Transforming Mission. This is a book that gathered so much previous thinking into one coherent and inclusive theology, and in doing so also sent out trajectories for continuing wrestling with the great challenges of mission in the endless diversity and powerful agendas of a world in process of becoming globalised and digitised.

Interestingly, amongst the books I read in the first years of my Christian discipleship, several were the all but iconic biographies of missionary endeavour and strategy on the old models. Through Gates of Splendour by Elisabeth Elliot, When Iron Gates Yield by Geoffrey Bull, Hudson Taylor by Grattan Guinness, By Searching by Isobel Kuhn; these and other missionary biographies represented a popular genre of Christian vocational, devotional and motivational writing. They were ubiquitous on bookstalls, the stock in trade of Christian bookshops and were passed on from one grateful reader to another as examples of genuine sacrifice, courage and advdnture, creating in their readers that potent mixture of guilt, admiration and longing to be more effective, fruitful and obedient to Christ's call to evangelise. 

I'm not sure when the last such missionary biography gained bestseller status. But sometime in the 1970's and into the 1980's missionary literature became more strategic in its concern to explore how best to communicate the Gospel. MIssiology grew more theologically self-conscious in formulating a mission theology established on biblical, systematic and contextual principles, aimed at developing new strategies for mission.

These more substantial and strategic studies left behind the model of the missionary hero and the life story of the remarkable exception. The evolution from missionary story and appeal, towards missiology as a recognised theological and academic discipline, and mission as an essential locus in any biblically based Christian theology, has created a status for all things "missional" in contemporary evangelical theology, and that missional mindset as an all encompassing and defining element of evangelical activism and strategic focus. 

Indeed words such as "missional" and "mission" are validating qualifiers for church activities and strategies. Missional as a criterion is also understood as an essential mindset of the kind of church and kind of leadership required for the church to be an effective bridge communty into each church's context. With globalisation, sensitivity to post colonial concerns, the decline of Christianity in the West, and the realigning of Christian weight and influence throughout the 20th and into the 21st Centuries, mission is no longer about overseas, and the missionary church is learning the scale of the tasks in its own contextual doorstep. A case can be made for suggesting that the last 40 years the church has had to unlearn much that was taken for granted, and quite literally repent in the sense of change direction from older models to new ways of the church becoming the Gospel in the changing fluidity of 21st C culture.

A recent book which now sits near the top of my must read list is Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, himself a significant thinker in the areas of mission and culture. The increasing interest in "the missional hermeneutic" as an interpretive key to the whole of Scripture is gathering pace and support. Where this will lead remains to be seen; but the age of the missionary biography is now one phase in the history of missions. It is previous, past, a form of apologetic no longer capable of those past feats of inspiration and challenge to personal commitment. But they remain classics of Christian experience, narratives of sacrifice and vision, examples of a nascent missional theology as biography even if the theology has required reformation and reformulation in a very different world.