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If I'm honest, which mostly I try to be, honest! Anyway. If I'm honest, I find prayer as much of a problem as a solution; and I find praying raises at least as many questions as answers. It isn't that I don't believe in prayer – of course I do. And I believe in prayer because I believe in a God whose way of being is relational, personal and communicative. Those ubiquitous words inclusive and accessible, have significant purchasing power when used theologically. I think together they convey essential truth about the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ. The God to whom I pray is a God who is revealed as an eternal Triune communion of mutually self-giving love, and of outward reaching creativity. The Creator is not dependent either on the Creation. or on all the creatures brought into being through that purposive creative gift that calls all that is into being.

At the same time human beings, created by God in the image of God, have that within them which answers to the transcendent and condescending grace that seeks fellowship, communion, shared purpose and convenanted obedience. "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." The fact that those words of Augustine have near cliche status doesn't entitle us to assume we have no more need of the reminder. God seeks to include all God has made within the life of the Triune God. In Jesus Christ God has created a new and deeper access to the heart of God. No-one has put that better than the intellectually brilliant author of Hebrews,who mid-argument about the call to faithful obedience, urges his (or her?) readers, "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." (Heb 4.16) Three words in this verse are themselves a triune promise of inclusion and accessibility; grace, mercy, help. Whatever else we pray for, and for whatever other reasons we pray, these three touches of divine blessing into our lives are reason enough to pray.

Grace, that unlooked for gratuitous gift from the heart of God, reaching out to hold in being that which God created; mercy, which is forgiveness but so much more because mercy looks not only to forgiven past wrong, but to enabled and renewed rightness, obedience and hopefulness towards a new future; help, which is that sense of being held, supported, sustained, carried through waters too deep for us and up hills too steep for us. And the theological genius who wrote Hebrews energises and ignites those words, grace, mercy and help with the advice "come boldly before the throne of grace." Permission is given to be outspoken, to speak our mind and pour out the heart; forget the niceties, the protocols, the usual hesitations and deferences of being before the throne of power. This isn't mere power – this is the throne of grace, and permission is granted to speak plainly, and with confidence.

So I pray, in the name of Jesus who reveals the heart of God; and in the communion and power of the Holy Spirit, God's creative presence suffused throughout all reality. In prayer I give thanks and praise; I intercede in love and concern for the world in its brokenness; I confess my sin, seek forgiveness and pray for grace to forgive as I have been forgiven. At times words are necessary, at other times they get in the way. Other times silence, contemplative waiting, deep reading of Scripture, place me in the attitude of listening for that still small voice which announces the presence of God.

But however I pray, I hold on to those three words, grace, mercy and help. And whenever I pray for grace, mercy and help I am encouraged to do so with confidence, openness and trust. So, here's where the problems arise when it come to praying. What am I to pray for in a post-Brexit, post-Trump, world in which some of the most destructive ways of seeing the world and speaking of the world are well down the road to normalisation? What would grace, mercy and help look like, if I were to pray for each of these to be given to all the followers of Jesus trying faithfully and obediently to live the good news right here, right now? As I think deeply, and seek wisdom to understand what is happening in the world these days, I don't doubt for a second we need mercy, but how is that to be lived, demonstrated, made real? So perhaps I need to pray grace and help to live that radical word of Jesus, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." We live in a world impatient with mercy and given to anger – so how to model mercy, to answer anger with understanding, to make respect and compassion more persuasive than grievance and resentment.

I have no doubt that prayer is now an urgent calling on the Christian church seeking to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the sign of God's justice and righteousness in a world dangerously over-fuelled with forms of anger that are destructive of our humanity and of the social safeguards of respectful discourse. How we work that out personally, and together as church and churches, is now a required research project into the deep wells of Christian spirituality, political theology and biblical wisdom.

For years I was Chaplain of Beechwood Primary School in Aberdeen. The school provided additional learning support for children and young people from 5-18 years. The full school Assembly was a brilliant celebration of life, sometimes noisy and excited, other times thoughtful and well engaged with what was going on.

Harvest was a mixture of the two. It takes 160 uninhibited young people to sing “He’s got the whole world in His hands” the way it should be sung, and with the actions performed with as much panache as any chorus in a West End musical. We always had bread on show. Sliced and whole, crusty and soft, plain and pan, wholemeal, fifty fifty and white, and one or two speciality breads.

We always said the Lord’s Prayer just before the end. We prayed for bread, that loaf at the centre, sandwiched between hallowing God’s name and deliverance from evil. We learned together that it is our daily bread not mine, that we live in a world where hunger is the daily reality, and daily bread a miracle.  

A poem read by one of the children each year was one I discovered years ago.

Be gentle, when you touch bread,
Let it not be uncared for, unwanted.
So often bread is taken for granted.
There is so much beauty in bread,
Beauty of sun and soil,
Beauty of patient toil.
Winds and rain have caressed it,
Christ often blessed it;
Be gentle when you touch bread.

Yes indeed; Christ often blessed it. And on the night before he died he took bread, gave thanks and blessed it again, and gave it to his disciples. That loaf at the centre of the Lord’s Prayer, is also at the centre of our communion with Christ and with each other. Harvest Thanksgiving is one of those occasions when thankfulness is deliberate, planned, intentional, and focused on the deep and necessary things of life. And if, as those amazing young people at Beechwood believed, “He’s got the whole world in His hands”, then it is part of our love for God and our Christian obedience to take bread seriously.

That means amongst other things remembering the hungry, and putting some of what we have their way. There are few more important ways in which we pray the Lord’s Prayer and witness to our faith in God the Creator, than feeding the hungry, doing our best to pray for and provide daily bread. Our gratitude to God is measured by the extent of our generosity for God’s sake,

Today I have been asked to preach on "God's plan for my life – what is it?' Now there are all kinds of questions spring up in my mind when I think about that question. Some of them are less than obvious, and some ar downright disturbing. The cartoon is by way of indicating the question might not be the right question – and therefore the answer isn't so simple it can be reduced to a meme and posted on Facebook.

The following is a theological reflection which doesn't answer these questions, but seeks to put them into a theological framework which asks a deeper question: What kind of God do I believe in? As to whether God has a specific plan for my life, and whether I can or should ever know what it is……well…

Why do I want to know?

Who gave me the right to know what God is thinking and planning?

Does God have "a plan" for my life, like a blueprint, or a loving purpose in creating me to become what in freedom I choose to be?

If God has a plan for my life, can I screw it up, or refuse to follow it?

If I do screw it up or refuse, does that mean from then on nothing that happens in my life is according to God's plan?

If however God's plan for my life cannot be frustrated, does that mean everything that happens, and how my life turns out, was planned from the outset?

So how can it be my life, if God lives it for me, arranges things so that God always wins?

Is God a chess player who cannot be beaten, or a loving presence who guides but does not compel?

You can see by those questions what my underlying hesitation is. I find it difficult to think of God as a divine puppeteer pulling the strings of every human life; or to imagine God as the omnipotent author who can do as he chooses and pleases with the characters and happenings in the plot of his master story; or to believe that God as the one who created human beings in God's own image in love and for love, then overides the freedom and gift that love must always be, in order to get God's way.

And yet. The entire Bible is premised on a God whose purposes are creative, redemptive and life-giving. A God whose purposes of love and whose character as holy love is expressed in mercy and judgement, presence and absence, God as active participant in creation calling all that God has made towards fulfilment and the full potential God intended in the first place. That God has a plan is a fundamental truth of the Bible. But the God revealed in the history of Israel and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is eternal creative, outgoing, and self-giving love, seeking through grace and power and love to be eternally faithful to God's own promises.

But that sense of God's purposive love needn't imply that God is inherently coercive, or infinitely manipulative. Omnipotence needn't mean a God who overwhelms the freedom that is God's own precious but risk filled gift. What becomes clear throughout the Bible, and is revealed in definitive finality in Jesus, is that God is love in relation to all that he has made. God is an eternal community of love, a Triune exchange of trustful communion and loving creativity that ever seeks to draw from his creatures an answering love.God is relational, and his purposes are fulfilled within relatedness. God, far from controlling and coercing us into his plan, calls and commands, invites and persuades, his creatures to find their true purpose and highest good in obedience to God.

In that very specific sense God has a deep and enduring purpose for each of our lives. But that is not the same as a God who pre-determines our choices, and compels our obedience; nor does it mean that God has a blueprint which we must adhere to or we will somehow fall out of God's will and miss God's plan for our lives. The idea that God has a plan that is specific, that controls circumstances, and compels our decisions and choices in that direction, would be to reduce God from a relationship of love and freedom, to a God who micro manages our lives like a hyper-efficient line manager of the universe.That is not the God we have come to know through Jesus

Paul's astonishing claim in Romans 8.28 is a remarkably bold statement not only about God, but about the life we all lead, and how God is at work within and beyond our story. Richard Longenecker's translation of this verse is exegetically grounded, theologically profound, and pastorally applied:

"Further, we know that for those who love God, God works all things together for good – that is, on bahalf of those who are called according to His purpose."

It's not true that all things work together for good; what's true is that God works all things together for good for those who love God and are called according to God's purpose. The subject of the sentence is God. And there's that enlightening and liberating word, "purpose"; not plan, not blueprint, not micro-managed existence, but life lived in the Spirit, in response to God's call, and lived  by and for the love of God to fulfil God's purpose.

And that purpose is? Well, that is the question we all have to ask, and not once for all, but every day. How do I fit in with God's great purpose of renewing creation, reconciling all things, living out the Kingdom of God, being a light to the world? And in doing that, how do I personally live the life more abundant, be an ambassador of Christ, have the mind of Christ, follow faithfully after Jesus in a world still hostile to a Gospel that honours sacrifice, commands peace-making, hangs loose to money and possessions, loves and welcomes the stranger as Christ, hungers and thirst for justice and righteousness, sees each other person as one whom God created, for whom Christ died and whose worth is indexed to the lengths God goes to redeem, forgive and restore. 

What is God's plan for my life? To be who he called me to be. To follow Jesus faithfully. To be transformed by grace and to be a builder of the new community in Christ. It's the responsibility, and calling of each Christian to be alert to those opportunities to serve God, to find the times and places in our own lives to witness for Christ, to be responsive and adventurous in following the leading of the Spirit who draws us towards maturity and new possibilities, to be wise and faithful in discovering and developing our gifts towards the service of Jesus, and to be part of a community of Christ where we grow and discover in prayer, fellowship and discernment, what God wants of us here, and now.

God's plan for your life…what is it?  This is what it is.

This the will of God, our sanctification….

Prove that good and perfect will of God by presenting your whole self as a living sacrifice

You are fearfully and wonderfully made, unique and thoroughly and completely known to God

You are called to grow in maturity into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ..

Commanded to abide in Christ and so bear much fruit

Challenged to take up your cross daily and follow after Christ

As to the specifics, the practicalities, how that works out, Michael Ramsey's advice remains true 60 years on:  "Jesus challenges his hearers; sowing seeds of truth in their minds and consciences, and then urging them to think out the meaning of it. Think it out, think it out! It is in the process of thinking it out – together with the love and the will and the imagination – that Jesus and his message are made known." (Michael Ramsey) 

The other day someone said something that I am beginning to hear with some regularity. The exact words don't matter all that much, but the feeling with which they were said exposed a vulnerability and anxiety that is becoming increasingly common. My friend said she could no longer bear to listen to the news. I knew exactly what she meant; I've felt much the same this past year or two. Now two things immediately knocked at the door of my attention. Actually the first knocked on that door, the second kicked it down in order to be seen and heard.

First, the woman is a thoughtful, committed and long time follower of Jesus, a Christian active in her church and with as healthy a view of life and herself as you're likely to meet these days. What does a Christian mean when they say they can no longer bear to listen to the news? Isn't switching off the realities of the world in all its brokenness the last thing a Christian should do?

Second, I felt such a surge of agreement with what she said I realised it was time to sit down and ask, and think through just what the Hell is happening in our world. I don't use that word Hell much. It's too serious a word to bandy about as a lazy expletive. But as I began to think about the news we listen to day in and day out, and the drip feed of information selected by a media industry whose main mission is to hook our attention, engage our emotions and shape our view of the world, I realised that much of that cycle of news was about Hell going on all around us. So the question I'm now pondering is, 'What in heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us?'

Of all people, Christians are equipped to look on the world without despair, to face the realities of its brokenness without giving up, to confront evil with hope and hatred with love and enmity with forgiveness. So if that's even halfway true, what difference might it make if Christians did what Christians are called to do, in the face of so much bad news? What if Christians like myself, and my friend, gave ourselves to a different kind of listening to the news? Christians are good news people. But the constant flow of up to date information and graphic images of human suffering, global disaster, brutal conflict, economic doom, political instability and social disintegration come at us from all directions and without interruption. Online immediacy of latest information, intrusive television from restaurants to supermarkets, the mobile phone attached with an umbilical cord to the ears, large civic digital screens in stations and city locations – it is hard to escape a world where connectivity is now necessary norm.

So, What in heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us? We are coming to Advent season, a season of contrasts such as darkness and light, fear and hope, emptiness and fullness, waiting and arrival, anticipation and fulfilment. My question begins to find its answer in Advent. Listening to the news for an Advent people will mean listening in stereo to two news streams. What in heaven's name I do with the Hell that is going on around me is listen to the good news which is the counter-balance to the bad news. To the darkness I speak light; to the cynicism of political agendas I trust in the God of the Magnificat; to the suffering of the migrant, the refugee and those bereaved and wounded in war, I sing a song of hope in Emmanuel, God with us; to the poor and hungry and marginalised and lost I enact the Beatitudes, become one of those who sees Christ in the naked, hungry, imprisoned and broken-hearted.

This Advent that will be the theme of my preaching. It's not the most politically correct or politely constructed title, but it is born and borne out of being with a friend whose sigh and sadness first prompted the question, "What in Heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us?" 

(The photo is by a friend, Charlee Maasz, taken inside Thomas Coats Memorial Church (Baptist) in Paisley. I was minister in Coats Memorial from 1980-84.)   

 

Yesterday I wrote about the death of a man who for the first 12 years of my Christian life was a mentor, friend and leader amongst our Baptist Churches in Scotland. Andrew Macrae was an inspirational, visionary leader and preacher on a Europe wide scale, who went on to take these same gifts into the academic world of theological education for mission in North America. I mention him on this blog again because he first pointed me to a certain kind of Christian reading that set my mind in a particular direction. As I began to take up night school and day release to gain qualifications for University, and as I began to prepare myself to meet the formidable Ministerial Recognition Committte, he lent me three books to read which have remained important milestones on my journey towards learning and growing in the knowledge of Christ. Life has moved on. The three books are now dated, though one of them remains in print. All three were books of substance, and my reading of them acted like the turning of an intellectual ignition key. I'll return to these three books below.

On Sunday speaking with one of our church members who like me reads for fun, as work, and just for the love of reading anyway and anywhere and anytime. The first two books I read as a new Christian were The Cross and the Switchblade, and Tortured for Christ. In conversation about such things she immediately said snap, these were amongst the first books she remembers reading as a young Christian. Both are books of testimony, written from the more extreme edges of Christian experience and conversion. One the story of an urban minister and the story of his work in New York city, in the violent world of drugs, street gangs and disillusioned lostness hungering for belonging and significance. One of the gang leaders, Nicky Cruz, was converted and so began a work of mission amongst the other gang members. 

The second is the story of a Romanian pastor, imprisoned for his work in the underground church during the Communist era. Richard Wurmbrand is unsparing in his description of deprivation, beatings, secret police, informers and the machinations of a State which saw Christian faithfulness as a serious threat to State security in the paranoid world of the Cold War. I went on to read other books of testimony and the costs and consequences of Christian witness in dangerous places; but I also started to widen my reading to include authors like Watchman Nee, Roy Hession, and Andrew Murray. I'm not sure anyone still reads them, or would even recognise the names today.

It was into those early months of reading that Andrew Macrae dropped three of his own books, lending them to me to help me get some idea of what theological reading might do for me. The first was Mere Christianity, C S Lewis's classic apologetic for the Christian faith. The book has been a phenomenon amongst Christians of all shades and ages, but especially popular amongst evangelicals for two or three generations. I read it as the eye-opener it is. To my young mind Lewis produced knock down arguments, made faith sound and read as reasonable as expecting sunrise tomorrow; he opened my mind to the scale and subtlety of Christian faith. It was thoughtful theology and yet it was an interesting, hard to put down read.

The second book was by the great Scottish scholar preacher, James S Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim. This is a book about preaching, about a faith worth preaching, and preaching worthy of faith in a Saviour who takes upon himself the universe changing work of forgiveness, reconciliation and renewal. I read it like a revelation. I had never heard preaching till I was sixteen; and exposure was limited to my own church and a few other occasions. But Stewart was writing about the highest calling to which the human voice is called, the thrilling responsibility of expounding and exegeting the love of God in Christ crucified and risen. This book made you want to preach, and at the same time warned that preaching requires your hardest work, your deepest thought, your prayerful dependence on God, and all of this in the service of a Gospel that saves the world.

The third book was T C Hammond's classic, In Understanding Be Men. In the nearly 50 years since I first worked through this book, I have read thousands of books of theology. But this book was foundational for three reasons. It was methodical in going through the classic doctrines of orthodox Christian faith. Each section was broken into pragraphs and had whole lines of biblical references to anchor thought into biblical text. There were suggestions for further reading, and to this day the bibliographic pointers of books I read remain amongst the most valuable features in a book. All in all this small handbook, one of the triumphs of the early Inter Varsity Press, introduced me to theology proper and set me on a road that would lead up the mountain ranges of Christian theology, history and biblical studies.

Three books, borrowed for a few months, and each of them an impulse towards training my own mind towards the things that matter in ministry. Amongst my debts to Andrew Macrae, is the discovery of Christian thoughtfulness in the service of others. Those books explored the inexplicable mystery of God's call to preach and the never to be forgotten privilege that such a call is. And they instilled a love of learning as one essential element in those called to ministry, and to a discipleship that requires understanding of people, of Gospel, of world and of Bible, and a lifelong commitment to bring all four of these into conversation whose centre is Christ.

In all of our lives there are encounters with people that have lifelong significance. At the time it may not seem like it, but something they say, the way they look at you, the sense that this person understands you, or wants you to grow into the potential they see in you, hints at that elusive quality of shrewd but generous judgement that sums you up, and makes you want to add up to their judgement. I can think of several people whose appearance in my life came at a crucial moment, when they helped me see the crux of the matter, and gave me the courage to stand at a crossraods and choose.

One of those was Andrew Macrae, whom I first met in 1968. For months, maybe a year, I had been both excited and troubled by the thought that I wanted to be a minister. Excited because here was something for reasons I found it hard to put into words, that I really wanted to do. Troubled because I couldn't match up my own sense of who I was, with what I thought a minister might be about. I was eighteen; I had been expelled from school, and had no O Levels, let alone Highers. There were serial episodes of being in trouble. I had just started an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer, an opportunity sponsored by my Probation Officer. My discourse was hilariously broad working class Lanarkshire, and up till then nobody from my family had ever been within thinking distance of a University.

But two years earlier I had been converted. I had come to know Jesus Christ and trusted in His love as the renewing power in my life. I had discovered the joy of being forgiven, a new life of being reconciled with God and with others I had alienated, an experience of being renewed in heart and mind, and now hungry to know what it meant to follow Jesus and live for God in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the small Baptist community in Carluke I had been accepted, welcomed and trusted. Listening to an old fashioned and in your face minister preaching from the Bible, was to me like water stations for a marathon runner. And as I read and learned and realised how much I didn't know and wanted to know, so began the thought that one day I would love to do this. That word love isn't lazy writing of an overused affective noun; it is the correct and precise word. For the love of God, because of the love of God, in answer to the love of God, I wanted to tell and show and live that love.

Early in that process of longing and self-dismissiveness, knowing what I wanted to do and not knowing how I ever could, my prayers became like day dreams of what it would be like to preach and to care for people in a Christian community. And just as often, I'd have to wake up to the reality that from where I was it wasn't very likely.

It was at that point I met the Rev Andrew Macrae, General Secretary and Superintendent of the Baptist Union of Scotland. I told him the whole story including all my reasons why it was an unrealistic hope, or an immature cry for attention, or significance, or belonging, or whatever. That day I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. Read the first paragraph again, it says as best I can what meeting Andrew Macrae was like for me at that very particular crossroads of my life.

I left his office affirmed, encouraged, firmly told to stop thinking of myself as inadequate as if inadequacy could ever be a disqualification from the service of Jesus. But to begin to think of myself as one who belonged to Christ, and who if called to be a minister will find that "I can do all things through Christ who strnegthens me". Yes, Andrew not only quoted that verse as answer to all my hesitations and self put-downs. He gave me that verse, to go away and begin to think about all this in the light, not of my own self-assessment, but in the light of the fact, yes, fact, that when God calls, we say yes, and in obedient trust, rely on God's grace and provision for what is needed. The first sermon I ever preached, and I still have the handwritten notes in an old brown paper-covered notebook, was on that text.

So when I heard yesterday that the Rev Dr Andrew Macrae had died, I took time to remember, with heartfelt and heartfilled gratitude, a busy gifted man, who made time to see me and who took the trouble to understand me, and discern the undercurrents of a confused but increasingly certain heart, about the call of Christ to ministry. It would be eight years of night school, day release, University and College before I was ordained in 1976.

But that first meeting with Andrew Macrae was decisive, as a previously awkward, wayward teenager was encouraged to believe the Gospel truth that God's grace is sufficient, and our weakness and inadequacy are simply God-given opportunities for that grace to come to fruition. In the words of Paul, and from a distance of 40 years, "I thank God upon every remembrance of Andrew Macrae", to whom I owe much that over the years has confirmed and reassured me in my own ministry amongst our churches, and in our College.

In a long life, Andrew gave himself tirelessly in the work of the Kingdom, as visionary leader of Scottish Baptists, then at Acadia University, Canada, as early academic exponent and passionate expositor of mission and evangelism as core activities of church life, and as theological educator and ministry mentor to countless students and future leaders throughout the Church of Christ. Thanks be to God for the great gift Andrew was to the Christian church, to our Baptist communities, to the wider ecumenical world where he was a known and loved figure, and to many ordinary folk who sought his counsel and help, I count myself privileged to be included amongst those his shrewd kindness and wise counsel touched.      

Eileen Kennedy is a contemporary American artist whose telling of the story of "Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary" is a powerful image of contrasts. Jesus is dressed in the traditional white robe, sandals, long brunette hair, beard and sitting in the classic pose of the teacher, hands gesturing towards the listener. Mary is sitting relaxed but attentive, leaning towards Jesus, eyes on his face, hands clasped either in prayer or in restful inaction. The sleeping cat adds to the impression of unhurried, non-stressful space.

A larger than life Martha looms over them, dominating the painting by size, demeanour and colour contrast. Her body language is impatient and annoyed, hand on hip holding the cable, other hand gripping the hoover, looking only at Mary, her whole presence an interruption of the conversation between Mary and Jesus; in addition, imagine the noise of the hoover, and the non-negotiable expectation of every hoover operator that those in the way should move to allow their space to be cleaned.

Yellow roses are variously linked with platonic friendship, wisdom and joy, affirmation of life as reminders of the sun. That they act as a partial screen for Jesus, while by contrast the two women are in full view, and their conflicting moods made plain by the body language. Kennedy has some fun with the rose screen. Beside Martha's elbow are two small bluebirds, looking into each other's faces. Lovebirds? Above them a golden bird with feathered tail in full display; frustrated at being left out? And near Jesus ankle a small red bird, meaning what? A tiny intimation of the Passion which lies ahead?

Whose side is the artist on? There is no sign in the painting of Jesus even noticing Martha, His head is facing directly at Mary, whose own head stays level so we are assuming she is looking up. It is an image of intense and exclusive exchange. Martha is annoyed, and from the composition of the painting the viewer may well have sympathy with her. In contrast to the biblical story in Luke 10.38-42, there is no sign of food, kitchen or hospitality. Martha is doing the housework; the hoover is an instrument of interruption, its noise a drowning down of the voice of Jesus and a distraction for Mary by created by Martha, who is driven to distraction by her sister's supposed selfishness. Is Kennedy hinting that Martha is about to bump Mary's seat with the hoover, which occupies the focal centre of the painting?

Kennedy's painting is cunning in a constructive way; it is also subversive of a story too often framed by pious stereotypes that miss the complexity of relationships put under strain by emotional tensions. The painting doesn't resolve those tensions; it highlights them, leaving the viewer to decide what is going on in the heads and hearts of the three protagonists.

Harry Emerson Fosdick used to be a name to conjure with in the first half of the Twentieth Century. He is largely forgotten now. One of the great preachers of a liberal and generous Gospel, he was long time minister of Riverside Church, built by Rockefeller in 1930. Fosdick started off as a Baptist, but was no Fundamentalist, held a progressive view of revelation and a non literalist approach to the Bible, and in social concern and social justice issues was outspoken, influential and often enough controversial.

I was thinking about him this morning, having chosen his famous hymn "God of grace and God of glory" as the hymn opening our worship. Sometimes our hunger for innovation, over-concern with relevance, insistence that hymns reflect personal experience rather than objective affirmation of faith in God, all combine to dull our awareness of that world out there and the realities that have to be encountered and navihated every day. Not so Fosdick, though his hymn was itself thoroughly contemporary, painfully and unuashamedly relevant. But its strength is in its unflinching confession of the mess of things, and its recurring refrain for us to be granted wisdom and courage for this hour, these days, this time. As we sang this there was an unmistakable sense of a congregation in serious agreement with words that spoje with prophetic clarity into the stae of our world, our country and of the heart and mind of contemporary culture. It is a hymn adaptable to our deepest prayers, and an affirmation, if we need it, of our faith in God when a whole lot else is proving transient, unpredictable and uncertain.

In the world of Aleppo and Haiti, of Trump and Clinton, of Brexit and the fallout in an increasingly divided society, of concern about increases in hate crime, anti-semitism and xenophobia, the rise of international scale emergencies such as mass immigration and the breakdown of international stability and the slow erosion of the authority of the great institutions such as the United Nations, the increasing undermining of the work of the Intenrational Red Cross and Medecin sans Frontieres, to the slow progress in action to slow down climate change and avart permanent damage to our planet and all the living creatures who share it with us – yes that is one long sentence, a whole paragraph!

But it is only a select and small list of what it is our world faces, the world in which I as a follower of Jesus am called to live as peacemaker, reconciler, carer of creation, worker for justice, conduit and inspirer of hope. So I need hymns like this, to remind me, of the brokenness of the world, and the redemptive grace and glory of God.

1 God of grace and God of glory,
on your people pour your power;
crown your ancient church's story,
bring its bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour,
for the facing of this hour.

2 Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn the Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.

3 Cure your children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

4 Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore,
serving you whom we adore.

H E Fosdick, 1930

One of the significant thinkers about forgiveness and reconciliation is Miroslav Volf, whose book Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the tragedy of the Balkan war in the 1990's. His home village was attacked by Serbian Cetniks, and subjected to atrocities such as rape, summary execution and arson. In the Preface Volf remembers being asked a question following a paper he had delivered at a theological conference about forgiveness and reconciliation. The influential theologian Jurgen Moltmann asked if, for all the fine theology and theory, he could now emabrace a Cetnik. Volf's answer was searingly honest, and radically charged. He said no he could not – but as a follower of Jesus he must.

And there it is. The dilemma of the enemy, whether perpetrator or victim. How to do the morally impossible even when it is a moral imperative; how to be obedient to God when the whole being revolts at what is demanded. To witness atrocity against our neighbours, our family, to bear the consequences and memory of cruelty, intentional affliction and hate articulated in word, action and cultural violence; how to even think in terms of forgiveness without satisfaction, redress, indeed justice?

Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace was a watershed treatment of how humans respond to inflicted violence, enacted enmity and deliberate relational rejection. Either the heart builds walls that exclude and reject, or it finds a way to embrace, dismantle walls and pursue friendship as the ultimate security of justice. It's a hard book to read, not only because of the subject matter. It is at times technical, socially analytic, psychologically exploratory, and all this in pursuit of a theological foundation for seeing the other, however hated and hating, as one we will seek to embrace rather than exclude. 

One of Volf's more accessible treatments of this whole nexus of ethical and theological problems is Free of Charge. Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Even the title is a reset button for many of our assumptions about the drivers and motives of a consumerist and competitive society. Near the start of the book he writes a paragraph that will be unfolded throughout:

God generously gives, so God is not a negotiator of absolute dimensions. God demands, so God is not an infinite Santa Claus. So what is the relation between God's giving and God's demanding? In other words, what is the difference between a Santa Claus God and a gift giving God? The bare-bones answer is this; a Santa Claus God gives simply so we can have and enjoy things; the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. God the giver has made us to be givers and obliges us therefore to give. page 28

And out of that generosity of giving and receiving is born the disposition to forgive. Later Volf speak out of his own experience of the courage and moral faith that enables forgiveness:

We give when we delight in others or others are in need; by giving we enhance their joy or make up for their lack. We forgive when others have wronged us; by forgiving we release them from the burden of their wrongdoing. The difference lies in the violation suffered, in the burden of wrongdoing, offence, transgression, debt. And that's what makes it more difficult to forgive than to give. page 130

The cost of forgiveness, and the connection between Christian forgiveness and the Christian experience and understanding of God are major strands in all of Volf's writing. The giving God is a forgiving God – but forgiveness is not indulgence of evil, which would neither be justice nor mercy. The dynamics of forgiveness, the anatomy of justice in relation to both mercy and punishment, the moral imperative not to hate and the equal demand to protect the vulnerable and bring justice to the victim, mean that forgiveness is no simple wiping of a slate, no ignoring of offence, no obscuring of the consequences of evil. The Christian faith instinctively turns to ponder the cross and its meaning in the heart of God and for the life of the world. While the ideas of a giving and forgiving God can be spoken as a sound byte, in reality they are truths rooted in the eternal love of God and the tragedy of a broken creation. Hence the focus of the first post in this series.

When it comes to forgiveness Christians should be well ahead of the game. At the dark centre of the Christian message is a cross, occupied by a crucified Messiah, whose last words were a howl of abandonment (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthami – My God why have you forsaken me? Mk 15.34), followed by the brokenhearted sigh of resignation (Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Lk 23.46).

The earliest Gospel is unflinching in its storytelling, and offers no comment on that anguished cry of dereliction. Several decades later it would take Paul at his most penetrating as out of that story of crucified love he forged a theology adequate to the Christian experience of forgiveness. "God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5.21)

And those words only tiptoe to the edge of the abyss;there is much more, hinted at earlier in Paul's argument about the necessity, meaning, cost and consequences of reconciliation: "He died for all that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him, who died and was raised again." (v15)

Sixteen hundred years later the quiet Anglican parson, George Herbert, also teetered on the edsge of the mystery. In a poem that demolishes human pride, whether from complacency or defiance Herbert distilled words into such a concentrated sequence of images that his poem remains one of the most potent analyses of the anguish and cost of forgiveness. In "The Agonie", the forgiver is the Holy Creator redeeming fallen humanity and absorbing into the eternal heart of God the sin and suffering of a broken creation, turning judgment to mercy and guilt to forgiveness in an alchemy of holy love condemning sin to nothingness. But at a cost both fatal and vital.

The Agonie

Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

Paul's magnificent argument for reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 is anchored in the granite of a grace that is eternal, infinite, unsearchable, and embodied in Jesus. "No one has ever seen God; the only son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known…and from his fullness we ahve all received grace upon grace."  Herbert takes that bedrock truth of grace unspeakable and unthinkable and uses it as a lens to look at the passion story of Jesus. And the mystery, abysmal and beyond any horizon reachable by reason, is that the man so wrung with pains is the one in whom the holy love of God confronted and suffered the deepest sin, the darkest hours, the fatal consequences, of the soul abandoned by God to the point of extinction. Reading that poem, entitled "The Agonie" is an education in the greatest mystery of human life – the existence of evil and suffering as negations of hope, joy and life itself.

Herbert is not offering explanations; neither is Paul. To "sound" sin and love, to plumb the depths of that eternal antithesis, is beyond human capacity. But out of that antithesis came a reversal of reality so potent with creative power that it is best described as a new beginning. The death and resurrection of Jesus called in question, indeed contradicted, the powers of hate, the destructiveness of violence, the permanence of despair and death as the ultimate threat to life. That's why Paul could say, "If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come." (2 Cor 5.17)

Forgiveness is the reality that is called into being by a holy love that confronts sin and nullifies it by absorbing its cost and consequence, by an eternal patience that both judges and suffers the worst sin can do, and by a grace of such rich mercy that through it God evokes and answering love, a grateful gladness and a hope both durable and plausible.  

The photo was taken by my friend Graeme Clarke – sunset on one of the iron crosses on the cloister railings of Paisley Abbey