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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

There's a lot of work being done currently on the Four Gospels in the New Testament. Why four gospels and not five, or three or more? Then there's the question of four gospels telling the same story but with differences of style and content, a variety of emphases and changes in the narrative flow, conflicting chronology and major omissions and additions. But they are each examples of what came to be called a Gospel. Not biographies, or anthologies, more than history and more than theology but with both as powerful streams in the literary genre we now call Gospels. All four are a telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the telling each is an interpretationof who Jesus was, and is, for those who heard and followed him, and for those who encountered him whether as supporters, as opponents and as enemies.

Amongst the great British scholars of the 20th Century, the Methodist Vincent Taylor was a leading mediator of responsible historical criticism of the Gospels, and used the relatively new discipline of Form Criticism in his own Gospel studies. His commentary on the Gospel of Mark was for decades a defining voice in the exegesis of Mark's Gospel, and though now dated it remains a magisterial close reading of the text. Seven hundred pages, 500 of them in double column and small print bear witness to an exhaustive and exhausting treatment in the days before word prcoessing. It is a triumph of New Testament scholarship, superceded only by the passage of time, changing methodologies of study and analysis, torrents of new information about the social and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, advances in linguistics and in the research tools available from online primary sources, to lexical and semantic databases, not to mention the entire industry of publishing in biblical studies. 

And for all our advances, are we any closer to understanding, comprehending, pinning down, encapsulating explaining in any provisional let alone final way, who Jesus is for us today? What was and is the meaning of that life lived in such obscurity, ending in such ignomy, and that after-life which has gone on and on for two millenia as historical challenge and intellectual scandal. An early essay by Taylor is as true, wise and intellectually wondering now as it was 70 years ago when he wrote it. Here is one telling extract, written as a prose poem:

We ask who He is and He gives us no answer.

Enigmatic as in the days of His flesh,

he is enigmatic still to the questing mind.

But He so works in history and life that,

after He has left us “in suspense”,

we come to know of a surety who He is.

He makes Himself known in His deeds,

in the breaking of bread,

in the cross,

in prayer and worship.

He is what He does.

His secret cannot be read:

it must be found.

(Vincent Taylor, "Unsolved NT Problems: The Messianic Secret." Expository Times, 59 (1948), 151. Quoted in David Garland, A Theology of Mark's Gospel. p.25.)

Enig 

Late in her life Denise Levertov discovered Julian of Norwich, and found in her a deep source of healing wisdom, immense and optimistic love for her fellow humans and patience with the world and with the eternal love and purpose of the Creator. A small suite of poems weave some of the themes most resonant with where Levertov was in her own life journey.

Her conversion to Christianity was neither routine nor typical. As a poet who deiberately wrote in prophetic and political mode about the injustices, cruelties and violence scarring the world she was never going to be be content to toe any credal or ecclesial line that was drawn in the wrong place on the sand. In the early years of environmental concern she picked up on the threats to the future of the earth and to the future of humanity and wrote about the exploitations of nature, the militaristic mindset of conquest, dominance and greed. 

Positively she was passionate about peace, and  no more passionate about peace than about its negatives, war, inflicted suffering, systemic injustice, racism and the avoidable poverty of countries stripped of resources and labour to feed the markets and appetites of the rich powerful nations. Levertov was a poet, a prophet and a political activist whose poetry was protest against abuse of power, truth telling to the deliberately deaf and moral resistance to the market assumptions that flatten the hopes of the majority of the world's people.

So when she came to read and write about Julian, she discovered a theologically wise and and spiritually resilient guide who had looked the Black Death in the face and clung nevertheless to her faith in the Divine Love.

And that brief parable of the hazelnut – Levertov considered that image, held the hazelnut against the vast night sky, the complexity of existence, the  ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know, and nodded her agreement with Julian. The reesult is this poem. 

The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,
unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all
language can name or fail to name, unutterable
swarming of molecules. All Pascal
imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine
is known to exceed his dread.

And there’s the earth of our daily history,
its memories, its present filled with the grain
of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen
to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,
this word or that, a tune in this key not another,
beat of our hearts now, good or bad,
dying or being born, eroded, vanishing–

And you ask us to turn our gaze
inside out, and see
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe
it is our world? Ask us to see it lying
in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses
every awareness our minds contain? All Time?
All limitless space given form in this
medieval enigma?
                             Yes, this is indeed 

what you ask, sharing
the mystery you were shown: all that is made:
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe
in God’s pierced palm.

I was once asked to be after dinner speaker at a church dinner. Specifically, would I give a light hearted speech about books and reading. They knew I am a bibliophile, that I read books, enjoy handling books, love the concept and the artefact "book". They're right. I marvel at the ingenuity of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and the human achievement that is writing a spoken language giving permanent visible communication of what is going on in the human mind. The human gifts of story, poetry, philosophy, science, and the technological cleverness of printing words and images, and then, and then the thing itself; the literary continuum of words and images impressed on paper, gathered into order, bound together as pages, chapters and volumes. A book is an everyday miracle of extraordinary significance for human culture and flourishing.

But I didn't speak much about that at all. Over the years I've read more books than I cann count. One a week on average wouldn't be an exaggeration, and only occasionally several or even two in one week. I'm a slow reader but persistent; I believe in both the long haul at the desk and the regular small increments of half hours and hours conscientiously attended to with book in hand.So if my guess of one a week is right and I started reading at 5 that would be 60 times 52 making around 3,100 books give or take. So how to choose which books to talk about? Or which writers? Or what subjects might be of general interest?

Some of them were read and forgotten long ago; some were read long ago and never forgotten. Some I could never be without, some, but not many, I wish I hadn't read at all. I have always had a library of books around me which isn't a fixed collection. Books have come and gone; many have stayed because I want to know them better, spend more time in their company, read them, refer to them, even handle them and remember the pleasure and at times the itellectual joy of what was learned and discovered and opened up by the words read and the thoughts born through reading this particular book, at that special time, for that specific purpose – and finding that the best books don't always meet our expectations. They change them, expand them, ambush our curiosity, pull the rug from our complacent assumptions, change our way of looking at the world, and call in question our ways of thinking and understanding ourselves.

I decided that some of the books that have left their deepest imprint on me were written by writers with the most memorably different names. It was an after dinner talk and couldn't go on too long so it needed to be more than the droning enthusiasm of someone who really needs to get out more. But they had asked me, a preacher and theologian, to talk about books. Well let's meet that one head on.

I chose several writers and their books that once encountered have stayed with me as books I now would not want to be without, and which I would now not want not to have read. And as both a challenge and a way of avoiding predictability I had set the condition that the author's name should be memorably different! Here's the list of books I spoke about within the maximum time of 20 minutes – a quote from each, some context, and why they have become important companions on my journey.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld

Selected Letters, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel

My Name is Asher Lev Chaim Potok

The Gospel According to John, Rudolph Schnackenburg

The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel

For the avoidance of doubt, the library / study in the picture is my dream place – until then, happy in my wee room surrounded by books!

 

Reading Dag Hammarskjöld can sometimes be like putting on a thick jacket, hat and gloves and walking out into a winter landscape. He was himself a keen mountaineer and lover of winter mountain landscapes. His stern, austere view of life and duty and destiny brings a bracing chill to his view of his own life and indeed his understanding of each human life lived responsibly. There is in Markings a constant thread of memento mori and at the start of 1951 the first line of his diary is a concentrated focus on the urgency of life responsibility: "night is drawing nigh". The allusion is to a famous Swedish hymn, which in turn echoes the biblical urgency of time passing and eternity not far off, "the hour is coming when no one can work".

One of Hammarskjöld's poems plays with the seriousness of life, and the moral imperative of using the gift of life responsibly by living in the reality of existence and not in the illusion of our own importance:

Lean fare, austere forms,

Brief delight, few words.

Low down in cool space

One star —

The morning star.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Those are the lines of a man unafraid to look life and death in the face, but not with Stoic indifference; on the contrary, with a defiance that is on the side of life, reality, responsible human action geared towards mercy, justice and the righting of what can be righted, and the confronting of wrong as a matter of principle. Any adequate reading of Hammarskjöld's biography makes it clear he was a man of inner granite. His own search was for an for integrity, life purpose and human achievement worthy of the sacrifice it takes to surrender in obedience to God. For there is no doubt that by 1951 Hammarskjöld had come to see and to hear the call of "the Real Thing", that which constitutes and sustains the reality and ultimate significance of all else.

Hammarskjöld's sense of vocation, discovered purpose, and awareness of the personal cost that might shatter the person he thought he was, had been in my mind for several days as I made my way again through Markings, guided this time by the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulen's book on Hammarskjöld. Life and death, achievement and sacrifice, obedience and cost, vocation and surrendered freedom: Markings is laced with those inner questionings that are inevitable when coming to terms with the unavoidable but at times excruciating tensions within which we are at times called to live. In one of those brief entries we wish we could place in exact context, Hammarskjöld in ironic mode: "He received – nothing. But for that he paid more than others for their treasures." This is not so much a complaint by Hammarskjöld; it looks back to his long meditation on Jesus in the upper room, the One who was "absolutely faithful to a divined possibility…"

"a young man adamant in his commitment, who walks the road of possibility to the end without self-pity or demand for sympathy fulfilling the destiny he has chosen – even sacrificing  affection and fellowship when the others are unready to follow him – into a new fellowship." (69)

And there again is the agonising dichotomy – "the destiny he has chosen" – because Hammarskjold had come to see in Jesus, "the young man adamant in his commitment", one who was destined and called and who chose the way of obedience to that call. Any serious Christian commitment must reckon with that same sense that life is gift, and its purpose the giving of that gift in service to the lives of others.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Christian life is an adamant commitment to the Real Thing, for only so can it be true that "we are real", and this life is the reality within which we are realised, fulfilled and consummated within the purposes of God. All of this I've been thinking about off and on as I've been reading Hammarskjold, and of course doing other things. Like going out into this real world and living, enjoying, working, looking, but still thinking.

At the very edge of the Forest of Birse is a defiant old Rowan tree. Much of it is now dead wood, but there they are, red berries on the surviving branches still doing what life does. Still there after all those winters, its berries gifts and seeds for the future. Against a blue sky, and in late summer heat, it is both memento mori and memento vitae.

This old blasted tree stopped me in my tracks; at that precise point the word that fitted exactly what I was seeing was "defiant". It was one of those moments when what is already in the mind intersects with what is now seen in the world outside the mind. Our duty to live the gift of life; the truth, so hard at times, that life is not forever, that "night is drawing nigh."

But as well as that the miracle and mystery of continuing fruitfulness right up to the end, that out of life lived sacrificially and gratefully come the seeds of further life. And then the great grace that could never be imagined far less expected as deserved. Life lived towards God, seeking in our weaknesses and failures, our hopes and joys, our loves and griefs, by that same grace praying to be "faithful to a divined possibility"; and the graced promise that such a life bears fruits that can never be counted, calculated or gainsaid, but which are harvested and gathered into the eternal mercies of God as the "divined possibilities" of our lives.

Give us peace with Thee

     Peace with men and women

     Peace with ourselves

And free us from all fear.

The Aberdeen Press and Journal circulates all over Scotland but its highest uptake is in the North East, where there are two editions – Aberdeenshire, and Aberdeen City. It continues a long journalistic tradition of the paper by publishing a weekly Saturday Sermon from a rota of people from various Christian persepectives. I am an occasional contributor, have been now for 25 years. The total word count for each sermon is 275 give or take a very few; I enjoy the challenge of aiming for such a modest length and still hoping to say something worth the reading.

This was yesterday's offering, included here because I am on a Dag Hammarksköld roll just now. I am reading about and thinking through the unavoidable complexities of global politics, diplomatic leadership and a faith commitment demanding self-sacrifice, integrity and a weight of personal responsibility that cannot be shifted elsewhere. Here is yesterday's Saturday Sermon:

In the 1950’s the name Dag Hammarskjöld had global recognition. He was the first Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1953 till his death in a plane crash in 1961. He was on a peace-making mission to the Belgian Congo. After his death a small handwritten notebook with hundreds of short entries was found at his bedside. It was published as Markings. It revealed a man of deep faith and integrity struggling to hold together Christian values and political realities in a world divided by the Cold War and multiple conflicts in Africa and Asia.

“In our era”, he wrote, “the road to holiness necessarily runs through the world of action.” He realised over 50 years ago that in a complicated, dangerous and God-loved world Christians must be engaged in justice, peace-making, and hope building. In Markings he wrote brief prayers like this: “So shall the world be created each morning anew, forgiven –in Thee, by Thee.” There is a hopefulness and a lack of cynicism in Hammarskjöld’s words that are refreshing in our own age of Tweets and political self-promotion.

This man who prayed “to love life and men [and women] as God loves them”, this man committed to building peace and hope amongst nations, wrote this prayer nearer the end of his life, at the height of his influence and responsibilities: “For all that has been – Thank You. For all that is to come – YES”. The combination of gratitude and hope vibrating through that brief cry to God point to the core values that can energise and focus Christian living and action today. Gratitude and hope are essential drivers of a Church believing its own good news of grace, forgiveness and new life .

The younger Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in his diary with that disconcerting mixture of self-confidence and self-criticism which are prerequisites of an honest self-awareness. When the Apostle Paul urged the Roman Christians not to "Think of yourselves more highly than you ought, but that each consider yourself with sober judgement" he was asking a hard thing. 

And when Calvin began his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the following words he was likewise aware of how hard unfiltered self-awareness truly is:"Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves."

Hammarskjöld is part of that same long tradition of Christian thought and realism about the human condition, and the elusiveness of self-understanding. If we do not take time to know and understand ourselves there is little chance we will know and understand the world and our place in it, or God and his purpose for us, or for the world. 

So whatever Hammarskjöld writes in Markings, it is an essential hermeneutical key that he is writing about himself to himself; and this is not an exercise in solipsistic thought experiments, it is Hammmarskjöld exploring the inner landscape of his mind, emotions and will, seeking to map his whole inner life. That is why he can write with such stern self-rebuke:

"How can you expect to keep your powers of hearing when you never want to listen? That God should have time for you, you seem to take as much for granted as that you cannot have time for him." (12)

What makes Markings a valuable book of spiritual direction and constructive psychological self-questioning is the way entries such as the above meet head on one of the recurring complaints of those who wish they were more spiritual, more authentic and more disciplined in their spirituality. C S Lewis once complained in a lecture about 'poor little talkative Christianity', and in doing so identified a form of praying that is all about words, talk, the selfish one sidedness that if unchallenged is the ruin of a relatioship. I think that is the force of Hammarskjöld's self corrective about never wanting to listen; the flip side of that is always wanting to be talking!

This connects and fits precisely with what Hammarskjöld wrote around the same time, in his late 30's and as Chairman of a major Bank. It is fascinating to ask what was going on in the life and mind of a man who as a banker was asking deep existential questions about who he is, what he is for, what if any purpose his own life might have, or indeed what purposeful power might be operating outside his life, calling him to self-knowledge, self-giving and ultimately self-sacrifice. Here is what he wrote, while still a bank Chairman:

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak. Is this the starting point of the road towards the union of your two dreams – to be allowed in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart to mold it? (13)

By the time Hammarskjöld was appointed Secretary General of the United Nations he had come to a mature and austere view of sacrifice as the fundamental value of human aspiration and achievement. Just before his death in 1961 he confided a late entry in Markings: "But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that therefore my life, in self-surrender, had a goal."

Here is the clarity of mind and purity of heart for which he strove, intellectually and emotionally. Like Kierkegaard, one of his favourite authors he had learned that "Purity of heart is to will one thing." And in his own words acknowledged that repeatedly in the later entries in Markings:

Ready at any moment to gather everything

Into one simple sacrifice. (xiii)

Simple does not mean straightforward, easy or uncomplicated; it means singular, focused, the union of heart and mind to life's purpose. That moment when he "said Yes to Someone" was his personal Caesarea Philippi, the ultimate moment of self-knowing and self-surrender to what God had called him to do, and that to which in saying Yes, he would be saying no to all other options. Few of us can aspire to that kind of clarity of mind, singularity of purpose, concentration of energy, and sacrifice of personal ambition. The irony in Hammarskjöld's case is that this was a very ambitious man, who had somehow encountered a truth and a power that reconfigured ambition to an obedience to that which was greater than himself. And at that point we are back with the theology of Paul and his call that those who are followers of Jesus and bearers of his cross should "present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is their reasonable service."

 

Sunday August 28 was the 40th Anniversary of my ordination to Christian ministry, hence the cake from the congregation at Montrose Baptist Church – which I am slicing up to share!).

A whole tangle of thoughts and feelings accompany such a milestone in a life which has been given in service to God and to the church. These include a sense of wonder verging on disbelief; gratitude that others have trusted and entrusted this person in the deep places of their experience; regret, best experienced as repentance for mistakes made, for wrong turnings that could have been foreseen, or experiences underused as resources for future wisdom; humility, which is always in danger of being self-congratulatory that it is felt at all, but yes, humility as a healthy sense of unworthiness; gladness that I have fulfilled a full working life following a vocation out of both necessity and choice, a daily saying of yes when sometimes circumstances and experiences urged and tempted me to say no. 

Anniversaries are more than dates, and are about more than celebration. I still remember the promises I made that day, to God and with all those present as witnesses. I remember too the weight of responsibility and life occasion combined with the kind of faith and trust that perhaps only the young can enjoy and experience as risk, confidence and inadequacy all bundled up in that theological word deceptive in its depth, "calling". Amongst the few unchangeable continuities in my own understanding of ministry through those four decades is that ministry is service, and that Jesus words about us all being unprofitable servants provide the loadstone that points ministry away from ourselves and always to Christ, the magnetic north of the soul.

Called, not because we are worthy, but by a grace that looks beyond our own self-assessments to the truth of who God calls us to be. Called, not to leadership which assumes to itself recognised office and conferred institutional authority, but which is demonstrated, embodied and lived in a life dedicated to Christ and characterised by a basin, a towel, broken bread, poured wine, and a cross carried for love of the world God loves. Called, not in the exclusive sense that only those called to "the ministry" are "really" called, but in the inclusive sense that all are called to self-giving love, disciplined trusting obedience, and grateful, glad service offered to God in Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. And that in the end, we are all unprofitable servants.

The verse that has followed me through my years of ministry is Romans 1.12. It was one of my first sermons in my first church. It taught me that ministry is mutual, reciprocal, communal – we receive more than we give, we share in the riches and poverty of the people of God, we live in a fellowship with others that is both gift and demand. Thus Paul says with a particular care to avoid paternalist pastoral presumptions –

                              "I want us to be encouraged by one another's faith when I am with you, I by yours and yours by mine." (REB)

Reflecting on those 40 years I have countless memories of that exchange of gift that we call ministry, and am grateful to all those so many people whose faith has encouraged me, and by God's grace, whose faith has been encouraged on our journey together.

One of the hymns I chose for that ordination service has remained an occasional check-list of what it is I am about and why, and how, and where, and for whom. I'm not sure if it is ever sung now; it certainly isn't amenable to a praise band, and neither the words nor the tune is upbeat catchy. But it said then, to a young man amazed at what he desired as a chosen way of life, and just as amazed that others didn't laugh at the very thought of it, it said then, as it says now, what is the deep truth that this life has been lived towards. For me, as for all whose lives are disrupted and transformed and energised towards God, none of it would have happened but for the grace of God. Grace is a gift that comes unsought, unlooked for, unexpected, undeserved; it is a gift that ignites the furnaces of gratitude, joy and obedience. It is a grace that calls us to follow, to take up the cross and walk uphill with Jesus. And maybe my love of the hills and the outdoors is about more than my early years of trekking the countryside; perhaps it is also the metaphor that sustains ministry, and reminds of that grace which demands of us the faith of obedience.

In 1960 my aunt and uncle left Scotland to begin a new life in Australia. I remember the postcard they sent from the Liner that was taking them and their suitcases to begin a new life in another country, a foreign culture, on the other side of the world. And given the expense and time of travel, the real possibility they waould never see their family again. My dad was an occasional poet, and he wrote a poem called "The Exiles". That was when I first encountered the word, understood its meaning, and wondered at the courage needed to be "an exile".

This week the Centre for Ministry Studies is hosting a Summer School on the theme "Exile: Living Faithfully and Hopefully". A range of people will share theologically and practically, from their wide and varied experience as ministry practitioners and theological teachers. We will think about Jeremiah's message of hope to a doom laden people needing to see a new and different future. Jeemiah gets a bad press as an aid to depression and doom – but in fact his message addresses exactly the tension of despair and hope, the desire to tear down and to build up, the sense of anxiety and dislocation felt in the hearts and minds of those who live through events that destabilise faith and call in question hope of a good future.The Co-ordinator of the Centre is Ken Jeffrey and he will be leading three Bible studies on the message that broke Jeremiah's heart and paradoxically cracked open springs of hope. Ken has spent years in parish ministry and now brings together such experience into the academic and vocational focus of the Centre. 

The Main Sessions of input are presented by Marion Carson (see below) and David Smith. David is a leading theologian of mission, deeply read and an extensive writer on the relation of the Gospel to contemporary culture, and has been involved in theological education cross culturally and internationally. Marion will be exploring the theology of hope for those experiencing exile, and exploring faithful and faith-filled hope undergirded by and resourced by the love of God. The building and sustaining of communities of love is one of the imperatives of Christian mission today. David will look particulaly at preaching to exiled people, and bringing hope and transformation through the realities of God's purposeful love and redeeming judgement. In addition to Jeremiah, David will reflect on the ministry of the German theologian Helmut Thielicke, whose preaching to his own people in the last days and the aftermath of World War II, plumbed the depths of human misery and guilt and loss of meaning, and brought a message of hope based on eternal truths on which life could be rebuilt towards hope and a future. David's latest book, Liberating the Gospel, is sub-titled Translating the message of Jesus in a Globalised World.

Three contemporary experiences of exile will be opened up for thought, prayer and reflection. Exile and Mental Health by John Swinton, recognised across the theological world as a leading thinker on the theological issues surrounding mental ill health, disability and the flourishing of human being. Exile and Social Justice has long been a concern in the ministry and writing of Kathy Galloway, former leader within the Iona Community, and continuing in ministry amongst the vulnerable, the poor and those who live in communities that struggle in our increasingly competitive and divided society. Exile and Displaced People includes refugees, asylum seekers and women trafficked in the sex trade across the world; Marion Carson has been a leading Christian voice in confronting such human tragedy and suffering, her recent book is entitled "Setting the Captives Free"; The Bible and Human Trafficking. Marion is one who has researched and travelled with those whose lives are deemed marketable commodities or political inconveniences.

There is great richness and depth in all these occasions of learning and listening, talking and walking in companionship through the days of a week. And it will begin with a keynote address from Doug Gay, who combines ministry and preaching in a congregation with academic teaching and research around precisely the themes of our week – how to live faithfully and hopefully in 21st Century Scotland. Doug is a recognised and important voice in the debates about nationalism, theology and identity and is a reliable guide for us as we ask what it might mean and what it feels like to be in exile where we are, now, here, as the church in Scotland. His book Honey from the Lion explores the ethics and theology of nationalism.

All told it looks like being a memorable and significant week of discovery and new thinking. Which is what is hoped for by all the presenters, the participants and the organisers. There can be few more important ministries today than the raising and realising and resourcing of hopefulness in Christian ministry and mission today.