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I was at a fruit garden and coffee centre in Montrose on October 1 (Yesterday). I was taking a funeral a bit later and came down early because I like to sit and think and prepare inwardly. Conducting a funeral should never become a familiar and well practiced set of skills. Death is an inevitable outcome of life, and each person's death is unique, special, important, and changes the way the world is. A presence has gone, a voice has fallen silent, a face only now visible in memory, a fellow sojourner has finished their particular and once travelled journey.

One of the first lessons of pastoral theology is to acknowledge with reverence the limited time and unlimited hopefulness of human life, our capacity as human beings to grow and change, to discover or hide from who we are, to be in fact, human. Death is that moment when potential and possibility have come to fulfilment, and the rest is left to God.

John Donne's words remain amongst the most cliched, quoted and irresistibly humane words on the way we should look on the death of another.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

And so on my way to take the funeral of a lady who to our knowledge had no close relatives, (and indeed no family member attended her funeral) I stopped for a coffee and some food, and some reflection time. I came back into the car, started it, put it into reverse, and my eye caught a movement in the long grass about 30 feet away. I realised immediately I was looking at a stoat, frantically at work, hauling and pulling a young rabbit it had killed towards, presumably, its den. I stopped, switched on my camera and managed only three or four pictures before the movement stopped and the grass was still. What I saw was a rare sight, one of those moments when several random rare circumstances coincide, and you are by entire accident, a witness.

Life can be unpredictably cruel. As one philosopher said, death is the possibility that overshadows all my other possibilities. As a theologian yes I can create a framework of creation, fallen and broken, where accidents happen, where life only survives by the death of some other part of creation; even vegetarians consume parts of the world to go on living in the world. And I can ask questions, interrogate my own faith claims, wonder what kind of God creates this kind of world, ask the futile question which reduced to my recent encounter with creatures reads, why this young rabbit and not another? Who kills the stoat? Why is life so ridiculously cheap and so infinitely expensive, so casually disposed of but to the one whose life is taken the tragic stopping of a unique unrepeatable existence?

At which point, it was time to go and conduct a funeral, and to celebrate a life, the infinitely expensive gift, and to remember with gratitude someone uniquely precious, and to do so from the standpoint of hope, trust and faith. The New Tesament vibrates with life and shudders with hope in the face of a creation which groans and awaits its redemption. The last reality of the universe is not death, but eternal love, the creative patience of the God who says "Behold I make all things new!" Death is the last enemy, but it does not have the last word. That word is God's word, and it is a word that spoke the world into being, called into existence each person and all creatures into the mystery that both terrifies and liberates, life and existence within the purposes of a God defined as the Love, Light, and Hope of all things.

In a week or two I'm doing an evening of Desert island Discs with a crowd of folk in our church at Montrose. Eight pieces of music is a strict ration when there are so many kinds of music I like. But choosing them has taken me back to CDs and LP records I'd all but forgotten I had.  Some music I used to like and now have grown beyond. Tastes change and I've often wondered about the various factors and influences that underlie our attraction to certain kinds of music.

At certain times in life we hear a piece of music and it 'fits' or 'takes', in any case it becomes an important vehicle for our joy or sorrow, our questioning or celebrations, our love life or the life we love. Gabriel's Oboe is one such piece. I'll never forget that scene in The Mission where a Jesuit priest calms the fears of the native people by playing the oboe, and that sublime melody Morricone composed replete with a yearning that translated perfectly the human sense of wonder and longed for community with the other.

Other times particular circumstances coincide with music we have known and liked, but for these circumstances becomes a vital language for our faith, or our lack of it, our hopes or their absence, our confidence or our fears. I remember sitting in a friend's living room, a friend who accompanied me through some impossibly difficult days, and who put on Spem in Alium as background music. I had never heard it, and its complex harmonies and calm slowness of movement wrapped me in a sense of new possibility and hopefulness. It didn't solve the problems, answer the questions or take away the challenges of making tough decisions and walking through dark places. But ever since it has been a source of hope, pleasure, spiritual consolation and inner replenishment. Not all music does that.

Then there is the music you heard when you were young and which you'll never let go because it has become part of who you are and who you have been and are becoming. I watched the Johnny Cash concert in San Quentin as an 18 year old. I was hooked on Cash from then on. His anthem Man in Black remains for me an exemplary lyric of social protest, cultural critique and sheer humane defiance of all that dehumanises. Sunday Morning Comin' Down remains for me an authoritative reference point for understanding the pain, cost and loneliness of alcoholism. His later music is deep, dark and amongst the most moving and poignant laments for guilt and regret, and occasionally gives voice, and what a voice, to the trustful openness of redemptive love that enables forgiveness, life and hope in the midst of all that contradicts it.

These three pieces may or may not make it onto a final list which needs some balance, a story to tell, and a point of contact with those who will privilege me with listening to my choices of music. But the choosing has posited some quite intriguing questions about how and why we like the music we do, and what music does in the shaping and enriching of our view of the world.

You know you must be getting on a bit when you're prepared to read a 700 page tome replete with dates and names, and theories and movements about how people in the last 80 years have read and interpreted the New Testament. Why would you do that?

It's not as if historical critical study of the New Testament is at the cutting edge of contemporary life, unless it's in the academy, the learned society and those who have nothing better to do with their time.

Now that's an interesting evaluative criterion about a book which spends quite a lot of time examining evaluative criteria for authenticating the words of Jesus! I read this book because I had nothing better to do with my time. What would have been a better use of my time?

Well, read the New Testament itself, not what a lot of dead people wrote and said about it. After all if it really is the historic witness to the greatest story ever told, what it says is more important than the revisions and excisions of  generations of scholars.

Or. Read something that deals with one or other of the huge issues facing our world today, like the mass migration of refugees as people move away from war looking for safety; or the pollution and slow asphyxiation of our planet. Justice and creation care are surely more relevant than whether a demythologiser of ancient texts might have been right or wrong, or whether Matthew or Mark were first to post the patent application for the idea of a written Gospel? 

Or write something yourself that is about your own passion, your own interests, that comes out of your own lived experience rather than merely rehearsing what others have got excited about, or upset about decades ago.

Or bake a cake, cut the grass, go shopping, climb another mountain, read a novel, visit the sick, write and preach a sermon, go a run in the car, do some tapestry, paint the windows, go see a film, walk by the sea, get a haircut, pray for a while, listen to music, read some decent theology, take your camera to the country, support a charity…. actually I do all these things, but I also made time to read this book.

I suppose the point is we will always have something better to do than what we are doing, unless we can give good reasons for what we are doing, and why we are doing it now. So here's a go at three reasons why the time and mental energy reading this book would not have been better spent doing one or some or all of the above.

Intellectual humility. I read the Bible a lot, and anyone who does knows that it bristles with problems, upsets our assumptions, comes from strange places in even stranger times, is embedded in many cultures and that the texts were produced over the centuries of 5 empires. The New Testament is a literary masterpiece made up of documents that were so embedded in their context, so specific to occasion, so soaked in cultural and religious norms, beliefs and values, that the idea I can simply read off what's there as if it were an email from God, is not to reverence Scripture but to trivialise it, not to submit to Scripture but to compel the Bible to be what I think it should be by giving an arrogant primacy to what I think. One way to avoid that is to learn how others have read and tried to understand; the questions, insights and approaches of previous serious readers. Hence names like Dodd and Betz, Conzelmann and Kummel, Barrett and Sanders, Bultmann and Cullmann, Martyn and Wright, are not mere debating ciphers in a tedious display of ongoing literary and theological pedantry. They were and are amongst the Church's most important voices calling the Church to faithful engagement with its own foundation charter.

Balanced Perspective. Bultmann's famous dictum about no exegesis without presuppositions should need no further argument. I read from the standpoint of a western, white, late middle aged male, whose life has been spent in Scotland, a small island nation on the edge of Europe. My education is in philosophy, history and theology, supplemented with 50 years of serious reading around other subjects including natural history, biography, social sciences, poetry and literature. I speak only one language with any fluency; all I know of the southern hemisphere is from TV, online and other distance learning; I am a Scottish Baptist, a small evangelical presence in a country with a powerful Presbyterian and Calvinist history. I read the New Testament through these and other lenses I haven't mentioned, and even some I'm not even aware of. I need other viewpoints and to be shown the landscape of the text from other standpoints. The text requires of me that I listen with care to what others in the community of faith have seen or failed to see; I'm willing to borrow the binoculars of this or that companion on the way in order to see more clearly, and realise that what I took to be a faraway rock is in fact a cleverly built house.

Fruitful Conversation. I don't have to agree with all, or even much, that someone else writes in order to learn from them. Often the important gift brought to the table is not the definitive answer but the defining question. To be made to think, and often enough made to think again, is one of the ways the Spirit of God gets it through our thick skulls that we are not the arbiters of truth, nor the copywright and permissions controllers of the New Testament. To borrow the image from the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…" why wouldn't we listen to their testimony, the story of their journey, the discoveries they made that I missed when I was last there? That verse goes on "running with perseverance the race set before us…..looking to Jesus, the starter and finisher of our faith."

The mainstream of New Testament Study is overwhelmingly populated by men and women who seek to be faithful within academy and church. Yes many of these scholars dig deep into the foundations of faith and at times rattle us all around with questions and conclusions we don't like. But just one example. Those who dismissed and trashed the work of Rudolph Bultmann overlooked, or worse still deliberately ignored, Bultmann's ministry of preaching sermons deep dyed in Gospel urgency, his faithfulness against Hitler in his witness to the Gospel of Christ, and his own deep piety that was a powerful underwater current in his intellectual and spiritual life. 

 

I was minister of this church in the early 1980's.

It was completed in 1894, an historical accident in which serious money, skilled craftsmen, highest quality materials, a brilliant architect, and a family dynasty coincided in the building of a memorial church.

Thomas Coats Memorial is the magnum opus of Hippolyte Blanc, an architect who has around 40 church buildings to his credit, most of them in Scotland.

The other day visiting the University of the West of Scotland, I stood in the new student reception hub and took this photo through the window.

Inside there are some of the finest examples of ecclesiastical craftsmanship – alabaster figures adorn the pulpit, three panels of the life of Christ are illuminated in the chancel above the organ, the choir stalls are each decorated with carved oak angels, the walls are decorated with rosetta carving and the lead panelled glass is all hand made and crystal clear.

Above the chancel a vaulted ceiling has painted angels and stencilled work, and the 3 manual Hill organ with over 3,000 pipes is still in regular use. The mosaics in the vestibule were laid by Italian craftsmen, the royal doulton fitted toilets are a sight to behold, and the massive chandeliers which when lit display around 300 bulbs illumine the waem stone pillars. There is no stained glass as Blanc wanted the building to be bathed in natural light.

The open baptistry is made of finest Italian marble and is a major feature dominating the front of the church behind the large intricately carved communion table. Blanc insisted that the overall concept was to be viewed in its completeness; so while any one piece had its own integrity and identity as a work of art, it was its context in the overall building that gave it significance.

The church is a prominent landmark for miles around, and the tower rises as a dominent feature of Paisley High Street. If you haven't seen it, and you like history and architecture the building is really a must see. The congregation is now modest, and the building a massive drain on limited resources, but for 120 years they have sustained this landmark church at the centre of the town. If you are around on an open day, go in and enjoy.  

I owe many debts to R E O White, Principal of the Scottish Baptist College during my training for ministry in the mid 1970's. His insistence, against my lesser judgment, that I should go to Glasgow University and do an Arts degree before coming to College, enabled me to experience the mind broadening and deepening of a degree in several disciplines, majoring in Moral Philosophy. Intellectually, I began growing up at Glasgow University. His lectures were carefully written, delivered with customary restraint, open to questions if you knew enough to ask the right question, and with handouts that were hand typed and duplicated at considerable labour to himself.

But my primary debt has been a lifelong love affair with the New Textament – its text and background, the history of its interpretation, and a humble recognition that in diving into those deep waters you can both sink and swim. His lectures on NT Introduction and Exegesis were eye opening, mind awakening, cold water in the face of sleepy and lazy piety more or less content with uncritical devotion complacently read off the surface of the text. REO in full flow was a wake up call, with his persistent questioning of assumptions, insistence on weighing evidence, teaching us to listen to other voices in the conversation, and his patient valuing of insights and questions from his students. Time and again during or after a discussion, the Parker pen was taken from his top pocket and a note placed in the margin of his lecture notes. He taught by showing and doing. His Greek Testament

That interest in the New Testament has cost me a fortune in books – that isn't a complaint, more a sideways glance of gratitude. Amongst the pleasures of having more time to myself has been a further immersion in the New Testament world, in particular the reception history of the New Testament and the history of interpretation.  So I'm currently working through William Baird's 3 volume History of New Testament Research, having reached volume 3. Many of the names are of scholars I read in College and the years after, some of them I can still hear REO pronouncing – Metzger, Bultmann, Jeremias, Kasemann, Conzelmann, Beasley-Murray, Cullmann, Barrett, Moule, Arndt and Gingrich, Kummel – all of them significant figures in mid 20th Century NT scholarship. Since College days many of those names have faded and their contributions in some cases now either overlooked or even dismissed in the light of new approaches and developments.

Which brings me to the point of this post. These scholars were disciplined and innovative, some of them soaked in learning and expertise across several disciplines, each of them inevitably shaped by their historical and cultural context. Close scrutiny, wide ranging study and creative engagement with the New Testament brought these and countless other scholars to differing conclusions as they argued, contradicted, presented alternative interpretations, called in question the methodology or results of years of research, and produced what can only be described as a heated conversation that is still going on. It is that conversation that is crucial to faith,our own and the faith of the church.

By our own reading and thinking, exegesis and analysis, experience and inner commitments, we each develop our own voice, and begin to take part in that conversation. That process began for me in REO's classes; it has gone on now for 40 years, and I'm still not tired of listening to those voices, old and new. Today names like Sanders, Dunn, Wright, Hays, Schnelle, Luz, Bovon, Martyn, Hengel, are part of that conversation / chorus; they are thankfully joined by the voices of women scholars, Schussler-Fiorenza, Gaventa, O'Day, Thompson, Lieu, and the late Margaret Thrall whom I mention specially because she knew and greatly respected REO – both of them Welsh!

So how do you fill your time in retirement? Apart from a couple of part time ministries that is, and an underlying commitment to read, think and learn. I talk and listen; I read and think; I do what I was taught to do as a biblical scholar, pastor and preacher. I engage with the NT text and dive into the discussions about meaning and message, puzzles and enigmas, histories and stories, people and places, social theories and literary approaches, theological earthquakes and groundbreaking discoveries, the whole blessed thing that is New Testament study.

This is one of my favourite hills, Clachnaben. It's visible on the skyline from our street, and from the route I take when running / walking. Living where we do I've become more and more attached to Psalm 121 and that first verse, "I lift up my eyes to the hills, where shall I find help?" (REB)

That question goes to the very core of faith when life gets dangerous, scary or in our modern discourse of positivity, 'challenging'. I'm suspicious of that sleight of word habit, by which a problem is redescribed as a challenge, and a setback is always to be thought of as an opportunity. No doubt every problem and setback is also an opportunity, though recognising it, and taking it, might be a bit of a challenge when you're scared, stressed or just not sure how to deal with stuff.

Psalm 121 isn't written for those whose first instinct is to think positive. It's for those whose negativity kicks in when the journey gets hard, strength is depleted and aloneness presses in. "My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth", is the answer to his own question.

In the older Scottish version,

"I to the hills will lift mine eyes;

from whence doth come mine aid?

My safety cometh from the Lord,

who heaven and earth hath made."

One of the greatest achievements of Scottish worship is the Psalms and Paraphrases. The poetics are sometimes forced, but there is no concession to our current love affair with positivity. A problem is a problem, a worry is a worry, fear is real and the valley of deep darkness isn't a crisis to be managed but a real place to travel through.

"Yea though I walk through death's dark vale,

yet will I fear none ill;

for thou art with me, and thy rod,

and staff me comfort still."

See what I mean about the poetic idiosyncracies in what is one of the masterpieces of experiential faith rendered into a nation's language and idiom. So when I'm out running, or walking, I look to the hills. Where I stay there's no option, they are part of the horizon. Psalm 121 is a pilgrim psalm, probably sung responsively on arrival at Jerusalem after the dangerous journey over mountains, through deserts, across ravines and all the time the threat of bandits. This Psalm is sung after safe arrival – I suspect it was sung on the way too. When we pass through ominous terrain, the Lord is endlessly vigilant; when we walk through dark ravines the same Lord is with us as protective shepherd to comfort and strengthen.

Trust is not the same as positivity; trust is dependence on grace beyond our strength. Mere positivity on the other hand is, at worst, a form of denial that trouble is real, and at best, a form of self-reliance that if taken too far becomes practical atheism; which is to live as if God is not our Helper and Companion through the dark places.  Those dark places are still shadowy, menacing and ominous, however much we rephrase those experiences as challenge, opportunity or "it is what it is". The person of faith knows all of that, and has learned to trust the createdness of the world and the goodness and mercy of the Creator, even in the presence of our enemies, and all else that is a harbinger of harm. 

Amongst the most familiar wheeled vehicles that clutter up our world is the supermarket trolley. These utilitarian mobile baskets have a massive influence on our lifestyle, health, shopping habits and financial outlays.

Consider. If we shopped with ordinary baskets we couldn't load it with all the processed and tinned food, plastic bulk packed vegetables, cartoned yoghurt, 36 pack crisp bags, frozen foods. 3 for 2 and BOGOF offers. We'd need to go shopping oftener, or go as a team, or pay to have the stuff delivered, or order online. So the trolley colludes with our appetite for quantity, our lust for bargains, our downhill addictions to more than enough.

Trolleys are the workhorses of the postmodern consumer, necessary hardware to enable the big shopping, the habit of impulse buying – do we ever notice that contradiction interms. That we've become habituated to buying what we didn't think we need, because it was there. And they come in various sizes and styles, from the deep loader, to the standard and then there's the quick whizz round version that can still take about four bags of stuff if you pack carefully.

The photo was taken on a walk along the front, the shipwrecked supermarket trolley an eloquent protest at our capacity to grab ands gobble, produce and procure, spend and consume, load up, pay up and use up. When I walk the front most often I'm down on the sand, enjoying the sound of the waves, liking the smooth billiard table feel of sand compacted by tide, feeling body and mind begin to find the rhythm of wave, wind and weather. Next time I'll take a carrier bag and a pair of gardening gloves, and see how far I can walk until the bag is full of the rubbish that washes up, much of it previously transported to the checkout on a four wheeled basket trolley. Much of it around Aberdeen is just as likely to have come from the industrial catering and offshore maintenance of oil rigs and oil fields. 

Of course filling a carrier bag is a futile gesture, not even a drop in the ocean of debris and detritus that washes around our shores. Why bother? Maybe as an act of symbolic repentance for our greed and carelessness; perhaps a prophetic enactment of our inability to look after our planet and yet the defiance that will be required if we are to make a difference; maybe as a prayer for the healing of creation, an embodied act of cleansing of a broken and soiled world; or even a liturgical act of doing for others what they haven't done for themselves, taking away their rubbish.

The Christian doctrine of creation is less about arguments on cosmological origins, and more about stewardship, creation care, environmental ethics rooted in accountability beyond ourselves. Organised clean-ups of beaches and parks, forest walks and mountains are not mere acts of damage limitation; they are statements of value, enacted resistance to the consumer disposable culture, rich in things and poor in soul, satisfied only when consuming, and suffering a hunger which remains an ache no matter how much we stuff ourselves with stuff. Perhaps alongside harvest thanksgiving there should be organised occasions of clean up, cultivation, culture, conservation and celebration of creation, and an asking of forgiveness for our sins against the Creator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gates are for opening and closing. As Robert Frost said about walls, gates are for keeping out or keeping in, and it's important to know which is which.

This gate is on Scolty Hill near Banchory. It's a place I've walked often, and remembering my stavaigin' as a boy, now and then I climb the gate rather than opt for the walk through side gate. Because gates are really ladders lying on their sides.

The photo is taken on the way back down.The canopy of trees only shows so much of the road ahead. Paths, gates, hills, trees, all you need really as a metpahor for what the life of faith is mostly about. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly" is the very first verse of the Book of Psalms. Where we walk, and with whom, seems to be important advice if we are serious about God.

So instead of walking with the ungodly and sitting in the seat of scoffers the righteous person, the person who wants to live right and walk the right path delights in the "law of the Lord" and meditates on it day and night. Two choices then scoffing or delight; laughing at what matters, or laughing because we have discovered what matters most. And if we discover what matters most we follow after it; and Jesus said, "Follow me – take up your cross and walk."

Walking up Scolty, and down again, following a chosen path, seeing gates as ladders to be climbed and invitations to walk further, and always only seeing so far; it's an enacting of that daily walk with others, with myself, with God. This time of year some of the paths have ferns and bushes and overhanging trees that restrict vision. That too is part of the joy of it, especially when you near the top and the whole landscape opens up in a 360 degree panorama and you know this is what you climbed for.

Christ of the upaward way my guide divine;

Where thou hast set thy foot may I place mine.

And move and march wherever thou hast trod,

Keeping face forward up the hill of God.

The right moment, on the right day, at the right place, a picture like this is possible.

The rain has nearly stopped and enough of the sun glints through grey clouds to create a shadow from white and pink.

The entire pond is opaque, the water unrippled and still, and there is only this one flower, a jewel set in metallic grey-green.

At such moments a camera is like a prayer book, but one in which there are no words, only images. And indeed each image has first to be seen, perceived, noticed, and then attention paid to the isness of what is there. So rather than a prayer of glad wonder at an encounter with beauty, taking the picture is more prayer in anticipation, and the digital image a means of grace to be attended to later.

Photographs are 'experience captured', according to Susan Sontag. That is only true when we recognise that what we capture is the image which may resurrect, or recall, or remind, of the experience. But that moment standing under a dripping tree holding the camera still, on a dull afternoon touched by fugitive sunlight, absorbed by beauty and being reminded by another of Sontag's cautions, that photographs 'enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at'.

In the same way that God is not there for the taking, or for the taking for granted, so a photo isn't mere object for our enjoyment. Sontag spoke of photography as "memory in acquisitive mood." Henri Cartier Bresson understood the need for this reverent reticence which holds our grasping in check: "A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you." Prayer and photography have this in common; each is our response to the initiative of another, and in that responsiveness is our salvation.

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King's College Chapel in autumn sunlight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

King's College in autumn mist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

King's College at dusk