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In Fort Lauderdale police have charged a 90 year old man and two pastors for feeding the homeless on the street, in a public place. The Mayor and the other civic authorities defend this action as part of a more comprehensive way of caring for the homeless. You can read about it here. I don't doubt there are other perpectives, circumstances, and different ways of construing this story. But even on a generous reading of what Fort Lauderdale police and civic departments are playing at, I find it astonishing, disturbing, and in a serious way amusing, that a community can score asuch a spectacular own goal in the great game of public relations.

Forget public relations though. Something much more fundamental to human community is going opn here. The issue isn't feeding the hungry, it's doing it in public, on the streets, in communal space that belongs to no individual but to all the citizens, which presumably includes the poor and hungry. The laws and bye laws are to remove the visible presence of the hungry and poor from the street. A law compelling well run and long esatablished charities to feed the hungry indoors, or on private land, smells of something deeply unappetising.

What is it that so embarrasses a Town Hall, Mayor, Civic Development Committee and Police Department that the hungry have to be rendered invisible; that the simple human act of sharing food is criminalised; that compassion and charity have to be regulated to the dictates of the never hungry? Yes the hungry being fed, and the poor being provided for is inconvenient, socially embarrassing, not good for the good name of the town, something that shouldn't happen. And now it has gone viral, which I do hope intensifies the social embarrassment and moral discomfiture of the small minds that thought all this up.

Notice the upper case spelling of the underlined descriptors. To balance that, let's talk about those other upper case important institutions,the Hungry, the Poor, and the Food Charities, especially the one in the firing line here, Love Thy Neighbour. Just as fundamental in this tussle over who can feed whom, and where, is a collision of world views, a conflict of ethical priorities, and a confusion of social responsibilities. No one is saying the civic authorities are inhumane, but they are far from sensible of the place food and the sharing of food has in the human story. No one is saying that thre should be no regulation of issues such as hygiene, public safety, and commonsense consideration for others; but the Poor and the Hungry are just as entitled to these benefits.

I do hope Arnold Abbott has his day in court, and wins. Oh, and by the way, Jesus would have been arrested in Fort Lauderdale for what he did with five loaves and two fishes. Come to think of it,didn't he also say something about "Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry."   

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business.

Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today isn't hard to imagine – where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves. Those of us who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom? V 3 which tells of Jonah running in the opposite direction fro  Nineveh only makes sense when you come to 4.2:

He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much! He knows God too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful. It is an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love. And that isn’t fair.

For Jonah that is theologically inevitable and emotionally unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger, this kind of God isn't what you need when all you want is vengeance. It would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord" means "Don;t be who you are Lord!".

So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God. He will learn that no matter what his theology, God remains sovereign in mercy and steadfast love. He will witness God's involvement in the deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn. This scandalous story touches on some of the most important things those who believe in the God of the Bible will ever need to know about themselves, God, and how God deals with those different "others" who share this planet with us.

The swallows are gone, have been for some weeks now. I miss them. On a late summer evening at Pitmedden gardens Richard and I watched an open air performance of Comedy of Errors. At the interval the queue was way too long to be served coffee so I went walkabout and saw this swallow just checking that the direction finding weather vane was properly calibrated.

Psalm 84.3 has one of those everyday images only noticed by those who look around with open eyes, even in church. Having gone to God's house gladly, the Psalmist has time to notice the birds securely ensconced in the place where all God's creatures should be safe.

"Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself." How much more then, the importance of making sure there is a place of safety and belonging for those other creatures who migrate from place to place in our world, looking for home. I refer to human beings.

"Consider the Hydrangeas", said Jesus, "They don't worry themselves to exhaustion ….but not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like them". I know,  Jesus lived in a pre industrial society and before capital consumerism, globalisation and digitalised finance grew like life threatening algae across the surface of human life.

Still. Around August every year for thirty years, outside the home of a friend, I've come face to face with this massive living bouquet of purple blue.

And I wonder. What would Jesus say now, to the anxious, driven unhappiness of our society insatiably wanting more, laying waste our planet, and oblivious of the precious unrepeatable gift that life is. Nothing radical. Just the same as he said then. "Seek first the Rule of God in your life….you can't serve God AND money." He was right then, and he is still right.  

The beach is a place of mystery to me. Those promises that the children of Abraham would number the sands of the sea sound like well meaning hyperbole – all the beaches of all the shores of the world – not to mention all the square miles of dunes from Sahara to Arizona.

But God knows what he's about, and anyway Genesis 22.17 only mentions the seashore. These five pebbles, lapped by the incoming tide have their own individual beauty, as does each grain of sand, and each child of God. Just as the lapidary rhythm of the waves and the sand smooth and soften the contours, so we tumble and roll in the grace of God, all the time taking shape as the people God calls us to be.

To avoid the blog becoming an essay and rant factory, this week a daily photo and brief expository comment.

As the Psalm writer says, in words redolent of trust in the good God, "I lie down and sleep….I am not afraid of tens of thousands of people".

So why lose sleep over the one or two people who might not find it easy to get on with me? That's their problem!

Well actually not just theirs – ours. Which means sometime soon I need to revisit Matthew 5.23-24 and take some initiatives.

At the centre of the first photo two thicket branches intersect in a slightly crazed cross. Once you start looking for it, the cross becomes ubiquitous, at times intruding uninvited, other times we are the ones who look for it and see it.

Dr Sheila Cassidy during her time working in the Plymouth Hospice, saw the cross in window frames, door panels, ward furnishings, floor patterns.

The second photo is a close-up detail from the same thicket. The moss, lichen and flaking bark have their own poignant beauty of life holding on, just.

"When we look at Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the revelation of God it makes to us is this: God is redeeming love, in the power of omnipotence; or God is omnipotent power in the service of redeeming love."

These words are from unpublished papers of James Denney. Along with P T Forsyth and H R Mackintosh, he comprises a trinity of Scottish theologians of the cross, whose shared emphasis on atonement, reconciliation and forgiveness would provide the theological cantus firmus of much otherwise pragmatic contemporary missional thinking.

It's time too, that we Christians recovered a living faith in the cross as the core fuel of the Gospel, and the source of the Church's energy. The ubiquity of the sign of the cross, (it's thgere if we look for it) is a recurring call to followers of Jesus to embody lives of contradicted consumerism, of witness by embarrassing contrast and of selfishness crucified and resurrected into the generosity of grace.

When I listen to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony it does what it is supposed to do. It opens up my mind to the countryside, the noises, smells and sights, and the feel and touch of organic, growing living things. And if they are the right living things the taste as well. I've got tickets for the Choral 9th Symphony in November and looking forward to my first hearing of it live with the RSNO. The soundtrack of The King's Speech brilliantly captured the solemnity and occasion of a King making a speech to the nation at a pivotal point in history by playing the slow sonorous march of the 7th Symphony, which I listen to often in the car. The Fifth is for me in a class of its own; I guess it addresses directly the serious existentialist in all of us when we are confronted with some of life's unforeseen and least explicable tragedies.

But the 6th, the Pastoral has always been deeply evocative of my childhood,  and some of its happiest memories of the countryside and farm life which was my growing up environment for fourteen years.

Playing around in the hayshed aged about 9, discovering where Milky the cat had got to the past couple of weeks – in her den with 5 new kittens. By the way bales of hay, those square rectangles of tightly packed hay tied with two lengths of baler twine, were a recent innovation. I remember pitch forks and hay stooks, and helping rake the hay in the hayfield.

Building a grass and stone dam across the wee burn at the bottom of our garden and making a pond deep enough to get soaked in.

Finding a Yellow-hammer's nest and seeing for the first time the Scottish ornithological equivalent of a Faberge, tints of lilac with dark purple traces, the background colour fading to white at the bottom of the egg, three of them nestling in a feathered cup, contained in grass and moss, built into the centre of a hawthorn bush beside the River Nith.

Being chased by a newly calved cow protective of its calf, and showing why it's important for folk walking in fields in the country not to assume that the bull is the more dangerous animal.

Helping Jack Duncan the farmer catch sheep in the field so he could cut away parts of the foot affected by foot rot and put anti fungal powder on. While I chased the sheep he practiced using his wedge in the long grass, hitting the golf ball in fields where it sometimes landed in dung!

Climbing fir trees getting the sap on my hands and loving the smell of pine. I still do and every time I smell it I remember that wood where we climbed and not an H&E inspector in sight.

And for those of you who haven't heard this story – my brother and the farmer's son persuading me to go inside a tractor tyre (I was about 8 and wee at the time) which they proceeded to roll down the hill with me inside, – and people wonder why I see the world from such varied perspectives! It nearly ended in tragedy as a car coming along the road was on a collision course with my tractor tyre trajectory so they bounced me, still in the tyre, over the ditch and into a field where the momentum slowed enough for me to crawl out, wondering why someone was holding my ankles and spinning me face down to the grass.

When I play Beethoven's Pastoral there is as described, awakening of cheerful feelings in the country, as my own memories populate this 200 year old piece of music with images and reminiscences that at the time were formative for who I am. I love and respect animals, wild and domestic, I need to have time and space in the country, recognise most bird sounds and flights, and grieve at the ruining of land and the depredation of natural habitat for so many of the creatures who share our environment.

The strange thing is, I never heard Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony until I was in my 20's, but it has the power to take me in imagination and memory to some of my favourite places in my inner landscape, and in the places where I've lived.

The photo of me at the Echt Agricultural Show this year is a tribute to that summer evening I was rolled like an Orkney Cheese down an Ayrshire farm road!

The car radio is for me a sine qua non of travelling alone. Depending on my mood or the time of day it might be Radion 4 (serious and thoughtful), Radio Scotland ( local at times parochial though no worse for that), Classic FM (sometimes flipped to another channel when those ludicrously hyped up or condensed milk gelatinous adverts come on!), occasionally Northsound (even more parochial) and because a young friend set it on the pre-sets, Capital. Every now and then I hear a song, or some music I like and I go chasing a copy of it. Quite a number of CD's have been bought on the evidence of hearing one track on the radio – and some have been life enhancing and some were a waste of money to me and a source of money to the charity shops.

Sitting one day waiting for Sheila up a leafy suburban street in Aberdeen I sat watching a lesser spotted woodpecker doing its heid-baning thing on a tree trunk feet from the car. At the same time I was listening to Garrison Keillor, the Minnesota comedian talking about a new CD he had made with the American opera star Frederica Von Stade. The CD was a collection of songs about cats, all set to classic tunes from various genres, classical, country western, light opera. I loved it and bought it.  Here's the In and Out Song

I buy books. Anyone asked for a defining fact about JMG would be likely to mention books. After picking up a parcel from the post office I got into the car and sat for 5 minutes or more listening to the most haunting music I'd heard in a long time. It was Advent, and Classic FM were paying a then little known saxophonist, Christian Forshaw. The track was "Let all mortal flesh keep silence", and I have played that CD for 10 years and it still makes me stop, sit down, listen and get up amazed, and deeply satisfied that for those moments, I have worshipped, and heard again deep calling to deep. For me this ancient hymn, and this composition with saxophone, describe in sound the mystery and majesty of the Incarnation, and touch the deep chords of that miracle we call the Incarnation. Here's Forshaw's Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. 

The music of Keillor that evokes laughter and a love for the ridiculous, and the music of Forshaw that gives sound to profundity, longing and awe, accidentally heard, and now intentionally loved, listened to as two voices in the choir of my own experience. 

Julie offers a serious and important comment on the earlier post about the Nobel Peace Prize. My response is in the comment section, but there's more I wanted to think through – hence this post.

I think UKIP represents one of the most menacing political movements to emerge in the UK in the last century. Their taking of a Parliamentary seat gives them a credibility and status that will be persuasive to many who think as they do, whether covertly or openly. It would be a mistake to describe what is happening as mere protest voting. It is  far from that – some of the most toxic social attitudes to other people seen as "not us", are now being given political currency to spend in the marketplace of ideas. In my view the rise of UKIP requires from the Christian Church a prophetic response which does several things.

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the coming of God amongst all people, the visit of the Creator to creation as one in whose createdness all humanity is represented. Christian faith is founded upon the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself; that Christ died for all; that God is the Father after whom every family on earth has been named; that in heaven peoples from every tribe, tongue, people and nation will join in the worship of God. Racism, discrimination against those who are "not us", who are "other" and therefore to be feared, or excluded, or even hated – these are ways of being towards other people which simply inimical to Christian faith – and on clear theological and moral grounds.

Let me put this more starkly. I just received notification today of a new book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer about his time in Harlem. The title and sub title say most of what I want to point up.

Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus. Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, R L Williams, Baylor University Press, 2014.

The title is I guess, deliberately provocative. Bonhoeffer grew into maturity in the years the Nazis were slowly and strategically co-opting support from the most disaffected, and by the time he was in New York anti-semitic, racist and power centralising measures were firmly in place in his homeland, Germany. Bonhoeffer knew about racism, and it can be argued that the extent of his surprise and pleasure at the spiritual authenticity and vitality he encountered amongst the black community in Harlem suggests he too had his own unexamined assumptions about the Christian experience, spiritual capacity and theological integrity of this black congregation he came to love, and they him. The impact of this time at Abyssinian Baptist Church on Bonhoeffer was far reaching, radical and by a lovely historical irony, has something to say to us about UKIP. First, here is part of the blurb that says what the book is about:

This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus argues that the black American narrative led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the truth that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action.

The rise of UKIP requires of the Christian church an ethic of resistance, a committed standing alongside the Christ who stands alongside those scapegoated and blamed, discriminated against and made the target of hostility. This Jesus Christ is unlikely to be wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, appealing to the lowest common political denominator, and cleverly attuned to disaffection, social anxiety and those latent racist attitudes that find scapegoats with the precision of laser guided ordinance. So. What would such an ethic of resistance look like? What do the followers of Jesus Christ do, say, think, and pray, in response to the rising popularity of a party whose foundation pillars are socially corrosive and ethically vacuous?

This is a start list – it can be added to. For me this is enough to be going on with as a check list of attitudes, actions and dispositions which are intentionally contrary to a UKIP agenda for our country and communities.

Hospitality and welcome as a way of life

Justice as solidarity with others blamed for 'the state we're in'

Compassion as caring enough to confront the name caller

Community as a place of inclusion rather than selection

Generosity and mutual sharing of cultural riches

Sacrifice as a willingness to bear the cost of protest and opposition

A clear and secure Christology – Jesus the friend of sinners, outcasts and "the other".

A Micah Mindset – acting justly, loving mercy, walking humbly with God.

It may be we are being forced back to biblical terminology – "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens." It's high time the Church started paying UKIP the compliment of taking it seriously.