One of the finest people I've ever known loved fireworks. Every year there was a wee party at his house with warm soup, home baked bread, hot chocolate and fireworks. These pictures from the other night are a way of remembering Stewart, who combined great wisdom with a child's heart, and who burned with an inner brightness that illumined life around him.
Long before the Rev I M Jolly, the lugubrious melancholic cleric, there was Qoheleth, The Preacher, the one who wrote Ecclesiastes. When it comes to incurable negativity, one foot in the grave complaining, and brutal honesty about what life can be like at its worst, Ecclesiastes is up there with the most convincing of pessimists. Here he is at his most unendurably and contagiously miserable:
Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:
I saw the tears of the oppressed—
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
and they have no comforter.
2 And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
3 But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.
4 And I saw that all toil and all achievement
spring from one person’s envy of another.
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
5 Fools fold their hands
and ruin themselves.
6 Better one handful with tranquillity
than two handfuls with toil
and chasing after the wind.
7 Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
8 There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business!
This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. This is the text I'm to preach on. It's about the tears of the oppressed, a world stripped of comfort, the flourishing of injustice, and power acting with impunity to take, and hurt and break; it's about competitive markets and endless toil, and the capacity of such misery to drain life of joy, meaning, purpose and hope. It's about human life dragged down into the gnawing teeth of meaninglessness, tragedy and futility.
This is an Old Testament text to argue with, to stand up to, to answer back. Preaching is an act of faith even if it sometimes feels like an act of presumption. I hear what Ecclesiastes is saying; I know what he means and have often enough watched the news and heard me muttering his low toned angry words, "I see the tears of the oppressed and they have no comforter; power is on the side of their oppressors…."
But for all that I don't believe the dead are happier than the living or that it's better for a human being never to have been born. Why? Because I see the world differently, through the lenses of love incarnate, love crucified and love risen.
So this Sunday, Remembrance Sunday, I will contradict this text. Not because Ecclesiastes is wrong in what he sees; but because he only has one way of seeing. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about seeing beyond the vision-limited obvious, contradicting the despair of all our evidence based pessimism, and seeking to cure the spiritual colour-blindness that so afflicts us we sometimes miss the visions of hope, mercy, peace. The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells of the love that dies to give life in a divine gesture of redemption born in the heart of Eternal God. The Christian response to Ecclesiastes isn't to prove his perception about the world and human existence is wrong; but to challenge the conclusion that death is better than life. The hopeless resignation of Ecclesiastes should be read alongside the equally realistic world-view of Paul who saw the groaning creation through the eyes of hope; because in the death and resurrection of Jesus this fallen, broken, groaning creation has been visited by God, reconciled, renewed and promised a future and a hope:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Rom.15.13
Paul arrived at that Benediction only after writing this, which is where Christian faith comes nearest to claiming finality for truth:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8.35-39.
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By the way, our First Minister, Alex Salmond does a great take off of REv I M Jolly for Children in Need. You can catch it over here.
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!