Category: Uncategorised

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.

There are mornings when the world seems to recover its sanity, its moral bearings, and a sense of proprtion and persepctive about what really matters.

The announcement that Malala Yousafzai and Khailish Satyarthi are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize makes this such a morning.

Malala has been at the forefront of the rights of children, and particularly gorlds and young women to be educated and enabled and empowered towards freedom. Khailish founded the movement Save the Childhood and has campaigned against the exploitation of children through slavery and trafficking. These are two remarkable people, whose humanity and commitment to peace and justice are inspirational in a culture where that word requires to be reclaimed on behalf of those who do extraordinary things. These two ordinary people are being honoured for their extraordinary achievements. They, and those like them, are the unanswerable riposte to the brutality and inhumanity of those whose pursuit of power, – economic, religious or military, is merely capable of degrading and diminishing their own humanity.

"The committee said it was important that a Muslim and a Hindu, a Pakistani and an Indian, had joined in what it called a common struggle for education and against extremism."

The world seems a brighter place today.

I spent three years immersed in the writings and life of James Denney. They were amonst the most rewarding and demanding years of my life. Not least because a part time PhD scheduled for 6 years was completed in three years, and eighteen months of that I was learning how to be Principal of the Scottish Baptist College. But the demanding and rewarding worked on another level too. I learned to recognise and read his neat absurdly confident prose – there are entire A4 sheets written in ink without a single scored out correction, even where the sentence is complex, the content powerfully argued and the clauses locked together with the precision of a gearbox engineer.

I enjoy reading all kinds of theology whether it's ancient or contemporary, paperback transient or hardback durable – I mean the theology not the binding. Denney's work in my view is hardback durable. One of the benefits of working at postgraduate level is you develop the confidence and construct the tools to disagree with the subject studied. Denney wasn't always right; like the rest of us he had his contextual bias and often unacknowledged presuppositions that obscured or skewed things a bit. But again and again Denney demonstrated then, and still does, an instinct for what lies at the centre of the Christian Gospel, and where therefore the Church's primary resources of wisdom, grace and inspiration lie.

Now and again I wonder about the likely conversations if we could collapse time and allow various theologians to talk to each other across the time barrier. What would denney make of Moltmann's The Crucified God with its radical proposals about the suffering of the Triune God? For that matter I'd like to be in the same room as P T Forsyth encountering the current explorations of a non violent atonement theology. Or listen to Augustine being allowed right of reply to Aquinas, Calvin, Warfield and Benedict xvi? And just to push things a bit more mischievously, what on earth would Jonathan Edwards make of John Piper's cherry picking of one of the most complex minds and impressive theological writings in Reformed Theology? 

But back to Denney. Here he is, not expounding a theory of atonement, but presenting an understanding of the death of Christ that answers to our deepest experiences of sin, redemption, forgiveness and grace.

"The love of Christ constrains us. He who has done so tremendous a thing as to take our death to Himself has established a claim upon our life. We are not ion the sphere of mystical union, of dying with Christ and living with Him; but in that of love transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt. But it will not be easy for any one to be grateful for Christ's death, especially with a gratitude which will acknowledge that his very life is Christ's, unless he reads the Cross in the sense that Christ there made the death of all men His own."  The Death of Christ. (Rev and Enlarged), 1911, pp. 102-3.

I did say Denney wasn't always right. His impatience with 'mystical union' and of participation in Christ arose from his suspicion of a claimed union that was not essentially ethical, and transformative. By temperament he was no mystic and had little time for a Christianity founded on the mystic way, rather than on the reckless gratitude of the forgiven sinner. But where the priority of the person and work of Christ is acknowledged, it needn't be either or; precisely that participation in Christ is the gift of a grace that saves in union with Christ and is expressed in the kind of gratitude which Paul describes as being "crucified with Christ and yet living by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. 

This post doesn't have a photo. At our local Westhill shopping centre the developers are in and the mature trees surrounding the shopping centre have been cut down, reduced to wood chip and the roots pulled out. For good measure the huge rocks that were part of the landscape have been hauled aside, so hundreds of square metres of woodcover and landscape garden are now a heap of roots, woodchip, piles of stripped soil. This eyesore will be replaced by some extra shops,and a slip road into the enlarged car park.

That's progress and in a growing town makes sense – but only a certain kind of sense. This is a community built around green areas, with generous provision of tree and shrub cover, and therefore a rich and diverse wildlife and flora. My inner feeling looking at this scarring of landscape reminded me of Hopkins' poem in response to the hacking down of a stand of poplars he thought of as creature companions. I guess I know a wee bit how he felt.

Yes I'll use the shopping centre. I may even come to appreciate the new shops. But at the moment mature sycamores felled in their autumn colours, some mountain ash with their rowan berries and a number of scotch pines all planted in the 19 60's seem like a heavy proce to pay – again. Becasuse this isn;t the only place such developments happen. I resent the word development being used for a policy that seems at least as retrogressive as progressive, and which undervalues the loss to a community of so much natural life sustaining landscape. 

Binsey Poplars, Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew-
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will made no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

It takes 256 pages of careful, documented and well informed analysis to reach this conclusion, but it is a compelling and significant comment on the future of evangelicalism. And it shows exactly why a biblically founded and funded theology is of the essence of Christian faith classically understood and existentially appropriated. Brian Stanley is not a partisan apologist for a particular sub-species of evangelicalism, he is a widely respected authority on World Christianity and heads up a Centre of unimpeachable academic credentials in the study of World Christianity. So here is food for thought for Christians whether evangelical or not.

"If the global diffusion of evangelicalism proves eventually to have transmuted into the global disintegration of evangelicalism, it will not be because of the philosophical and hermeneutical  boldness of a few post-conservative evangelical theologians in the North. It will rather be because in the explosive popular Christianity of the southern hemisphere the balance will have  been tipped away from a Bible centred gospel that while being properly holistic, still holds to the soteriological centrality and ethical normativity of the cross, towards a form of religious materialism that  that subordinates the cross to a crude theology of divine  blessing reduced to the promise of unlimited health and wealth here and now. In the majority world the sharpest challenge confronting  believers in the message  of the atoning power of the cross derives not from Enlightenment scepticism but from the daily realities of endemic poverty, hunger, pandemic disease and structural injustice….The battle for the integrity of the gospel in the opening years of the twenty-first century is being fought not primarily in the lecture rooms of North American seminaries but in the shanty towns, urban slums and villages of Africa, Asia and Latin America." page 247.

The implications of Stanley's conclusions for the future of Christianity are stark and should set the agenda for further reflection on the nature of evangelicalism and the need to both redefine and revitalise that way of following Jesus in which a biblical cruciformity is the mark and measure of discipleship. And if the term Evangelical is to retain a reliable validity and value as a descriptor of such discipleship, then that may well have to lead to process of feview, revision and redefinition. Such a process might include a revisiting of the evangelical tradition, a rediscovery and recovery of evangelical essentials and a consequent realignment of loyalties and owned identities. Stanleys work as a historian rightly stops short of such a suggested process. But it does seem as if his conclusion implies the urgency and cogency of such far reaching and considered reflection. 

The last few weeks have been full of experiences. Well, yes, I know that's what life tends to be, a flow of experiences that we live through, respond to, swim in, dance around or whatever other metaphor helps us grasp the remorseless happening of things. One of the causes of fatigue is unassimilated experience, when so much happens there isn't enough time to process and understand and respond before the next significant happenings happen. Fatigue could be described as that underlying tiredness in which energy is still available but like a lowering bank balance you're aware it doesn't last forever, and will need replenishing soon, but you still have stuff to buy, bills to pay, gifts to give and food to get in.

This post isn't a sermon, homily, or paraenetic essay – that word is a cracker to use if you want a fancy term for a team talk! This post is unashamedely about me, and anyone who reads this is welcome to apply or dismiss what are essentially out loud thoughts about why I feel as I feel. Which is not sure how I feel about a number of things just now. I'm not worried about that. It can actually be quite a helpful spiritual discipline to do some intentional introspection.

The post Referendum doldrums are not unexpected. After the excitement and engagement, the hoping and the worry, there is the inevitable sense of loss, disillusion and, for much of what happened and how it happened, distaste, anger, determination to go on hoping, and much else.

This coincided with the joyful significance of beginning a new ministry with the good people in Montrose Baptist Church. Regularly preaching amongst a community I am now getting to know, and sharing more and more in the rich mixture of Christian experience that is always the fertile topsoil of a church, I'm looking forward to the learning and teaching, the giving and taking, the praying and playing of life together.

The death of an aunt leaving only one tenuous connection now with my mum and dad's generation was an occasion of sadness, but the loss compensated by a life lived well within the limits of circumstance that are different for us all. I did the eulogy which was easy enough, if only because she was someone it was easy to talk about honestly, affectionately and with confidence that she would have approved of what was said, in her own modest way. The rose is for Aunt Etta.

Then there's the options and opportunities for further ministry, whether teaching, training, writing or engaged with people helping in personal development. Like John Wesley "Lord let me not live to be useless"; but then allowing for a moderate answer to that prayer, who wants to be as driven as that small revival dynamo for whom usefulness, maximum efficiency and minutely precise time management verged on the neurotic?

Much of the above is an artificial but useful separating out of current personal life streams which in fact are a confluence not so easily or tidily analysed. Unassimilated experience; a lowering bank balance of requisite energies and emotions; the flow of circumstance and the continuum of happening; these are three of the best reasons I know for taking, making, and wasting time in prayer. Taking time from other things to make time for God and spend that time with no eye to productiveness or profit other than being with the One in whom I live, and move and have my being. Sometimes it isn't guidance we need, but grace, not more energy about our work but more humility about our perceived importance, not more time but less agendas, not more commitment but more patience, and therefore not more personal development but more abiding in the vine which nourishes and fructifies, and given time, turns the water of rain falling on roots, into the grape juice that becomes wine.

Caring

Generous

Compassionate

Imaginative

Just

Supportive

Fair

Seven adjectives of social responsibility and common good.

Seven principles of community building and resource sharing.

Seven opportunities to make life more secure for all of us by making life less precarious for others.

Seven positives that give life and energy to social welfare policy.

But all these encouraging Yes words can easily be negated by the ugly, life diminishing little prefix "Un".

The Chancellor's speech yesterday was an Un-speech.

Uncaring, ungenerous, uncompassionate, unimaginative, unjust, unsupportive and unfair.

My prayer for our communities: "Give us (the poor especially) this day our daily bread".

The deficit can be eliminated without raising taxes. Welfare benefits for working age people are frozen for two years. Some wee tax cuts for middle class folk with pensions. No comfort for those who don't have or can't afford pernsion contributions.

Austerity is once again the watchword of a millionaire Chancellor of a cabinet largely made up of other members of the millionaire club. Austerity, a word devoid of compassion, reeking of self-righteousness and scornful of charity – and by that word I point to its old fashioned meaning of grace gift, caritas.

An election is coming so no mention of increased taxes, and beyond the election if Chancellor Osborne has anything to do with it, there will be no need to raise taxes. Which for me raises the key question – why in heaven's name not? There is a more serious deficit to be acknowledged by a millionaire Chancellor – a deficit of understanding. He simply does not have the life experience, practical knowledge or social awareness to understand that not everyone is out only for themselves; not everyone thinks those on benefits are less worthy of care and support; not everyone thinks that the mantra of rewarding those who 'do the right thing' has any ethical, political or economic validity. At least no validity beyond the narrow confines of minds that have never wrestled with the disciplines of home economics, paying bills by juggling limited money, making choices between heat and food.

What's more George Osborne doesn't undetstand me. He hasn't a clue about people like me who accept that the welfare of those who are sick, elderly, out of work, struggling to make ends meet on a minimum wage and frozen benefits, is a responsibility which has its own moral logic, and which will inevitably cost me money. Likewise my personal commitment to the NHS, which does not belong to the Government of the day. Its future and its own health is a responsibility that ought to have a higher ethical priority than the self-interested posturing of those who find reasons to cut its resource allocations while pretending that the contribution has gone up in real terms. "In real terms" – there's an irony! I presume what is meant is in book keeping terms, which is not the same thing at all, is it, really.

So the Chancellor is urging us to choose the future not the past – a phrase he used repeatedly in his speech today. But excuse me,- we have no choice but to choose the future. The past is, well, past it. The question is will we choose an austerity future a la Osborne, or a different kind of future. Whatever future it is, be astonished Mr Osborne, as a matter of Christian principle and social justice, I would willingly pay more income tax to enable the funding of those institutions which contradict the austerity dictat imposed from above and by iron fisted intent penalises those least able to afford it.It is that unselfish if unglamorous acceptance that I have to pay more to make sure others are looked after that the Chancellor fails to understand.

And if he is really saying, and really believes, that the majority of the electorate will vote against any party which raises levels of tax, then maybe Mr Osborne has to ask himself his own question and answer it with his own strap line – choose the future. Ah, but what kind of future? Just or unjust? Austerity or caritas? Party or people? Rich or poor? Which deficit matters most – the national money deficit or the social justice deficit?

Behind the smiling Chancellor is the strap line "Securing a Better Future". Whose future? Better for whom? Who will be more secure?

The other day Sheila baked spelt bread. For 5000 years spelt wheat has been grown and used in bread-making, and it was one of the staples of the Roman army. The recipe used was basic but with a little honey and olive oil added to it, the taste, texture, crunch….mmhmm. The smell of it baking is the unique aroma of food for the hungry, an invitation to eat and also a call to patience, waiting for it to be baked, to cool and then….then to eat it. 

"Give us this day our daily bread" is one of those lines in the Lord's prayer that, for me, is a mnemonic device to make sure as I lead a congregation in saying it my mind doesn't skip a track. In the centre of a prayer about the hallowing of God's name, the coming of the Kingdom, the forgiveness of sins and scary temptations there is a loaf. God's will is done and his Kingdom comes when people have daily bread. Daily bread, a phrase that sounds straightforward in English but which translates a word used nowhere else in Greek literature. The classicists and linguists have had a field day suggesting its meaning, but the more settled view is that it means 'bread for the coming day'. So if I pray it in the morning I'm thinking of today; if I pray it at night, I'm looking to tomorrow. Either way bread enough for one day – and this prayer reflected a society in which people were paid daily. Think about it, if you're sick and can't work, how do you eat?

Which brings me to food banks, the Lord's Prayer and the feeding of the five thousand. Food Banks are both a disgrace and a place of grace. That they should exist is a scandal, that they do exist is a mercy. A Food Bank by definition is a place where food is deposited; the hungry and poor are by definition the current account holders. Scotland (or UK if preferred) is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, so the existence of Food Banks is a scandal, a disgrace the indisputable evidence of political and economic failure. It is possible for an economy to grow out of recession and be a failure, because the economy is not an entity, a person or an agent; the economy is the word we use to describe how we do things in our country. And the way we are doing things means that for many people the Lord's Prayer asks the impossible, because for those without money the daily bread isn't forthcoming in an economy that trades in money.

Jesus knew about bread, and about hunger, about the rich and the poor, the powerful and the vulnerable. "Give us this morning bread for the day…Give us tomorrow bread for the day…" The same Jesus looked on a hungry crowd and multiplied five loaves and two fishes into an ad hoc food bank. That act of extravagant mercy is defining of the church, bread for the hungry, rest for the weary, a place to sit down and be nourished, space to be human. "Jesus took bread and blessed and broke it.." and so the Eucharist was handed to the church in broken bread gratefully shared. No the church isn't a food bank, it is a mountainside with loaves and fishes; and it is a community which resists the iron systems of economic discrimination, which calls in question cash value by demonstrating the genius for generosity, which contradicts the barcode with the made marketing that tells the customers don't buy one and get one free.

And just so we are clear. Food banks are centres of hope for the hungry, places of refuge for those harassed and helpless in a society where for some folk life just doesn't work.They are, however, an embarrassment that they have to exist at all in a country where austerity has become a godless mantra. I wondered about that phrase, godless mantra, but I leave it in. The God referred to in the Lord's Prayer is self-excluded from any set of policies that make it impossible for some folk to pray with trust for that loaf, stuck in the middle of the liturgy to remind us of our humanity.The God I believe in multiplies bread, gives thanks and breaks a loaf. We don;t live by bread alone, but we won't live long without it.

And yet. As a follower of Jesus I give food to food banks, and encourage churches to have donation boxes as prominent as the offering plates.Likewise, as a follower of Jesus I am called to match compassion and generosity on the one hand with a chronic discontent with things as they are so long as they stay the way they are. So the war on benefits, the minimum wage, the myth of 'the deserving poor' as if poverty is a choice, the in-built cycles of poverty, the loneliness of those on the margins, the convenience to the economy of zero hour contracts, and a bureaucracy increasingly heartless and sanction obsessed. Alongside these I place the scorn of Amos my favourite Old Testament political radical,'You sell the poor for a pair of designer trainers…you trample the poor in the dust…you who oppress the poor and drink expensive wine…you build your businesses but you won't prosper…but let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness like a never failing stream…"

Ok. Let us pray, "Our Father,…Give us this day our daily bread, and lead us not into the temptation of thinking that food banks are unnecessary, but deliver us from the evil of putting up with dehumanising poverty for the sake of the deficit." Or words to that effect.