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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlQZyTF_LY

I've just watched this on a Sunday afternoon and rediscovered the meaning of sabbath:

The gift of life celebrated by celebrating the joy of humanity.

Eyes lifted above the mundane towards the future and our least selfish hopes

Voices raised together in praise, supplication and self-offering to that which is greater than us.

The renewal of hope by the eclipse of cynicism.

The sifting of our emotions and the repristination of our desires.

The costliness of excellence by disciplined gifts offered in the service of others.

Harmony of voice, vision and purpose in realising our greatest longings as human beings.

The performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy here is, I use the word advisedly, awesome. And as an Advent connoiseur I resist the showy, the superfluous, the trivial and as much as I can of the consumerist sideshows. But this film clip performs on an Isaianic scale. Heaven.  

Photo taken on Friday, from Stonehaven beach.

God's Mercy

Gods boundlesse mercy is, to sinfull man,
Like to the ever wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis n'ere
Known,or els seen to be the emptier:
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fild-full, then when full-fild before.

Tucked away in C K Barrett's wee book on Paul is a gem of theological precision born of intellectual humility. As a description of the proper disposition of the true theologian it's as good as I know:

"Faith is not a collection of theological propositions but a readiness to let God be the God he means to be and to give him thanks for being the kind of God he is."

(C K Barrett, Paul. An Introduction to his Thought (London: Chapman, 1994) 97.

Today I'm starting a new tapestry. At the moment it's undefined except I want to do a colour exegesis of Colossians 1.15-20. I want to do it as a representation in colour and allow the developing colours to define the form and pattern. I'm considering starting in the middle of the canvas and working outwards, and each time I pick it up, always to read the passage and then just get on with it! Now here's a theologically loaded question for aesthetics; or perhaps an aesthetically probing question for theology – What colour is pre-existent and incarnate Christology 🙂

All of this is of course radically subjective and there's the risk, perhaps even the likeliehood that I'll simply indulge and favour my favourite colours. Yet as a form of contemplation, a dwelling in the world of the text, there are some gains, and some safeguards. The first is a constant reading and re-reading of the text, each time before the needle returns to the canvas. The second is to dig into and around the text, keeping a journal of exegetical excavations, recording reflections and ideas, keeping a photographic record of its development. In this way the work of exegesis, the welcome discipline of faithful enquiry, the guiding of feeling in conversation with the text will I hope open imagination beyond the immediate and subjective. The third is to try to faithfully and honestly reflect on the text from the daily context of life as I live it, the world as it is, and my own inner climate as the text does its work of command and invitation to perspectives other than my own.

All of this is experimental, and as open ended as these things can be. The framed canvas without a stitch but with needle poised was the easy part! It's Advent, and Colossians 1.15-20 seems to me to be a text of hopefulness and expectation. To peace on earth and good will to all peoples, Colossians earths that hope on a Jerusalem dump where God in Christ is reconciling all things, making peace by the blood of the cross. 

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence we call God…

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins; that call us out over our

own fathoms.

It's the eve of Advent which is a season of depth and waiting, of promise, hope and patience. Just as the frantic frenetic fanaticism of fundamentalist consumerism reaches its fantastic fever pitches of greed and getting, I welcome not an excuse, but a reason, to find time and space for silence and ungrasping.

And yes, that last sentence is overwrought and over-written, but it tries to describe a culture that is equally overwrought and precisely at this time of year descends into the chaos of hyper-consumerism.

So these words of R S Thomas draw me towards the mystery of that which cannot be purchased; remind me of a grace that has no barcode, and gives access to the Good and all goods without a credit rating. And Thomas recognises that the depths of human longing and hoping reverberate with the presence and promise of God, that we are beings with our own unfathomable reaches, beyond our ken but within the knowing of a love eternal and constant.

The photo was taken on the Fort William road, the reflection of the hills over the depths of the loch an icon of the human being, the reflected image of God. A place that invites us to come within listening distance of the silence of God.

Veni Emmanuel.

s

Winter Haiku.

Frosted autumn leaves

discarded in the gutter,

defy the greyness.

……………………………….

Getting into the car I noticed these frosted now defrosting leaves in the gutter which was full of grit, gunge and oily road surface. In unexpected places there are those who defy the greyness.

On Saturday I travelled from Glasgow to Fort William. I was sharing in the opening of the newly completed extension of the Baptist Church there. It was a terrific afternoon with a packed church, heartfelt singing, and a sense of achievement mixed with gratitude and genuine surprise at the goodness of God.

One of the spectacular bonuses for me was the drive up, through some of the most beautiful landscapes of one of the most beautiful countries in the world. I stopped at least half a dozen times and if I hadn't had a time and destination beckoning I might have spent the day just looking. So I took some photos, and was frustrated by the limitations of the camera. I don't just mean my camera – I mean any camera.

Once or twice I did a 360 degree scanning of the countryside and just wondered, and gazed, and felt that strange ache of sadness that we know isn't so much unhappiness as the authentic sense of our own finitude, discovering yet again the limits of our capacity to behold and see, and yet for all our incompleteness sadness laced with the sheer ecstasy – by which I mean the outgoingness of our inner life of thought and feeling – the sense that we are looking at the work of the hands of God, and the knowledge that the overlap distance sadness and joy disappears at such moments.

This was Loch Lomond at about 11.00, and I could have sat there for ages.

I stopped here and took some photos for young German visitors and took this one for myself. Psalm 121, "I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid?

And this is the Loch as mirror, one of the most serene moments of reflection – both on the water surface, and as I sat and was amazed.

I've written more than once on this blog about my attachment to the Gospel of John, and my debt to some of the great commentators 'on this most mystical of the Gospel narratives'. One of the Oh My Goodness moments in my research in the papers of James Denney was coming across an entire series of lectures on the Gospel of John. At the time I didn't have either the time or energy to read them; they lie in New College, and they may be of no great moment, though it was James Denney who wrote them, and I'd be surprised if they weren't well worth exploring.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. On page 195 of her biography of Levertov, Greene almost incidentally mentions that during a month when she couldn't write poetry Levertov wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John. Yes, Levertov on John, a manuscript apparently too long for publication. One of the leading poets of our time, whose patron saint was Thomas Didymus, whose religious inheritance included Hasidic Judaism, Anglican parents and her recently embraced Roman Catholic faith, at a key moment of questioning and discovery on the borderlands of faith, produced a handwritten commentary on the Gospel of John.And written by someone whose poetry, letters, essays and lectures demonstrate the power of words to move, fire imagination and persuade.

Somewhere in an archive box at Stanford University, there are some notebooks that if they were ever published would make the most remarkable reading. Levertov in conversation with the Fourth Evangelist would bring two poets, two seekers and two scintillatingly complex personalities together, sparking lights and glints of truth off each other, exegeting the Word made flesh, pointing to those flashes of recognition, as the Light that lightens every human being comes into the world as word again. I can't think how I'd ever have the chance to read Levertov on John. But in a strange way I found it a gladdening thought that a favourite poet would invest such thoughtfulness on a text that uses the images and stories of human life such as give value and poignant fittingness to the themes of her own best work. Maybe just knowing that she wrote that commentary, and it was comfort and guidance at a time when much was uncertain and she was looking, not for certainty but for that which would hold her.

I'm going through one of my regularly recurring Paul phases, probably stimulated by the imminent arrival of N T Wright's desk buster 2 volume magnum opus on Paul and the Faithfulness of God. The hype surrounding Wright's "Paul" is understandable, and understandably overstated. There are plenty other substantial, significant, scholarly and in their day, groundbreaking studies of Paul, an apostolic succession into which Wright is now rightly co-opted. W D Davies, H N Ridderbos, F F Bruce, E P Sanders, J D G Dunn, J C Beker, E Kasemann, Udo Schnelle, M Gorman, are only some in a succession of serious attempts to understand, interpret and illumine the mind of St Paul.

When it comes to commentaries on Paul's letters, some of the most dedicated, imaginative and disciplined scholarship of the last 50 years has pored over and been poured into exegesis of Pauline texts. In my own lifetime Barrett, Cranfield and Dunn on Romans, (a Durham Trinity plus of course Wright himself who was Bishop of Durham), Fee then Thiselton on I Corinthians, Furnish and Harris on II Corinthians, Martyn on Galatians, Markus Barth and E Best on Ephesians, O'Brien on Philippians, Dunn on Colossians, Malherbe on Thessalonians and Marshall on the Pastorals. There is something about the mind of Paul that defies the best efforts of those who want to get at 'the centre' of his thought, who look for coherence and system and tidiness.

So I was heartened by these words in and essay on Paul :

"Accepting the fluidities of Paul's statements means accepting a certain amount of ambiguity.  This is helpful in restraining us from imposing our modern penchant for precision on his thought. That is, a thinker's ambiguity is precisely part of his or her thought structure."

R Scroggs, "Salvation History", in Pauline Theology, vol. 1, Ed. Jouette Bassler, Fortress 1994.

And given that Paul himself recognised he had been entrusted with proclaiming the mystery of the ages and the unsearchable riches of Christ, and whose doxological theology is both invitation and warning that the grace of God defies human categories and the love that surpasses knowledge, eternally and essentially eludes the capture of human concepts. It may be that what we can only apprehend partially, and articulate falteringly, means that our theological and exegetical explorations ought to be hospitable to ambiguity rather than certainty, and conducted with humility rather than alacrity. In the end, doxology

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
    How unsearchable his judgments,
    and his paths beyond tracing out!
³⁴ “Who has known the mind of the Lord?
    Or who has been his counselor?”
³⁵ “Who has ever given to God,
    that God should repay them?”
³⁶ For from him and through him and for him are all things.
    To him be the glory forever! Amen.

(The photo looks across Loch Skene, a late autumn evening while watching migrating geese. Nothing at all to do with Paul – just a photo of a favourite place.)