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Favourite poems sometimes have complex pedigrees. The prayer of thanksgiving by Simon in The Wisdom 0f Sirach 50.22-24 was the inspiration for Martin Rinkart to write the German Hymn Nun Danket Alle Gott. This was translated by Catherine Winkworth as  Now Thank We All Our God, the version printed below. Incidentally that supposedly sweet tempered, gentle Anglican and spiritual director, Evelyn Underhill, was less than impressed with Winkworth's translations of the German Mystics, referring to her as 'wicked Winkworth'. But whatever her shortcomings as translator, she produced a rock solid hymn of praise and thanksgiving adequate to our deepest and simplest theology. Karl Barth was guilty of writing some of the deepest and simplest theology in the history of the Church, and the hymn below was one of his favourites, and its middle verse a personal prayer credo – one which I'm happy to sign up to myself.

The photo was taken in August – Smudge is a crypto-Barthian in her spare time.

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;

Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,

With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;

And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;

And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;

The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;

The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;

For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

Martin Rinkart (1586-1649)

¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶ for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and
invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things
have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He
is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn
from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and
through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether
on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

I spent a while today reading around this passage. It's probably a hymn, composed by Paul, or borrowed by him and edited to fit the theme and argument of his letter. Even in English translation the rhythm, images and rhetorical impetus are felt when it is read with care. Seven times the universal "all" is used. The ultimacy and particularity of Christ as Lord of the universe could hardly be more exclusively claimed.

One of the most intriguing articles I've read is Morna Hooker, "Where is Wisdom to be Found? Colossians 1.15-20", in Ford, D., and Stanton, G., (eds) Reading Texts, Seeking Wisdom, (London: SCM, 2003) 116-128. Nearly as good, in the same book with the same title and on the same text is Richard Bauckham's essay. But it's Hooker who shows how the Hebrew scriptures extol Wisdom and Torah as pillars of creation and active agents of God's essential being – and that is Paul's background as he writes. The hymn doesn't mention wisdom – it describes the creative power by which creation and renewal of creation are fully expressed by Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. It doesn't mention wisdom – it describes Wisdom's accomplishments. Hooker shows how the theme of wisdom is a connective thread in elsewhere in Colossians, and finds its focus on the apostolic aim to lead Christians into wisdom and understanding and to "present everyone mature in Christ". This is Christology as the basis of hopeful Christian existence, looking for the reconciliation of all things by the only One able to fulfil such a redemptive reversal of creation's brokenness. Christian maturity is to live within that ethos of conciliatory wisdom, vulnerable love and hopeful trust.

Why is this important enough for a blog post? Here's a few sentences from Hooker's concluding pages. In them she takes with utmost seriousness, in a way many fear to do, the absolute priority of Christ as the interpretive key to Scripture. As a Baptist committed to communal discernment, her words affirm the radical freedom of the gathered congregation to seek the mind of Christ in Scripture:

"The text does not mean what you think it means, because it witnesses to the one who is behind the text, namely Christ. For Paul the 'canon' is not Scripture itself, but Christ, which means that Scripture  must be read in the light of Christ. Where is wisdom to be found. Notr in the written Torah – not even in the epistles of Paul – but in the living Christ.

How do we interpret Scripture? How do we distinguish between and ethical and an unethical reading? Between a reading that is legitimate and one that is illegitimate? Between one that is right and one that is wrong?  Between one that is wise and one that is unwise? …For Paul the answer is: look at Christ, and at what he reveals to us of the love of God; interpret Scripture in the light of Christ." 

Where is wisdom to be found? In Christ, crucified, risen, living and present in the church and the world, amongst his people as they gather with Scriptures open, hearts receptive, minds alert and hopeful in trust, with fear and faith that the Lord of creation awaits our obedience as discerned in the words that bear witness to the Word.

Here is a paragraph that gives New Testament theology and exegesis a good name. It comes from a lecture later published as an essay by J D G Dunn. It is worth reading slowly, and twice – as biblical exegesis, this is faith seeking understanding.

So too with our hope of Christ's coming again. There is an uncertainty about it which pervades all human prediction about God's future purpose. It is the language of vision and metaphor. It is therefore, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, as is all human speech about God. But it is the best we have and we should neither be embarrassed about it nor should we abandon it. For it tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future is not random and pointless; God's purpose still prevails and drives forward to the climax of his-story. It tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future has a Christ-shape and a Christ-character. The future will not come to us as a total surprise. For the God we encounter at the end of time will be the God who encounters us at the mid-point of time, God in Christ. And the Christ we encounter at the end of time will be the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, the Christ we encounter in our worship, in the Spirit, in Christ and through Christ to God the Father. We believe that this Christ will come again. "Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus."

I've read J D G Dunn's work on the New
Testament since his first book, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's one
of the great blessings of my life and times that I have lived when some
of the finest New Testament scholarship has been producing such
original, high quality studies in the New Testament, and that so much of
it is so readily available. Dunn's new book, a major study of Oral Tradition and the Gospels is published in a few weeks. In a month or so N T Wright's two volumes
on Paul will be published – I've waited a long time for this (1680 pages!) instalment of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.

I was perhaps a bit hard on 'spiritual reading' and 'spiritual writing' in the previous post, not much though. My own alertness to the presence of God is more often heightened when I too wrestle with the text and theology of the New Testament, and read a paragraph like that one above by Dunn. It is a conclusion to an academic essay, a conclusion securely tied to critical scholarship applied by one whose own faith is rooted in the text of the New Testament, and to the experience of God in Christ through the Spirit to which the New Testament bears witness. Dunn, in his preface to Jesus, Paul and the Gospels is up-front honest about this, speaking of "[my] conviction both that recognition of a vital religious experience was an important way in to understanding how Christianity flourished and that one's own religious experience was a vital part of critical interaction with these ancient scriptures".

That is such a heartening sentence, and places first class biblical scholarship not over and against, but alongside a faith that seeks understanding. In such an hermeneutic the text is allowed to interpret the interpreter. The same convictional foundation underlies N T Wright's work. Mind you I smile when I think that the first book of N T Wrght's which I read in 1986 was a slim, elegant and exciting Tyndale Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, total 190 pages!  

The row between the Daily Mail and the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is a telling example of the nastiness of innuendo, the damning of people by association with deliberately caricatured ideas, the grievous sin of claiming the high moral ground by appealing to the lowest moral common denominator. When a newspaper uses terms such as 'hated Britain' and 'legacy of evil' and 'poisonous creed' as ways of describing an academic Marxist who was a Jewish refugee from Belgium, fleeing to escape from the consequences of National Socialism's military aggression, who served in the Royal Navy, and whose contribution to the cultural, intellectual and social life of our country has been adversarial rather than confirmatory, then I smell a rat, and perhaps a bloated disease ridden one at that.

That a man who fled Nazism as a terrified teenager, having experienced German right-wing exteremism in its most destructive and evil manifestations, and known at first hand an ideology with a powerful capacity to reconfigure morals and social engineering to suit its own evil ends, that such a man should be damned, and his children attacked for being his children, makes me wonder which of the descriptors of Ralph Miliband has so infuriated the Daily Mail. Was it Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, or academic? The paper claims it is the word Marxist they wanted to highlight, and they did so with all the lethal ambiguity loaded into such a word by a paper which stands at the ideologically opposite pole. Was it Socialist, a word clearly so repulsive, it  was used as a sick joke with a photo of Ralph Miliband's grave, headed 'Grave Socialist'. (The belated admission it was an 'error of judgement' makes it sound as if the wrong font was used in the insult). I don't think it was the word Belgian that triggered this landslide of insinuation and hermeneutic malpractice. That he was an academic, who lived in an environment of contested and debated ideas, and whose role in a democarcy is precisely to engage with ideas critically and with intellectual integrity, cannot surely have so offended a newspaper which claims it is defending the integrity of Britain's institutions by allegedly exposing someone who 'hated Britain'. Was it the word Jewish, something Ed Miliband himself mentioned in two consecutive Party Conference speeches, a fact noted in the daily Mail's defence of the original article, and noted with editorial precision linked to a rather wooden allusion to 'the jealous God' (note the negative pejorative) of Deuteronomy (note the cherished words of the Torah).

My problem in deciding which of those words launched the article – Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, academic – is that whatever the motives any journalist claims, whatever the public interest a paper says it is defending, they write in the murky unhygienic waters of diverse prejudices and dirty politics. The ambiguities of words that have cultural resonances far deeper than their surface dictionary meanings, the suggestiveness of what is said and what is omitted, the bias and blindness of a paper's ideology, right or left, the toxins thrown up by social insecurity, economic panic, and the survival instincts of a culture in moral and existential disarray, – these require of responsible interpreters an hermeneutic of suspicion. No I don't know with certainty what underlies such an attack on a senior politician's father; but neither will I exclude the possibility there are underying agendas that it may be too dangerous to state openly.

One further thought. There is something intellectually naive about an article that quotes one sentence against the English and their nationalism as proof of lifelong hatred of the country where he found safety, when that sentence was extracted without context from the diary of a 17 year old refugee from Nazi Europe still trying to find a standpoint from which to view his broken terrifying world. Ralph Miliband's ideas and political views, and his view of the world and of Marxism in particular, could hardly be further from my own; likewise the policies and ideas of his son hardly commend themselves to me as the most ethically sound, economically feasible or politically promising. But they should be judged on their merits, not caricatured as Marxist bogey men resurrected to sinister purpose. History is not a predictable catena of causal connections, whatever a tabloid newspaper would like us to believe.

"We have lost our nerve and our sense of direction

and have turned the divine initiative into a human enterprise…

And all these drab infidelities are committed

not because too little power is available to us

but because the power so far exceeds the petty scale we want to live by.

God has made us a little lower than the angels,

while our highest ambition is to live a little above the Joneses.

We are looking for a sensible family-sized God,

dispensing pep pills or tranquilisers as required

with a Holy Spirit who is a baby's comforter.

No wonder the Lord of terrible aspect

is too much for us…..

(John V Taylor, The Go Between God (London: SCM, 1972) 48.

Slightly dated now in its langauge, but this remains a powerful and original exploration of the work and reality of the Holy Spirit in creation, church and human experience. This remains an early milestone book in my theological awakening.

The photo of a battered Bible in a country church notwithstanding, the Word of the Lord endureth forevermore!

What a year for blackberries, brambles as i call them. I can remember one year picking brambles after a hard frost and it was the easiest picking ever. Mind you the fingers were numb in minutes. But the frozen brambles came away so easily and into the margarine tub. There are few tastes from my childhood more vivid and memory jogging than bramble jellly. I still love it.

Obviously so did Seamus Heaney – is this poem not a marvel of long ago reminiscence, remembered delight, mouth-watering recall of those moments when our taste-buds learned how to explode?

Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full…

While on the subject of wonderful fruit – it's the Victoria plum season, and oh my goodness, apart from chocolate, I happily forego all other sweets and treats to eat my fill of these fruits of Eden. You think an apple is a temptation……. 🙂

I first read a Chaim Potok novel when I was 23. I opened the orange penguin edition of The Chosen on the top deck of a Glasgow bus on its way from Sauchiehall Street to Glasgow University. It was raining, mid afternoon and the street lights were already on. I was in the front seat, and I've never lost the child's fascination with travelling upstairs with a drivers-eye view, and particularly the wavy swing of the bus going round a tight corner, more exaggerated from on high.

I was soon immersed in a very different world of Hasidic Jewish culture, in pre-war Brooklyn, a society of Talmudic Judaism which was intense, fervent, strange and fiercely defensive. That book changed my entire view of Judaism, Jewishness and provided me with an entry into a world I have come to value, to some extent understand, and to sense at times a deep affinity with those who take prayer, worship, obedience and reverent love for the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible with life affirming seriousness. Since then I've read Potok's novels, studied A J Heschel's volumes of philosophy and theology, much of Martin Buber's philosophy, immersed myself in Denise Levertov's poetry and essays, consulted Shalom Paul and Moshe Greenberg's commentaries on Amos, Isaiah and Ezekiel, revelled in Robert Alter's literary studies and translations, wrestled with the moral dilemmas of Elie Wiesel holding a world to account for the attempted murder of a people, and worked through the often dense but brilliant writing of George Steiner.

It wouldn't be true to say I owe all these intellectual field trips to discovering Potok's work. But there's no doubt my own theological worldview has been positively enriched by such encounters; my awareness of the truth and value of other faith traditions has been sensitised, and in turn my own learned lessons in humility have encouraged an openness and receptiveness to the truth that others bring to us as their gift. All this triggered by reading Conversations with Chaim Potok, in which he explains why and how he wrote the novels, and in particular, his concern to explore the experience of modern Jewish communities  where people live at the core of two cultures, and in a nexus of colliding values.

Here is his apologia for writing 'at its best':

"Writing at its best is an exalted state, an unlocking of the unconscious and imagination and a contact with sanctity."

I have a feeling that Heschel, Buber, Levertov, Shalom Paul and George Steiner would underline that passage with a tick in the margin. If you haven't read Potok, be it far from me to tell you what to do, but….

This is a photo taken earlier this summer.

I was going to write a poem about it.

On reflection it is already a poem – visual, evocative, suggestive.

Weathered paint, cracked pointing, crumbling stone,

sashes, lintel and frame worn away with the wind.

A window of opportunities taken? Perhaps not, now lost.

No mere hole in the wall, an apperture of light,

illuming the human,the homely, the holy.

What is it that leads us to describe an experience, a poem, a hymn, a talk, a book as 'devotional'? Devotional can mean it makes me feel better, or its purpose is to awaken emotions of love to God, or it creates in us a desire to serve  God better, or repent and turn away from our sins. But an equally important question for me is what makes a hymn, picture, book or whatever else 'devotional'? I started thinking about this when I came across a hymn I haven't sung for years, but even reading it I felt something deeply stirring, a mixture of memory and resonance, faith and familiarity, love and longing, desire and determination, regret and renewal. 

The word devotional is an essential word in Christian theology and spirituality. It refers to those experiences and encounters, those moments of intimate significance in our journey with God, when our deepest hopes encounter love inexhaustible, and when therefore our greatest failings are gathered up into grace sufficient.

Sometimes I don't know what to pray when most fully aware of my humanity, and the apparent impossibility of being other than a recurring disappointment to God. (The apostle above portrays this kind of spiritual being scunnered!) That of course is itself a lack of trust in the power of God's love and grace to renew and transform and make possible a new creation. So a hymn like the one below, more or less consigned to memory like an artefact from a previous age covered over with all that has come after, retains a mysterious hold on my religious affections. It more fully expresses my faith than most ad hoc words of stammering yearning I can write in a journal, or say in a prayer. This is a hymn which isn't about how I feel, as if God didn't already know all that anyway. This is a hymn of spiritual aspiration, of ethical re-affrimation and of discipleship which takes seriously inner disposition as well as outer behaviour.  It will find its way into an order of service soon, as I am privileged to preach around and choose some of the hymns – to choose this one would be to choose a hymn undeservedly neglected, but which is, in the richest senses, devotional.