Category: Uncategorised

Three posts ago I reported the loss of Denise Levertov's little gem of a book, The Stream and the Saphhire. It went missing on holiday and I was intending to replace it. But my book has returned. It appeared on my desk while I was away at College. I'd like to suggest this was a miracle, an act of gracious providence, God in His mercy making good heartfelt loss, evidence that in the life of faith God intervenes on a daily basis with blessings unlooked for. Now I believe all of these possibilities.

The book which I left on a sun lounge had been picked up by Sheila and put for safe-keeping in her bag – I did say it was a small book. On second thoughts, Sheila found and retrieved my book, graciously looked after it, returned it and made good my heartfelt loss, and presented me with an unlooked for blessing. So my miracle, God's gracious providence, God's mercy in looking after me, and daily unlooked for blessings all coincide in Sheila. 

Living in Aberdeen it is incumbent to be aware of the theological minds that have graced this city. Two of them come together in 1970, in a wee book called P T Forsyth:Per Crucem ad Lucem, written by the Professor of New Testament and former Master of Christ's College, A M Hunter. What makes this brief study of Forsyth so good is the coincidence of minds and sympathy of spirit of two men who could be called liberal evangelicals. Separated by two or three generations they were theologians of the New Testament Gospel, and Hunter had clearly found a kindred heart in the writings of Forsyth.

At one point Hunter builds boldly on Forsyth's insistence that growth in holiness is God's work not ours. "The witness of the Spirit in our hearts is 'Christ's perpetual interpretation of his own work as gospel. The Spirit lights the Bible, leads the church, anoints the ministry, and all by a constant rejuvenation of the gospel and its power to create, criticize and create anew".

Hunter goes on: "Sanctification is not self-culture….Paul did not consecrate himself to his great work. He obeyed a call and found his sanctification – his growth in grace – in the pursuit of his ministry. So we too are sanctified when we are on our Saviour's business. Growth in grace comes not by working at it but by passing ever more deeply into self-forgetfulness – into the grace, the cross and the service of Christ."

And for added emphasis here is Forsyth again, sounding like one of the magisterial Puritans he admired, Thomas Goodwin: "Seek first for the Kingdom and sanctification will be added; care for Christ and he will take care of your soul; sail by the Cross and you will sail into holiness."

Aye, those Aberdeen theologians of the Gospel knew what, and Who, they were talking about. And they were way too wise as pastoral theologians, and shrewd as psychologists to tolerate the me, me, me self-help spirituality that is often implicated in our programmatic activism as we try to make happen what in the end, and the beginning, is grace, gift and mercy.

To lose one book is careless; to lose two is culpable; to lose two books by the same author is unpardonable; to lose two books by Denise Levertov is expensive – because I will replace them!

Conversations with Denise Levertov was left on a train on the way back from and External Examiners Board. The Stream and the Sapphire, her collected religious poetry is now available for whoever follows us into the accommodation where we recently had a holiday. (Photo taken on said holiday) If they pick it up and read it, then they will discover one of the sharpest most compassionate spirits in contemporary poetry; they will hear a voice that beckons them into deeper water, that urges them to look and see a bigger sky, that tugs at those nameless longings another reat writer described as God putting eternity in our hearts. So I've just re-ordered it and rather than writing the abandoned copy off, I pray a blessing on the book and whoever reads it. It has been a balm in Gilead for me, and a pocket companion who seldom fails to say the right thing.

Here's a quotation I wrote down in a wee journal I kept a few holidays ago – it encouraged me to write prayers of intercession for worship that both saw, and felt and touched the hurts and wounds of the world:

A poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in
order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand
it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a
willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action
towards stopping the great miseries which they record.

"additional action
towards stopping the great miseries which they record" – a definition of and justification for intercessory prayer, perhaps?

This afternoon goes down as one of the best sporting days of my life. Maybe best of them all for feel good factor!

Home grown excellence, huge commitment, an enigmatic but brilliant coach, the love of a nation, and a match that takes tennis to different levels of strength, emotional resilience and sheer imposition of will on ball and opponent.

Accompanied by roast beef sandwiches, strawberries with cream and ice cream, and a box of hand made chocolates, a gift from a grateful neighbour whose garden I did gladly dig!

It's been a great day 🙂

Look at the flowers of the field… not even Solomon in all his glory….if your Heavenly Father so clothes the flowers….how much more you!

Jesus at his most naive –

Lord grant us just enough naivete to help cancel our cynicism, and turn trepidation to trust.

"Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered…" A whole biblical symphony of resolute hopefulness, risk-taking trust, imaginative thoughtfulness and not least redemptive peace-making surrounds those words with their own alternative-sounding reality. The love of God, of which we so often speak in terms that are glib, even unthinking, or exclusive, so often lacks the notes of holiness, mercy, justice and judgement. Divine love wins by sacrifice, overcomes by surrender, redeems by self-giving, but in the end is a love that is free and confers freedom, that is powerful but not overpowering, and that is holy and reaches out to hallow and sanctify all that falls short of the glory of God.

All of this was in mind when I wrote yesterday of Stuart Townend's song and the way his words capture huge vistas of biblical vision and Gospel hope. I've just finished a book of essays on the love of God, Nothing Greater, Nothing Better. Theological Essays on the Love of God. The subtitle is accurate, the main title sounds like a bad line from a praise song, but the essays with only one or two exceptions are telling theological, at times pastoral or dogmatic, reflections on Divine love.I am entirely partial, but the essay that is standout for me is by my Doktovater David Fergusson, entitled, "Will the Love of God Finally Triumph".

Here in a short essay is an articulated theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom because love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love. One of the greatest books ever on the love of God (I seldom use such exaggerated superlatives) is W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense. Its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God. That book has provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about love – precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, investment, self-donation, no guaranteed outcome, waiting; and Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky.

Back to Fergusson – I detect in Fergusson's critique of Barth's universalist tendency that same passionate acknowledgement that the love of God is not sentimental surrender to wishful thinking, nor is God's love a trawler net that hauls all human beings into the kingdom choiceless, and regardless of who and what in the end they choose to be and do with the gift of life. The voice of God is consistent with the love of God, 'I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.'Love dies under coercion, and love lives always with the possibility of rejection – the Divine love defines love and though the love of God is unending, there will always be the possibility and reality of those whose choice is rejection, a final self-determining no.

A good example of David Fergusson's theological instincts is when he puts in their place, those wistful non-universalists who desperately wish universalism was true but regrettably cannot make it so:

Such remarks are puzzling. Are we saying that  God's final scheme is undesirable? Are we even suggesting that our own moral preferences are somehow better than God's? Can we claim to be evangelical if we hold that it would be good for universalism while also lamenting wistfully that this is not what God has on offer? There is a good dominical response to this: "If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to
those who ask him!" Matt. 7:11

All of which brings me back to Stuart Townend's See What a Morning. What gives the hymn its theological, pastoral and liturgical power is the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus in the way Christians see the world. Love crucified is risen; love survives the violent attempts at its extinction; life says no to death; finality does not rest with despair but with hope; against the closing down of all possibilities, the love of God holds open possibilities infinite and eternal; and love remains love, the free offer of gift and the invitation to response in that same freedom.

"To know the love of God that is beyond knowledge", indeed the entire doxological sections of Paul's Ephesians, is one of the great theological limiters on our intellectual hubris – even what we know is partial, finite, seeing through a glass darkly. We lack words and concepts, ideas and arguments; our imagination and vision and mental stretch and emotional range are inadequate to a different and vaster reality. 

A closing challenge from Fergusson: "If choices are made only when made in the full knowledge of God's love in Christ, it is in the church that the burden of human responsibility is greatest".

The photo is of Schiehallion, early morning, before we climbed it. Shrouded in mystery, much of it obscured but there in all its solid reality, waiting to be climbed but not conquered, providing a standpoint from which to view the world, and remember that this ancient mountain puts us firmly, finally, and faithfully, in our place!

Stuart Townend writes too many hymns, just like Charles Wesley and Graham Kendrick. And yes I do mention them all in the one sentence, because at their best the have given the Church some of the finest hymns in the worship repertoire. What makes a hymn  good, great, even classic is a seriously contested question and no obvious answers forthcoming. Rhythm, imagery, tune, resonant experience, affective power, words – yes, and perhaps the precise cultural moment the hymn is composed and first sung.

Stuart Townend's "See what a morning", is one such hymn – theologically spacious, glistening with the imagery of hope, utterly Christocentric and rooted in Trinitarian faith, affirming of life and new beginnings and possibilities. I can't sing it without recognising the disjunct between this hymn and the litanies of despair and negativity that now dominate global news prostrate at the altar of The Economy. The irony is that the spacious, generous, inclusive safety of the term 'economy' is now lost in our worship of wealth, growth, the possession of power and the power of possession. The economy of salvation works quite differently in Christian theology, 'wrought in love, borne in pain, paid in sacrifice.'

With a defiance every bit as unflinching as Paul in 1 Corithians 15, the hymn finishes each verse with the resurrection cry: "For he lives: Christ is risen from the dead!". Likewise the sixth line of each verse trumpets the great reversal of the Gospel, when all that ruins God's loving creative purposes is confronted with a power it can neither comprehend nor overcome. And the last verse is programmatic for the Church of Christ facing a world wearied and worn thin by human activity that is singlemindedly self-serving, and therefore resolutely destructive. To sing in such a world, "death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered", is to experience a trnasfigured worldview, to speak a different narrative, to look for a different ending that is in effect a new beginning.

The scandal of the resurrection remains for all sophisticated cultures, the late post-modern West included, the most radical questioning of what matters most, the most outrageous statement of what is ultimate, and the clearest most compassionate reticence about all explanations of purpose and meaning in the face of human suffering and the pain of all creation. Resurrection is not a statement that it all worked out in the end; it is a doctrine of utter disconinuity, a divine reversal of the order of things, the working out of a different economy in which cost, sacrifice and loss are borne in a transfiguring act of Eternal Love.

The Church is a resurrection community; a place where we are speaking life, stirring hope, bringing peace: a place where we sing and shout, "death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered"; for he lives, Christ is risen from the dead.  

See, what a morning, gloriously bright,

With the dawning of hope in Jerusalem;

Folded the grave-clothes, tomb filled with light,

As the angels announce, "Christ is risen!"

See God's salvation plan,

Wrought in love, borne in pain, paid in sacrifice,

Fulfilled in Christ, the Man,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

See Mary weeping, "Where is He laid?"

As in sorrow she turns from the empty tomb;

Hears a voice speaking, calling her name;

It's the Master, the Lord raised to life again!

The voice that spans the years,

Speaking life, stirring hope, bringing peace to us,

Will sound till He appears,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

One with the Father, Ancient of Days,

Through the Spirit who clothes faith with certainty.

Honor and blessing, glory and praise

To the King crowned with pow'r and authority!

And we are raised with Him,

Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered;

And we shall reign with Him,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

"See, What a Morning" (Resurrection Hymn)
Words and Music by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend
Copyright © 2003 Kingsway Thankyou Music

The Pilgrm Psalm 121 has always raised my spirits by lifting my eyes. And when it comes to lifting my eyes to the hills, Schiehallion is about as impressive as they come. I've seen it in snow, a glistening majestic peak clothed in ermine with the occasional rocky outcrop showing; I've seen it in autumn with the colours muted and warm; and I've seen it at sunset in the afterglow of a summer day. Today I saw it from the window of the place we are staying. I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence doth my help come. Statement or question, the answer is the same – the Lord who made haven and earth.

"It is not we who sustain the Church, nor was it those who came before us, nor will it be those who come after us. It was, and is and will be the one who says 'I am with you, even to the end of time…' As it says in Hebrews 13 'Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever. And in Revelation 1, 'Who was, and is, and is to come. Truly he is that one, and no one else is, or ever can be."

Quoted in A McGrath, Roots that Refresh, 192.

Now there's a presupposition that should inform every missional decision, preface every strategic review, edit every agenda for change, reassure every discipleship risk assessment. And there's a presupposition that should alleviate anxiety, prevent paralysis, dissolve complacency, and negate negativity by the positive assertion of the eternal reliability of who God is in Christ.

Frederick Hart's Christ Rising is one of my favourite images. The cruciform shape and the bursting energy show a figure transcending humanity, but profoundly human.